I haven’t done a great many posts on tips lately. Mostly it is because I am doing all I can to get through each day.  I don’t have a lot of energy and what I do have is shared with my family.  I turned a corner the other day and I wanted to share what happened.

My knees have been causing me so much pain lately that a restful night’s sleep has evaded me.  If I don’t move in bed I start to cramp up and if I try to move I am in a lot of pain. So needless to say every 30 minutes to an hour I am awake.

I was lying in bed the other day and I was contemplating my current situation.  I was going over in my head what was going on in my life. I considered the amount of stress I have been under and how I have tried to deal with it. I was also evaluating my diet and trying to figure out what might be causing the increased inflammation and pain and what I was going to do about it.  There are so many variables that can effect how I feel it’s hard to pinpoint which part of my life and routine is causing all this pain. I needed to figure out if anything I was doing was having any impact at all.  While I was lying there pondering all these factors all I could think of was the only time I am not in pain is when I am still.

I was irritated that in being still the world was going on without me.  All I could think was I can’t live like that either, spending the entire day not moving to avoid pain is not really a solution to my problem. Then it hit me, maybe I was looking at this all wrong.  Maybe the universe was trying to tell me that I needed to be still.

I sat with that thought for a while.  Maybe I needed to stop fighting the stillness and just for a while embrace it.

So I did.

I welcomed the stillness in my body and my mind.  I stopped fighting and was simply still.

I don’t know that if in that moment of acceptance my body and mind connected, but I do know that when I woke the next morning I had slept the entire night without waking from pain.  Since then I have been experiencing significantly less pain and inflammation.  I am not pain free nor am I inflammation free but in the days since I feel like I am at a manageable level.

Before this realization I was really afraid that I was either going to have to go back on medication to control the pain and inflammation or I was going to have to live with things the way they were.  I wasn’t really sure that I would be able to do that.  All that pain, takes it’s toll on my spirit. All that pain takes it’s toll on my family.

I had gotten away from meditation for a while.  Life had gotten busy. Priorities changed.

I won’t let that happen again.  I need to take the extra time for the stillness.  In embracing the stillness, my body has thanked me.