That Time in 2018 When I Started Crying and Didn’t Stop
In 2018, a dam broke in my brain. During a mindfulness practice called a body scan, I felt a physical pain so great that it brought me to tears.
It brought me to tears in that excruciating moment when I allowed myself to truly feel the intensity of pain I felt in my ankle. It hurt so badly, but not because I had an injury or structural issues within my ankle. I had widespread pain that floated.
Some days, it was my back. Other days, my shoulders or my hips.
That day, it was my left ankle.
I cried. And I cried. And I cried.
Later I would call it my dark night of the soul.
Today I call it my miracle.
Emotional Release
I’d never been much of a crier. In college, I boasted that I never cried.
So, imagine the panic one who “doesn’t cry” must feel when suddenly and unexplainably, the tears won’t stop coming.
I am not one to ask for help. But it scared me. I sent my mindfulness teacher a message. She called me. She encouraged me to talk to my doctor. She thought maybe I should go to the emergency department.
Something told me that seeing a doctor was the last thing I needed to do. I’d been seeing doctors with much regularity since 2012, when I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder. My primary symptoms were chronic pain and fatigue.
So, I didn’t listen to my teacher. I don’t recommend this. But in retrospect, they’d have probably put me on meds to stop me from feeling what it was I was feeling. And feeling, well, feeling and releasing through my tears, I believe, is a big part of how I healed from chronic pain.
In 2012, I started out using mind/body techniques to help my mental health – truly, to help me to live a good life in a body that constantly hurt.
What I didn’t recognize (to be fair, neither did modern medicine) is that my pain was coming from signals in my brain. And by practicing various mind/body techniques that led me to release emotions that I’d been storing for my entire lifetime, I healed my physical body.
When I interviewed for my current job, I joked with my now team that I wanted to somehow prove that I healed myself. I’ve been there a year now, and just recently connected with a researcher who is taking the science of this all to the next level. My story is forthcoming – but if you’re curious, check out this podcast. I did NOT engage with Pain Reprocessing Therapy, but my own self-care routine cobbled together many of its parts.
If you’ve been diagnosed with chronic pain and have been learning how to live with it, please, please, please – check this out.
You may need to copy & paste the link into your browser — they seem to be blocking referrals from my domain (weird but maybe my grandma was right and I shouldn’t swear so much) 🤣
