I come in with a lot of joint pain today. We start off with breathing and mindfulness specifically targeting the joints. It’s really hard for me to visualize the breath, the light, the warmth. I’ve been doing body scans every day but struggling even more with it on my own. I’m going to try guided meditations/scans at home. But here, with her guidance, it is easier.

But still hard. I can’t feel my body. Art therapy is helping me feel at peace while present in my mind. I’m realizing more and more how much I’m not present with my body. If I’m not present with my body or my mind, what am I? Who am I? Where am I?

She suggests if I can’t send the light down my arms into my hands, where we are focusing, to try to picture like a jumper cable stretching through the air from my mind to my fingers. It’s a little easier to find my hands this way.

It doesn’t help that my feet fell completely asleep without me noticing. I suddenly recognize the discomfort and have to bend my knees and wait until the blood comes back to my toes, the pain associated with moving my legs at all during this process very apparent. She says that you can’t choose your superpowers or the consequences that come with them. She says there are people who would love to do what I do with racing who don’t have this same ability to keep going when the body is in extreme discomfort. It helps me to reframe some of the frustration I feel in seeing how out of touch I truly am with myself. Maybe it is not as much of a problem as I’m making it out to be but rather a part of how I exist.

That doesn’t mean I’m not going to continue working on my mindfulness or trying to listen to my body, but I also realize that it’s kind of an oxymoron to try really hard to relax. This isn’t something I need to fight for. Isn’t the whole point just noticing? Without judgment?

I do want to learn to hear some of my body’s cues and get within reach of its intuition. I do want to unclench. But I also see that it’s not that I never hear my body at all; eventually I noticed that my feet had fallen asleep. They aren’t completely lost to me.

As she works on my arms, my joints do feel relief. She says picture the love I feel for maybe a pet. I do. She says to send that to my fingers. I start to cry. She says to thank them. I do. I’m surprised at the reaction I’m having and the relief. I guess my hands are pretty essential, hard workers who just need to be acknowledged sometimes. They are doing a good job. It’s helpful for me to remember to notice that, not just when they hurt.

For my left hand and fingers, instead of sending love, she directs me to put my trust in them, that they know how to heal and how to handle what they need to do. I say I like the idea of this but that it’s scary, that I’m not sure I believe it, but I want to.

She’s made the distinction between some of the more psychological manifestations of pain and physiological ones, which I appreciate. This practice has limitations. But this practice has power, too. At least for this moment, the pain has subsided.

She tells me about some of her own experiences and things she’s working on with overfunctioning. About how she’s gone rafting and felt so much fear and a need to be able to steer, but then she went with her fun aunt who just got in a tube without a paddle and would crash into obstacles that would send her spinning, and laughing. It changed the massage therapist’s perspective seeing her aunt approach the same thing in such a different way. The next time she went to the river, she took her aunt’s approach. She was scared at first but then it was freeing.

The theme of it all comes back to staying curious about life. I just read a book, I Who Have Never Known Men, which immediately became my favorite book I’ve ever read. The setting of the book is, essentially, the unknown. There was a passage in the book that elucidated how the narrator’s determination to live came not from hope but from curiosity. As I reflect on my session today, that is what I’m sitting with.

Sometimes there are no resolutions, no explanations. The unknown is uncomfortable and at times inescapable, but by relieving ourselves of the need to search for certainty we may find harmony with unanswered questions. Sometimes the things that give you strength also come with downsides, and you can’t have it both ways. Sometimes life is what it is and you are who you are. Sometimes there are things that can’t be fixed, even within ourselves, and all we can do is meet ourselves where we are and just keep asking, what do I want to do now? Lingering on what can’t be changed only gives more weight to the very real pain that exists. And it’s okay to think about it, and it’s okay to talk about it, but it’s also okay not to.

Thinking about it hasn’t been something I have had any control over before. But I’m learning tools that are helping me have more choice. I can’t change what happened. I can’t change that I will be reminded of it. But for the first time I’m starting to feel some power, even if only slight, to let the thoughts come and go and think about something else. For the first time I’m starting to feel my life grow past the trauma and thus there are more places to go in my memory that are beyond the thing that has consumed so much of my life before.

For so long, the trauma grew with me. I see that its growth is finally, finally coming to an end. But mine isn’t. For the first time, the percent of my life devoted to it is going down. And I feel that. And this is just the start.