I haven't woken up feeling good in over 6 years.*
How did I get this way? Mostly bad posture (including sitting, sleeping and standing), weak core muscles, and not paying attention to things like stiff necks or tightness in the lower back for too many years...
I disappear for days at a time when I get busy or when this all flails up and gets especially uncomfortable. It's not pain, it's more like physical anxiety (from pressure on the nerves), sleep apnea, and tightness that makes movement feel unnatural, as well as uncomfortable breathing and almost everything seeming to make the problems worse at times.
I feel worlds better today than I did for the the past three days, but still have a ways to go. Health is everything, without it, you become a hollow shell. Remember that next time you talk to someone with health problems. They are working 5-10x harder to laugh and smile and to wake up in the morning. They don't need pity but they do need support sometimes, especially patience and someone who tries to make them smile.
If I actually manage to fix these issues, I guess I can consider myself lucky, having experienced old age earlier than others and then able to go back to a healthy middle age. I have learned many of the lessons that old age teaches through my own health issues. If I don't recover...well that will suck, but I'm doing everything I can and I have to believe there is a purpose for it. I have gained so much from these experiences that I can share, and I believe that life has a way of getting our message or voice out if it's something that people are ready for.
I realized that stretching my neck to the left and right and then doing stretching out my shoulder blade every morning works wonders, but only if I do it right after waking up. If I wait ten minutes, the effects are much less noticeable. When I do this every day, I wake up feeling better and better each day, until one day I feel a pinch in my neck. That is caused by too much pressure in a vertebrae in my mid-back which is causing a contradiction between my neck and my mid back.
After all that is fixed, the hip problems start to rear their ugly head, but that's when focusing on stretching and massaging the QL muscle is most important. All the while, I'm using TCM massage and Wuxing theory to keep the body as flexible and comfortable as possible, though it's almost totally useless when the neck isn't straight and pressure around the neck nerve starts to intensify, which is why those morning stretches are so important.
From now *I'll also be doing some posture exercises that I've designed myself. I have tried many recommended to me and none of them work very well, but listening to my body I realize that a lot of these problems came from weak lower back muscles and incredibly tight hamstrings. Now my body cannot even stretch effectively cause the muscles have overcompensated in all kinds of ways to keep me upright. So I am essentially untangling like a knot....and as I mentioned, the neck is the first knot to unravel always.
Don't ask me if I have seen a doctor....seen many...chiropractors, everything else. Nothing wrong shows up on X-rays, good massage therapists can find the problem but it doesn't mean they can fix it quickly, and good ones are hard to find. Physical therapists haven't helped much either. In the end listening to my body, taking things that *I learned from different kinds of professionals, studying by myself and learning to understand my bodily sensations myself has been 100x more effective and less damaging. The fact is, the body is so complex that it takes a whole lot of sensitivity and collaboration to fix some problems
It is taking a lot of work, and there is so much to balance that I forget certain steps or techniques or run into new problems sometimes...but I am making progress.
Just in case you were wondering what is wrong with me.