Your Body Is Your Home

This concept floored me - as a lifelong searcher of stability and harmony as a hypermobile person - newsflash I have just realised that I am already home, if I just trust my body - I am home and I am already safe and I am stable, this gives me the sense of coming home, I sense of comfort I'm not sure I've ever felt before - it's a sense of belonging and finding that I was here all the time, just waiting ..

I've spent my whole life looking for a solution to my daily pain. I felt that exercise and strengthening my body would be the solution - my first degree was in Sports Studies - I learned physiology, human movement the component parts that scientifically make us upin my 20's I was the fittest I had ever been especially in my late 20's, during this time I felt better but still not great, but the level of training it required to stay 'well' was unsustainable for me, I became disillusioned with exercise being the paneceer to my pain. So in my early 30's I left the Health & Fitness industry, I had had some success with alternative and complementary therapy and it fascinated me, even though I was still very Newtonian in my expectations of the human body, in as much i still believed that the solution was external to me, not internal,  so i then pursued a career that would help me further understand my body and so I studied to be a chiropractor for 4 years, qualifying when I was 35.

Chiropractic College was amazing and my understanding of the human body and human condition became so much clearer to me,  on reflection though, it was just a toe in the ocean compared to what I know now. During my 4 years at college as a class we practiced honing our chiropractic adjustments on each other regularly and ultimately this made me worse, I left with as much pain if not more pain by the time I left - let me also say that whilst I was trying to fix the machinery of my body, I was not paying any attention or was even aware that the programming and central computer part so my mind and brain had me trapped in cycles of chronic pain response and protective reaction.Iit wasn't until I started to learn Pilates, Meditation, Mindfulness,  Breath work and roll that together with better Nutrition and understanding of Epigenetics that I started to downgrade the over reaction of my mind and brain , which are in charge of my body.  Once I had amalgamated these techniques then I started to get some harmony and rest bite - I was then able to release a lot of the crutches/avoidance habits I had used to help release me from my pain - , when I drank alcohol my body didn't hurt, and I had a sense of freedom that I couldn't find in my everyday life, the incessant over thinking, harsh judgements of myself they all disappeared and a more carefree fun and exuberant Seona appeared. I knew as a health professional that this was not the answer or a solution, however it was something that gave me the outlet I needed and was a hard habit to break.  When I started to find that sense of freedom and of becoming something greater than I was every day in meditation and breath work with only positive outcome it was a game changer. I became mindful of the negative thought patterns that were keeping me in cycles of unsupportive self-talk,life began to change exponentially. 

Still this was me using many external techniques to build harmony, and mend the disconnect between my body and mind, such a significant improvement to the state of mind ad body I had been in and taking such giant leaps into a belief and understanding that I am ultimately good. However, when I heard that statement 'My body is my Home' only then did I realise that all the work I had done had in fact made me feel at home in my body and that my mind/body connection within myself was deep and true. - that home wasn't my family, that it wasn't a physical place, it was finding the peace to just be in my body and this long journey of self discovery that had taken me decades was just that adventure that had brought me back to myself to the one place I should feel safe and loved - my BODY.

I am so grateful for this revelation, for this wisdom and for the now beautiful sense of calmness that I am home already and always have been. I cried with a sense of relief and belonging that I had never felt before - that I AM all I need -  to truly want to live in my body and that I trusted my body. I think that is the life of a hypermobile person - that they have the built-in mistrust that their bodies will let them down - that we will twist our ankles for the 45th time or that our unstable hip or spine will go into spasm that our shoulders will pop out again and that we are fighting this battle with  ourselves that no one else can see. My journey is not the journey for everyone who is hypermobile - as you know there is a vast spectrum of connective tissue dysfunction that umbrellas our community, with the associated neurodiversity that travels with a hypermobile body, but I can now find peace with the fact that I am no longer fighting to improve myself, to improve my body, because this simple phrase has made me realise that if I take time every day to acknowledge that what I need to feel better and what I need to improve is all internal not external and that with gratitude of what I have, not what I don't have, I can feel a beautiful sense of myself and the journey I have been, not as the curse I once felt I had been bestowed with, but a unique gift in the sense of home I have within my body.