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i love my hip, i love my healers

the healer community in detroit is pretty amazing. small, but gifted. i work with adela nieves, who is trained as a curandera, and with enid carter, a black mama masseuse who affirms my body the whole time she works on me. both take however long we need.

both have helped me with an ongoing hip pain that i have been looking at in horror, unable to comprehend that such a strange fire could truly be radiating down my body. they’ve helped from a physical and emotional perspective.

enid said in our most recent session that i have to love my hip. it is a simple thing, but when a body part is in pain, my response is to think – ‘[insert body part] i wish you would go away, detach yourself from my body, disappear, just stop!!’. i curse at the pain, i curse at wherever i am sitting, everything around me. then i curse at the sky.

then i go into my somatic mode and think, ok what does this pain have to tell me? through the filter of my curses, it’s sometimes hard to understand the pain, but i listen, i journal, i reflect. i pray, i wish, i long for relief.

enid suggested that i just love on the hip. and do the following loving things to it:

ice it
use a yoga ball for sitting at my desk
rub and ask others to rub my sacrum and feet
use pillows to support my knees and ankles when i am laying or sitting
stretch my hamstrings daily, gently, with a yoga strap
use weleda brand arnica oil and arnica pills
and take aleve – don’t sit in the pain

and then keep sending love at my hip, at my back, down my leg, to my whole left side as it works to release the pattern of pain, to my right side for growing stronger in this process. i think about the million intersections of my body, my wholeness, and the layers of emotion, memory, and joy that reside within me.

then i love my hip.

and i love my healers.

i love my hip.