Sitting, Walking, and Trying to Stand It

The pyriformus is a muscle that holds the head of the femur in the hip joint. The gluteusminumus is another muscle that does this. They anchor the leg onto the sacrum, the perforated shield-like bone that solidifies late in life. Until age 20 or so, you have a tailbone down there. After age 25, you have a sacrum.

These left-side muscles have never had an easy time binding the femur's head to the sacrum. Now that an extra 50 pounds of pregnancy weight has settled about my bones, they are in distress. There is inflammation, there is immobility in the SI joint, there is the apparent shortening of one leg.

There is ordeal of going down stairs. There is the bus driver making the bus kneel. There is the assurance that this is temporary; and there is the admonition that in three weeks or so, I'm going to need every conceivable millimeter of pelvic flexibility I can muster.

I'm not sure how much improvement is possible. Someone's head is sitting on my pubic bone, after all. Someone rides so low that I am spared the classic pregnant-lady dashes to the restroom because my bladder nestles in the space afforded by this person's neck. How can a pelvis hope to equilibrate in such a situation?

Today I did two things differently. I got out the book I should have looked at a week ago, the tremendous Trigger Point Therapy Workbook, and I figured out which muscles are struggling.

I also considered that perhaps this pain means something other than "I walked around too much, carrying too many things, two weeks ago." Perhaps there is some holding, some distress, some unreadiness, something unresolved. Perhaps I am fighting something. Perhaps I am scared. One clue to this is that my mind has been resolutely singing to me for weeks. I wake up with a song in my head. I sit. And then the song comes back. Finally, I instituted a practice of non-thinking for three breaths, just in the middle of daily activity. Did it several times an hour. Wondered, felt, listened only to breath. Sang some more.

Is this what it will be like when I face death? Will the profundity of what is coming be masked by the banal chatter of the mind? Do I want to be like that? Do I dare be otherwise?

This life as I know it is coming to an end, and something else will be born. A baby--and a mother--will come into the world. I don't know that I will even remember this time of waiting, but I want what comes next to be felt truly and deeply. That means feeling truly and deeply now.

This is the time to sit, and to sit more than ever. The pyriformus doesn't mind, and the heart and mind need it. I'll be aiming for 3 hrs a day, I think. Ask me how it's going.