Incorporating Rites of Passage framework when addressing chronic health conditions.

A rite of passage is an event or experience that marks the milestone or change in one’s life. A transformation that leaves us never to be the same as we were before, with integration into ‘life, after’ being one of the most crucial parts of the process in order to maintain congruence.

Only some of the experiences we encounter in modern day have a ceremony or celebration, something to externally validate a change, like graduating from high school or marriage.

But what about the experiences or changes we can’t necessarily see? The ones that don’t initiate a celebration or public appreciation for our endeavours, like travelling solo overseas for the first time, experiencing heartbreak, or grieving the idea of where you are vs where you thought you would be at your current age.

These are the ones that seem to negatively impact us the most. Left unidentified or unspoken, we consciously or not begin to internally process things.

When a child is left to internalise things, without the data points or ‘experiential tools’ that adults have, they tend to start asking themselves “is there something wrong with me?”, keeping them hypervigilant, activated, therefore dysregulated into thinking “I am the cause of the issue”.

Many adults are not too dissimilar in their approach, reaching for internal blame over communication, or being ‘fine’ to shut down help, over being honest and sharing the load.

In the field of psychotherapy, thought leaders define trauma not as the event itself, but keeping it to yourself: not talking about it, not sharing and essentially trying to manage it all on your own, whilst continuing the rest of your life as ‘normal’ as possible.

Why is this relevant to our bodies, and our muscles and pain?

80% of what we interpret is transmuted via our senses, or our body, leaving only 20% to our cognitive interpretations of the world and how we experience it.

Our autonomic nervous system is responsible for generating this feedback and will respond to this information without our conscious control. In other words, we cannot think our way out. If we are feeling safe and open to the world, this ease will be relayed throughout the body. And if we are experiencing the contrary (physiologically and psychologically, real or imagined), we will enter a survival mode, an evolutionary physical response to threat experienced in our tissues: contraction.

One of the most common patterns I see in the body, is a contracted (and not necessarily weak) psoas (the lumbar and major hip flexor) with weak or under-active glutes. Simultaneously occurring can be the grabbing adductor (inner thigh).

Rites of passage is relevant when working with chronic health conditions, because the transformational stages one may be experiencing (ie. in the middle stage of the passage), are conceptually happening inside a cocoon. This perspective can lend itself to the fear, anxiety and resistance one might have towards taking a risk, or stepping outside a comfort zone- conceptually being a butterfly yet convinced they are still a caterpillar, with a fear of falling instead of flying should they take the leap.

We may not physically receive wings and be able to fly at the end of a transformation, however, we may embody some of these sensations, in an emotional or energetic capacity once we’ve reached a milestone.

For a human, this cocoon isn’t completely foreign. We entered the world through a womb, a transformational space, and we leave that space through a passage, a birth canal, bringing us out of the foetal position, the innate way we know how to self- soothe; comfortably made possible to you by the psoas muscle.

Over the years I have found it fascinating to witness, especially in myself, how much the body recoils unconsciously into this position. That we have fascial slings (more specifically: the deep front line) that quite literally pulls us over and down into a ball shape at its shortest line of pull. That our tissues contract and tighten beyond our conscious demands, and that there is only so much physical force we can apply to counter what is happening for us. You may never feel it at its fullest expression, but you may be familiar with slumped shoulders, a tight and shortened abdomen or being stuck in flexion at the lower back. Signals like pain often turn up the volume when we get lost in the symptoms.

Perhaps it’s not redundant nor a waste of time to try so hard to lose body fat when we are inside the cocoon preserving our stores, or working hard at trying to fly high when we’re only at the beginning stage of a new venture, but perhaps applying the framework can help us understand where we are and what we respectfully need, to adjust our expectations and take the pressure off. It may mean allocating more time to creating liminal spaces for ourselves or simply taking time to slow down, rather than focusing on fixing the external ‘stuff’ by doing more.

We may learn through life experiences that some of our core needs are to be seen and heard as we truly are, not what others or society expect us to be. Often when these needs aren’t met, we can find ourselves having an incongruent experience with how we feel vs how we show up in the world.

If the individual is open to it, I apply the rites of passage framework in somatic treatments to initiate congruence; to safely discover if some of the chronic physical issues we experience can be eased by allowing the untold or unexperienced things beneath pain to surface.

This is what feeling space is all about.