Taking a Fall

Two weeks ago, I fell taking a step onto a neighbor’s basement stairs. My foot just slipped on the carpet and I was about to bounce down the stairs on my bottom. Having sprained my ankle in September 2007 two weeks before I was going to run a half-marathon, I was determined not to let my legs take any of the ill effects of this fall.

So I braced myself with my hands – I let all the weight fall into my upper body. Within minutes, I knew my arms were going to hurt. I was in a fragile emotional state before the fall, and I knew that the feeling of upset and the trauma were going to settle into my body in a powerful way. I went home and sobbed for a few minutes after I took my first round of drops of Perelandra’s Emergency Trauma Solution (ETS Plus). I repeated the drops every 5 minutes four or five times. Then I took arnica and applied Traumeel lotion topically.

But it hurt a lot to raise my arms out to the side, and I knew that whatever I did, I was going to need help. I kept taking arnica – no OTC painkillers and the next morning called the massage therapy center where I’ve been going for over a decade. I knew my regular craniosacral therapist wasn’t working that day, but the other one was, and she had an opening. Fortunately, my husband had a few days off of work, so I could take the appointment.

The session was very powerful. Not only did I leave feeling like almost all the pain was gone, I was profoundly relaxed. It was clear that I needed the session anyway; CST simply needs to be part of my regular life, at least as long as I’ve not got a consistent yoga and meditation practice going on.

I happened to get in this past week with another CST practitioner I used to see a lot before my son was born. He has more experience with visceral manipulation and other aspects of Upledger training. He worked on my son for 30 minutes and for me for the remaining 20 minutes. The work felt deeply therapeutic. He said I was still locked up from the incident and that he worked to release the tension. That night I actually felt tired before 11:00 for the first time in a long while. That would not be the first time that CST helped me to chill out enough to be able to get to sleep at a decent hour.

I’m very glad to have these practitioners in my life to keep me from holding on to negative patterns and then compensating for them in other problematic ways.