Knots in the Soul

Another in my continuing saga of analogies between the body and the soul . . .

A month or so ago, I woke up hardly able to move my neck. Who can relate, people? It SUCKS.

Apparently I’d slept on it funny . . . and had been doing that for a while, I guess, because it had been getting progressively worse for a few days. My kind and thoughtful colleague Lani used to be a massage therapist, and she offered to work on it a bit before the school day started, which helped dramatically – thank you, Lani! A couple days later, she also brought a foam roller to school and showed me how to use it to essentially massage my muscles myself at home.

I’d never seen a foam roller. Hadn’t even heard of such before this fall. As part of my job as Middle School Team Lead, I have been seeing in our Athletics teacher’s lesson plans the instructions to use "foam rollers and lacrosse balls" at home between workouts. 

Foam rollers . . . I was picturing those cheap little curlers my mom used to put in my hair for me to sleep on. And I didn't even know one used a ball to play lacrosse. For the life of me, I couldn't quite imagine what these items looked like or what you do with them or why. I did NOT take Athletics class in Middle School . . . and if I had, I doubt we'd have used such contraptions back then. But thanks to kind and thoughtful Lani, I am now enlightened, and I purchased my own foam roller and lacrosse ball. 

Fabulous devices, these are, people. Over the Christmas break, I have been using them daily. I don’t quite know if I’m using them correctly – I just hunted down some instructions online (seriously, how DID we live without the internet for so many centuries??). I will say, though, that my body was feeling remarkably good, and the pain in my shoulders and upper back seemed to finally fade.

I’ve always liked massages. They are relaxing, for sure. But the massages I'm used to are casual affairs, akin to having a glass of wine and laughing over a sitcom episode with your honey at the end of the day – simply a way to let go of the day’s tension and relax. This treatment with the roller and ball – this is more than that. This is therapy. Focused and intense healing work. The kind of work my upper back muscles needed was not like wine and a laugh while cuddling on the sofa; it was more like an intense, purposeful conversation analyzing and defusing a crisis moment from the day to weaken its power over my spirit. Therapy.

One thing I learned from the instructions I found online was that, with the lacrosse ball, it needs to sit on the sensitive area for a while. “Let the ball relax into the pain,” it said, or something like that. Because using that stinkin' ball is painful when you have tight, damaged muscles that need such treatment.

"Relaxing into the pain" seems counter-intuitive. My instinct when something hurts is to avoid it, to protect it, to do whatever I have to do to keep from triggering the pain. (What’s the old joke? The man tells the doctor, “My leg hurts when I do this.” And the doctor tells him, “So stop doing that.”) And as I discussed in a previous post, there are some injuries that do need protection while they heal. But that’s not the goal here. The whole point of these devices, apparently, is to apply gentle pressure to tight muscles until the muscle lets go of its tightness. The tightness is the source of the pain.

And now the analogy begins, because my body isn’t the only thing with tight places. My soul has a few tight, twisted knots which make their presence known loudly on occasion. And I’ve learned that avoidance is not what is called for here. I’ve got to work that inflamed emotion or, more specifically, the errant thought behind the emotion: is that really true? How do you know? What evidence is there supporting it? What evidence is there against it? What does scripture say about that? Have you prayed about that? Have you gotten good spiritual guidance about that? Are you really sure this idea is true – sure enough to continue living your life in light of it?

Some painful emotions are not the result of breaks but evidence of knots. I’ve got to apply strong, gentle, controlled pressure until the tightness gives in to the weight of truth . . . and releases.

There's more: Lani made a point of telling me to drink LOTS OF WATER after using my foam roller. “The massage releases toxins, and you need to flush those toxins out of your system.” Now, I’ve seen some arguments against that particular theory, but I’ve been drinking the water anyway. And I’m convinced it helps. Maybe just because I need to drink more water anyway, but whatever.

And, of course, it doesn’t escape me that that Jesus calls himself the Living Water. Always looking for the metaphor.

I woke up yesterday morning with another excruciating knot in my upper back, dang it. One of these days, I’ve got to figure out what I’m doing during the night to cause this crap.

And maybe that’ll end up in another blog post. The analogies abound, y'all.