Tolle talks about the seeming super abilities that awareness grants its users. This again takes me back to my dog. She definitely has a much lower IQ than I do, but there are definitely times that she outwits me. I’m sure every dog owner will admit the same.
Actually she quite surprised me the very first day we brought her home when, as a 9 or 10 week old, 3.7 lb puppy, I had to take her crate out of her X-pen because she was jumping on top of the crate and using it as a launch pad to jump up onto our couch. All this two days after her spaying and hours after we brought her home. She changed hands for what must have been the 4th or 5th time in the past week or so. She is a rescue dog that we found abandoned in the street a couple of weeks prior. We turned her over to the shelter and adopted her after they checked her out — and checked for a legitimate owner.
This makes me think of how humans think of trauma and surgery. As a human, every now and then I think back on all the things she’s been through and feel bad for her. I even feel guilty that she was spayed because it feels like we took something from her, but she never really seems to worry about it.
It makes me wonder about our human responses to illness and injury. How much more could we do if we were more aware of the physical state of our bodies?
This takes me to all the work I’ve been doing in PT over the past year or so. It started when my right knee started hurting, then by the time I went to PT both knees were hurting. Like many weightlifters I was told I am “too quad dominant.” When you say it this way it sounds like my quads are too strong! OK, so another coach or fitness professional might say “no your posterior chain is just too weak!” This is getting closer, but I’ve tried PT numerous times in my life and it’s never been as successful as it has been this time. I am sure the team I am working with plays a role in that, but I can’t help but suspect that I have also changed through my years of training and have finally become a little more capable of allowing myself to heal.
Going back to what I was saying before about being “too quad dominant,” as weightlifters, we are always told to “use more legs.” I see this now as an awareness problem. We never talk about our hamstrings, glutes, hips. Now I don’t hate sitting as much as some of the standing desk fanatics, but I will admit that sitting all day at a desk, doesn’t help either. What is there to do but relax and try to forget that your posterior chain is there? I see this round of PT as awareness therapy more than anything else. It isn’t that my quads are too strong, or that my posterior chain is too weak, but rather that I’ve just forgotten that some of my muscles exist.
I can feel it when I squat, and I’m sure you feel it every day when you try to move in some way or another. I am going through some range of movement, and then things just freeze. What I have realized is that the freezing sensation is the limit of the range of motion that my anterior chain can obtain. Because I have insufficient awareness in various muscles of my posterior chain, that is the limit before they need to wake up to take me the next few inches.
In PT it’s not so much about getting stronger but rather putting myself in various positions which force me to use muscles I have forgotten play a role in every movement I do.
Thinking about it this way has guided my path to recovery. I think this is what people mean by “not forcing things.” Before I would push harder, trying to load up my anterior chain and push it past its breaking point. When that didn’t work, I would try to relax or let go, as some people describe some types of stretching, but I think these approaches are both too much and not enough. The real solution has been to look for what I am ignoring. What is so obviously a part of my body and yet completely uninvolved in what I am doing.
The beauty of movement is that you can’t move one part of your body in isolation. If while doing a certain movement, you can point to one part of your body and can’t see how it is contributing to the movement, then you have a gap of awareness — the gateway to all pain.
