Letters from sea: me, myself, and my nervous system
Practicing perception & studying the spiritual depths of somatic experience
I grasped the barbell, got into position, cleaned the weight up onto my shoulders, then jerked it overhead — just like I had thousands of times before in my seven years as an athlete and weightlifting coach. But this time, as I caught the barbell above my head, something in my back screamed. I gingerly set the barbell down and haven’t picked it up since. This was 2018.
Thinking it was just a tweak, I booked a massage appointment a few days later. As an athlete, I was no stranger to the value of regular bodywork: physical therapy, massages of all varieties, saunas and Epsom Salt baths were part of the lifestyle. But this time, as the masseur was working around my thoracic spine, something terrifying happened.
Like a long wick on a stick of dynamite being lit, a sizzling wave of electric pins and needles began to run up nearly every major nerve in my body. My scalp felt like it had voltage running through every square millimeter, the skin around my eyes and mouth prickled and stung, and my hands had completely frozen in a locked position that I was unable to to release them from. I felt as if I had been plugged into an electrical current: my body was on fire, all my nerves were zinging, and I was temporarily, but very literally, paralyzed. My masseur became nervous (panicked?) and offered (requested?) to stop the session and left the room, and I waited and waited and waited until I had the use of my hands again so I could get dressed and go home.
An extensive and frustrating effort to understand the cause of events like these began. Occasional paralysis and neuropathy were things I had experienced before, though never to this degree, and a new slew of other symptoms (that I will spare you the full list of) had arrived after that day in the gym — most prominent of all was the 24/7 fatigue and the extreme pain around my hips that prevented me from even doing gentle yoga or going on short walks around my neighborhood for the following two years.
I saw neurologists, osteopaths, sports physiologists, naturopaths, physical therapists, neurosurgeons, and chiropractors. I had three MRIs, extensive imaging and tests of all kinds, including an EMG (which to this day remains the most physically excruciating experience of my life), I was poked and prodded and questioned, and while we found some clues and we ruled out some of the big and scary stuff like MS, I was mostly just stared at in consternation from an impressive array of some of the top medical experts in Seattle.
With no one able to offer a single comprehensive theory of my litany of intense symptoms, I began patching together pieces from here and there, stitching a quilt out of professional’s best guesses and my own experience, doing extensive online research, discarding things that clearly weren’t relevant, and building a picture of what was happening within my body. And the diagnosis was: several simultaneous factors, both chronic and acute and structural and circumstantial, had converged to create one massive Nervous System Crash.
The allostatic load from the regular stressors of extreme physical exercise on a body with my particular movement patterns and spine, piled for years on top of launching and running an online business by myself, sitting atop all the foundational stressors of just being a human in the world, hit a tipping point — and my nervous (and adrenal) system got fried.
Today, after 5 years of zero to negligible physical movement, regular sensory deprivation, meditation, healing work, and resting and slowing down as much as I possibly can, my daily energy is mostly good and back to normal, I don’t have any of the chronic bodily aches, it’s been a long time since I’ve had any paralysis or neuropathy (woo!), and I can do short gentle workouts without pain or days of resulting extreme fatigue. By all accounts I have “recovered”. But underneath the generally positive checklists, I know that my nervous system is still exceedingly tender.
I know this, because in the five years between then and now, I have been learning how to listen. And the last several months at sea have required that I look, that I listen, even closer. My physiology has demanded it. Permeating the fabric of all experience are the signs of a nervous system, once again, on the edge: severe anxiety, some resurfacing trauma, a couple panic attacks, and the confounding and somewhat embarrassing reality of this all happening to me: a literal mindset coach, who for a living, helps people navigate anxiety, among other things.
I’ve been a student of my mind for a long time. I built a business on all I’ve learned, helping others learn their own way through their own mental and emotional spaces. I’ve been a student of the body for a long time, pursuing and teaching physical fitness and well being. But I have recently embarked on a whole new level of study and interest — one that lives deep within the waves of present physical sensation and the way this animal body interacts with its environments, one that has reminded me that “mastery” of our humanity and biology alike is an illusion we’d be wise not to cling to, one that has reminded me that new levels of awareness, wisdom, and understanding of our beings are always available for us to discover, if we’re paying attention. I have been paying attention. And I’ve been humbled and awakened by what I’ve found.