In this last phase of my odyssey I was about to hit rock bottom. My main daily activity was surfing on Google, looking for support.
I registered in various forums which discussed anxiety. I spent the day typing my symptoms in the Google search box, ready to read every link. The silence in my room was broken only by the clatter of my fingers pressing the keyboard.
My mind was in a state of anguish that accompanied me the whole day. A feeling of uneasiness in my belly and in my chest told me, “Moreno, hurry up, please.”
I cross-checked keywords, I combined them, I isolated them…these outlined my complex of symptoms, but every problem was faced separately on each website, as if the human body was made up of water-tight compartments.
Words that I looked for on Google were:
- Generalized anxiety
- Panic attacks
- Insomnia
- Chronic fatigue
- Back pain and pain in the left shoulder
- Neck pain
- Recurring obsessive thoughts
- Digestive problems
- Dry mouth
- Hiatal hernia
- Ulcers
- Chronic gastritis
- Dyspepsia
- Constipation
- Reduction in vision after a meal
- Significant loss of weight
And, to finish up, one of the latest symptoms, persistent vomiting after meals.
I didn’t fear death any more, I was ready to face it. I was slowly being worn down, in a bed, and there didn’t seem to be anything more to do, since I had tried every kind of therapy. Death at that point would have been liberation from the physical body which I had loved so much and which had now become a cage of death.
Besides the unimaginable insult done by incalculable suffering and lost years, there was the injury of the fact that nobody understood what was wrong with me. My family had got to the point of being angry with me, accusing me of being masochistic and the creator of my own misery.
One day, like many others, while I was wandering through my usual search for a site that dealt with anxiety, I met a guy named Cesare, who commented one of my posts that dealt with Reichian therapy, which I was doing at the moment.
My post was a nice essay of bio-energy, and Cesare seemed to have taken in all that material very well, responding point by point.
Up to now, out of everything I had studied, that which seemed to come closest to my whole problematic was the connection between mental disturbances and posture.
Although I had become an adherent of bio-energy (even if it didn’t do much for me) I was struck by Cesare’s issues. He made me aware that the problem might be of a simple mechanical nature.
Everything clicked together in my mind when he asked me: “Moreno, what are your clavicles like, are they “V” shaped?”
In practice, he wanted to know if my clavicles were raised. It was the first time that anyone had asked me a question about my posture. None of the specialists I had consulted had cared about it. What did my posture have to do with my ailments?
I answered him promptly that my clavicles were indeed raised, and he explained to me that they were raised to keep my head from slumping forward.
With that affirmation, so simple and sensible, a chink of light opened up.
Cesare continued writing to me and told me how all the ailments I suffered from had their origin in the mouth.
He wrote that the skull doesn’t rest merely on the first cervical vertebra, as science teaches us, but has other two points of support in the front, which were the teeth: the right dental arch and the left dental arch he taught me that only a few missing millimeters of dental height in the teeth can cause the head collapse forward.
I was amazed by all this. It actually made logical sense. Finally, everything was clear to me. It was as if he had put the last piece of the puzzle in, the lynch pin. I had sensed it from the first moment, I had sensed it when my left arm hurted me, in the canoe, when I looked at myself in the mirror, when I vomited, when I had my anxiety attacks. But no one had explained it to me: these symptoms were connected to my posture.
The problems with my back, the fact that I now had muscles that were super contracted, the problem with closing my mouth, that I had had since I was a child, the allergies and the digestive problems that could have been caused by the compression of muscles, blood vessels and nerves, and the cursed left shoulder that froze so often – – now it all came back to me.
Everything made sense to me again. That was one of the most important days of my life.
Cesare was a bright guy and was very similar to me in his way of thinking. As I did Cesare undergone a series of studies looking for a remedy to his problems. Finally he tried a method which, incredible but true, brought your head back nicely again between the shoulders and released your spine, decompressing everything. Do you know what that meant to me? It was the dream of my life. It meant finally standing up straight.
The feeling of euphoria was incredible! I decided also to try this route. By now I had nothing to lose. I had hit rock bottom, and now I could finally give myself a shove to starting climbing upward again. I felt my body too small to contain so much joy.
Of course there were doubts: how on earth had such an important discovery not been made earlier? Why was I only now made aware of it? Why had no one ever told me that my problems might come from my mouth? In the end, I had visited at least thirty doctors.
There were only few people in Italy who practiced this method, in an experimental way. They were pioneers in the field of biomechanics, brave people who wanted to escape the judgement imposed by a twisted back and debilitating symptoms. I decided to start this adventure; Cesare told me how to do it, and so I left for Pisa.
