Dad had been terminally ill with heart failure in hospital. He had lost 30kg and the glow in his eyes. He had been in ICU for months, hadn't been outdoors or seen the sun or inhaled fresh air for that long - his skin was turning grey... He spent his meal times alone because the hospital policy was one visit a day, in the afternoon. And to top it all off, him and I had always had a complicated relationship - talking was not something we did.
I had hoped being so close to death would open him up to talking, to sharing, but that never happened. So I did what I did best - I started using my Shiatsu skills on his body to bring him some relief. I would spend the entirety of my hospital visits massaging him, in silence. I would ask him to breathe into his abdomen, and he would feel calmer. Just a little human touch was making a ton of difference. I could tell how much he was looking forward to my visits.
On one of the days I felt my lower back snap and something started hurting. At first just a little. With time it started hurting more and more. I started believing it was a herniated disk because of all my symptoms - pain in the morning, pain when coughing or sneezing, pain shooting down my leg. Months later, an MRI confirmed what I already suspected: a double-sided herniated disk between L5-S1 with advanced state of inflammation. My pain levels reached 9/10 on some of those days.
Physiotherapy only helped temporarily with pain management, but I wasn't being taught how to use my body differently. I went to see a neurosurgeon who told me the only solution was back surgery. I was 32. I knew deep down that there had to be non-invasive alternatives, also because as a Shiatsu student at the time I knew most pains were the symptom of emotional imbalances and blockages in the body. My dad passed away while all of this was unfolding.
One day I struggled to get out of bed from pain: a sneeze was enough to make me think I'd become paralysed. I had Shiatsu class that day but didn't know how I was going to get there... I took a pain killer and managed to bring myself to class. I started crying almost immediately with pain. The teacher asked a colleague to take care of me and she started working on my lower back. I sobbed, and sobbed, and sobbed some more. I felt the lower back start to release some of the tension. Just allowing the frustration of that pain to come out in the form of tears allowed the tension to release a little.
In the following weeks I started doing acupuncture and working out very gently, within the limits of my pain. I started listening to podcasts about chronic pain and realised pain could be my greatest teacher and motivator if I allowed it to be. If I could work with it, instead of against it, it would show me exactly where my body had learnt to hold back, to brace.
One day I got home and allowed the sadness to move through me. My grieving process, like all grief, was tumultuous and unpredictable. Sadness turned into crying, and crying turned into sobbing, and amongst the sobbing I heard myself saying out loud "Dad, please don't go...", over and over again. The words I had not allowed myself to say to him or anyone else while he was dying, the words that had felt so unfair to even think, were now being expressed. I said them out loud and allowed the little girl in me to externalise the pain, the grief, the fear, without restrictions nor filters. I sobbed in child's pose until I felt a shift in my state, and when I finally came to a stop, I felt my lower back opening up a little more, releasing some of the grip that it had been holding.
I experienced something similar during a breathwork session and during an acupuncture session, and soon realised that my Shiatsu teacher was right. The physical symptoms I was experiencing were very real AND they were caused by unexpressed emotions that were trapped in my body. When I finally allowed them to move through me, things shifted.
Most days my pain level is 1/10 nowadays, some it vanishes completely. Some days when I'm more stressed or inflamed, it rises to a 3/10 or a 4/10, but I no longer feel desperate about it. I now treat it as the best teacher I ever had, and one that made me so much more capable of working with chronic pain and understanding it at a visceral level. The cherry on top? I recently got an MRI, two years after the first one, and the herniated disk has completely re-absorbed!