Month: March 2024

Today in my weekly riding lesson I was told to keep my right hip over my right foot while riding down a line of jumps off the right.

The profound thing was.. I actually managed to do that by the end of the lesson.

Ten years ago I fractured my right leg and sustained nerve damage. While I was back riding and competing later that year, I had a few years of not having full sensation in that leg and likely developed many of my adult compensations in my riding position during that time. On many levels, that injury began a strange spiral of events and lingering things that I can only summarize as what became the novel of my twenties.

Entirely not unconnected, a few weeks ago in a therapy session I faced the realization that the events of, and that followed, that injury were a hinge point for me becoming defensively averse to certain aspects of myself. Aspects that I learned to fear or avoid, because of fear of further ouchies on some level.

It’s strange how trauma of any kind can do this to our bodies and minds. We survive in many ways by our awareness shifting.

Back to riding. The sensation of a motor pattern I haven’t been able to fully or consciously commit since before that injury was “all of a sudden” intact. Heavy air quotes around “all of a sudden” to signify the intense and seemingly endless work I’ve done that likely compounded to that small, albeit profound moment.

Amidst all this it’s also not shocking to me that since that therapy session a few weeks ago where I was all but smacked in the face with the realization of a form of fearing myself, in sessions since my right side has been waking up. Including what feels like intriguing sensations I can only link to what I remember nerve healing feeling like way back when the injury was originally healing.

It’s not logical to say that ten years later my leg and all connections upwards throughout the body are beginning a new stage of healing.. but, it isn’t complete nonsense either.

All I know is that for the first time in many years I was able to adjust my right hip on top of my right foot and stay relatively straight and balanced through a line of jumps. I didn’t expect it, and I didn’t know all the dots were linking, and here we are striding onwards.

Having been faced with the diagnosis of a chronic illness recently, and as a therapist who frequently works with chronic conditions of all sorts, I’ve been faced with the paradox of the chronic reality of human existence.

On one hand, it’s human nature to pursue solution. We are orientated to survive by recognizing threat and resolving threat, neurologically. Yet, our conundrum persists.

To be human is to encounter one thing after the next. To be human is to exist through experiences, many of which are threatening, overwhelming and traumatizing.

There is no cure for our diagnosis’ as humans.

We may experience all forms of acute and chronic discomforts, diseases, traumas and mishaps. And we are designed to be irrevocably changed by them as we live through them.

That is surviving, as well as thriving.

The recognition that we can not solve our chronic human conditions is both a relief and torture.

Acceptance is perhaps one of the reasons, if you are one who needs a reason, why we experience a human existence.

This recognition isn’t to minimize the nature of chronic disease, or any of the chronic complexities we experience. If anything, it amplifies their significance.

If I’ve recognized anything in those I’ve worked with professionally in support of their chronic concerns, it’s that they are more sensitive, more aware and more burdened. They have often been caught by the worst of life’s experiences and perhaps are in the midst of sorting their way through the processing of that. As they navigate their relationship to themselves, they are forced to meet pain, grief, trauma and the ebbs and flows of biological sensations time and time again.

As I begin to consciously navigate this for myself, within myself, I am recognizing that I’ve had some nature of chronic complaint most of my life. Be it post traumatic syndromes, or mystery health complaints. The current diagnosis I have received is both unique and synonymous in nature to many ones I’ve received in the past.

I am facing a reckoning within myself; biologically, spiritually, energetically, mentally and emotionally.

The question I am facing from my intuitive parts is this: Is this reckoning simply an embodiment of evolution? Is my breakdown just another breakthrough? Is breakthrough just another way of framing yet another turn of the wheel of life?