Sometimes the Universe puts up signposts.
During a recent trip to our local town of Bradford-on-Avon I picked up a pile of leaflets from some of the people advertising therapies in the area. B-on-A is a bit of a hub for That Kind Of Thing; one of the reasons I love it.
One leaflet was for a woman who offers hypnotism and various other things, including creative kinesiology. It got left in a pile on the coffee table. Somehow, that particular leaflet ended up on top of another pile in Charlie's office and he thought it was me dropping a not too subtle hint, because we'd been talking about him getting hypnotism to help with the vestiges of a stammer he has from his schooldays (it wasn't). So he called and made an appointment.
And it was astounding. Not just because a day later, he didn't stammer once during the type of phone call that would usually have found him completely locked on a consonant, but because it also opened up memories that his mind thought it had forgotten. His body hadn't.
So I decided the time was right for me to address my emotional eating issues before my poor old bones crumpled under the 30 pounds of extra weight I'm carrying. Or my body became so toxic that it fell into serious illness. Or my exhaustion got so extreme it tipped into CFS or something. Or my head exploded. I made the appointment.
The first one is 90 minutes - 30 minutes consultation over a long questionnaire you've already filled in and 60 minutes of treatment. I'd thought hypno was the way we'd go but the kinesiology just took off so we went with it.
In brief, my energy, immune system and strength/resources are all running at about 50%. I thought this was great - way better than I'd imagined - LK did not. She was pretty horrified.
She was more horrified by my confession that I don't really drink water. And I don't get thirsty. She muscle-tested me with water (I held a glass of water in my right hand, against my stomach, while she tested my resistance with my left arm) and - as my arm repeatedly flopped like a limp lettuce - said,"That? Is not right."
My body rejected the water as an unknown substance. Which meant something on a meridian somewhere was broken. She worked on a couple of points (think acupressure) and tested me again. Loving that water. Arm as strong as an ox.
She muscle-tested me while asking my body how much water it needs a day and it said 2.1 litres. So that's what I'm drinking. Minimum. And for once it's actually easy. I want it. I feel thirsty.
We did some other minor adjustments and then got onto the eating stuff. She took me back (asked my body what age it wanted to return to) to when I was about 5. We talked and tested over an issue that I had at that time that has stayed with me as deep shame. I was horribly affected by the birth of my second brother at that age and my jealousy was HUGE. I so wanted to take it out on him (I didn't) and we talked through those feelings. Where in my body I was feeling them, what words were coming up in my head, anything I was feeling. I felt it in my arms as an almost overpowering urge to push, reject and shove and had interpreted those feelings as being how I felt about my brother (whom I've always adored btw).
Cut to the chase, through various tests and acupressure and sitting with my feelings and just spilling what was coming to the surface, I came to see that my issue was not over the jealousy - I was FIVE and my Dad had a new favourite, how else was I going to feel? - but over the depth of my feelings. ANY feelings. Because I am someone who feels things BIG and my family liked to feel things small. Big feelings are undesirable. Inappropriate. Unlikeable. Wrong. Inconvenient. Not welcome. Not nice.
Hi, I'm British.
And so I learnt that I needed to suppress those feelings by hook or by crook. I had to be good. And in the past I've used nicotine and running away to deal with them but now that neither of those options are available to me, I eat. I literally push down those feelings with food. I swallow them up.
I also learnt, throught the consultation part, that I'm a textbook kinesthetic learner which makes perfect sense to me and puts a lot of things I already knew into a nice tidy package that I can refer to.
So that was the first session. It rocked. I have another booked for later in the month. We have no idea what will happen then. More of the same or something else to look at? We'll see.
Weirdest thing? I've had chronic knee pain now for a couple of months. Very bad. Almost unable to drive bad. It's gone. I haven't had it since I walked out of LK's therapy room and yet we did nothing to directly address physical problems.
We talked about my (recent) inability to commit to regular exercise. What could I do that would stick? In my childhood and teens I was a ballet dancer. In my 20s I was a farm-hand, a waitress and later an aerobics queen. In my 30s I taught various kinds of fitness. In my 40s I got a desk job and 30 pounds of extra body.
I'm over aerobics and its many cousins. I like the idea of running but not the reality. The gym bores me silly and my schedule is a mess so it's easy for me to skive. Money and childcare keep me from regular classes of any kind and yes, I'm great at making up excuses.
After my appointment the internets brought me to Bindu Wiles's brilliant 21.5.800 for which I duly signed up. And then yesterday, freewheeling through blogs, years after it was actually cool, I discovered hooping. And fell in LOVE. Within a couple of hours I'd been shopping and bought the makings of a hoop for me and a hoop for Evie. I'd watched numerous hooping videos on youTube and subscribed to some hoopy blogs.
This morning, at about 7.30, while Evie and her cousin (who had a sleepover last night minus the sleep.) played in her room, I was in the garden with the chickens. Trying out m'hoop. It's a humbling experience when you realise you've lost all co-ordination and can't spin a hoop for more than four spins without it knocking seven shades out of your anklebones. I persevered and pretty soon had it up to 17. Which probably sounds a bit crap but it made me skip around the garden punching the air.
So, kinesiology, water, yoga, writing and a big old hoop. It's feeling good.
I'm loving the process.
