My left shoulder and neck were kind of stiff again this morning — which got my attention.
The thought of going through all of the drama I went through in February and March all over again makes me feel sick to my stomach, but what’s even worse than that is that I know why my body aches this way again. It’s because I keep trying to go back to something comfortable instead of changing my ways…
I’m a face-sleeper.
I have been since I was very little. I always prefer to sleep on my stomach, and even when I set out to stop myself from rolling onto my tummy, I usually end up flopping over because it just feels so good to me. But when my neck and shoulder were literally consuming me with pain, the pain got even worse if I tilted my body to either side, and, the one or two times I pushed past that tilting trigger of pain, and ended up on my stomach, within seconds I was in tears.
When Dr. Dong fixed my situation by lighting my back on fire, he told me in his broken English that the way I sit and sleep were the cause of my problems. He didn’t even know for a fact that I sleep on my stomach, yet he could tell because my body was showing him how out of alignment I am when I was face-down on his therapy table. He could tell because my body was showing him that my way of doing things was causing my pain…
For more than six weeks, my pain forced me to sleep on my back, even though my longing to roll over was something I noticed every single night. But now that the pain is only a very vivid memory, and it’s not stopping me from returning to my old habit, I’ve allowed myself to slip back into my favorite sleeping position once again. And. My body is telling me nothing has changed. This way of sleeping might feel comfortable at first, but the truth is, it’s hurting me.
On my morning hike today, I did the stretching exercises Dr. Dong suggested while I was standing on my favorite prayer rock. For “120 seconds” I lifted my hands up in the air and pressed my shoulders down, and I surrendered my tensions to the Lord. I actually felt my neck click into alignment halfway through, and along with the release came a lesson.
I’m pretty much in a continual season of my life where I’m stretching and straining for answers, for clarity, and for some form of safety. I’m willingly stepping out with my faith as my only guide, and to be perfectly honest, I’m really scared most of the time. My circumstances don’t make sense to me, and I don’t know if I’m doing things in my life the “right way” or the “wrong way.” I pray, I confess, and I try really hard to figure things out, but I live in this enduring white space of wonder.
But there is this tendency in me to try to mold my thoughts in such a way that they sit more comfortably in my mind.
I’m prone to rolling over into my own understanding of things and then falling asleep to the realities that might be right in front of me. My old habits or beliefs are stronger than the lessons I’m trying to learn right now, and when God finally shifted the pain of my lessons so that my pain wasn’t my only focus, I suddenly see that I go right back to seeking my version of comfort and my own sort of conclusions instead of God’s.
I know it’s not going to be easy to keep myself from flipping onto my stomach again tonight when I go to sleep. I don’t even think I realize I’m doing it when I do it! But most mornings, I wake up on my stomach, and when I get my first look at myself in the bathroom mirror, there’s usually a huge crease on my face that proves sleeping on my stomach wasn’t just a short-term position!
There’s a saying in personal development that goes like this: Awareness heals.
So does pain… But right now, I don’t just want to heal or recover from a very big lesson I’ve recently learned that is as much about my body as it is about my soul. I want to change… And maybe for me, awareness is really just an invitation to change.
