While reading last night from Christiane Northrup's book, "Goddesses Never Age" she wrote about pain and the emotional connection.
"Goddesses Grieve, Rage, and Move On"
"Several years ago, I developed what we call "frozen shoulder." It's very common in midlife women and, like just about everything else, it's believed to be related to hormone levels and menopause - but I knew that wasn't my problem. The pain started one day, seemingly out of the blue, while I was picking up a piece of wood to place in the wood stove. I developed immobilizing pain in my left shoulder, dropped the wood, and actually fell to my knees. The next day, I could not stretch my left arm behind my back very far without wincing in agony, and the pain continued day after day. Because I hadn't suffered an injury, I felt that the cause had to be emotional, and that he pain and immobility, real as they were, were ultimately rooted in unresolved emotions. The brain doesn't recognize the difference between emotional pain and pain caused by a physical injury. In fact, brain studies have demonstrated that emotional pain registers in precisely the same areas of the brain as physical pain."
...."With the help of a holistic chiropractor and my Pilates teacher, I spent months trying to open my rib cage and move my shoulder, which helped ease the pain and expand my mobility slightly. But I knew that the key to complete recovery lay in releasing the blocked emotions related to my heart."
"For several years, I had been romantically involved with a man I loved deeply but who was not emotionally available to me. I desperately tried to fix the relationship, which in many ways mirrored my failed marriage. Because I couldn't get this relationship to meet my needs, I was doubting my desirability as a woman- an old issue for me. Could it be that my shoulder pain (and the occasional chest pain I had had about once a year for a decade) had something to do with my relationships with the important men in my life?"
"Much as I idolized my father when I was growing up, he was busy taking care of my mother and her needs, as well as earning a living. It was a time when I needed my desirability validated by the number-one man in my life: him. I remember one day when I was around middle school age, I was waltzing in the kitchen with him, trying to learn this skill. My father was a good dancer, and as we ended our dance together, I asked him what he thought, hoping he would approve of my moves. He replied, "You'd do okay if it was dark - and the man was drunk." My Scorpio dad's barb hit me very deeply, right in the heart. He made similar criticisms of my tennis playing even though I practiced for hours and tried so hard to please him by being a good player. He didn't take the time to teach me or arrange for me to take lessons from someone else, but simply criticized me in his forthright way."
"I'm sure his comments were the result of being irritable from overwork, or simply thoughtless in the way all of us can be at times. And I know many women who have suffered far worse things than I did. But that doesn't mean I should have made excuses for him or downplayed the emotional impact on me - "Oh, for heaven's sake, that was decades ago! Are you still holding on to that? Just get over it!"
"No matter what happened to you - or how long ago it happened - you must do the healing work that only you can do. Failure to do so just perpetuates the pain and dis-ease. My father's insensitive jokes and comments had created a wound that became buried in my tissues. Now that the old theme was playing out in my adult life, all these years later, the old emotions I had felt as a child were expressing themselves as pain and immobility in my shoulder. My body was telling me to heal old hurts."
"I didn't realize this right away, however. It began to dawn on me during a session with Doris E Cohen, Ph.D., author of Repetition: Past lives, Life and Rebirth. Dr. Cohen has been a clinical psychologist for 40 years and also works on the spiritual level and with dreams. For a few years now, she had been suggesting that I look at my father issues, but until this point I hadn't been ready to face that possibility. It took the repetition of the original heartbreak with my father - in the form of an adult relationship - to bring the issue to the surface by bringing on physical pain. The severity of my discomfort made me willing to look again at my emotional issues surrounding my father and begin a program of healing, as Dr. Cohen suggested to me."
"For three days in a row, I set a timer for 15 minutes to do an anger and grief release session. During the first five to ten minutes of each session, I imagined my father sitting in front of me and let my rage fly. I just let him have it. I shouted at him for making those thoughtless, hurtful comments years ago. I swore at him, crying, "How the f--- could you talk to your daughter like that? What were you thinking, you bastard? In addition, I took a hand towel and snapped it agains some sturdy woodwork, all the while yelling expletives of rage until I was spent."
"After a few sessions - and sometimes, just a few minutes into them, I often found myself lying on the bed, curled up in a fetal position weeping and crying out, "I want my Daddy." It was a cry of a little girl whose heart had been running her relationship life on some level for decades. My level of grief surprised me. But underneath anger there is nearly always hurt. My ever present "witness" self stood watching while I went through these steps of releasing pure, unfiltered anger, getting in touch with my grief and letting it out, and nurturing myself and my body afterwards. After this process each day, I took a bath with Epsom salts. As I sat in the warm water, I imagined all the toxins in my body and mind leaching out of me and down the drain."
"For three consecutive days, I used this anger and grief release process, and then spent five to ten minutes a day for the next two days doing "active imagination" work, imaging exactly how I wanted my father to respond to me during the times when he was so critical. I imagined him dancing with me in the kitchen, praising me for my beauty and grace, and skill as a dancer. I imagined myself glowing with pride, awash in his praise for my desirability."
" Having cleared the toxins from my cells, I was now reprogramming those cells with a new story. It was like removing rocks from the soil and cultivating it before planting new seeds. I also did some of that towel work and raging to express my frustration, anger, and give about the emotionally unavailable men in my life. Within about two weeks, the shoulder pain and limitation were nearly gone. It took about another month for full range motion to return and all pain to completely resolve, but then I was pain free even during my Pilates sessions."
"One of the insights I had during my healing process, which I developed over the course of a few months, was that the imprint of lack of love toward myself was being mirrored in some of my closest relationships. People were reflecting my own beliefs about myself back to me! My well-developed intellect wouldn't let me see that at first. But working with my dreams, with Dr. Cohen, with the exercises of releasing my feelings about my father, I came to appreciate my role in keeping myself stuck in old beliefs and behaviors that no longer served me. Notice, I didn't sayI had no right to my old feeling, or no right to see my father as cruel in some ways, or no right to my defensive behaviors and choices - such as getting and staying involved with an emotionally unavailable lover. I said I rid myself of what was no longer serving me. I stood up for myself and my own worth. I declared that I deserved better, and that had to start in the only place I have any control over: how I treat myself. The fact that you are entitled to your hurt, grief, and defensiveness doesn't mean it's working for you. You get to decide whether the payoff of holding on to all that is worth jeopardizing your health, feeing, lousy, and pushing away new opportunities because of your distrust, or cynicism, or avoidance behaviors. It's up to you to make the choices. I just advising you to let all the crap go so you can flourish." Christiane
So, while reading this, I thought of my aching hip and lower back and wondered what chakra it signified?
I googled it and found this by Christiane Northrup....
"Your first chakra health is related to your upbringing and early life. This includes your immediate and extended family, race, social status, education, family legacy, and family expectations. Organs: Physical body support, hip joints, spine, blood, immune system. - See more at: http://www.drnorthrup.com/your-chakras-a-roadmap-to-vibrant-health/#sthash.VYImc6FF.dpuf"
Also, I found this....
"A healthy root chakra connects you with vitality to your family of origin, your immediate society and to the global community. If your 0-7 years were challenging and without love, then this damaged root chakra will function much differently. Issues of survival such as emotional dysfunction, stress, anxiousness, and restlessness will plague you."
I wonder, if I were to give voice to my parents, just as Christiane, vented at her father, would my pain go away? Would it be released? I believe, that I have touched on the voice of the little girl, but only to scramble to safety, to put up boundaries, but I am not certain I have allowed her to vent and release.
My intention is to allow her to speak...for the pain of her early years may be in my hip....eager to be heard.
