Being a Muscle Detective. Feeling Lost, Yet Hopeful
This week I am taking a break from our regular topics.
I’ve been participating in a writing group, experimenting with different styles in hopes of making my future book more engaging, and stretching my writing muscles along the way.
The following two pieces came from recent writing sessions in response to very different prompts. Neither was written specifically to explain the Bridging® Technique work and experience.
Yet, I realized they captured something I don’t always convey when writing about muscles, movement, physics, and recovery.
They capture what it feels like to do, and to experience this work.
So, this week, I thought I’d simply share them with you.
The writing group I participate in is led by Deborah Bayer who also shares delightful reflections on her SubStack, Healers Write, Writers Heal.
The writing group follows the Amherst Writers and Artists philosophies and is a wonderfully supportive and respectful way to find your writing groove. There are many trained group leaders so you should be able to find a group whose time fits your schedule if this sounds interesting.
The Muscle Detective
(The writing prompt was to write about a list with a flip at the end.)
My day is spent sleuthing and recognizing the many ways muscles mis-coordinate.
The structural becomes neurological.
The disjoint becomes pain and loss of balance.
Was it the surgery?
Where the time-crafted layers of function were cut or moved apart, then glued or stitched together as best possible. Only to pull, twist, or tether when trying to move once again.
Was it the injury?
It pulled muscles apart, or squished them together, or plain old jumbled them up. The wreckage was left to work as best possible, because “nothing is broken.”
Was it the virus?
It triggered an immune response, collapsing the body from an immune standpoint. That collapse also pulled the scaffold out from the muscle’s fibers, relaxing their tension, when tension is required for nerve impulses to travel to activate them.
Or, were the muscles ever correctly linked together?
Had they been allowed to program themselves with the movements composed during fetal and infant development? Sometimes babies are fighting to stay alive, missing pivotal periods of movement.
Surprisingly, the same hug, sway, and playful wiggle we use to engage with a child is the same way to engage these sidelined muscles waiting for support so they can play together again.
Lost, Yet Still Hopeful
(The writing prompt was related to the poem ‘Bird Wings’ by Rumi. We were to describe what do you see in the mirror held up to where you are bravely working.)
They arrive anxious, frustrated, and beaten-down by a medical system that can offer only pills and surgery.
Our questions about distant past injuries and procedures are met with skepticism. The change in tenor occurs with the awareness of the heaviness or rigidity of the body which correlates to that past incident.
Surprisingly, support for the trauma, both physical and metaphysical, yields change and the constraint (and pain!) disappears.
If only I had a window inward to reveal the way the support allowed the muscles, nerves, and blood vessels to relax and reengage, like old friends.
What’s Next: Ankle sprains: Healed, yet still unstable?