Physical Therapy: Reflections on a Lifetime of Hypermobility

Prior to meeting Ida Lovgren at Create Wellness in Seoul, I'd done PT on and off over the years in response to the many sports injuries that have peppered my life. I have cherished our sessions. I have seen Ida for eleven 60 minute sessions of PT exercises and rehab-specific bodywork across 4 months so far. After 12 years of gradually falling apart, I am on my way to a whole new level of physicality. My mental, emotional, and spiritual commitment to growing through physical therapy has finally come to pass. I hope to study with Ida long into the future.

I started to have neck pain when I was 23, but as with most things, my issues were present far before they registered as pain. I've struggled with hypermobility since birth. Having genetically loose tendons and ligaments all over has lead to a lot of conscious and unconscious confusion as to what "proper" posture and alignment actually feel like, what muscles should be bearing what loads, to what degree and at what angle.

Hypermobility also creates to the ability to make beautiful, unique shapes with my limbs. I can contort myself into extreme positions that were coveted in the dance communities I frequented. While I have always studied movement and the body, until I started seeing Ida, I wasn't studying my unique situation properly. What appeared to be my gift was actually my curse and my undoing.

I am now aware of why things inside me have always been subtly off for as long as I can remember. One of my earliest memories is of how my right leg would ache mysteriously for one day a month and then it would be gone the next day. As a child, my posture was atrocious. I W-sat religiously. I was pigeon toed. I've pronated. I've supinated. I've had back spasms, hiked hips and reverse neck curves that put me out for days. I've torn tendons and ligaments irreversibly. I've lived at the chiropractor and resented myself for being so dependent on outside adjustments in order to function.

Seeing Ida was the dawning of a new era. Through her I learned that I wasn't engaging the proper gluteal muscles to keep my hips in their sockets long enough to walk properly all these years. My pelvic floor was as obscure as a black hole until Ida entered my life. Through Ida I finally understand why it used to take me the effort of 20 armies to sit up straight for 20 minutes. She set me up on a blind date with my core and we hit it off.

I understand now all the smaller reasons I was anxious about performing certain athletic activities. Don't even ask about my ability to aim at a target or about my hand eye coordination. Even my teeth sit in my mouth at wild angles, and I've had braces. Through physical therapy sessions, I finally understand why I've always felt a little bit ungrounded, physically and mentally. There is finally a concrete name and a concrete cause for the instability that has always been my shadow. Through working with Ida, I'm going through a rebirth. I am approaching my embodiment from a completely different place. She is teaching me to awaken muscles that have been long dormant and undeveloped. My lateral quadriceps are taut and bulging while my medial hamstrings have literally never been removed from their packaging let alone done anything muscles are supposed to do. She is helping me adjust the engagement of the muscles that have received a lifetime of overdevelopment to compensate for their counterparts that were dead asleep. At age 35, I am finally healing from the ground up.

From Ida I have finally learned to breath. What a wake up call to know that you've lived half a lifetime never having inhaled all the way, down to the depths of the root chakra. What a transcendence to finally know how to send an inhale out to patrol every inch of the abdominal cavity and "reinflate" the areas that have started to collapse inward like a dented soda can. Now I can carpet my pelvic floor with the sweep of an inhale. What a powerful moment it was to finally learn that I can realign myself from the inside out instead of constantly needing a practitioner to do it for me when I had reached the point where I was too subluxated to function.

I have participated in all these group yoga classes and been in so many other instructional environments that coached proper breathing and yet I was never able to fully integrate the lessons because I was so unaware and had different needs than the students with regular joint function. Group breathing exercises were like being given a blank sheet of paper and being asked to write an essay in a language I had never studied. Working one on one with Ida, it was like she took the pen, put it in my hand, and held my hand over the paper and infused me with several years worth of "language lessons" over the course of just a few collective hours. Because of how precisely she worked with me, the scope of the feedback she gave me when I was hitting the mark and the articulation of her redirection the second I went astray, I know myself infinitely more intimately.

After an event that crippled me and left me with compromised mobility over 3 years later, I have had a lot of cause to think about what really happened. I was warned multiple times across the years until nothing could stop my achilles from rupturing. It was neither an accident nor a coincidence. Divine intervention never is. Divine intervention is also a far cry from the sky opening and a fleet of angels swooping in to carry us. Sometimes divine intervention is about being shattered into a million pieces and the personal empowerment that becomes available to us when we are left with no choice but to pick up the pieces of ourselves and enlist specialists like Ida to coach us through the arduous process of recreating what was lost. Along the way I discovered my other half-- the long lost part of me. I am receiving far more than what I started with.

Looking back, it's like my soul was living as a foreigner in my body all those years. We were quite separate. I was born into this vehicle completely unaware of how to properly drive it. The injuries piled up. I had been driving around with the emergency brake on, trying to speed up and wondering why I encountered such resistance. I have existed in my body without knowing its unique "language." Ida taught me just enough of the basics of my human body's language that it and I are finally starting to communicate well enough to function together, enjoy each other's company and learn from each other. It blows my mind now to reflect on how separate I felt from my body in the past, how alien it felt to live in it. As I continue to work on myself, I'm catching glimpses of a whole new physicality available to me. I now have a healthy relationship with chiropractic as opposed to a dysfunctional dependency; it supports me equally as much as I support myself. With Ida's guidance, professional integrity and potent expertise, I am just beginning to claim physical union between my soul and the human body I have been given in this lifetime. Union of body and soul is not something to be taken for granted. It is not a privilege all of us are born into. It is the greatest privilege of all to be one of the ones who must earn it with the currency of self awareness.

I am profoundly grateful for this chance to reflect upon Ida Lovgren's brilliant contributions to my life. A positive review of any service is about a life changed for the better and I took great pleasure in articulating exactly how. Our sessions have been consistently revelatory. Ida has prompted a sense of hope and grace in me that is always with me no matter where I am or what I am doing.