Post-Surgery 3

A few weeks have gone by and I've been able to move quite a bit more.  Someone told me that doctors recommend 12-14% body fat for recovery after surgery, and I usually hang out around 8-9%, so I used it as an excuse to eat ice cream three times a day for a little while.  That made me feel like crap, and I'm still down about fifteen pounds from before surgery.  I've had a hard time doing any kind of cardiovascular work, with energy being really low, but I ran yesterday and the weight loss certainly made that more pleasant.  I think the loss of muscle mass, along with the fact that I have been pretty consistent with GYROTONIC and GYROKINESIS, made it wonderfully easy to feel the swinging of the femur in the hip socket, and the efficiency of the psoas for this task when you let it do its job.

I was terrified to get back into breathwork, since people say it's so hard after anesthesia.  I was warned about how hard it would be to stay in my body, as well as the potential to relive the pain of the surgery that I was knocked out for but was probably stored cellularly.  Thus far when I've breathed the actual session hasn't been that bad, but for the rest of the day afterwards the scar is very painful (I hope because it's healing).

Most of the internal aches have gone away.  The scar is still pretty sensitive.  I can't bear weight on the pubic bone for prone exercises, since that's the most tender spot.  In working on prone extension exercises, I've noticed how much I tend to breathe into my belly (which is engaged but protruding) to facilitate the extension.  I've sensed for a while that exercises like rocking were too easy for me because of this, and as I work on keeping my belly narrower and breathing more into the thoracic, I do get the sense that it's a healthier pattern.

I've been working on plenty of abdominal exercises, and the only ones that don't feel safe yet are where I'm lying down and my legs are suspended low to the floor.  I've noticed in curling my spine how a pattern that was already there a little bit is more pronounced- a tendency to shift the ribcage to the right.  I know my left psoas is tighter than the right, and I think with the recent trauma to the left side of my viscera, those tissues are a little freaked out.  I had kind of masked the original imbalance under a lot of muscle mass, and right now it's more visible since I'm so skinny.  I'm trying to move slowly for now on curling exercises so I'm sure to engage and lengthen through the left side, and I'm spending plenty of time stretching it.