I have been thinking about my body over the last few months.
Last year, I had a serious accident and ended up with full thickness flame burns to my back and right arm. I was admitted to the hospital for assessment, and the consultants determined that it would be best to allow my body time to heal before considering surgery. Two weeks later they decided I needed skin grafts, and I returned to hospital to get all my burns skin grafted. They used my right leg as the donor site to provide the skin needed for the grafts. My body needed time to recover. The donor site was painful for several weeks while it was healing, and I found it difficult to get about. Interestingly, my skin grafts weren’t sore and that was because I had damaged the nerves. I was lucky that my skin grafts healed quickly. However, because they are skin grafts, they will not completely heal until I reach the two-year mark, and they will continue to need care for the rest of my life. I experience itching, nerve pain, and tightness in the grafts. This has been a life changing experience.
Reflecting on the period after the accident, I realise that I pressured myself to show others such as my employers that I was healing and doing okay. I returned to work after 10 weeks and I started completing reflexology for menopause training 6 weeks after the accident. By the end of November, I was advertising that I was offering appointments again. At the time, it seemed like the right thing to do and what society (and my inner critic) expected off me.
At the new year, I decided to resign from my job and go self-employed. By the beginning of February, I had started trying to get back into running but it wasn’t happening. I felt rundown and tired. My sinuses were bothering me, and my skin was dry and flaky. I started to get really frustrated and eventually decided to make an appointment with the GP. The last time I felt like this I was anaemic. I waited a month for a GP appointment and to get blood tests. The blood tests came back all clear. It was at this point I had to accept that my body was trying to communicate with me, and I had to listen. What was it trying to tell me? That it needed rest. It had experienced physical, emotional, and spiritual trauma and it needed to heal. As I write this, I do wonder how did I not know this? I did but I didn’t listen because I felt the need to meet societal expectations of achievement, success, and busyness. Proving that I am a survivor.
My journey going forward is to listen to my body and to develop a greater sense of body awareness. What am I doing differently? I am going for massage, reflexology, and reiki treatments. I am participating in yoga and Pilates classes. I am engaging in counselling and doing somatic work which involves meditation, journaling, and body awareness. I am trying to turn down the volume of inner critic and working to show myself love and compassion. I remind myself daily that going slow is okay. Doing things that I enjoy, and which involve being present like wild swimming, walking, pottery and sewing. The last 9 months have been a massive learning curve for me. It has meant that I have had to slow down, start listening and noticing and most importantly feeling what is going on my body.
I don’t think I am different or special. I think that as humans, we have stopped listening to our bodies. This is often due to the messages projected onto us as children which can continue into adulthood. Many of us will have a memory of parents or teachers telling us to get on with it: we may have forced to go to school or to an event when we were ill or exhausted. We may have been made to walk when we wanted to be pushed in our pram or carried by our parent. In our current world, we go to our work when we are ill because we fear being judged by work colleagues or we will be disciplined for our attendance or not paid for the absence.
The challenge for us is to start parenting ourselves and showing ourselves compassion and kindness. For example, instead of continuing to run when we have sore knees and popping ibuprofen to dull the pain, we could do something radical like accepting that we can’t run at present and find other forms of exercise such as walking and swimming or be even more radical – rest completely and allow our body to heal. This may also involve seeing the GP or physiotherapist to check out that there is nothing functionally wrong with our knees. By listening to our bodies, we are showing ourselves kindness, compassion, love, and tenderness. We all deserve kindness, compassion, love and tenderness and it is often something that we are desperately craving.
Our bodies are amazing. They deserve to be treated kindly. Engaging in forms of body work such as reflexology and massage, can support our bodies to relax, rest, heal, and recover. When people engage in body work, they are helping their body to relax, find balance, and create conditions where the body can start to heal.