The Emotional Journey

I looked at a picture taken of me recently and didn’t recognize my self. Much like seeing a picture of someone seriously ill… how the light seems to have dimmed. The skin a different tone and texture. And I looked back on other pictures and saw the bloat of illness. A bloat others would just see as fat. But I know better. My body was not built like this. I do not eat in a manner that would even slightly support weight gain nor the maintaining of it.

I don’t see the face I feel I should see when I look in the mirror. I don’t feel the way I think I should feel in my body. I’m not living the day to day life I know would align with my soul. An important thing when on a healing journey.

I listened to an interview with man who lost three limbs in a freak accident of electrocution. He lost the limbs the electrical current ran through. He commented that he’d always been a pretty good athlete, good looking and smart but had always felt a bit melancholy. People didn’t understand this as on paper he had no supporting evidence for his emotional state. And that after his accident he felt his body aligned more with how he felt on the inside. Something about that connected with me. I instantly knew that my physical challenges with auto immunity and weight made me approachable in a way I never was when lean, pretty and confident.

I grew up torn between emotion and non- emotion. Between being openly smart and hiding it. Between being pretty, lean and athletic and playing it all down. And when I began to dabble in young adulthood to displaying my looks, athleticism and intelligence I quickly grew over confident and managed to manifest the wrong man to marry… My life and dreams teetered on wobbly spindle legs like a drunk stork for years. My emotional growth froze as my confidence was emotionally beaten into submission. And I know looking back my symptoms had begun in earnest.

There were periods in my teens when under stress my jaw would lock on one side and then after a couple days it’d switch to the other. There were times when in the six day retail holiday work weeks that required 10+ hours each day that one or both of my wrists would swell and I’d have to brace it. I called it “retail wrist” but I was experiencing mild flares.

In times of calm I had no symptoms. But get me in an office where there was discord or shift my schedule into a marathon of deadlines and I got emotional and physically tender and “puffy”. Another variation of a flare.

When it went off the rails was when I entered a Yoga teaching training program while working in a very intellectually and emotionally challenging office.  I worked in a hostile environment Monday through Friday and went to an hour or ninety minute yoga class four days each week. And on the weekends I attended training from 7 am until 6 pm. And then there was the study time. And then there was my two hour round trip commute. After all the years of nursing my failing auto immune status my body gave into its power. And it’s not yet recovered.

Which brings me back around to the interview that prompted the pondering…..How much emotional inner healing  is needed to physically heal?

More than you would think to think.

It is glaringly apparent that I am extraordinarily physically sensitive to my emotional state. Teaching and murmurings I’ve grown up with and kept at a distance are burrowing into me now. The positive thought & meditation. The visualization & rest. But if I’m living a solitary life in the midst of a heavily populated office and visible position, am I undermining all the inner work? And if so, how much inner growth, healing and balance is needed to tip the balance of the external? This is my philosophical quandary.