Tense Teeth • 02.26.09
Long before I discovered yoga I thought I had mastered tension and stress, usually with a dose of caffiene and niccotine. I’ve since found ways to combat it without resorting to poison — at least most of the time. But I still believed that I knew how to deal with stress better than most people. Sure, I had tightness, and certainly yoga helped me deal with stress EVEN BETTER then before, but I started off in pretty good condition. I got a glimmer that something was wrong with this belief about 5 years ago when my then (expensive) dentist said some kind of trauma had happened to my tooth that caused a chip. I told her that I didn’t recall a trauma. She stared at me as if I had to be joking. I wasn’t.
Then my finance started to worry about my teeth grinding at night , it was so severe he was certain there was damage. I started to worry too. When my (current) dentist confirmed that my teeth grinding had caused another chip in my molar and further wear in other molars, I got that raspy panicky feeling. I don’t even know how to grind my teeth when I’m awake, HOW could I be grinding in my sleep? And then I remembered my dreams, dreams of me actually EATING teeth, obviously it wasn’t a dream. I was chipping my own teeth in my sleep, but even that failed to wake me. Heavy sleeper.
In one of those fateful made-for-TV-moments in my next class my yoga instructor reminded us class, that people generally keep tension in their body. For women its often the hips, tightness, and clenching. I’ve witnessed several times when people discover their bodies “opening”, and burst into sudden tears, as if years of frustration was finally released. I’ve heard of similar cases in massage sessions. Toxins release, and a sense of liberation overtakes the client. I secretly envied this. Where was my tension? I thought perhaps I didn’t have any tension pent up, that I had somehow through my own brilliance managed to dispel of all the tension in my body. I was just that good.
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