Practice Log for June 28
Areas of focus: solar plexus (gallbladder & liver) | Duration: 3 hours
Methods & Movements
This session was a bit more emotional and heady than usual as I continue processing last week. I came with a tense and almost swollen-feeling gallbladder. My guts are in constant churn…it’s extremely uncomfortable but not quite painful.
It made me fuzzy, so I set a general “healing” intention. Once I got into it though, the theme sharpened quickly to a very fine point - to lovingly connect with the trapped emotions of this gallbladder sensation and in so doing, find deeper self knowledge and awareness. It needed to be gentle, though it had some more physically demanding moments too.
I did not tape my feet this week, but was able to use the memory of the last week to practice that alignment without the supports. I will probably alternate week to week for a bit. (Look! Another form of pendulation!)
I wrote A LOT during the first bit, as I felt into the emotional wound at the core of this trauma. Some of this was personal, some will likely find fuller expression in some philosophical writing, and some is I think culturally relevant, especially for those coming from a similar background as me - white, southern US, fundamentalist christian, raised female. I will share more on this in Insights & Breakthroughs below... but first the actual process.
All the writing felt like a sort of “mental” kriya…lots of things connecting all at once. The physical kriyas came on perhaps an hour later in a top-down series of flows, seeking out the pain in the body and beginning to help it move. See the Mapping section below for a depiction of those first 7 movements, originating from the gallbladder, or very close to LV 14 known as “The Gate of Hope”. This proximity and its placement between the heart and solar plexus chakras was notable to me, especially given the themes I’ll explore later.
After these, which lasted perhaps 45 mins, I was guided into a very active series of flows, very inwardly focused exploring full activation of large muscle groups.
That flow:
- Adho Mukha Svanasana | Downward Facing Dog Pose - the classic, but something about this pose helps me activate my legs and feet together like nothing else can. A good warm up for where it was going.
- Adho Mukha Vrksasana | Handstand - I explored a variety of supports here without going into full handstand; my wrists are not ready and there are trust issues in my neck and shoulders. I can take the weight, but am not ready for the full balancing act.
- Parivrtta Malasana | Revolved Squat Pose - I love that this apparently translates to "dirty pose"...it feel appropriate for the way it wrings out my guts via the combo of twisting and pressurizing the abdominal area.
- Uttanasana | Standing Forward Fold
After that, I did a number of positions to activate my thighs. This is a muscle group that is under active due to a number of serious injuries from a time when I was too young to understand that I needed medical attention and PT. I am…slowly… learning how to access these muscles. It seems a bit easier with the femoral nerve released (see last week). I’m excited to find out how this changes things for me, as I know this group of muscles is key to most movement and balance, and should bear most of the weight of the body where now I rely on a whole bunch of compensations. It will feel different.
Given those composition, these were kinda funky variations on chair poses, squats, lunges, and bridge-type things, less about hitting the right external shape and instead focusing on finding the version of the posture where things could engage…safety of course. It is humbling to allow myself to honor the limitations of my body rather than default to all of the compensations I’ve built up over the years. I can accomplish forms that “look right” from outside…but internally I’m putting the burden of my weight on finer muscles while the big guns sleep. So this was about being very intentional about waking them up.
I expect there to be more "thigh talk" soon.
Insights & Breakthroughs
In a dream this week, I saw a statue of a woman made of pure white porcelain. At first, she was a lovely young woman with a nice facial expression - calm, demure, almost saintly. She even wore a hood over her head that made me think of classical depictions of the Mother Mary.
Then, in a flicker, the statue morphed; now she was a raging, contorted woman with two gigantic left hands, one on each arm, and fingers that seemed to be twisted and gnarled to the point of almost melting. Her face held the bitter, resentful hurt of a martyr pushed beyond their limits, one who has finally accepted that the one(s) they gave everything for will never appreciate them, will never understand. It is a face of someone angrily, helplessly, hopelessly falling into despair and regret. Her body was hunched low to the ground, the energy of her posture signaled an angry trapped bull, but this one does not know her power. One arm, twisted back behind her back, awkwardly held a beverage in a tumbler…I knew it was alcohol, her last resort and secret escape. Within its embrace she could at least cry. The white porcelain was cracking and structurally unsound, crumbling, perhaps damaged in the firing.
Even though my grandmother never, to my knowledge, touched alcohol, everything about this demeanor rang of her. She was a mother figure to me, and I watched her slide into a strange dementia during my teen years, utterly drained of all self-esteem and raison d'être. My heart breaks for her now. Her life burned out quickly from all that sacrificing.
The dream was a powerful scene, and deeply moving. Through it I am able to recognize the expressions I’ve seen on SO MANY women throughout my life, both peers and former caregivers, and feel into that hurt. She is a traumagenic alter ego of "The Woman" archetype in fundamentalist white christian culture. She is the saintly martyr some of us were raised to be, seen through to its logical conclusion when the sacrifice is “taken for granted” by society and close kin. She is in me, too.
These scenes, along with movements of K this week, all combined into a series of prompts. Answering these questions for myself brought me into greater self understanding and enhanced my power of differentiation:
- Where do I feel “taken for granted”? Or is it so pervasive I’ve gone numb to it?
- Who is the source of the emotional experience “I am taken for granted”? (Be more specific than “society”. We make change by choosing carefully the company we keep and there are people who will not take us for granted, though they can be hard to find.)
- If it is someone from early childhood, note how deeply that has necessarily colored experiences ever since. Note how closely it may be associated / confused with notions of “safety”.
- If it was a role model, how might I be unconsciously aping their model of love? Can I differentiate between their love and pain, and my own life?
- Is this someone that I can remove from my life? If no, why not?
- If I feel dependent on them, is this conditioned into me? Am I truly dependent or is this a limiting belief?
- If because I truly love them, can I talk to them about this? Are they willing to collaborate with me in changing the structures I’ve unconsciously allowed to crop up that reinforce the “taken for granted” feelings?
Ok, if you are unfamiliar with the Gate of Hope in acupuncture, maybe go check it out now. Here's a brief introduction that I liked.
For myself, I’m realizing I’ve actually made most of the external changes already. Years ago I started making hard choices that slowly but surely moved me away from the people, places, ways of being that reinforced the feeling of being “taken for granted”. What remains is the habitual belief, essentially a body memory, of that emotional experience learned in infancy. That aspect of myself will heal soon, and I hope to heal a little piece of my culture along with it. This is a key, or maybe the key, to my Gate of Hope.
My intuition tells me there will be more here in the coming weeks as this emotional experience mapped down into my legs during practice...reminding me that our legs, our feet, are the at least metaphorical vehicles through which we, as adults, put our needs and preferences into action and move ourselves to safety, once we know what it looks/feels like.
Mapping
- “Flow” 1 originated just below LV14, the Gate of Hope (acupuncture), near (I think) my gallbladder lies. I’ve had significant tension and discomfort there for a week or so of traumagenic / psychosomatic origin. I naturally started here, listening in to connect with the trapped emotional content. This was still and meditative, thus the black smudgy shape. I sensed a sort of swirling deep within.
- In orange, flow 2 was the first real movement, which felt like an opening in my ears, neck, throat, moving back and forth from each ear to the other. Something about the Kundalini (K) activation makes this way more than the typical stretch. It’s as though the fascia under the skin is extra crispy and ready to shape shift.
- 3 was different in that it seemed to bloom outward from the gallbladder knot in all directions, but especially up and down simultaneously. It felt as though the knot became my center for a moment and the energy pulled, gentle but active up and down along fascia planes into the deep core above and below that spot, opening up channels to invite the stuck energy to process out…emotional content moves up towards the modes of vocal, facial for that sort of expression. And some goes downward, integrating into the digestive energy flow more fully. It is subtle but noticeable.
- This downward movement hit a blocker near the sacrum, so flow 4 seemed intent on releasing the hips and legs, and likely is what opened the door for the work in the thighs later on, once I moved into the physical yoga practice more fully.
- Depicted in light pink, flow 5 was a deep core activation and seemed to flow around the internals of the abdominal cavity…almost in a smoothing type motion. It felt like a massage originating inside, with flashes of pin-point pain as it hit and released what felt like various tiny adhesions.
- Still in pink, this was an expansive set of breaths, moving out from the heart center in all directions.
- In orange, these movements seemed to drill into the space right around my heart, and felt like it cleared space for my heart to “breathe easier”… kinda like how the “Grinch’s heart grew three sizes that day”*.
References
* The Grinch Who Stole Christmas - https://www.best-poems.net/poem/how-grinch-stole-christmas-by-dr-seuss.html