Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Owie


Waah, my shoulders are so stiff. So tense and sore, my neck feels like it's held up with wire, like those tortured gerberas you see in restaurants, a wire pushed into their stem and up into their heads, so they don't droop. Almost unconsciously, I yearn for real massage, constantly. The thought of someone really working their fingers into those iron hard muscles and releasing some of the tension makes me a little weak.


Take my attention to my shoulders, become aware, again and again, relax, let them fall away from my ears, un-hunch, sit up straight...


Apparently it takes ten thousand times, of consciously doing that, before your body gets the point and adopts the behavior. I'm fascinated by the way we handle stress and unhappiness physically. What our bodies receive and record. My pilates teacher put it this way - we adopt certain postures necessarily, for protection, perhaps. It works for us at the time, these little shields, and reactions to the onslaught of emotional, physical life. But then we forget to unknit them, take them down, we don't realise that we no longer need them. So we keep the stoop, the hunch, we cover our mouths when we laugh still, maybe, let all our tension settle in our shoulders, or in our spines. Locked.


I've just remembered, I was going to post about a guy who lives up the road from the house where my husband grew up. He's a nice looking guy, and sweet, I think, but he grew up in a nasty street with half of his face a little deformed, a little twisted. It's not too bad, it's like a little of his jaw didn't develop. But he grew his hair long early on, always wears a hat pulled down, stands with his head angled in towards his shoulder a little. He always looks like he's flinching at the stares, the taunts. In an area where my husband got stopped for a 'fair search' for cigarettes on the way home from school every day, it's safe to assume there was a lot of taunting.


It's heart breaking really. He looks like such a lovely guy, he's completely attractive. His neck must be so sore, all the time.

4 comments:

  1. My back and neck have been in bits for the past few weeks. Maybe we could get some kind of group rate if we all went to a chiropractor?

    As for the last bit, kids can be such bastards.

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  2. Yeah, but we're talking scumbag kids.

    Don't go to a chiropracter, go to an osteopath. Victor Megannety on Church Road is good, though he's a bit strong. It can be a bit uncomfortable, though you feel good afterwards. I think they're all the same.

    If I was rich, I'd routinely go once a month or so.

    I also heard about an American guy, also in Geystones, who does something a little different, and he maintains the treatment by reinforcing the adjustment briefly every day for a month or two, you just pop in and he twiddles your vertebra about, as it were. I quite like that idea because a lot of the time the treatment doesn't last that long for me. Too easy to get misaligned again, for various reasons. I have back problems though :(

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  3. Hey, thanks for popping in. I've had a stiff neck for 31 years now. Massage feels good but ultimately doesn't help. Neither does the chiropractor. I'm just twisted. Most of the time, I'm not really aware of the pain or lack of motion but then there are other times I feel like my head is just going to snap off and roll across the floor. The cold and/or wet are particularly bad for me.

    Kids (and grownups) really can be cruel and we all build up whatever defenses we can. Some of them are better than others. I know a young man who, because of a doctor's negligence, had to wait too long to get a rare tumor removed which by then had grown into his brain. Radiation fried his pituitary so he is now sterile. And the left side of his face failed to develop much like the guy you know. But he had a lot of support, holds his head high and appears unaffected. Wonderful kid.

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  4. Chiroprators only work with bones, they ignore the soft tissue, which is key, and I think this is why they can injure people sometimes.

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