The power of acupuncture

If you have never had an acupuncture treatment before, I highly recommend it.  It is one of the most relaxing yet deeply spiritual things I've ever done for my body and my soul.  I'm going through the treatments to help with the pain that is always coursing through my body.  Somehow, though, my acupuncturist has this ability to make the tears come out.  She does it before she even lays a hand on my body.  We always sit and talk before she does her work and today I was telling her about everything that has been going on with the pain I've been feeling, the quieting down of the stress around the worker's comp injuries, not being able to sleep well and my body recovering from the toll of being on Optifast products for the better part of a year.  While I lost a ton of weight on the program, there were some negative side effects that I personally went through, one of which was the threat of fainting every time I would arise from a sitting position and another other was the loss of my hair.  I went through other things, too, but those things are enough.  Somehow, all the feelings of everything I have been going through in the last year, let alone the few before that, just came out in a flood of tears that I wasn't prepared for.  I've just been so stressed out, teetering on the edge of collapse I think.  Valentine's Day didn't help me because as I was cleaning out my office the night before and found a picture of my ex-boyfriend on my desk.  He broke my heart and shattered it into a million pieces.  Most of the time I'm fine and I can move forward knowing it's for the best that he is no longer in my life and then at other times it still hurts just as it did when things were still going on. Oh that cowardly bastard, but perhaps that's a story for another time.

It's not as if things are going badly in my life.  Things are actually moving forward and I'm doing the best I can to live in a healthy manner in body, mind and spirit.  But we all have our breaking points. A person can only take so much and I really feel like I've had my fill in the last few years to last me a lifetime.  So, when I was talking with the acupuncturist and she spoke to me in such a compassionate manner, I just found tears falling onto my cheeks.  Today, given how emotionally raw I was, she wanted to spend some time working on my spirit because she told me she could tell I was sad and feeling depressed.  I don't know ... am I?  I haven't put that label necessarily on it, but maybe I am.  I do have some of the symptoms.  And who could blame me if I was.  She told me to lie face up on the table and she would be back shortly.  So, while I waited for her, the tears just kept falling.  I suppose it was a safe place for me to feel whatever I was feeling.  By the time she came back in, they had stopped.  She put needles in unusual places today, on my earlobes and on the outer ridge of my ears.  I just relaxed though, completely trusting the process and letting whatever I was holding inside go.  It was such a calming experience and just what I needed. 

I tend to hold so much inside of me and do a pretty good job most of the time covering up how I'm really doing.  I'm not intentionally covering things up for the most part, but I suppose that has been my nature my entire life.  When I was a child and being abused, I always covered the truth up because I knew, even as a little girl, that the truth would tear apart our family, that it would hurt more than the physical pain of the abuse.  So I became the brave little girl who faced the world in her perfect little dresses with perfect little ponytails and a great big smile always on her cute and sweet little face.  No one would ever guess what was going on behind a closed door.  As an adult, I can see that I do the same thing ... I hold things in because the truth of whatever is inside is what I have held onto for my entire life.  As I get closer to the time that I will meet with the therapist, I am becoming more aware that it is going to be a process of a lot of self-discovery and perhaps dredging up of pain before I can  then move past it enough to finally let it go.  I'm not sitting here in blame of the one or two people who abused me because it was a long time ago and they were sick individuals, but if you don't tell anyone what's going on, where does the pain go?  Now, I'm trying to do things differently but then that means that sometimes things just come gushing out, like with the acupuncturist today.  Yet, I would rather have that than be diving into a carton of ice cream.  I deserve so much better than that.  Let's face it, we all do. 

Who knew that the act of weight loss would be such a soul-searching process.  I sure didn't.  I just wanted to feel healthier.  Yet I know that to feel physically healthier means I will need to dig into why the weight came on in the first place and why it stayed with me for my entire life.  I'm 41 now and I can say with every ounce of certainty in my body that I'm utterly willing to let it go.  I don't want to hurt  in the way I did when I was at my heaviest.  I wish that on no one.  Can you imagine the sort of pain a person has to be living in to weigh 420 pounds, especially as a woman?  Yet, I'm willing to go there because I don't want to be the person of having the experience of weighing 520 pounds or even more.  Who knows what the stopping point is.

Now I'm on a break from work for a week. I made no plans for this week except to ensure I'm getting in some good exercise each day.  I still have class during the week, but it will be nice to spend some time just getting the sleep I don't normally get, maybe visiting with some friends and who knows what else.  It's a week of vacation that I really need and a week I know I'm incredibly grateful for.