He was completely focused and filled with grace as he ran down the hill with a shovel in his hand. Using that shovel, he smashed the driver side window and reached in to unlock the door. In one smooth move, he jumped into the car, released the emergency brake and rolled the black Caddy out of reach of the flames which were licking the passenger side already - threatening to engulf the entire car.
We’d seen the smoke while clearing the South Forty next to my mom’s hillside home in Echo Park. We were preparing the field for our up-coming April 30th wedding. Maybe someone flicked a cigarette at the bottom of the hill, but the dry spring weeds were the perfect meal for the voracious flames which fanned up the hill faster, and with more deadly power, than a speeding bullet.
The Fire Department having been called, my beloved streaked into action. My hero! Later, he would recall the feeling of being totally alive in those few moments.
I know those moments. I’ll bet you, too, can recall a time of feeling absolutely alive - all your senses engaged, a-tingle with vitality and radiating life force. Great sex can bring on that feeling of being fully engaged, all cylinders synchronized... or maybe you’ve felt that aliveness during a performance of music, dance or theater, or maybe in an emergency or disaster you have felt “in the flow” or as if on “automatic,” doing everything exactly right. Are we not meant to feel that aliveness more often? How do we get numbed out? Is it all at once or does our life-force leak out through the holes Life pokes in us? Or, is it that we’re not challenged enough... because we’re always in climate controlled buildings or cars, have enough (or too much) food and the saber-tooth tigers are extinct? Maybe Aldous Huxley was right. In Brave New World, he suggests we should occasionaly swim in pools with mechanical sharks - just to get our adrenaline flowing.
Hearing veterans talk of their war experiences and how each would lay down his/her life for buddies, I sense their conviction is related to knowing the importance of life, and to using his/her keen sensory awareness and survival skills for a good outcome.
There’s a brilliant scene in Kathryn Bigelow’s film, The Hurt Locker, when the newly-returned-home-Iraqi-vet is in the cereal aisle of a fluorescent-lit American super market, lined floor to ceiling with way too many choices of (non) food. The aisle is empty and eerily silent. For me, the scene evokes the huge contrast between living with all senses engaged and living in a way that seems so divorced from what is real, and so numbed out as to be unrecognizable as LIFE - more zombie-like than alive!!
“How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen Par-ee?” I think the lyrics of this WWII song refer more to the adrenaline rush that’s missing when the GIs get home than to the actual City of Lights, it’s sights, sounds and scintillating soirees. I think it’s fairly easy to become an adrenaline junkie.
Many of my clients are survivors of some pretty harrowing traumatic impacts - from incest, abuse, medical procedures, falls, car-crashes, bullet wounds and accidental poisoning, to neglect as infants or a birth gone awry - all of which got their fight/flight/freeze responses all dressed up. Without being able to complete the actions required to slough off or use up the excess adrenaline that spikes when our body/mind perceives something as life-threatening, we’re left with that excess trapped in our muscles. The body's always going toward health; looking for a way to discharge the excess adrenaline, and to complete what it got prepared to do but got thwarted from completing. Agents of the thwart include anesthesia, seat belts, being held down, social mores and being too little to run or fight.
Unresolved trauma may show up as frozen shoulder, IBS, fibro-myalgia, migraines and other painful syndromes, anxiety, insomnia, depression, anger management problems, or lead to full-on PTSD which can color every day with intrusive thoughts, heavy-duty somatic symptoms and inexplicable behaviors.
One of my clients was a Viet Nam vet who was in a tank when a grenade was thrown into it. Not only did it rupture his eardrums, leaving him with many profound and troubling hearing problems, but it left him with pretty severe PTSD. His startle response was off the charts. When he first came to my yoga classes, he could tolerate only thirty seconds of Shavasana (deep relaxation pose) before going into extreme anxiety. Over time, he was able to re-learn how to relax without spiking into a full-blown hyper-adrenalized state (anxiety attack). In his office, in his place of business for over twenty years - where you’d think he would have felt safe - there were times when, if the phone rang, he’d dive under the desk. This behavior was embarrassing and hard to explain to his customers!
His behavior, actually, IS explainable. His hyper-vigilant startle response was due to never having completed the defensive response of running toward safety. He was inside the tank with the grenade when it exploded. He couldn’t run. He couldn’t fight. His body still wanted to get the hell out of there! All his muscles were tensed and ready... forty years later!
In addition to teaching him some yoga and self-regulation skills, I helped him to feel the impulses, however subtle, that his body was showing. The body is so smart. It knows exactly how it needs to move. We’d watch the tensing muscles and ask, “What movement is wanting to happen here?” We’d follow the body and support the completion of that move in a very slowed-down way - wringing all the juice (adrenaline) out of it.
His wife was very happy with the way Somatic Experiencing helped her husband to sleep more soundly, reduced his extreme startle reflex and made him happier, less angry and less anxious. To hear him tell it, all he knew was that the yoga helped his golf-game!
How lucky am I to have been led to a job where I can witness the incredible aliveness that is our birth right as humans? I get to hang out with some very brave folks who are coming back to themselves - beyond the numb/dumb and humdrum and into the light of their own true life-force.
How lucky am I to have married my hero at our “wedding in the weeds” in 1972! We're lucky to be alive, alive, OH!
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