Visiting Grandparents. Moments Ahead of Time
Part of what brought me to healthcare work was seeing some of my family members suffering from illnesses and pain. I was too fragile for that amount of chronic pain, so I yearned for preventing this happening in my older age. Aging painlessly became my inner motivation to live healthily quite early on.
I didn’t have a clear idea what is preventable or what unavoidable. In Estonia life had been hard on previous generations in many ways unimaginable. The hard part wasn’t the bending down when gardening vegetables or washing dishes with cold water. It wasn’t the poverty, physical work or lack of sleep. The hard part was living under occupation, having families torn apart and not being free to live how you wish. On top of everything it has always been the reaction to hard reality that has caused inevitable harm.
On top of everything it has always been the reaction to hard reality that has caused inevitable harm.
By the time I was born in 1992, Estonians were independent. However, survival habits had been deeply ingrained and passed on to future generations. Visiting my grandparents today I see the question of health differently. It’s clear to me now that it’s not the harmful patterns or movement habits that causes my grandmother back pain, shoulder pain or collapse of the spine. She doesn’t need to learn better habits. Instead, it’s the world she carries on her shoulders that literally pulls her down. Yes, life is hard and yes, our organism reacts to life.
Overdoing
My granny’s survival mechanisim is extreme overdoing. This has been a normal reaction to an abnormal situation. Today she’s still taking care of everyone else at the expense of her health. When I walk into the living room in the morning, she shoots out of the chair to serve me breakfast, even before saying good morning. It doesn’t matter that it’s painful for her to stand up. When it comes to making a salad for lunch, she’s already out to get tomatoes before I can blink my eyes. When I’m washing the vegetables for dinner, the leafy parts are thrown away from my hands before I can even put them down.
Survival mode
Sounds like I have no space around a person who never takes a break, but this is a story for next time. My granny doesn’t realize there’s no space left because she perceives everything from the firmly rooted survival mode. Her nervous system is functioning from that place of reaction. She’s constantly a moment ahead of everything, living in the future, jumping to the next thing. It’s difficult for her to stay put mentally, so she doesn’t. It’s painful to move, but less achy than the quiet in the room when she’s not filling it with doing.
„People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.” Aldous Huxley
This is what you see a lot around you. If it’s not the overtensing by goal-achieving and hard concentration, it’s the lack of tension from mindwandering, withdrawal from life and collapse. The difficulties arise from both sides: too much tone or lack of tone in the body. Life energy that is not flowing.
One of the solutions to that is centering: finding your way out of the habit, moving towards the center, the middleground of all the possible reactions.
Good health comes from the ability to stay present with the reality without reacting to it.
And so I gave my gran a little hands-on demonstration of what I do. She’s sharp and she understood what’s it about, but most importantly she got the experience of what I mean by staying back. It felt like she gained an extra second before jumping to the future. It felt like it became possible for her to stay in the current moment, stepping back from the next moment. Our last few days of my visit were spent in the same timezone, present in the moment. She wasn’t constantly ahead of me anymore, didn’t jump up to serve me, didn’t do everyhing for me before I even managed to stop her. She was calmer and more relaxed herself and I was enjoying more space to respond and process whatever needed to be processed.
Kinder Self-Use
The only purpose for this space, centeredness and non-reactivity is to prevent harm we’re otherwise doing to ourselves by ourselves. That same reactivity is what has caused most of the muscular tension, bodily pain, busy and anxious mind, insomnia and whatever health issues develop further from tension.
Today I hear a lot about conscious living amongst my generation. I don’t think it's the stop before an activity that is needed to rethink our actions. We’re not that clever that we can walk around and stop before every stimulus that triggers us. It’s not kind to even try to be in charge of these things. There’s something more than your thinking brain. Something beneath your reactions, something hidden that dominates your feelings which are what you actually act upon.
For now I stay with the concept of reactivity. It's that reactivity that keeps us few moments ahead of ourselves. In my grandmother’s case that’s how she lived her whole life before that first experience of stopping under my hands. Today luckily there are tools available for not letting it develop that far. This is what Alexander technique is all about.
