Changing My Mind... Every Other Friday, At Half Past Two.
I don't even bother to listen to anything. The drive will take me less than two minutes, depending on how long I get stuck at the stoplight that allows me to cross a busy road.
Total drive time typically is three minutes. It's now too hot to walk the 12 minutes.
For the past two years, almost every other Friday, I have acupuncture and cupping done over the span of 90 minutes.
I've been using acupuncture to help with stress and back pain for almost two decades now. I remember the first time I tried it... The session started face up, then I turned over to have the acupuncturist focus on my back meridians. Thirty minutes later the session was over, and I pushed myself off the table.
It took almost a full minute before I realized my back pain was gone.
While I lay on my stomach, with my face peeking through the head rest hole and feeling blood rushing into my face, my mind had wandered continuously. Not fixating on any one thought.
I had forgotten about my back pain until I was off the table and getting dressed and recalling why I was there in the first place.
"Am I going to jinx it?" I wondered. I feared that now I remembered I had come in with back pain it would come back.
Manifesting it again.
But I didn't.
I, of course, would continue to have some back pain occasionally. But that first session reiterated to me something I'd already known and experienced...
How the mind completely calls the shots in life.
A youthful stint in a psychiatric hospital for a few days and a few months of psychotherapy afterwards to explore some deep depression that had made residence showed me how I could push beyond my mind and change what it thought was reality. I learned to cut out the noise - aggressively on a dime - and hyper fixate towards an opposite direction. Which helped me move into a healthier space.
In the past 20 years my yoga practice has been key to purging the mind's fixations. Pushing out the aches that exist for it alone. And the bi-weekly acupuncture and cupping do the same.
When I first started getting the cupping, the fascia in my back would scream as the heated cups were slid up and down my back and then placed in a spot to hold for 15 minutes.
The fascia didn't like being pushed to open up.
Now, they usually glide like ice sliding along a warm surface. No pain. But there is some bodily screaming when a cup is placed. My body doesn't want to play along with hosting it for a few minutes. But after about 30 seconds, it calms the fuck down.
And the tension from the cups running across my back feels good.
And I have the round cupping marks for a few days afterwards. I'll forget they are there, until someone in a yoga class is standing behind me and comments on them.
"Oh! Where do you get your cupping done? I want to try it."
I've referred my acupuncturist out to so many people at this point. But ever other Friday, at 2:30pm... That's my standing appointment.
My mind drifts for 90 minutes as I get cups suctioning on me, and then also needles tapped into different energy channels, depending on what is ailing me that week.
This week it was low energy. And stress.
I came out of that session with a dizzy energy. I wanted to go home and take a nap. But I knew I would force myself to stay awake and enjoy being in a dreamy headspace.
And I enjoy the silent drive back home. So that I could continue to enjoy the changed mind.
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