Where It All Began
My internship period, working full-time as a physiotherapist for a year without vacations, was too big of a transition from endlessly sitting at a desk learning towards becoming physically very active. It was mainly my back that protested this big transition. But it never really went away. Sometimes there were peaks of terrible pain in the upper back due to muscle cramps in the muscles of the chest and thoracic spine. I developed chronic pain and had gloomy thoughts about it like ‘at 35, I’ll be in a wheelchair’. My range of walking kept shrinking and was ultimately only 10 to 20 minutes. I always thought about how I could get back.
Psychological Problems
At the same time, there were other problems, and I was guided for a while by a psychologist for students. Looking from the psychological side, he said that my back problems were expressions of my psychological issues. That made me very angry because I said, ‘because of my back problems, I can do so little. If that back would cooperate more, I would naturally be a different person’.
In retrospect, I can say: ‘That man was right!’ I was very insecure in life and certainly not the inhabitant of my body. I functioned solely from my head: eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and mind worked just fine. I sometimes say that I was a walking head: I could look, listen, talk, taste, smell, and think. However, my sensors were all off, set to not feeling. Of course, I didn’t know that. I knew myself as I was.
How could I have figured out that there were other possibilities I wasn’t utilizing?
Further Into Problems
Gradually, it got worse. More and more complaints arose, mainly in the musculoskeletal system. I still remember thinking: ‘Now I also feel pain in my left shoulder. That was about the only joint that had never protested before. When I came across the Feldenkrais Method by chance during a Tai Chi weekend, I was completely captivated by it. That one movement lesson, lying on the floor, gave me a totally new feeling.
‘Hey, this back now lies completely differently on the floor. And I don’t feel pain at all, it feels different than it ever has! I think it’s relaxed now, and that means I was never relaxed and always had it tensed. And if this is now pain-free and the muscles are relaxed, that means I make my own pain and can change it to being pain-free. Like I feel now, I always want to feel!’ And I registered for a Feldenkrais training because Feldenkrais Practitioners didn’t yet exist in the Netherlands. Naturally, achieving ‘feeling like this’ didn’t happen in one go. Of course, I had strong habits that only slowly changed. But I knew where I was going, I had set my marker for a much more positive future.
My Life Full of Ups and Downs
I also went through ups and downs in my life and regularly received guidance during downs. Now I could be open to it. Now I knew: ‘who I am is my limited idea of myself, the self I know and call “ME”. I didn’t know how and who else I could be, but I wanted to explore whether I could stretch my boundaries. And I wanted to find new possibilities within myself that I hadn’t discovered on my own. At the same time, I continued with Feldenkrais movements. And every time I felt something nicer, like a deeper relaxation or more space in myself, that became my new goal: ‘If I can feel this way I always want to feel that way’.
The first thirty years of my life gradually went downhill in a way. The next thirty years of my life gradually went uphill. I felt increasingly better and more spacious in my own body. I regularly felt better than ever before, but that also receded again, although never totally. Due to a few accidents and health issues, that trajectory had bigger dips for a while, but it is clearly on an upward trend again.
Each time, I am amazed at my new ability, which now not only concerns mobility and space within myself and over my mental balance, but also clearly about my sense of connection: connection with myself, with others, with the zero point field. This field has many different names: quantum field, universe, heaven, cosmos, Source, Creator, God, the All, or whatever you call it for yourself. And every time there is the: ‘Oh, if I can feel like this, then I want to always feel like this’ and then I work on it. In my work with Roy Martina, my mantra or life motto changed slightly to:
‘If I can feel like this, then I want to always feel like this or even better!’
I am curious if you also have a life motto. I invite you to share it with me and the other blog readers by writing it in the comment section.
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