This afternoon I saw my myofascial release wizard, and, phew, what a trip that was. By this I mean I cried. A lot. I don’t know. If you haven’t experience myofascial release or anything like it, I know it sounds odd. Marcus got a massage and cried. How strange. And I admit, it is strange. Hell, I’ve HAD myofascial release before and still think it’s odd. No, phenomenal. Phenomenal is a better word. This being said, when I had myofascial release before, it was by a lower-level practitioner, and for a shorter session. So maybe that’s the difference. Or maybe my body just wasn’t ready. That’s one thing I’ve become convinced of. If you’re body isn’t ready to let go, sweetie, you ain’t letting go. If you’re body doesn’t think it’s safe, it’s going to remain on high-alert.

High-alert. I guess that’s how I’ve felt for, oh, twenty-five years now. Granted, I’ve never experienced classic panic attacks, but I have spent ever so much time feeling nervous and unsettled, breaking out in hives, having headaches, and on and on. More than enough signs to let me know my body was, in a very real way, upset and needing attention. Like, Darling, we can’t handle this any longer. This being the go, go, going and self-pressuring. “Sometimes we keep ourselves busy so we don’t have to feel,” my myofascial release wizard (MFRW) said today as she was working on my neck and shoulders, which have been consistently tight for decades. “But what would it be like to let the weight of the world slip off your shoulders?”

“Honestly, I don’t know,” I said. “It’s been there so long.”

This is one of the challenges of healing. We live with our our pains and problems so long that we get used to them. Not that they’re ever fun, but we become comfortable with them. We even identify with them. We say, MY headaches, MY hives. We say, I’M sick, I’M stressed. Whereas some cultures say, I’m experiencing a headache or sickness, thus making an important distinction. That you and your illness are not synonymous. Of course, this is a difficult perspective to keep in mind, especially when your body’s been hurting for years. And yet more and more I’m convinced that a body that’s hurting is a body with a story that desperately needs to be heard.

Where things really got interesting today was when my MFRW worked on my belly button. “I’m going to do what’s called an umbilical cord release,” she said, “and it’s your connection to your mother.” Well, before she really even got going, I started bawling like a baby, I suppose because my mother has been clinically depressed since I was in her womb and, consequently, she hasn’t always been able to be there for me like I’ve wanted her to be. And whereas logically I can say that I understand all this, that it’s okay, alas, my inner child, that little fellow that was in her womb, is apparently not big on logic. This is to say that the story my body told this afternoon was one of sadness, disappointment, grief, confusion, and even anger. Because so many times both my parents weren’t able to be there. Because I had to grow up “too fast.”

The more I allow myself to acknowledge and feel these feelings, the more I’m convinced that my inner child (for lack of a better term) is alive and well. That is, although my driver’s license, the mirror, and my bathroom scales clearly indicate that I’m a 39-year-old man, there’s very much a part of me that’s stuck in 1994, the year I was in a terrible car accident and my dad was arrested. The year I had to grow up. “What does that boy need?” my MFRW asked. “What does he need to hear?”

Sobbing, I thought, He needs to hear that he did a good job. (A great job.) And that it’s over now and he can relax.

Something my MFRW said that stuck with me today was that whenever the wind gets knocked out of our proverbial sails and our boat gets tumped over, we often blame the people we most care about. Like, You weren’t there for me. This is your fault. But the truth is that, most likely, they got knocked out of the boat too. Because shit happens. In my case, I was clearly affected by my mom’s depression, but so was she. Ever so much more than I was. So was my entire family. When dad was arrested, my whole world shifted. But all of our worlds did. This perspective doesn’t change the feelings and emotions that got shoved down all those years ago, but it does help me let them go now. More and more I’m convinced there’s never a good reason to hang on to all that shit anyway. People say that holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the object of your anger to suffer, and I’m coming to believe this is quite literal. Our bodies pay the price for our rage.

And sadness, etc.

To be clear, I don’t think the goal is to be free from any one emotion or the information it carries. I say information because I wish that years ago, even as a teenager, I’d been able to hear what my sadness and tight shoulders were telling me. Sweetheart, we need to be cared for. We need to lighten up. We need to know we’re good enough. This is valuable information, and why I don’t think the goal is to be free from our emotions. Rather, I think we need to experience them. To let our long-buried feelings finally have their say.

Lately I’ve had a lot of experience with this sort of thing, and I freely admit that I don’t do the best job explaining it. It’s not that I get in a room, start talking about my history, and break down in tears. Rather, while in a safe place in which I feel comfortable, emotions like sadness, anger, and self-pressure (if that’s even an emotion) bubble up. Very much like the way a sneeze does. All of a sudden, you’re aware that your body has something to say, something to let go of. And you can either hold it in (ouch), or let it come out. Having gone through this process over and over again over the last month or two, the go, go, goer in me is ready to let it all out. Now. To let go of the tension in my body and experience, I guess, more freedom. Because I always feel lighter, looser on the other side of a release. And yet it appears that the body has its own timeframe for healing. As my MFRW says, “It’s baby steps.”

I used to read stories of healing and releasing like the one I just told and think there must be something wrong with me. Because I was try, try, trying and not getting the same results. Now I think it was just timing. “There’s a season for falling apart,” my MFRW says, “and a season for healing.” It just wasn’t my season yet. Granted, I was learning a lot, which I think gave me a solid foundation for my current experiences. That is, had I not read so much about the mind-body connection and the way our fascia stores our memories, I could have been seriously freaked out by all-of-a-sudden needing to wail or hiss or grunt. I could have shut it down. Which is honestly my first instinct. Because if I’m not all my pain and suffering, all my trying, all my tension, then who am I? And whereas I don’t have an answer, I’m willing to find out. Not only because I can’t keep going like this (twenty-five years is long enough), but also because I’m convinced it’s something good and beautiful and true.