Lymph flow through a turning point
/My teacher came over to address a recent pain at her right ankle and heel. It had been aggravated for a few weeks, with no particular onset. She was especially noticing it going up and down stairs and it seemed to focus in her achilles tendon. In her professional life, she was at a turning point in the culmination of a huge environmental project. The project had been in development for 4 years now and was finally close to receiving full funding for implementation. As she sat in the lobby with me and tuned in to her body, the right side of her neck and shoulder was grabbing her attention as well. We were both curious as to how these three items would all fit together as we moved to the massage table.
I started the session by holding the head and allowing the cranium and the neck to unwind so the mind could settle. It became quickly apparent that there was a line of tension running all the way down the fascia on right side of the spine, to the pelvis and the groin. Somehow the neck bone was attached to the leg bone. This was intriguing. I guided my teacher to relax into the foundations of her diaphragms, especially at the top of the chest, behind the clavicles. I then worked gently with her breathing to mobilize and rebalance the upper ribs and shoulder girdle.
We followed the line of the core breath down to the abdominal diaphragm. Only slight rebalancing was needed there and the energy at the solar plexus felt potent. Moving on to the pelvis, I noticed that the lymph was flowing more easily through the left hip than the right hip. I asked my teacher to find the center of her pelvic diaphragm. We were fascinated to see how far to the right her center was sitting. As she focused on breathing into the center of her pelvic floor, I offered the right hip joint and sacral joint some decompression. As the tissue started to unwind, we could feel the tailbone grounding better to the earth as energy and lymph flowed more readily through the right leg.
Now that all the pathways were open above, it was finally time to address the achilles tendon. When connecting to the ankle, it felt tight and congested. All the energy, though, was running through the toes and the ball of the foot, but none through the heel. The heel had a quality of feeling perched, instead of planted. This gave me an image of a dancer pivoting on her toes. I asked my teacher if she felt planted in her major project. She laughed and said it was at such a turning point that she had gone through the mental exercise of what her career would look like if she walked away from the project right now. When that investigation proved unsatisfactory, she returned to the people involved in the project and tried a different approach. She felt like the momentum was headed in the right direction again.
But her heel either wasn’t on board or didn’t get the memo.
It was still preparing to pivot. What were we missing?
She further discussed the most recent delay with the project. It was brought on when part of her project was “reallocated” to another team in the same department. She felt it was analogous to an invader pillaging for the choicest riches. These smugglers do not realize they are upsetting the entire balance by removing one part of the whole. But the members of the local environment feel the resulting imbalance for generations. My teacher had to maneuver hard for that part to be returned to her team, or the whole project could have been defunct. It was slowly returning back to her team’s assignment. This was a crucial victory that would ultimately benefit many other teams, as well as the environment.
Knowing my teacher’s ancestry, I asked if it was possible that reclaiming this poached section of her project might be part of an epigenetic healing. Could the ancestors in her lineage, that had once plundered other lands, want to heal that karma? Through her experiencing this poaching personally, seeing how it would be detrimental to the local lands, and then repairing it, would that make amends for the historical culpability she had inherited?
She tuned in to the energetic support of her ancestors behind her. Usually she felt their strength and support like a hand resting on her mid back, behind her heart. Now she was aware of them as a pressure on the right side of her neck, almost as if they were tapping her on the shoulder to get her attention. Once we acknowledged this guilt they were holding and thanked them for bringing it to our attention, we rooted the heel in the earth to release this old pattern of energy. We asked her body to see how her heel could be safely “planted” in the proper direction that this project, and her career, were heading. The field on the right side of the body cleared immediately in all directions and filled with a warm expansive flow. We took a moment to balance both sides of the body before getting off the table and taking a short walk to integrate. The posture was straighter, the neck tension was gone and the ankle pain was 90% cleared.
She was back on her path.