There is was again, the anger, arising from seemingly nowhere, red hot and ready for battle. Why is it here again, and what can I do to help keep it at bay? It would come up suddenly, and in that moment of recognition I would stop and look to see where this anger came from, why it arose once again. What a frustrating process this was, each time I would look it seemed that I saw only blank walls with no path forward. Again and again I would return to this quandary, looking for the way in, the path to understanding, knowing where this anger came from and why.....
And so it was for days, weeks, months, I would sit and meditate and look for the pathway to the source of the anger. I had become aware of this smouldering anger over the course of many years. It would show up uninvited and rain on a perfectly good day. This is how things were, and it was a little sign of what was going on, of what was happening inside that I had not noticed.
The body is always talking to us, and I had learned, like so many others, to simply ignore the messages. I had learned to ignore what it was telling me, I had taught myself not to listen as I continued to push forward with whatever I thought I should be doing at the time. This had been my method of operating for so long that it did not even occur to me that my body might be giving me any sort of instruction or clue card that what I was doing was not in my best interest. I did this successfully until 2002, and in that moment my body gave me such a big message that I could no longer ignore what it was saying.
I had felt terrible for a bit, run down, tired, and it was no wonder, I was exhausted. I was in residency training to be a Family Physician, and I was working outside the training in a small clinic 20-30 hours a week after hours and on weekends whenever I had the time. I was working far in excess of what was healthy for me, but I felt compelled to do the work. I did not feel like I could say no to the opportunity to earn a bit more money, and make up for the cut in pay we had taken when I went back to training. And so one night I woke up sweaty with fever and sick at my stomach and the nausea overtook me. What came up looked funny, but it was late, and I felt terrible so I did not care. Over the next couple of days, things would change, I had other signs that I had likely had a bleeding event in my stomach. I felt OK and it did not seem to keep happening so I went on about business as usual. Then one day in mid summer in the Texas heat, I was loading bags of feed into the truck and I had this chest pain, it was weird, and had some shortness of breath with it, and was not like anything I had ever had previously. I wondered aloud if I might be having angina, or heart pain. I finished my work, and returned to the air conditioned comfort of the truck more winded than I had ever been, and a random thought rolled across my mind.... 'you know, you did throw up a lot of blood the other night'.... and so I looked into the mirror and saw that the whites of my eyes seemed to extend all the way onto the lids, and the palms of my hands did not have any colour to them at all, the lines were pale white as was my face. Twenty four hours later I knew exactly why, as Dr Pfanner finished outlining the depth of my idiocy that had culminated in a large ulcer and the loss of half the blood in my body. I realized, that in fact, I was probably working too many hours, that the funny ache in my stomach was not too much coffee but really too much stress. I realized I needed to change, and for the first time I began to listen, albeit not as closely as I eventually would, to the messages that my body was sending my way.
These days I listen, and I listen closely. I noticed when the jaw starts to get a little tight. I have learned to listen to my body, and listen to the wisdom that it has that operates below the radar of my brain's frontal lobe. There is a brain in my gut that sees this world in ways that my eyes do not. This brain communicates directly to me through my vagus nerve, it tells me things through the language of my body, and I have learned to listen more closely. As I followed my anger back in time, I could see that pathway that it took physically to arrive at the red hot battle lines, and the source of this spring often began in my jaw. I had watched and learned to see the steps prior to the anger to see what steps my body went through before the anger erupted. I could see the small movements, the tensions arise that were preludes to more action if I did not notice and adjust, and so I learned to listen to my jaw, and I have been rewarded for this attention.
My jaw will tighten when things are going astray. If I am crossing a boundary that I set for myself, saying yes when I should say no. It well also alert me to those moments when others are pushing the edges of my boundaries well before they arrive at my doorstep. If I listen to the jaw, then I have plenty of forewarning that I need to take action, to take a step back from something I have agreed to, or to say no to something that is being asked. I would love to say that I am really good at listening and following this advice that comes from my body, but like so many things in life, it is complicated. The stories in my head often overrule the wisdom of my body, and I get the chance to once again learn the lesson of listening (although thankfully not in as big a way as I did in 2002). But I recognize these moments sooner, and I have a greater chance of changing what would otherwise be blind behaviours and responses, and that my friends is an opportunity not to be missed. And in the right settings, there are times when I can follow these physical messages deeper and deeper and land up on the memories and beliefs that got the whole ting started.... but that is a story for another time....
For more information on the Polyvagal Theory look here on Pub Med or from Dr Porges at his website.
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