The Pain I Did Not Know I Had... Lessons from Ireland Part I

I recently spent two weeks in Ireland with my psychic/energy tools teacher and another teacher/healer who was co-leading the journey to sacred sites throughout the country. I wasn’t exactly sure what my purpose was in participating on this trip, but I have Irish ancestry, I learn and heal so much from my teacher esp. when I travel with her, and I am curious about the mystical side of life in general and especially sacred sites in Ireland. So, I trusted my spirit when I heard the call to join (that came through a dear friend of mine).

I started experiencing quite a bit of hip pain shortly after I landed in Ireland. I’ve had hip pain on and off throughout my life, so it was something familiar to me; however, this time it was incredibly amplified, almost like it was screaming at me. An intensity I was not familiar with.

I checked in with one of the leaders; she had indicated that oftentimes people will experience foot pain in Ireland as it is harder to ground energetically there due to differences in the magnetic grid throughout much of the country. When I asked her if that pain could extend up to the hip, she said no, not really, and that likely wasn’t what was going on with me.

This woman is a beautifully gifted healer and clairvoyant and, as I had previously asked about having a healing session with her, she knew there was an openness from me for some healing work. She said directly to me, no there’s something else going on for you… and then she asked me “Did you ever have children?” My response was a quick and assured ‘No’ (thinking peripherally to myself that my pain wasn’t due to childbirth, or anything related to that…) and then she said “Yeah, so your body is grieving that.”

WOAH – what?!?

That was truly the LAST thing I expected to hear.

The idea that there was grief that my (animal) body stored from NOT having kids. Woah! THAT was a big one for me. This was truly something I did not realize could even be a thing and I had no idea this grief was in my body. When she said it to me, so matter-of-factly in response to my question, I almost felt a sense of disbelief, at the mental level of my body.

She asked if I would like a healing and when I indicated yes, she came over and put her hands on my hips for a couple of minutes to do some energy work on me. I could start to feel subtle shifts in my body immediately.

Then I started to notice that there was something that resonated in my body, very subtly, like a whisper with what she had just told me. My mind/body/spirit complex had to take it in very slowly, or at least that all it was capable of in the moment, very slowly letting that idea and understanding sink in. That I could actually have grief at some level of my body about not having kids. I guess after all, my body was made to give birth and that did not happen. And therefore, some level of somatic experience of grief resides there.

I still say/feel a big WOAH when I hear and think about this. I mean I did not WANT to have kids… so why would I experience grief about that?!?

And yet when I think about it from a higher-level perspective, I can see other ways that perhaps this grief was expressing itself in my life. Ways that it was coming out sideways, trying to make itself known since I was ignorant of it at a conscious level.

For example, I find it challenging to be truly excited and happy for someone having a baby. Mostly I feel this at a mental level and my mind goes to some of the reasons that I chose not to have kids, primarily over-population and the sense that there are way too many people in the world and why are people continuing to have so many babies? Everyone is always so happy for people when they have a baby. And a small part of me seethes at the impact I believe it is having on our beautiful and struggling planet.

This is hard to admit ~ I realize this might be a controversial thing to say ~ it might feel insensitive to some people whom I love dearly, which of course is not my intention. I’m slowly learning to be ok with my truth even if it is not a popular sentiment. And I still deeply love my friends who do have kids.

There are other situations that I can look at from this bigger perspective and see that they could be simply an unhealthy expression of grief. With a bit of distance and contemplation this idea now completely makes sense to me. And yet I never considered doing any sort of ritual to acknowledge this grief in my body (and I’m one who loves ritual! Check out my menopause blog post as one big example…).

Ah, this being human is so complex and multi-layered and ever surprising. We have experiences on many different levels of our being and yet so often we might only be aware of one or two aspects of any given experience.

This journey to get to know myself better is slowly moving through the multiple layers of my own body, to places I never anticipated. And this from someone who has worked a TON with the body, on multiple levels. I practiced and taught yoga for years, including a specialized series Yoga for Chronic Pain! I’m a yoga therapist and work with people to help release and heal somatic emotional pain in their bodies. It’s kind of what I’ve focused much of my life on for the past decade. I’ve had more massages and somatic trauma release sessions than I can count, and I’ve strived to heal this hip pain for literally years.

And here I was having a whole new experience in my own body… a new experience of healing somatic grief that I didn’t even know I had.

Maybe this is just how it goes. We keep showing up to do ‘the work’ on ourselves, and then one day we get to a point where we are ready to have such a pivotal transformational experience such as this, one that shifts everything.

Now, when I sit still with my body, I can tap into what that grief feels like with a whole new perspective and understanding. Which, in turn, means that I can tend to this grief in all the ways I know how and with all the tools I have practiced and developed over the years.

Oh, and that hip pain??? It was gone the next day and continues to be absent today.

I’m incredibly grateful for the healing that I received in Ireland, just this one part led to an unfolding of other possibilities for healing that I was also unaware of. The feel of experiencing, and then releasing, the grief in my womb became part of a very important component of my journey in Ireland….

And that is a story for Part II. Stay tuned!