Chapter 8: Stuck in the city
I didn’t know that peace of mind cannot be bought with a credit card.
Barely a week after I had returned from Chicago and it was all as if I hadn’t even been gone. All that chicken soup-for-the-soul time and familiar vibes from the US got washed off after a week in the daily grind.
It was lunchtime on a slow Friday and I was still sitting at my desk in the open-plan office. Around me, rows of desks full of laptops, paper notebooks and women’s bags, dirty coffee mugs, but empty of their inhabitants. A website promoting a yoga retreat was blinking in front of my eyes.
High-resolution photos of emerald green pastures guarded by spiky mountains in the background, the sunlight at the perfect evening angle, selling you the promise of serenity. It was somewhere in a mountain village in the Alta Garrotxa region of the Spanish Pyrenees. Happy people with happy faces sitting on yoga mats on a wooden terrace overlooking the mountain splendor. I dreamt myself to be one of them. The cool breeze and the pine tree scent came straight out from the screen and into my nostrils. My shoulders melted, hypnotized by the photos. It was a bit expensive, but I was fine paying for peace of mind.
‘Where are you jet-setting next?’, my deskmate asked in a sly voice, startling me with her sudden presence behind my desk chair.
I was about to answer, excited at my discovery, when I perceived a trace of envy in her voice. My shoulders slightly tensed again.
‘I’m not jet-setting’, I stressed the word ‘jet’ a second longer than natural, defending myself. ‘I’m just checking a place a friend recommended’.
Was I becoming a jet setter? Was that a fancy word for the runaways who couldn’t sit still? Was busy becoming the new worthy?
Because I was keeping busy. Weekend trips, spa days, open-air cinema tickets, anything just to avoid the vertigo feel when I’d see my calendar empty.
Soon more of my colleagues started calling me a jet setter, influenced by the one nosy deskmate. But they didn’t know about the sleepless nights, panicking I’d die alone. I’d cover that up with an extra layer of foundation the next morning. I just showed the pretty parts, the instagrammable parts. The flight tickets, the yoga retreats. The weekend plans up on the Costa Brava beaches, avoiding mentioning that I’d paid for double rooms for myself, because I was going alone. The deluxe Thai massages, hiding that it was the only time when I’d feel the touch of another human on my own skin. Healthcare measures rather than self-indulgence.
Before the lunch break was over, I got back to the yoga website and paid my deposit for a weeklong retreat that took place in five weeks’ time. There was no risk anyway. I had until two weeks before its kickoff to cancel if anything came up.
The following weekend the temperatures confirmed summer was there to stay. I met up with a girlfriend for an afternoon at the beach. More plans in order to avoid the vertigo of the empty agenda.
The moment she sat down opposite me at the beach bar table, she thanked me for making room for her in my busy calendar. I took my time to respond, arranging a stray lock of my long hair behind my ear.
‘Are you mocking me for doing stuff when it was you who suggested I should spend half a decade single and do everything I wanted?’. I was a bit hurt.
I told her that I was slowing down. That I had just booked a yoga retreat to go and slow down. She smiled. Then, an uncomfortable pause in which she looked me in the eye. Finally, she said it was precisely the opposite of slowing down. I loved her but she could really be cryptic sometimes.
While we were waiting to order some cold drinks, she started telling me about her latest slow routine during a hiatus between two jobs. I imagined having all that time on my hands, all the thoughts that would crowd my head, how much I’d bite my nails, how often I’d check Instagram. She took up to half an hour every day to just sit and feel the feelings in her body. Eyes closed, no distractions, just noticing what she felt.
I made an effort to understand, barely noticing the iced coffees being set in front of us on the table. At that time, I usually thought my feelings, I rationalized them, explained and over-analyzed them. But feeling in the body? That was foreign territory. Did one feel the frustration in the knee joints or under the left shoulder blade?
She went on with feeling the feelings.
I went on drinking my iced coffee a little too fast, jolting my leg under the table up and down, not realizing that was where frustration resided in my body. In my jolting leg.
Suddenly, my leg paused its movement and I felt a warmth in my left hand - curiously, the same hand that was holding the iced coffee glass. I saw in front of my eyes another summer day just like that one.
Holding my straight-A report card in my left hand, I rushed to enter my father’s study to show it to him. I was seven years old, that was my very first year-end report card. He snapped at me for bothering him from work, no time for my good news. A steel ball fell deep into the pit of my stomach, its weight dragging it downward. The shame of being too much invaded my bloodstream, liquid poison making me feel heavier.
Curiously, now it was the first time I remembered those bodily sensations from almost 30 years back.
I froze, blocking the stomach pain and making my bloodstream almost solid, as I exited his study. I went straight to my room and opened a novel. Entering the fantasy world of books had been my way of forgetting about the painful feelings in my body, numbing myself out.
I felt my girlfriend’s hand over mine across the table, and when I looked at her her eyebrows were raised in concern. Shaking off my vision from another summer, I told my friend I didn’t really understand what feeling the feelings meant.
Before answering, she looked at the bartender. Apparently, he had been throwing us impatient looks from the entrance of the terrace. He had placed our meager check on the table, but I hadn’t noticed. Leaving a couple of bills on top of the check, we stood up to let other beachgoers who were lining up enjoy the shade as well. We moved to the beach to soak up the early summer sun.
Sitting down on the two towels we spread one next to the other, my friend continued our chat:
‘Well, you don’t understand because you think about your feelings instead of paying attention to your body.’
Another pause while she took off her dress and pulled out the bottle of sunscreen from her bag.
‘I could tell you some statements, like a sentence, and you don’t reply to it, but you pay attention and see if anything changes in your body when hearing it. Anywhere in the body.’
A game I didn’t remember ever playing. It was part exciting, part strange.
‘Alright, let’s do it’, I said applying sunscreen on my face.
‘Let’s finish with the sunscreen first, because you need to be focused on this.’
We finished applying lotion, cleaned our towels of the sand that had already amassed at our feet, and sat down one next to the other.
‘OK, here we go, the first one. Let’s start soft. Your landlord will kick you out of your flat in one month.’
I was paying close attention to my body but felt nothing. I looked at my friend hoping for a helping tip. She didn’t help.
‘Sorry, but I’ve got nothing for you.’
What was I supposed to feel about that? I didn’t have a clue. Relief?
‘Let’s try another one’, she said. ‘You should have divorced sooner.’
A part of my heart dipped lower towards my stomach. My shoulders became heavy and were being pulled downward by an invisible force.
I couldn’t bear these changes for longer than a few seconds and I started talking, explaining to my friend what I was feeling and trying to analyze why that happened.
She touched my hand to stop me.
‘No no, no talking about it. Just feel. It’s not going to kill you. That’s what feeling your feelings means. Pay attention to your heart, to your shoulders.’
She saw my discomfort and pushed further.
‘OK, let’s do a new one. You will be single for five years.’
My head got light and I got dizzy. My heart started racing in my chest, a race to nowhere. My hands got cold. I was sweating with the summer heat, but my hands got cold. I looked at my friend frightened. I couldn’t even be mad at her, fear overpowered me.
‘Do you feel that?’, she said gently. I looked at her, afraid my heart wouldn’t take the strain. Afraid of the newness of it all.
Then she started talking to me about my dead marriage. About how it was a chapter in my life that had been very important, but that was ending. She reminded me I tied my identity to that chapter, I wanted so much to be married and be a mother, that now that it ended, I was also losing those identities. She stopped from time to time, making sure I was there with her, in the hard moment.
At first, just a tear rolled down my cheek as her words became a tsunami, drowning me. Then more of them. Then, I felt I was inflating from pressure. After the weep came a howl, and right after that a breakdown and incessant, ugly sobbing.
My friend stopped talking. She moved on my towel and hugged me from behind. She supported my body as I was expelling all the grief and regret I had been keeping down for many months. People would stop near us from time to time, asking my friend what had happened. She would wave them away, as you do with pigeons nearing your picnic display. She would also shush them, there was no place for questions. Words could do damage. It was a time for a silent embrace and feeling of the pain. I could see some beachgoers moving their towels a bit farther from ours, maybe giving us space, or maybe bothered by the repulsive display. That was not what people expected to encounter during a sunny day at the beach.
It took me a while to expel all that I had stored in me, my friend silent next to me, the sea surface sparkling under the sun in front of us. What a striking contrast between the beauty of the beach and the gloom inside me. Life and its duality.
The night after the beach day with my friend I didn’t sleep so well. But there were so many nights I didn’t sleep well those months that I didn’t pay attention to it. The rest of the week, however, didn’t go better.
On a particularly early morning, my face was turned towards the window and caught the first rays of light that started to peer in. I tried opening my eyes but moving my eyelids was painful. They seemed to be connected to the back of my neck, which was throbbing. An iron bar ground through my back muscles every time I tried to shift my head left or right. I frowned in pain.
After that day at the beach when I learned how feelings felt in the body, I wondered what feeling was it that wreaked such havoc in my muscles.
In trying to get out of bed I felt helpless. Stuck. It was a strange feeling not having agency over my own body. Like when I had a limb that was asleep, I used all my willpower to move it, but it dangled dead. The same was happening to my neck, and add the stabbing pain. I wrestled with myself and finally managed to get up and get dressed.
I went to the office, but the situation didn’t improve throughout the day.
I thought it was due to sitting in front of a computer day in and day out, most times back arched and neck stiff.
I thought it might be the desk chair.
I requested to change it and they brought me a higher-backed one.
It took me twice as long to walk back home that evening. I couldn’t even look left and right properly to check incoming traffic when crossing streets.
Back home, I checked my mattress and contemplated sleeping with my head where my feet usually were.
I pulled out my blue yoga mat and made space for it between the bed and the desk. I laid down and stretched, a slight relief.
The next morning I woke up in a similar state, despite being at the other end of the bed. Neck so stiff, I had to prop one leg on the floor and push myself upwards with my arms in plank before turning to stand up.
After looking at all the external places that could possibly give me such pain and stiffness, I finally looked inside. My body was echoing the feelings I had started feeling a few days before on the beach.
I was carrying the burden on my back, a heavy sack crushing my neck. I asked for help from another friend who I knew was going regularly to an osteopath. The doctor made time for me that same afternoon when I mentioned my state of immobility for the past few days.
Before going in, I counted the days until the yoga retreat up in the Alta Garrotxa mountains and how many osteopath sessions I could fit in until then.
He welcomed me with a warm smile and there was something about kind doctors that moved me. There were only a few of them. And when I happened to meet one, I felt I lucked out and I could take a giant leap forward towards better days. After a long list of preliminary questions and forms to be filled out, I finally got to lie down on the bed and get a physical exam. I just wanted him to stop asking me questions about my menstruation and the latest drama in my life, and crack me healthy. Or massage me healthy. Or whatever it was that an osteopath did. But it turned out it was all related. The drama, the female cycle, the back muscles, life.
First, he examined my bones, my posture, my joints. His facial expression informed me most of it looked fine, unbroken. There were some sketchy parts, some less than ideal parts, but alright. However, as he moved around my pelvic area he said in a flat, matter-of-fact tone that my pelvis was blocked. I suddenly felt naked. Did he know I hadn’t had sex in several months by then? Blocked how? I could walk and cycle and run perfectly fine. My pelvis seemed the opposite of blocked to me after all the circular movements he did with it. There was a lot of tension stored there, he clarified.
Then he moved to my muscles, but it wasn’t an easy fix, as I had hoped. He didn’t even go straight to my upper back muscles, the very reason I was there. He started listening to them, and I wondered if I’d entered a hidden camera show.
He tapped my breast bone and as that was vibrating under his finger taps, he asked me if I had been going through an emotional hardship lately. Again, I felt naked. I burst out crying as an answer. Yet again, I couldn’t control my tears in public. I was beyond feeling ashamed, acknowledging this was the new me, shedding tears in all public places. The osteopath’s bed seemed to turn into a therapist’s couch.
I briefly told him about my failed marriage. I surprised myself also adding that I didn’t have faith in a happy future anymore. He didn’t need more details. He told me I stored a lot of difficult emotions in my chest, above my heart area, and that the pain in my back was due to the back supporting the load of the chest pain. He gently said some words about life and its hardships, about the future and the importance of hope. A priest giving a sermon on a Thursday afternoon. What I needed, he said, was to free up the emotions in my chest, and then my back would feel better naturally. The back was the heavy loader, but I needed to work on the front part.
By the end of the session, I realized he wouldn’t quickly release the pain in my back so I could go on with my life. His job wasn’t to heal me with a crack of the bones or a deep tissue massage. His job was to point out what my body was telling me, through the pain. It sounded like I had to do the hard work, while I had hoped for a magic pill.
He told me I would feel even more pain in the next few days, as my body would start healing. We set up another session in a week’s time. I wanted to return more often, so I could get it over with, but he insisted the body needed time. I was determined to squeeze in a few more sessions before my yoga retreat. I needed to be free of pain by then, so I could go and slow down properly.
My back did get worse before it got better, as the doctor warned me. I fought with it, pushing myself to get well in time for the yoga week. But she had a timeline of her own. After three osteo sessions, I was nowhere closer to what I’d hoped for.
A slight drizzle started to spray my forehead as I walked home from my latest meeting with the osteopath. I would have looked up to see how serious the incoming rain was, if it weren’t for my stuck neck. I had a 20-minute walk, and the closer I got to my flat the more clearly I knew that I had to cancel the yoga retreat. I was in no physical state to travel to the mountains and enjoy a week of free-flow movement.
Arriving home, I took off my wet shoes and went straight for the laptop to cancel that trip. After typing the booking number, my breath shortened in anger. I was past the date when I could get my deposit back, because I’d waited for so long to take the decision. I canceled anyway, shaking my head, defeated. I still had three osteo sessions scheduled. I would give my body the time it needed to get better. Sometimes you’ve got to lose some money in order to gain some well-being.
Read next: Chapter 9 - Painting in exile
Thanks for such an insight into the awakening of self-knowledge. The day we discover that feelings happen in the body and not the head is a tough one. And the body has a very long memory...