For the past two-plus years, I've had a nagging pain in my neck, on the right, in the back. The acute agony passed after a few weeks, leaving me with a constant tension and strain. I've tried all kinds of treatment: PT, chiro, acupuncture, massage, naproxen 2x daily for two months. Nothing, I mean nothing worked. Finally got an X-ray last week; I am fortunately not afflicted in the actual apparatus of the cervical spine.
Not long ago, CJ Of The Magic Hands theorized: "When you figure out what's bothering you, it will go away." I wrote that off as so much woo-woo hooey.
But about a week ago, I was complaining to someone about my current employer then pointed to my neck and said, "And that's where (my current employer) lives." Ha ha ha, very amusing at the time. But this morning, I noticed that my neck is ... well, not healed. But certainly, I'm not having the cripping, distracting, tortuous stress on the structure back there.
What's interesting to me about this is that it reinforces my fresh belief in the reality that the mind-body duality doesn't exist. What afflicts the mind affects the body and vicey versy. The more attention I pay to the sorrow and worry and anxiety that I feel every day going to the newsroom, the less the neck bothers me. Perhaps I'm starting to face the real pain in my life. Or at least one slice of it. In the meantime, I'll take my usual 800mg of ibu and move forward.
Now if I could just figure out how to treat my chronic inertia...
1 comment:
I’m by nature a skeptic when it comes to therapies that do not develop from scientific inquiry, but there are so many indications that “mind” and “body” are not separate categories. (I think anyone who has ever had a professional massage would agree). “He did ten years in Attica / reading Nietzsche and Wilhelm Reich” goes the lyric to a bob Dylan song I first heard when I was 14. I wondered who this Wilhelm Reich dude was (I thought I knew who Nietzsche was but not really). From what I could gather, Reich’s ideas were too out there for me (orgon, etc) but later on I came to appreciate the notion that muscle tension can be a placeholder for repressed emotions.
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