body

Please do not judge

Posted on by SomatiCat

Don’t be too quick to judge those who suffer physically or psychologically.

I have never had migraine.  I know it is idiopathic and it is terrible.  But I don’t know how debilitating it could be.  Idiopathic means you don’t have control over what is happening to our body.  You can’t tell when it will happen.  You can’t do anything to prevent it.  You may avoid certain situations to minimize the chance to trigger attacks, but who knows?  It might be just waiting for us around the corner.  Once it happens, you just remain still waiting it to pass, hoping to survive.  After the first attack, you have to be constantly on guard.  There could be next attack at any moment.

Sounds familiar?

I have just been diagnosed with Meniere’s disease.  It’s idiopathic and I have no idea what triggered it.  In the last 6 weeks, I had 4 attacks.  Once it hits, I immediately have to lie down and wait it to pass.   Just raising head makes me terribly sick.  It won’t kill me but it is dangerous to stay upright because I lose balance.  Fortunately so far I was home when they happened. Now I am anxious.  What if it happens when I am riding subway?  What if it happens when I am walking alone at night?  What if it happens when I am walking down a stair alone at night?

I was suddenly thrown into a world full of danger.

Now I understand migraine is not just a headache.

You will never understand how debilitating it is to be a survivor of sexual assault unless you were sexually assaulted.  Yes, you can be compassionate and supportive, but you never understand how it feels.

So please don’t even think of judging those who are surviving.

 

Restricted Access Area

Posted on by SomatiCat

I am an adorable three year old.  A perfectly happy little girl with natural exuberance radiating from her smile.   Whenever I post my baby photo on facebook, many of my Facebook “friends” say, “You haven’t changed at all.”

And I’m like, “Yes!!!!” crying out my victory.  By age four, she was locked up behind a heavy door.  I dedicated the last 30 years of my life to find and raise her to be a woman she was meant to grow up into.

“You are too skinny,” Dad said. “You are ugly.  No man will marry you,” Dad said.   “Having girls is a waste.   I shouldn’t have had a girl child,” Dad said.  “Why aren’t you a boy.  I wish you were a boy,” Mum said.  “Your skin is too dark for a girl,” Auntie said, “but strangely red becomes you.”   “You were a tiny thing.  A tiny wrinkled faced monkey baby.  I was sure this baby wouldn’t survive,” Grandma said.  “Look at this girl’s eyes.  Too small,” Dad said…

I was too short, too dark, too skinny, too fat.

I was ugly and nobody would ever love me.  (Then why did you touch me?)

Everything about me was wrong.

Don’t believe what they say, Girl.  They are defective mirrors.  They reflect distorted, biased images of you, or maybe perceived images of themselves.  It’s not you.  You are a perfectly happy little girl with natural exuberance radiating from your smile.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Heartburn

Posted on by SomatiCat

Through sheer chance my G.I. doctor found I had Barrett’s esophagus during a routine physical.  The lining of my esophagus was turning into that of small intestine.  That sounds scary.  The doctor asked me if I had an acid reflux.  I didn’t.  Part of  the lining of my stomach was also turning into that of small intestine.  That spelled the possible C word.  I was told I must have a silent (symptomless) acid reflux and I’ve been on medication since.  Eventually my stomach lining turned back to normal, but I still have Barrett’s esophagus.

I haven’t had stomach issues for a long time.  Definitely I didn’t have heartburn.  Then I remembered I often had stomach ache when I lived with my mom. I remembered my mom used to tell me that my younger brother had a delicate digestive system.  When he got nervous or stressed, he threw up. I didn’t thow up but I remembered that after I left home for college, I sometime induced vomiting, probably more often than average young women.

Something clicked.

My original home had been making me sick.

I ran away as far as possible.  There are a continent and Pacific ocean between my parents and me now.  I visit them once a year and that is our compromise.  I used to stay with them for more than a week.  I got depressed.  So my stay got shorter every year.  One year, after spending 4 days or so, I had a severe stomach pain.  Another year, after spending several days with my Mom, I suffered IBS like symptom for two weeks.

My mom has spent her entire married life feeding somebody.  It was her role in the family.  She has taken care of my father, who has type 1 diabetes, for half a century.  It requires a lot of work to feed a diabetic.   Both my brother and I was a light eater when we were little kids, so it has become her mission to feed us as much as we would ingest.  Through therapy, I realized that my mom force-fed me and I was exercising to set a boundary by saying,”No, thank you.”

I told her I usually didn’t eat breakfast.  I woke up to find a breakfast ready on the table.  What can I do?  I ate breakfast: ham and eggs, toasted bread, and yogurt, milk and coffee.  Mom brought a jar of homemade jam to the table and told me to add it to yogurt.  I only ate plain yogurt, so I said, “No, thank you.”  “It’s too sour without jam.  You should add it,” mom insisted.  “No, thank you,” I said.   I told her I didn’t usually have a breakfast, that she didn’t have to prepare mine.  The next morning I woke up to find the same breakfast ready on the table.  “Do you like to add the jam to your yogurt?”  My mom asked.  “No, I told you I didn’t eat sweetened yogurt,” I said.  “It doesn’t taste good without jam,” she insisted.  “No, thank you,” I said.  I set a boundary firm, don’t I?  The next morning I woke up to find the same breakfast ready on the table.  I found she had added her homemade jam in my yogurt bowl.  I didn’t say anything.  I stopped feeling.  When it doesn’t matter what I want or what I don’t want, why should I feel anything.  I swallowed the sweet yogurt in silence.  “It is good, isn’t it?” she said.  That night I had an acute stomach pain.

It isn’t about a spoonful of jam in my yogurt bowl.  The same pattern repeated again and again for lunch, dinner, snacks and everything else.   Eventually I became a foie gras geese.  No wonder I had issues around eating.   I still can’t tell if I’m really hungry or not.

I told my friend the story and she said, “You have a nice mom.  She likes to take care of you.”  She made me feel that I was a thankless brat.  I felt like throwing up.  If you force a piece of chocolate into a child’s mouth, it still tastes sweet. But it doesn’t mean the child wants it.  “I told you it was delicious, didn’t I?   You like it, don’t you?  I was right.  You were wrong..  You don’t know how you feel so I’ll tell you how you feel.  I am right and you are wong.  How you feel doesn’t matter.”   This is how we lose the ability to be ourselves…

If you still think forcing a piece of chocolate in a kid’s mouth against his/her will doesn’t matter, just substitute it with a more sinister word.

How do you feel in your body?

Posted on by SomatiCat

“How do you feel in your body?” my therapist asked.  “Fine,” I answered.  “Do you feel the floor under your feet?” he asked.  “Yes. (So what?)” I answered.  This question irritated me like a hell.  I didn’t understand what it was to do with my psychological misery.  I had two arms, two legs, feet and hands.  I was fine, thank you for asking.  “Stump your feet on the floor.”  I stumped.  “How does it feel?”  “Nothing,” I answered.

“What does it make you feel like?” the therapist asked and I looked for my feeling outside of my body, staring at the ceiling, or watching my therapist’s cat yawn. I didn’t find my feeling in my body.  My feeling didn’t reside in my body.

Disconnection is an excellent survival mechanism.  In a battlefield you won’t survive if you feel.  And for some of us, childhood was a wartime, and the body is where the battle was fought.  In Trauma and Recovery Judith Herman writes, “Traumatic events violate the autonomy of the person at the level of basic bodily integrity.  The body is invaded, injured, defiled.  Control over bodily function is often lost; in the folklore of combat and rape, this loss of control is often recounted as the most humiliating aspect of the trauma.”  Our trauma doesn’t have to be of rape or combat.  It could be grandma pinching your cheeks.

I am not saying that pinching chubby cheeks of an adorable kid is a form of child abuse.  It could be a rather innocent expression of affection.  However, when it is done repeatedly against the child’s will, it could amount to loss of “control over bodily function”.

My ex-boyfriend had a habit of pinching.  He pinched his daughter, he pinched his nephews and he pinched me.  It was his way of saying, “Hey Sweetie.”   I can’t speak for his daughter or nephews, but when he pinched me I felt a rage surging up deep in my body.  “Stop it,” I yelled.  “Don’t pinch me, ever.”  He pinched me a couple of more times, and every time I reacted violently.  Then thankfully he stopped pinching.  He listened to me.  While pinching itself didn’t hurt much, it triggered an uncontrollable anger out of nowhere.

When I was a little girl, my childless aunt doted on me.  She literally tried to eat me with a spoon.  Since she was the source of love and affection, and chocolate and candies and dolls and all the goodies, I clung to her.  She used to tease me by doing something I didn’t like.   The more I shrank from, the more she seemed enjoying.  She used to lick my face, saying I was so cute that she wanted to eat me up.  It was wet and yucky.  I said, “No!!!” but she was much bigger and stronger.  She told me that she loved me and that I should let her do whatever she wanted to do.  Sometimes, she bribed me with goodies.  It’s an innocent expression of affection, isn’t it?   Pinching was a variation.  I don’t remember who pinched me, but it does not matter.  It told me the same story.  My feeling does not matter.  I don’t have control over my body.  They have.  And I am an ungrateful brat if I don’t appreciate the affection the adults are giving to me.  Tolerating the feeling of discomfort will be rewarded with chocolate, or whatever goodies.  Got it?  Just replace the word “pinching” or “licking” with “touching improperly.” It tells the same story of trauma.  “The traumatic event thus destroys the belief that one can be oneself in relation to others”(Herman 53).

When I was a little girl I told my mum that my tummy ached.  I told her that I would feel better if she let me eat a piece of bread.  She didn’t give me bread and took me to a family doctor.  It turned out that I was not sick but just hungry.  I didn’t know the word to explain the intense sensation I felt in my belly.  What I felt in stomach, aching for food, was denied as not legitimate by adults. When I was a teenager, I had a painful period.  I told that I had severe cramps and couldn’t move.  My father said, “No, you don’t.  You are lazy.”  My mom didn’t protest.  (Later I found that my mom never had a painful period in her life, and she couldn’t imagine how bad it could be.)  Thus in my early ages I learned not to trust the feeling in my body.

We lose the ability to connect to one’s body little by little.  When someone in authority, such as parents and teachers, tells us we have to feel certain way again and again while we don’t feel that way, it becomes unsafe to be ourselves.  Others in our life take away our connection to the body.  We gain artificial limbs and body parts instead, which function very well.   Nobody notices it’s artificial.  Sometimes they could be much more useful than real limbs, just like a sword loaded limb, since we don’t feel pain.  Eventually we might even forget they are not real. When one suffers a hugely traumatic experience and survives, the disconnection between mind and body could be much harder to reconcile.

About the photo: I took the photo of the glass sculpture at Corning Museum of Glass. Unfortunately  I don’t know the artist’s name.

Hands of Kuan Yin

Posted on by SomatiCat

“I just might be able to walk again,” she said in a barely audible voice. “I know,” I said under my breath, feeling every details of her tarsal bones. She knew she would never and I knew she knew.

Her feet permanently dropped at the ankle like a long stem rose brought home the night before sadly drooping in the morning light, making me feel slightly guilty of something which I didn’t know I did or I didn’t.

She wanted to have them dorsiflexed. “My toes stayed curled up in my boots today. They want to be stretched,” she said. I held her foot and slowly reproduced walking motion.

“When I move your foot, just imagine that you are moving it by yourself,” I said.
“My brain is not sending correct signals, isn’t it?”
“Your brain is sending signals all right. It is your nerves that are not delivering messages to your muscles,” I explained. “It’s like a highway with the southbound lanes closed. You can take a cab to JFK airport, but there are no cabs to take back to Manhattan…” I caught myself walking into the dangerous territory of reality. Your motor neurons are dying. You can’t rehabilitate dead neurons. That was what I didn’t say.

“When you want your feet on the wheelchair footrest, your friends place them on it for you, don’t they? Your mind sends a message to the feet to move and your feet are placed on the footrest, even in the exact way you want them to be placed, with the heels of the boots on, not off, the footrest. It’s just the same as your doing by yourself. Your mind moved your friends’ hands.”

“I’ve never thought that way,” she said and started to cry in silence. I’ve never thought that way either till now.

Her feet, which didn’t have to carry her weight any more, were impeccably soft and ice-cold at the same time. “Nirvana,” she sighed when I jostled her foot in my hands. Her leg muscles held no tension. There were no muscular defenses to disarm. I remembered her once athletic legs. With her nerves failing to fire, her muscles were wasting away. “Floppy, aren’t they?” she kept reiterating. Flaccid they were. Her immobile legs and feet were still cold as if she had been standing on the winter edge of the water, letting the surf sweep cross her legs, every wave slightly higher, taking away her body heat, higher and colder until it touched her knees. The frigidity had been steeped deep in the bones, refusing to thaw.

I am palpating a skeleton, I thought. Through the thin layers of flaccid tissue my fingers could clearly see bones and tendons. When I touched a tiny muscle behind the knee, she said, “I didn’t know it would feel so good to be touched there. I would never have known.”  You would never have had to be aware if your legs didn’t fail to move, I thought.

She moaned. “Is the pressure too much?” I asked. “No. It just feels so good,” she said and then asked, “Why does it feel so good?”

“Your body is ready to receive. It is difficult for most of us to surrender to receive. I feel Ki is flowing into your body effortlessly,” I said. “Most people resist and block the flow, you know.” I was making up as I went, searching for words she wished to hear. Or was I verbalizing what I always knew?

“Yes, I can feel Ki flowing in,” she said, and after a pose, continued, “Don’t you think I just might be able to…”

She wasn’t talking to me and I didn’t say anything.

Her feet and legs were finally reclaiming warmth, like the frozen ground moistened by the gentle rain. She hadn’t talked for a while. She was drowsing off.

“I fell asleep,” she said.
“It’s O.K. to fall asleep.”
“I don’t want to. I’ve been fighting hard not to.”

I didn’t understand. It’s the whole point of getting a massage, isn’t it? To relax and drift into sleep away from the tension of waking life, to yield to somebody else’s hands, allowing somebody else to take care of you.

“I want to remember how good I’m feeling now. If I fall asleep, I won’t remember. I don’t want to miss even a moment of it.”

The muscles had transformed themselves into a purely sensory organ, responsive to external stimuli, while unable to react. Like a legendary musical instrument, she responds to my touch and she is listening to the music that she only can hear. Her intact sensory nerves respond to the touch with the ever-changing combination of pressure, temperature, rhythm, direction, slow, fast, light, deep, circle, straight, faster, lighter, nerves firing and resonating.

What a state of being. She had a pure awareness of the body and I was resonating together with her.

The hands of Kuan Yin (観音）touched me through her.

The Japanese word for “treatment” literally means laying on of hands.

RIP my friend,  July 29, 2011.  You were a warrior.

Integral Anatomy Workshop: Day 2

Posted on by SomatiCat

We spent entire day separating the skin from the underlying superficial fascia, literally getting under the skin of Tony.

What I learned today.

  1. The skin separates me from what is not me.
  2. The skin protects me from what is not me, like a breathable armor.
  3. We shed the surface layer of skin like crazy.
  4. Shed skin becomes what is not me or is it still part of what is me?
  5. You should not cut your armor unless absolutely necessary.  Once cut, the energy field changes dramatically even in a cadaver.  Tensional integrity will be lost.
  6. We are innately wet and moist being but without the skin/boundary, we dry pretty quickly and it will change the quality of being.
  7. The skin does not want to be separated from the adipose layer.
  8. Considering how delicately we worked to seperate the skin intact, liposuction is abomination.

I am happy with the way our group members treat Tony. I feel each of us is making our best effort to make Tony comfortable. He is cared and respected.

We have 8 groups.  Each group has started to show its distinct personality and it’s reflected on the cadaver we are working on as if we are sculpting our own image out of the “form”.

Drawing by Tam Tran Valenti

Drawing by Tam Tran Valenti

The Infinity Circle of Lunch

Most of us spent one hour lunch time outside on the green grass under the blue sky.  We spontaneously created the infinity circle of lunch.  After iIntensly staring at yellow adipose tissue, we need other colors to balance our brain.

Infinity Circle of Lunch

Infinity Circle of Lunch

Integral Anatomy Workshop: Day 1

Posted on by SomatiCat

Today I met the legendary Dr. Hedley, the Fuzz Speech Guy, and our cadaver “Tony” at an undisclosed location (out of respect to the donors).  Entire class consists of about 30 people.  My team includes two structural integrators (a Rolfer and a KMIer), a Pilates teacher, and a massage therapist.

I will spend 8 hours/day, 6 days a week, for three weeks to learn who I am with Tony.

What I leaned today:

  1. Skin color is not even epidermis deep.
  2. When you stand cadavers up, they look happier and you feel them more personal.
  3. Cadavers go where their hips go.
  4. An Invisible and inaudible bell works as well as a visible one
  5. Hands and feet are as personal as faces.
  6. Once I get used to, my brain re-calibrates for through-the-exam-gloves touch and I can feel detailed texture just like with direct contact.

Gil calls a cadaver human “form.”

Holding each form in the standing position revealed the story we didn’t see when they were lying on the table.  How the body occupies the space is an integral part of who they are.  Standing makes them look closer to the life.  One female form was surprisingly tall with dancer’s legs.  Standing, she looked younger and livelier.  Personality of the form takes shape through interaction with the gravity.  Narrative emerges from the relationship of the body with gravity in space.

Integral Anatomy Workshop is an intensive hands-on human dissection workshop for manual therapists/structural integrators/body workers/philosophers.  It’s quite different from medical school gross anatomy lab classes.

Dissection is an act of introspection. By unwrapping the layers of the donor’s gift, participants uncover hidden layers of themselves.  Gil Hedley, Ph.D.

The Gross Anatomy Lab is super clean.

The Gross Anatomy Lab is super clean.

The lab is super clean.  The color scheme is:  whitish linoleum floor; white lab coats; black counter tops; black chairs; orange cabinets, and lots of stainless steel glare under fluorescent light.

We spent about 7 hours in this totally artificial sanitized space with continuous humming of some kind of machines in the background.

Day 1 is for observation.  No scalpel.  We spent long time with Tony, taking notes of surface marks, such as surgical scars.  Most of the students are one kind of manual therapists or another.  Our way to relate is distinctively different from med students.  We touch and feel to relate.