Photo by Ilya Semenov on Unsplash
A key moment for learning is when things stop working properly.
Most of us have no idea how our car works. We don’t really need to either, so long as its functioning correctly.
But the moment something goes wrong, we decide to investigate. We open up the hood of the car, only to have the level of our ignorance be laid bare. We have no idea what we are looking at, nor how any of it really works. Time for us to learn quickly, else we be stuck on the side of the highway in the middle of the night.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on my breathing. Without realising, I would take shallow breaths, likely fuelled by general stress and anxiety. Even in yoga classes, I learnt of ‘belly breathing’, and thought that this was the correct way to regulate the internal system.
It was only when my osteopath pointed out the need for me to breath through my diaphragm that I really started paying attention to it. Suddenly, I realised I had a muscle that I was previously unaware of. I think I follow the path of many high masking autistic people in this regard. Chronic body tension being held together into adult life.
The good news was that once I had identified the issue, the changes have come pretty quickly. I’ve felt my chest open up a lot more, and my posture has improved significantly. My shoulders have gone from being heightened and tense, to lower and more relaxed. My pelvic tilt has also shifted to a more neutral, healthy stance without me even actively trying. I didn’t even know I had a pelvic tilt until now.
The bad news is that his has had a whole lot of destabilising effects. On Sunday, I had a ‘vestibular episode’. I woke up dizzy, and household objects felt weirdly distant from my depth perception. By the later afternoon, I needed to throw up several times.
My body had such a rapid body alignment correction that I was standing slightly taller, and with a more upright head. This confused my spatial perception to the point where I’ve had to basically avoid sudden movements for the last few days. I spent the evening lying in bed with a weird spinning sensation going on in my head, even with my eyes closed.
I’ve also had weird feet pain. Someone asked me yesterday whether I was limping, and the answer was yes, apparently. I had random pain in my right foot. I think due to putting weight on parts of my foot that had previously been underused.
Today, I have quite acute jaw pain, which I think is a sign of the releasing pattern from habitual clenched teeth. A few days ago, massaging my cheek bones seemed to help. Now I’ve noticed the pain has shifted, and it’s further down, towards the inner part of my jaw. To massage it, I have to reach my finger inside my mouth and rub it gently.
This has not been a particularly enjoyable period, but it’s at least been informative. But perhaps one silver lining is that I’m gaining a lot of really valuable insight into how my body works.
I’m seeing that the more I tune into the different mechanisms, the more attuned I am to myself. My eating habits have become more particular, and I think it’s a positive sign that I’m desiring what my body actually needs, rather than stress eating out of a fear of scarcity.
Mentally, it’s also been relieving to break out of the autistic stereotypes too. I believed for a while after my diagnosis that I had poor interoception, meaning that my ability to read my body was poor. Now I’m realising that it’s probably actually very strong, but been numbed from a lifetime of being taught to ignore it. As I let go of my conditioning, I’m regaining a strength that will serve me for the rest of my life.