In May of last year while tending to my garden, I could barely stand with a new ache in my legs.
Leaning on the stoop of my wooden staircase next to Lilac bush, I tired not to panic. I looked at my legs and feet and was startled to see that my muscles were twitching and my toes were moving.
My partner and I got in our car and drove to the nearest hospital while I received tests. It takes a lot for me to go anywhere near a medical clinic. But these were strange sensations and symptoms.
For several hours we stayed in the emergency room in our quiet town. It is hard for me to breathe in medical clinics. The past is not the past, especially for your nervous system.
The doctor talked to me for a whole TWO minutes. She offered me a diagnosis that made no sense. I had no time to fully question her. After much deliberation, I gave into the treatment and swallowed the medication. It made everything worse for a few days, but at least this ruled out an infection.
I returned to the medical clinic for the fifth time. For the millionth time in my life, I was met with medical people shrugging their shoulders and holding their arms in the air, much like that emoji. I was given a referral to a Neurologist for the weird stuff in my legs and was promptly sent out the door.
The twitching continued. For weeks I couldn’t sleep for more than four hours a night.
Come on, Kelly! You know how to deal with this. You know all about weird pain. You’ve had 33 years of it!
Coaching myself and speaking with other dear friends who know about illness, I accepted what was happening. Not in a “positive thinking” sort of way, but rather drowning in a puddle of my own tears kind of way.
The fact that I was no stranger to illness meant I could navigate these dark tunnels of strange sensations without knowing how I’d find my way out of them. I was not alone. I had my partner, friends and neighbors to talk with. I could afford to see a Chinese Medicine Doctor and Physiotherapist. When I couldn’t get myself out for a walk, I laid down next to plants like Nettle, Yarrow, and Valerian. Valerian supports sleep and historically was used to treat insomnia, fatigue, and migraines. Their scent was enough to calm me.
Another sleepless night in my bed, voices carried me to do what I do when my body scares me. I closed my eyes and prayed to my ancestors and other beings for help. Whenever I pray to my ancestors and guides, I feel the room shift. The space of the room fills up. I’m nourished and protected by my ancestors.
I am someone that is interested in embodiment. I walk the line of being tired of living in this body and simultaneously unable to contain the love I have for all bodies. I’m fascinated by beings that climb, swim, walk, gallop, trot, pace, fly and crawl on this earth.
Considering this and my capacity at the time, I dug through old note books on breathing. For the jolts and fasciculations (involuntary muscle twitches) I was experiencing, I was curious how to support my nervous system. My diaphragm was also troubled, and taking deeper breaths or longer exhales created searing pains cascading through my left side underneath my ribcage.
This is the thing about breathing. People may tell you there is a “right” way to breathe for your body and nervous system. I’m sure I’ve also made this error as a teacher. Take deep breaths in. Breathe long exhalations out. Breathe in your belly (side note - you don’t actually take in air into your belly). But it was my teacher, Amy Matthews, that taught me that out of context, we can’t evaluate breathing. There is no one right way to breathe.
When you are a fetus, you don’t really “breathe”, at least not through your lungs. The nourishment you took in when you were in the womb was through the umbilical cord. Your liver is your respiratory and digestive system. Oxygen and carbon dioxide flow through the blood in the placenta. Most of it goes to your heart and then flows through your body.
Amniotic fluid surrounded you while you were in the womb. Amniotic fluid is made up of water, proteins, lipids, electrolytes, minerals, urea and fetal cells. You are cushioned in this fluid. Your lungs were also full of this fluid and this was essential for your lung development. Your lungs continue developing far beyond your birth.
The greater omentum is an apron of connective tissue that hangs down from your stomach and covers your small intestine. If you lift the greater omentum up, the back side is attached to the large intestine and the transverse colon. The greater omentum is larger than the lesser omentum, which hangs down from the liver to the lesser curvature of the stomach.
The greater omentum was not considered significant by the medical community but now it’s seen as important. If there’s an injury in the abdominal cavity it gravitates toward it to protect and nourish that area.
Within your greater omentum there is an opening between one fluid filled space and another fluid filled space. This space is your omental bursa. It’s behind your stomach. A bursa means a pouch or purse. Pancreas, spleen, and stomach are all connected to each other in this place of our bodies.
If you’d like to feel this place in your body, find the right side of your ribs and just under your right ribs is where your liver is. Your liver fills that space front and back. It comes across your midline under your xiphoid process (a triangular-shaped bone that makes up the distal part of your sternum).
Put your left hand just under your left ribs - that’s where your stomach is. Your liver overlaps your stomach a little bit.
Imagine and feel a space deep to your liver that slides in behind your stomach. Slide down behind your stomach into your greater omentum.
Where do you notice the movement of your breath and the sliding of your organs?
Practice a kind of breathing that may feel like you are not breathing. Imagine how you breathed in the womb - fluid breathing.
You may find it helpful to let go of any effort. Lessening the effort of breathing will help this area slide and glide and release. Seep into the spaces in between your tissues.
I think it is worth mentioning something here about external respiration and how there is no need to force breath into our bodies (unless you want to).
In external respiration, we breathe in oxygen from the plants and trees. More than half of oxygen we breathe in comes from organisms in the ocean, like phytoplankton and seaweed. When air flows into us, our tiny blood vessels around air sacs in our lungs called alveoli receives the oxygen we need to be received by our heart. Our heart moves blood throughout our body and then blood returns to our heart.
What we breathe in is oxygen rich. In our blood is carbon dioxide rich which is released back out to the atmosphere through our exhale.
In our thoracic cavity the structures of breathing is an open system. When we change the shape of our body in such a way that the volume of the thoracic cavity increases, air comes in. As the volume increases the pressure decreases. There’s a difference of pressure between inside and outside and the air equalizes itself so air comes in.
The universe tires to balance the air pressure, everywhere. Our ribs make space, our lungs slides along our ribs, and the universe rushes in to balance the air pressure inside us and outside of us.
We don’t have to force breath in our body. We only need to make space of it.
There are many ways to breathe and many choices. Try doing less.
Through these strange sensations, I found these pathways into my body that had been forgotten. As taking deep breaths was painful at the time, this kind of fluid breathing offered me some ease.
I found myself back at the medical clinic, this time with the Neurologist. Three months had passed and my symptoms had improved but were not gone. The Neurologist offered a diagnosis that was not a serious one. I left satisfied enough with that.
I hope that by sharing this it may help open to new possibilities of movement of breath in your body.
May you also find ease.
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