I am 68. My body has served me well. I have been a competitive athlete for most of my adult life. I run swim and bike along with other adventures that come along. When I was 27 I was in a head on collision that left me unconscious and hospitalized for 10 days with a severe head injury. At that time it was not as clear as it is now how to rehabilitate a head injury so I just bounced back into my full and busy life, single parenting two small children, working and living life.
Within a few years the effects of the head injury began to surface. Constant neck pain, headaches, and Thyroid shut down, right arm shut down, Hashimoto’s disease and later Graves Disease. Suffice it to say the Accident was in my past but the ramifications were becoming very present.
In my 40’s I began seeing Osteopaths who helped me function along with any and everything else I could try to help with the neck and upper body pain. Nothing held. I ended up needing treatments almost every week for the last 25 years. Suffice it to say I have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the consequences of this injury.
Last winter I embarked on a long Series of SHEN, Physical and Emotional Release Therapy to get underneath the body’s defenses to the trauma in the body from the accident and other emotional losses and traumas that came with a long full life. At the same time I began to FLOAT. Intuitively I knew that floating would be the perfect way for my body to enter a quiet space to integrate the healing from the bodywork. It was a very intense period and I feel quite sure that the results would not have been so amazing without the floating. The floats allowed my body and Soul to integrate the deep work.
But then something amazing happened. Recently I decided to go from weekly 60 minute floats to the 90-minute option. I began to experience a deep unwinding each time I floated. I have had three of these unwindings now and during the most recent one, last night, the body began unwinding almost immediately when I sunk into the nothingness. It is hard to describe but I’ll do my best.
I focus on my breathing and allow the body to settle. The body knows what it needs. I try and stay out of its way, allowing the body to begin a series of subtle and then not so subtle movements, which over the 90 minutes seems to replicate some of the positions my body was thrown into during the seconds and minutes after the impact of the accident. I was unconscious so I have no memory of that period but as my body does this unwinding I can sense that the contortions it is going into are the same contortions that the impact of the head on collision threw my body into while it was unconscious. Those became locked in the body and are just now releasing.
I have seen my current Osteopath twice since these unwindings have begun and he too notices how much more movement there is in my neck. I have remarkably less pain and more flexibility. The headaches are gone. My body feels more and more balanced on a deep level, and the body seems to be aligning with the Vertical Axis in a way that is totally new to me. And, I know there is more. As they say about unconsciousness, the Body remembers. It is not unconscious. It is registering every single insult and that insult lives in the body until such time as you do something to help it release. For me this is floating. I have done everything else. Now it is time to do less, to do nothing, to let the exquisite nothingness heal my body and me. I could not be more grateful to FLOAT NC for this opportunity.
