Finding Empathy for My Body
“It is difficult for a woman to be healthy in a culture that is still so very sick. It is the ultimate victory for a woman to find a way to love herself and other women while existing in a world insisting that she has no right to.”
– Glennon Doyle
Finding Empathy For My Body
I had a weird experience yesterday, as I looked over at my “bad” leg. I keep my foot elevated whenever I’m sitting and as I glanced at it, I felt a sudden empathy for it.
It probably sounds really weird, because my body is me, right?
For most of my life, my body and I have not had a great relationship. Growing up in the 80s-90s, I consumed fashion magazines at the peak of “heroin chic.” I had a CK ad of Kate Moss on my bedroom wall as a pre-teen. I never felt that I was thin enough, even when I was just a few pounds away from having an underweight BMI. There have been times when I have achieved body neutrality but I have never really been friends with my body.
As I aged, I began to appreciate my body more for what it could do than how it looked. By my 30s, I knew that I was probably never going to appreciate how it looked, having spent so many years focused only on perceived flaws. The first time I ran a mile without stopping, I began to appreciate what my body could do. Weight lifting and yoga, my preferred forms of exercise, make me appreciate my body for its strength and flexibility.
I have felt, for most of my life, like the thing that inhabits my body – call it a soul, spirit, energy, whatever your preferred word is. It feels most often like a thing that gets me around, as though I am that weird little alien piloting a human body in the first “Men In Black” movie. So feeling empathy for it, as something separate than ME, isn’t all that weird.
My Leg Has Had a Rough Year
As I looked at my leg, I thought about what a rough year it has had so far. It has been broken; immobilized in a cast; in multiple different forms of pain for the past 14 weeks. Its whole purpose is for supporting me and it has been unable to do that most of the time. If I think of my leg in the way I would think of a child or an animal, I imagine that it must feel sad not being able to do what it is meant to do. It has lost at least 1/3 of its muscle mass. It sort of makes sense why my nervous system, which is always in a state of low-level anxiety, would go into a meltdown of sorts when it began to start to work again. I know my conscious mind was very afraid as I began my time out of a cast and in a boot. I don’t think that is what caused the CRPS but I do think that it is unsurprising that my sympathetic nervous system went into overdrive, so to speak
I was afraid of hurting myself again. I was afraid of somehow harming the healing that my leg was doing. I was afraid of falling again, by slipping in the bathtub or by accidentally putting too much weight on it. I was afraid that my husband was going to start to resent having to take care of me. I was afraid that I would be in constant pain for the rest of my life… The month between getting my cast off and getting my CRPS diagnosis was full of fear.
I started to wonder what might happen if I replace all of that fear with love.
Practicing Love
As an appreciator of Buddhism (I am not exactly a practicer follower of any one particular religion) one of my favorite practices is that of metta, loving-kindness. It is a simple practice, of radiating love for ourselves and all beings. As the Metta Institute explains: “Metta is first practiced toward oneself, since we often have difficulty loving others without first loving ourselves. Sitting quietly, mentally repeat, slowly and steadily, the following or similar phrases: May I be happy. May I be well. May I be safe. May I be peaceful and at ease.”
As I looked at my leg, I thought, maybe I should practice metta toward it. It hasn’t done anything wrong. It isn’t my leg’s fault that I developed CRPS, it isn’t anyone’s fault as far as I know. Being upset or angry with it for being in pain doesn’t lessen my pain. While I am grateful that my pain is nothing compared to many people with this condition, I do experience pain that isn’t due to my injury. Most of my pain is in the morning, when I first get out of bed and begin to use my foot.
So that’s what I have decided to do. I figure, it can’t hurt anything. It might help, but at the very least it can’t hurt.
Managing CRPS
Stress management is one of the things that is recommended for helping to manage CRPS. Mindfulness meditation is frequently what is recommended for helping to manage stress. We live in a very “mindless” society. We are always busy, going to work or school or practice or running errands, going going going. When we are not busy, there is so much that is set up to distract us from being present. Phones, social media, television that plays the next episode automatically, more and more things are geared toward distracting us from whether or not we are actually happy.
It’s never a bad idea to start a mindfulness practice. For me, I have definitely gotten out of the habit of meditating daily and slowly down in an intentional way. A metta practice is a good way to tune into the present moment again as I wish for love and blessings to come to myself and everyone around me – including my body.
The Future is Unknown
For now, that’s all I know. There’s no telling what the future with CRPS brings. One of the physical therapists I have been working with told me about a woman she works with who was late diagnosed and even as advanced as her CRPS was, she has experienced an ease in symptoms. That is certainly reassuring since so much of what I read on the internet is the worst case scenarios.