Meditations and miracles

(Nimue)

Back at the start of covid, I lost most of the feeling in my feet. Given the state of everything, I didn’t get it checked out – it didn’t seem that urgent compared to the need to isolate. Then it became normal. I think it was a combination of how stressed I was and how much I was disassociating. It’s easier to damage a system than it is to fix it. I’ve had a lot of time where I barely registered my own skin, and it’s enabled me to tune out a lot of pain. It also makes it hard to feel real, or present, and it’s been an expensive way of dealing with some really challenging things.

I’ve not been actively disassociating for months now – I’ve not needed to do it. It’s a costly protective system, but for a long time it was the best option I could find. Disassociation is something that can happen spontaneously in response to distress but you can also do it deliberately with enough practice. A body used to trauma can numb out very quickly. I’ve had all of that going on. 

Associating again is much harder work. I did a little bit of going barefoot outside back in July and August, and  there were hints of sensation. Before then I hadn’t been able to reliably tell without looking whether I had socks on, or whether my feet were in the duvet or not. As the loss of feeling in my feet was not a deliberate choice I wasn’t sure if I could find a way out of it.

I dug in with the meditation. I’ve made a point of spending time every day thinking about my feet and trying to feel them. My theory was that the issue might be more with my brain and nervous system than anything physical. It wasn’t the kind of numbness that goes with loss of circulation, the blood mostly goes round enough. It was more that my brain didn’t register my feet properly so I had no information from my body about where the ground is, and things like that. It’s possible I’d had similar things with other parts of me, but feet are so much more noticeable when you can’t feel them.

Neural pathways are rather interesting things and we can build them by trying to build them. This is a massive consideration around stroke recovery. So, I tried to rebuild the relationship between my brain and my feet, and I invested time in that every day, trying to feel my feet. It’s been the primary focus of my meditating for about two months now.

Then I woke up one morning and I had feet again. I could feel my own skin, and how dry it was! The impact on my balance has been instant and massive. This will make me safer and makes it easier to walk. The implications for dancing are huge. It’s been tricky figuring out ways to dance without being able to move my feet much. 

Some of this healing is a consequence of no longer disassociating all the time. Some of it I am certain is the result of using my meditation skills to repair the damage done to how my brain was relating to the rest of my body. Brains are startlingly flexible things, but it is easier to get them to shut down than it is to rebuild a system. Dissociation is something that can just happen to us in response to things that are unbearable. Spend too much time doing it, and coming back from there is hard. Possible, but hard. Getting feeling back into my body and my brain back in touch with my feet feels like a miracle.