Mind-Body Connection

When rage comes up toward others because of their own dysfunction it is extremely difficult to let it go. The real problem is their reaction to their perceived environment, be it greed, lust, liquor or fear. So logically you cannot own their behavior and transfer the reaction to yourself. But damn, it is so hard not to! And boy, am I ever full of rage for certain people that exist in my life right now!

Stress is the biggest aggressor for a flare-up. After a couple of hours of pent-up rage or anger my throat gets sore. My glands feel heady and I flash feverish. It feels scratchy to swallow and my head begins to ache. I used to refer to this as my "afternoon-flu", like it was an expected visitor, an old friend I knew was coming to visit every day right around 4 o'clock in the afternoon. It was only a matter of days before I was glued to the sofa in a full-on flare-up. The never ending cycle of push-crash-rebuild-push-(not too sure if this is really happening but oh here we go aga..i..n...)-crash-rebuild-push...well, you get the picture. But now my life is pretty steady and stable. And I am not constantly on the brink of exhaustion from less-than-normal activity. But the second that rage hits its like it is right back to 2007 on the bottom floor of that department store. I am looking through a screen door of blurred vision and have a vice-grip headache squeezing my brain. My throat is inflamed and my body pulses feverishly through the Percocet induced complacency of total-body pain. Wow, have I come a long way, baby!

But I really feel, all of this pertaining to me and not any other Fibromyalgia patient, that there is an aspect of Fibromyalgia that is the result of an intense mind-body connection. I have always had hyper-aware senses. I notice EVERYTHING, to the point of exhaustion. I began self-medicating in my early teens as a way to escape this, among other dysfunctional behaviors. I was not given the skills to manage this intense gift in my formative years. I also genetically carry bi-polar disease (and that darn triglyceride malfunction!) and learned responses including manic-then-depressive episodes, throwing tantrums, irresponsible choices and fits of uncontrollable rage. I know full well that I was sick in my spirit long before I became sick in my body and can't help but conclude there is an inevitability there. A deep, unconscious connection.

Finding peace in my spirit is an exercise that is always practiced. Day in and day out, family and strangers, clients and co-workers. I must feel good to be me in those few private moments each day we all have to ourselves. Those few sacred moments before I fall asleep at night and the first few minutes I experience as I awake in the morning and assess my surroundings, realizing the life I have built for myself. It is there that anger and resentment and fear and regret build up into inner knots and hills and mountains in the pit of the stomach. And if you keep building these, everyday, in many different ways, then eventually that will become you.

The answer; live a life of truth, prideful humility, forgiveness and integrity? For perhaps it is in forgiving others that we become free, it is in humility we are recognized, it is in just and right behavior we are heard. So let me find my spirit, and dig that darkness out of the deep pit it is sitting in (a pit I try to keep empty, so as not to let it overwhelm my life), and forgive them for their shortcomings, and be the kind of wife my husband is proud to call his, and don't condemn them for their fear and anxiety and oppressive ways of living. And then thank God that is not me.

Thanks for joining,
Leah