What Lies Beneath

Underlying pain can be unnoticeable.

Until it's gone. I think that's weird.

My hip flexor has been spontaneously shooting pain into my leg. I never know when it’s coming, but when it happens, my whole body folds over like an injured animal, hobbling until it subsides. Sounds like good times, I know.

It started to improve with stretching. If I’m being honest, I was barely stretching. Unsurprisingly, the shooting pain has gotten more frequent from my neglect.

So I tried increasing the time I was spending stretching. I probably went from 23 to 71 seconds.

Still no improvement. I think it might have gotten worse.

My husband recommended ice. And you know what? Ice is helping.

I don’t know why my hip flexor is bothering me. But here’s the thing: I don’t need to know The Why to fix it. I just needed to keep trying different things and take a cue from what made it feel a bit better. That’s an awful lot like embodiment. If you’re unembodied, you don’t need to know The Why. Just keep trying different embodiment practices until you start to work through sensations and, on the other side, feel better in your body. It can be slow and frustrating, but you do get there. Keep trying. I really mean this: if I can do it, so can you.

What’s kind of weird, though, is that after icing my hip flexor the first night, I woke up in the morning, and getting out of bed, I noticed that my hip didn’t hurt. The weird part isn’t that the ice helped so soon—the weird part is that I didn’t know that my hip was hurting when I got out of bed each morning. Like, at all. I didn’t know at all.

The aching had built up slowly over time in a way that I didn’t even recognize its existence. I could only feel the sharp, piercing pain that came on suddenly.

Being not-in-your-body is kind of like that. You might not even know that you’re living unembodied. Every once in a while, you feel a sharp, overwhelming emotion or sensation, but those are the only ones that get your attention. Underneath, there’s an everyday ache that you don’t even know is there. It’s been there so long that you can’t remember what it felt like without it, and it becomes a part of you, tainting how you experience the world.

Until it’s gone.

One more thing. My hip flexor was in such bad shape that stretching it was, in fact, making it worse. That can happen with embodiment practices, too. Sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself is to take a rest and apply an ice pack. Then try the next thing towards feeling better.

Complement with: Unclogged and A Body and Sometimes Asking “Why?” Makes it Worse.