Walking in Santa Barbara

I’m walking up State Street .. keeping my eyes focused on what’s ahead of me while dimly noticing what passes on the periphery. Images from the past also flash by. Mostly shops and restaurants that are no longer there. I watch them come and go. Now I’m focusing my attention on the rhythm of my gait ..now I’m focusing on where I feel tension and where I feel relaxed ..now I’m focusing on my breath ..feeling pressure build when I inhale and drop as I exhale. Now I’m noticing pressure build as others pass by. Feeling self-conscious. Funny, you’d think I’d outgrown that by now. Oh well. Now I’m remembering an article I read this morning in Luminosity ..reminding me (for the millionth time) how presence of mind is my ally against craziness of mind. I duck into the library on Anapamu and listen to a room full of children sing. Sweet. I don’t leave until they’re done.

Unlocking paralysis

Monday August 6, 2012 Rehab: One thing I saw when I first entered rehab was a video about ‘learned paralysis’. It was a lecture by VS Ramachandran that I found on the Internet [ link ]. Although my paralysis wasn’t learned in the sense he talks about ..it made me realize how much of a stroke is information-based. Transmission from the motor areas of my brain had been interrupted. Rehab was going to depend on me finding pathways around this. I needed to re-establish contact with the left side of my body. To me this meant flooding my brain with information. Tuning-in to internal (proprioceptive / kinesthetic) as well as external sources (visual / tactile). So, even though my paralysis wasn’t ‘learned’ ..I was going to have to re-learn and re-juvenate neural-pathways to unlock it. Gaining a better sense of ‘somatic awareness’ was the first step.