http://agelessyoga.com/Second_Chakra_Part_1_Water_Element_Emotions_Pelvis_Sexual_Energy_Yoga_and_Relationships.htm
As we said in the First Chakra article, the colon or large intestine has an earth element function, in that it extracts the water from the watery slurry received from the small intestine, transforming what remains into the earth element just prior to its elimination. [...]
A second aspect of the water nature of our pelvic area is the urinary fluid function that takes place in the lower abdomen. In addition to our intestines and their fluid contents, we have water storage within our bladder. After our kidneys filter out waste products from our bloodstream, they are sent to our bladder for storage. We don’t feel this process as it is taking place. Only at the time when our bladders are full enough so that we are prompted to urinate do we notice that our kidneys have once again cleaned our blood of waste. Likewise, on a psychological level, it is not unusual for stressful inputs, minor irritations and physical, mental or emotional fatigue to go unnoticed until a sufficient quantity of it has stored. Only then are we prompted by a sense of psychic discomfort of our need to get rid of this accumulated emotional waste. And like the very natural cycle of taking a restroom break, we are best off not to ‘hold it’, but to instead take a break and empty our stored toxicity and take the pressure off. Not letting go simply increases our stress levels by the increasing toxic buildup through holding on to emotional waste products like worry, petty complaints and overblown concern about every little thing we are thinking or feeling or every little thing we imagine others might be thinking or saying about us.
***
So I'm no longer up all night in a combination of tangled-up fear and anger and pain (triple warmer revs from 9 to 11 pm; gallbladder begins pumping bile from 11 to 1 am [though how the pattern works when you no longer *have* a gallbladder??!? I have no clue]; liver churns with old, unexpressed anger from 1 to 3 am; lungs try to expel old grief from 3 to 5.)
I've moved on! Yay! Now I appear to be working on the 5 to 7 am window (waking up pretty consistently around this time many days, though not all).
The tricky bit is, I'll wake up with my head absolutely *full* of things that *must* be written down NOW (or ideally *talked* about, but there's only me here, so I make do with my computer - which I've learned to leave ON til I've passed through this spate and can go back to bed.[and sometimes I *do* talk, just to myself, even *that* helps, a little, just to vocalize.)
So this time of about 2-3 hours is this frantic window of scribbling ideas, typing them on the computer as fast as I can, just trying to get it all OUT, and at the same time, MADLY needing to go to the bathroom, but can't type and sit on the can at the same time - so, the typing wins and I HOLD IT til I've got enough of the 'mental' stuff out to be able to 'let go'. And also this is the window where I clean my 'integument' (have no idea why *that* particular word comes to mind - too much science fiction/fantasy and too much geeky fascination with bugs and such? Dunno.) Meaning: Scrub teeth (remove night before's gunk, which I partly left on there because I *finally* ate a decent meal, which was good for my teeth and gums - I had a bad spot on one of the lower teeth before that, and now it feels like it's beginning to heal from being 'fed' something besides SUGAR... gotta feed yourself *something* sweet, though, both to deal with the stress and because there's been too much BITTER in life for too long. All kinds of balancing acts going on simultaneously.)
***
And there's the left eye thing: Was having some pain in my left eye, as if a nerve was being pinched or irritated or something. First I thought maybe I'd been rubbing it too much, maybe while I was half asleep or something? But then I suddenly noticed, a few days ago, that I'd been CLENCHING that side of my jaw.
So over the last few days, in addition to all the *other* work I've been doing on 'eye segments' and whatnot (a la Reich, though with my own approach and methods- really all I got from Reich is the 'validation' that what I'm experiencing makes sense and that it's 'valid' to approach 'stuck' emotions via the body as well as via the mind) I've been trying to be aware of when I'm clenching that whole side of my face and RELAX it.
And, oddly enough, in a strange encounter in the women's restroom last night at the restaurant where I had dinner, I overheard two women talking while I was in the stall, and came out and added my two cents. One of the women kept commenting on how *young* the other one looked, how she still looked 25, while she herself looked 'so old, wrinkles around my eyes', and she went on - I look terrible, haven't been sleeping, lost weight - sounded like she must have been through a breakup recently, sounded like she was saying everything BUT what she needed to say, as if she was aware someone might be listening - oh, of course she was. I was actually looking in the mirror when they came in, and their conversation sounded like something I didn't really want to listen to, so I escaped into one of the stalls (I *did* actually have to use the toilet, I wasn't *just* hiding :-)
So anyway, I put my two cents in. But what was interesting was, she said that *I* didn't have any wrinkles around my eyes (in that flurry of 'conversation', there'd been bandied about the idea that women, as we age [or, *most* of us] have to choose between being fat and having healthy skin or being skinny and wrinkly.
I said I couldn't deal with the fat, so I'd have to be wrinkly. And she said, "But you don't have any wrinkles around your eyes." And I started to disagree, thinking, I have *lots* of crinkly eye wrinkles. My brother calls them 'smile lines', which is nice... But anyway, I glanced in the mirror to point them out, and realized she was right!
And I thought to myself, all this work with the non-scrunching and eye segments and literally SCRUBBING away the 'old stuff' along with all the other approaches of ELIMINATION (meaning 'getting rid of', as in the sense of bodily elimination) is actually finally PAYING OFF. It's fricking WORKING!!!!!! Bloody hell, do the happy dance (where's Snoopy when you need him... oh, maybe better is the crazy rock 'n' roll dance that Calvin and Hobbes do.)
So I said to her about 'exfoliating' around the eye area instead of being so fricking 'careful' as we're taught to do, and she said, how the heck do you exfoliate around the eyes? So we were off.
But I later thought I wished I'd had time to say to her about sadness, and the wrinkles around her eyes being unexpressed pain or whatever about her *situation*, and NOT about old age, which was what she was complaining about to her friend.
I wanted to say, 'What you see in your friend's face is HAPPINESS; what you see in the wrinkles around your OWN eyes is that you can't cry when you need to because you feel compelled to 'put on a happy face' even though you *feel* miserable (or whatever she's actually *feeling*). Which is why you're tired and can't sleep, etc. etc.
All classic stuff, not to be dismissive of her situation. But it's probably for the best that I *didn't* think of saying any of those things at the time, because she would have thought I was crazier than she already *did* think I was :-) (wacky sentence structure, have to read that later and see if it's comprehensible - googly face here, which I don't know how to make an emoticon for).
But it was interesting to SEE all this stuff, and have them SEE the IMPROVEMENT in me (though of course she'd never seen me before, so had no baseline to compare to.)
And also interesting how we take things for granted - that the SURFACE is ALL THERE IS.
More to say there, but think I'm starting to repeat myself, and still have one more edit to make, and STILL haven't gone to the bathroom or finished this current layer of 'exfoliation' :-) Mental/emotional OR physical.
Wacky. But cool. Trying to do everything all at ONCE, because I HAVE to, because it all hooks together. But, jeez! It's HARD! And crazy. Because I have to go so FAST, to get it all done, or else it all sticks back in there again, and I lose some of this stuff, and have to start over.
And I don't want to go BACK. I WANT to go forward, to move on, to be DONE with this stuff. FINISHED.
So ok. GO to the fricking BATHroom, NOW.
***
I've wondered if this is what it's like to be bi-polar: Hours, days, maybe WEEKS of being stopped up (I wonder if bipolars tend to be constipated??), bottled up by BEING AROUND PEOPLE WHO WON'T LET YOU EXPRESS YOURSELF, then suddenly, something shifts, a channel opens, a window, and you're free to let all that pent-up stuff OUT.
But you're so frantic to deal with the backlog that to *others* you appear manic, panicked, obsessed. But really, you just don't have TIME to stop and do anything else. You HAVE to deal with everything NOW, because NOW is when you FINALLY have the time and energy and THE RIGHT CONDITIONS to do what you *need* to do.
As I say (yes this is my VERY OWN saying that I made up my VERY OWN SELF, please give me credit if you use it!)
"When conditions are right, the flower will bloom." My very own zen saying. Yes, it's fabulous, no applause necessary, just send money :-)
It's like what I've heard/read happens in the desert when a drop of water falls: The whole place suddenly goes NUTS. That apparently sere, barren, dry, dusty world suddenly blooms with a madhouse of flowers and dormant frogs whose eggs were deposited below the sand the *last* time there was a rainstorm.
GO with it!
***
As I'm trying to become more aware of the relationship between body patterns and emotions, I'm noticing that there seems to be a blockage in the left side of my lower abdomen, as if I can actually FEEL something stuck in there, all lumpy, is that my large intestine, that I can feel from the OUTside?
I keep thinking of it being INAPPROPRIATE (meaning, unnecessary) old guilt for PUTTING MY OWN NEEDS FIRST.
So. STOP TAKING CARE O OTHER PEOPLE. Let them take care of themselves, and YOU take care of YOUR self.
It feels like some kind of two-step, or three-step, or circle step - I become aware of an emotion, or a physical pain, and then I notice the link between what I'm feeling emotionally and what I'm feeling in my body. I work with whichever part I can work with, either the body part or the emotion part, and see what moves.
Then, after doing this for a while (hours, days, whatever) something starts to move, to change, to shift.
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