Cracked Open

After I had my kids and carried them on my hip for years, I had a lot of pain on my left side. When they were in their late teens the pain moved to the right, maybe from overcompensation, maybe from playing drums and overusing my right foot or maybe both, but for the last several years, after long walks or too much standing, I have to elevate my right leg and rest it when I sit down. It’s been noticeable but manageable, until this year when it got worse.

It went from what I called hip pain to realizing it was glute pain, most likely piriformis syndrome, which is the glute muscles pulling at the sciatic nerve that runs down my leg. It’s achy, tight pain that leads to nerve pain that shoots down the leg like electricity. It's something I navigate day by day, and it's made doing some of the things I love, like taking walks, more difficult.

I’ve been diligent about doing yoga, seeing my chiropractor and doing daily PT, but it didn’t feel like it was healing. Then one day while I was just stretching at home, my hip kind of cracked and popped and I started crying. Not from pain, but just a flood of feeling. And it wasn’t my typical crying, it sounded different.

Somatic practitioners may call this a completion cry, the sound of something that probably started a long time ago and has been waiting to finish. The idea is that unprocessed emotions don't disappear, they get stuck in the body and wait. Maybe something happened and was never able to fully express itself, or maybe it's an accumulation of things that built up over time. Either way it really doesn't matter and the mind doesn't need to narrate it, the body just needs to let it go.

Regular talk therapy works top down, mind to body, with the hopes that you cognitively understand something and then the body follows. Somatic therapy works bottom up, where the body releases something and the mind eventually catches up.

As a yoga teacher and holistic social work practitioner, body literacy has been an important part of how I understand myself and others. I spent a decade working with a body worker doing exactly this kind of deep somatic work, but somewhere around 2020 I became somewhat disillusioned and had good reason to pull back from a lot of it. Some of my teachers were drifting toward an aspect of wellness culture that was more combative than helpful, more interested in questioning mainstream medicine than actually helping people heal. I found myself learning about high-control groups and cultish thinking, and realized I needed to get a lot more discerning about who I was learning from and why.

This was a good and necessary move and helped me get more grounded and self trusting, but I also started to lose track of some of the most important parts of somatic healing. I did less reading and learning in that more holistic way, and that curiosity has always been part of how I'm wired.

After that crack and cry a part of myself remembered what I knew. I had never fully left it behind since EMDR stayed with me through therapy, but I had drifted away from that deeper work of listening to what the body was trying to say through pain.

The body tends to hold what the mind has managed or overridden, all the things we absorb from culture and experience or force ourselves to believe. The places where we gave more benefit of the doubt than we should have, where we convinced ourselves we were wrong and others were right, where we tried to fix everything even when someone else was causing the harm.

For someone like me in perimenopause, somatic work is even more interesting because the hormonal shifts are already helping with the unlearning. When estrogen drops so does oxytocin, the hormone of caretaking and connection. Old caregiving patterns start to shift, making us less consumed by what others think and need and more curious about what we actually want.

Plus, each part of the body has its own meaning and significance. My hips, glutes, psoas, piriformis, and legs all carry their own messages, and then there's the shift in pain from left to right.

The left side of the body is about receiving, nurturing, and others-focused or feminine energy. Carrying my kids on my left hip made literal and symbolic sense, my left hip had gotten tired and overworked from holding others.

Then, when the girls were older, the pain moved to the right side, which carries more doing energy, like asserting, moving forward, and a shift from carrying others to carrying myself forward. It’s basically, my kids are more independent now, my parents are gone, and the caretaking chapter is changing, so how do I move into the next phase? That question lives in my right hip as much as anywhere else, and it connects directly to perimenopause and how I’m evolving.

In somatic and trauma-informed work, the hips are also considered a storage site for unprocessed emotion, specifically fear, control, and the chronic bracing we do to keep ourselves stable. The psoas muscle, which runs through the hip and connects the spine to the legs, is sometimes called the muscle of the soul because of how deeply it's linked to the stress response. When it releases, crying is typical.

I can take some guesses about what I've been bracing against over the years, like the fear of making mistakes in parenting or career, the fear of death and illness, disappointment, worry, overwhelm, losing control, wanting things to change and also fearing change. I can feel myself bracing just writing that list.

Plus, all of this may not have started in adulthood. It probably started much earlier, when my nervous system was still developing and I learned that I needed to be careful, to show up as expected, and get it right for the safety of myself and others.

Through PT I learned about the piriformis, a small deep muscle that sits right behind the hip joint and under the glute. Its job is to externally rotate the leg, to turn away from something. In somatic terms it’s a muscle of deflection. It also sits on top of the sciatic nerve, which is why piriformis syndrome leads to that electric, shooting sensation down the leg. When the piriformis is chronically tight it compresses the sciatic nerve and the pain travels all the way down.

The psoas braces the front of the hip and the piriformis guards the back, and when one is chronically tight the other tightens too, compressing the whole joint from both sides.

So I have pain in the muscle whose literal function is to turn away, sitting on top of the nerve that runs the full length of my leg which is my ability to move and walk forward. And what's interesting is I can do almost everything else. I can move up and down stairs, use the elliptical, lift weights. But I cannot walk straight forward without pain.

My body has been trying to both protect me and move me forward at the same time, probably for a very long time, and those two things are finally in enough conflict that something had to give.

So, do I know for sure all of this is correct and the reason for my pain? No. Maybe it's just because I started playing drums a few years ago and overtaxed my right side, maybe it's an old yoga injury, maybe it's the drop in estrogen and the increased inflammation that comes with age (even though I'm on HRT), or maybe it's all of the happening at the same time.

But what I know for sure is that I believe in everything that helps me heal and I'll try whatever has the wisdom and possibility to keep me moving. Doctors, medication, supplements, physical therapy, chiropractic, rest, nutrition, journaling, and of course, the somatic release of whatever my body no longer needs.

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