This time of the year really gets me down. Everything seems so brown and monochromatic, I start to feel like I’m living in a black and white photo. And to make things worse, it seems as if no one has cleaned up their dog poop all winter. As the snow melts, it’s like the tide receding on the worst kind of jetsam.
At the same time it’s as if I’m drying up. I turned while I was doing the laundry the other week and my back seized and cracked. Luckily I had a massage scheduled through my insurance a few days later. Though it felt good to have her work on my back, I could tell I needed more adjustment. As she touched me, it almost felt like my ribs were broken. She said she could see that my shoulder blade was out of whack and suggested I see a chiropractor.
I wasn’t able to get in for another week, so I scheduled an appointment at a flotation tank in the meantime. If you’ve never done this, you float in a tank of water with enough Epsom salt so your body floats.
Doing so takes pressure off your body, muscles and joints. The water is at skin temperature and it can be a very relaxing experience. To me it feels like floating in a cloud in the tropics and eventually my mind drifts to a place that feels almost like sleep. According to literature about floating, this is the theta state, a type of brain wave that happens just before falling asleep or waking up.
It is similar to the feeling I get during some massages when I feel very relaxed. After floating, my back felt relaxed, but went back to creaky when I was subject to gravity again. So I was still glad to visit my chiropractor the next week. She is different from other chiropractors I’ve used who only use the table to manipulate my spine. She uses her hands to crack and adjust my back, and by the time she was done my back felt limber again.
I was starting to feel like the tin man after the was oil poured in all the right spots. But I had one more treatment planned. My husband bought me a spa gift card a few months ago and I was glad to find out the facility offered a mud and steam shower. During this treatment, you basically rub mud — clean and wonderfully scented, not like the stuff outside my window — on your skin and sit in a steamy shower at the same time.
It was the last bit of hydration I needed to make it through the rest of winter. It’s almost like taking a garden hose and washing away winter’s remnants. There are less than 30 days until spring. This week it’s going to be 50 degrees. Soon the grass will grow, the poop will fade and all will be colorful again.
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A version of this post was previously published on CatherineLanser and is republished here with permission from the author.
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Photo credit: istockphoto