The Interconnectedness of Everything

I recently fell off my horse, and she’s a big horse, and as my wife jokingly likes to say: Jessica fell off her high horse! Unfortunately, I did not bounce, so I didn’t get back on my high horse but instead lay on the ground groaning whilst my horse cantered her way back home.  Luckily, I didn’t break anything, but I had the most ginormous bruise on my right side and my whole lower back was impacted.

The first thing I did was to get into the cold sea, I’m a great believer in the healing properties of seawater especially when it’s cold and after about half an hour I felt some of the shock and trauma had left my body. My second stop was with Andrea Royen the following day where I had a Body Harmony session that restored my breath to the whole of my body. It wasn’t until the end of the session when I stood up and realised I was breathing in my whole body again just how much I had been holding my breath since I hit the ground.

But one thing I have learned on a deeper level from this rather painful process Is the interconnectedness of every part of our body. I’ve known this intellectually, seen in it Body Harmony sessions when I’ve been working on somebody’s head and it’s been affecting their feet, but I’ve never viscerally felt it so strongly as recently.

My main injury is in my lower back where I’m very bruised and very inflamed and one of the most painful things whilst this has been happening has been sneezing. I am now exceptionally aware of just how many muscles it takes to sneeze, and not only that, the main contraction of muscles when I sneeze is in my lumbar spine. And I know that because it’s been very painful.  Interestingly, coughing takes a slightly different set of muscles not quite as low down the spine as sneezing.

As with all injuries our body has the amazing capacity to compensate for those injuries, to acclimatize, so for example I could still walk,  or maybe I should say limp.  That compensation had a whole other set of symptoms on my left side, again clearly demonstrating that no one part of our body is in isolation.

It’s funny that I’ve caught myself using the phrase of “putting myself back together”, but that’s what it felt like, literally reconnecting the bits of my body that have been put out of place. I am sure this is not news to many of you who’ve been practising Body Harmony for many years, but for me it was such a powerful reminder of the interconnectedness of everything.