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.
