Rebirth Into Joy

In my deepest self I believe and pray that the spirits use me for the benefit of the world, that they relieve me of self, that I can be of service to the invisible and visible alike. I am not in control, they are. They create the world. I don’t believe it is about fate, per se. I don’t believe there is an end goal. Evolution is not about perfection, it is about adaptability, so the spirits adapt us. It feels like such a difficult thing to say because I don’t understand why such horrendous things are happening in the world, but I am not in control. I do know that when I orient towards wholeness then I realize sickness is part of wellness. That doesn’t mean I don’t take immune boosters to get better, this doesn’t mean that we sit and watch abuse. But on a deep cosmic level I must admit over and over that I am in service to something greater, and that something greater expands me and adapts me and when I listen closely my life works a lot better.

So in my journey to wholeness I’ve had to admit this year that I have adrenal fatigue. I love being in my 40’s because it seems like this is the decade where you reconcile how you’ve been living with how you want to live. The strong grooves finally show up and you have a choice of how to adapt to something better. Well, my nervous system couldn’t keep going on with the untenable amount of stress that has been bogging it down for decades. Thank god. It’s all starting to make sense finally and I am actually not unhappy about it, but I do feel like I’ve lost my ground. 

The journey begins like this: earlier this year I began thinking more seriously that I had adrenal fatigue. Basically it just means that you’ve tapped your adrenals so much and they aren’t able to produce as much of the get-up-and-go hormones, namely adrenaline and cortisol. These chemicals are important to the process of life but we tend to be addicted to our own hormones in this culture for a variety of reasons. So I thought I had adrenal fatigue and then I got covid and then I really had fatigue. My body was so exhausted for several weeks that it wasn’t even possible for me to have any tension in my body. I was like a soft amoeba all squishy and happy. It was joyous, really. I was only sick for a few days and I couldn’t get out of bed for weeks but I was happy because my body was in such a deep parasympathetic nervous system (PSN) response. (Incidentally, I find it very interesting that we are now living with a global virus that forces us to rest. In a world of over-production this virus makes us to stop). The PNS is the rest and digest part of our nervous system. 

Shortly after recovering from covid I went to see my chiropractor and I made an off-handed remark about how my neck always ends up hurting in the same place. He asked me about car accident history and then he off-handedly mentioned maybe I should get an x-ray because maybe my neck has lost some of it’s natural curve. I didn’t really believe it in the moment but when I went home that day I remembered that I had been in a an awful car accident when I was 18. The short version of the story is that someone pulled in front of a car I was in and we t-boned them going like 50 or 60 miles per hour. I remember very little of what unfolded after that but the driver of my car had to be helicoptered to the hospital because her lung was punched and had several broken bones. The other passenger and I were mostly okay. 

A year after the car accident I began grinding my teeth in my sleep. Then it all made sense and this is the part I never put together until now, more then 20 years later. I got an x-ray and found out my neck is straight as a stick, straight as a stick. There are many reasons why this can happen to a person besides whiplash. It used to be called nursing-neck, military-neck, and these days it’s being called text-neck. It would be so great if there wasn’t such big repercussions in the body when something is out of alignment, but that just isn’t the case. Straightening of the cervical spine causes a lot of anxiety in the body. Did you catch all that? Looking down at your phone endless can cause your neck to straighten which can lead to anxiety in the body. (Also just staring at your phone all day can cause anxiety regardless of straightening..).

So what happens is the vertebrae are inflaming the vagus nerve right the base of the skull. The vagus nerve innervates the diaphragm and ends up in the guts and pelvis. It’s part of the enteric nervous system which is called our second brain (really should be called our first brain). Essentially it’s our gut response. The weight of the skull is also putting extra pressure on the neck muscles because the weight distribution is imbalanced which stressed and tightens the muscles of the neck and shoulders. In my case, the straightening led to my jaw being very tight and clenched. Since my early 20’s I had to start wearing a mouth guard at night (yep, super sexy), otherwise I wouldn’t have teeth today. So all night long for 20+ years my neck muscles have been working to the max. This of course makes my shoulders very tight which in turn makes it very difficult to diaphragmatically breath. 

Quick breakdown of breathing in the body: the diaphragm is the largest breathing muscle in the body and it works in tandem with the pelvic floor. As we inhale the dome of the diaphragm flattens, pushes down on our internal organs, and expands the pelvic floor slightly. On an exhale, the pelvic floor gently tightens and the diaphragm returns to it’s bell shape and expels the air from the lungs. When we breath in this way we are activating our parasympathetic response which makes us happy (I mean, we are breathing into the pelvis! Yes, it makes us happy). The other way we breath is into the chest which activates the sympathetic response. This is our get-up-and-do-things mechanism in the body, also known as the fight or flight response, but that is kind of a misnomer because we also need it for just getting up in the morning. However, stress puts us into a chronic flight or flight response and that is really, really bad for the body. 

Over the past 5 years I began to notice that it was incredible difficult for me to breath into my diaphragm. I’ve become low key obsessed with understanding the breath as a result (look out for my book about the breath in about 5 years time…). This also results in my pelvic floor being very tight. Are you getting the picture? Car accident, straightened neck, tight jaw, poor ability to breath deeply, not breathing into pelvis, permanent state of fight or flight, nervous dysregulation, adrenal fatigue. This information has literally changed my life. I mean, yeah, sure, I bet there are people out there who haven’t spent 20+ years hijacked with cortisol just because they got into a car accident.. but also, makes you wonder. 

The wildest part about all this is that having covid gave me this very clear touchstone of how it feels to breath deeply and feel happy. I hadn’t felt that way for decades. Or at least it was slowly receding over many many years. I would wake up every single day with anxiety (or when I was younger, ideation) and have to come back from that first thing in the morning. Hours of my day are spent just trying to get to a state of stasis. Sure, the emotional response to previous trespasses certainly had their impact, no question. But damn, I don’t have anything left to cry over and I still can barely function in some ways. 

Before like 6 weeks ago, I wasn’t able to drop into my breathing at all. I am now rehabbing my neck and there was a huge nervous system response almost immediately. I could feel my system starting to decompress. It is going to be a long, long road (not made easier by the fact I got whiplash again a week ago being reared by a drunk driver who fled the scene). But I finally have hope. 

I haven’t really let this all sink in deeply yet. This has shaped my life more then I can explain. I really have to question how much of my utter suicidal depression for so long was at least in part due to the fact my vagus nerve was super stressed out. However, in a round about way I probably wouldn’t have become a bodyworker and I probably wouldn’t have started writing a book about the breath about 4 years ago. Ya know, the whole wounded healer archetype. I’ve been trying for so long to make sense of my emotions and body and now I finally have a way clearer picture. 

But there is more. I have to admit that even though I’ve been doing bodywork for 7+ years, I actually have had very little emotional release from just bodywork. Some, yes, for sure, but on some level I now must admit I’m a bit of a fraud. Sorry. Now that I have this whole new orientation to my body I am more interested in somatics and vagus nerve release because I can actually target the area of my body that need release. Before I couldn’t quite find the epicenter of stress in my body, if that makes sense. It’s like some part of me knew that all this bodywork stuff wasn’t actually getting to the root of the problem. Plus, every small release in my body was usurped at night when I would gnash my teeth for 8 hours, thereby waking me up to the same anxiety ridden body as the day before. Now I can kind of separate the anxiety from the thoughts and just recognize my body feels stressed but it may not actually be a sign of emotional disturbance.

On this level, I have actually in fact been way more effected by talking and mental awareness than body awareness… in a way. I am hyper sensitive and aware of my body, but I wasn’t able to move through the anxiety there. I more have had to rely on rearranging my thoughts to shift my mood. I feel like I am admitting a shameful secret as a bodyworker. Sorry, not sorry. But now it makes sense because the stress was in my body but since I couldn’t get to the root of it there I had to on my thinking to move my emotions. Or something like that. Maybe I’m over complicated all this but it feels accurate. At least for now.

And now, and now, and now. And now, where do I go? And is there anything in here for you? There is so much freedom is this awareness. Sickness is part of health. Death is part of life. Decay is part of growth. I might be mad about all this someday but right now I am just relieved to know, to complete this picture. In a lot of ways this unknown journey helped steer me into the inner sanctuary of spiritual world. My inner world is carved in stone and gem, it is cavernous and strong, it is intricate and beautiful, full of secret passage ways and forgotten tunnels. It was built with tears, solitude, and despair. But my outer world feels like a one room sand castle. It often feels shallow and about to fall apart. Calling all clowns and goofballs, I need help enjoying this world! I need help creating a life outside myself, but I am getting there. The fatigue feels strong right now but I keep slowing down and becoming more present and more intentional. I keep asking the spirits to adapt me and use me, guide me and take me apart. And now this is the part where my life rebirths into joy.