Una Burke’s designs are inspired by historic tragic events and body accessories that convey stages o a healing process. Her conceptual wearable art pieces are associated with the cause, the physical and psychological effect and the healing stages of human trauma.

Anne Becomes Ellen Gayda’s Patient

Anne here, ripe as always to share details of another life adventure — in this case, being treated by Philadelphia-based, body psychotherapist Ellen Gayda for a serious gym injury, not properly diagnosed or treated in over a year.

The physical therapy exercises that should have made my body heal were aggravating my condition further. Simply stated, I had dislocated my pubic bone, causing a host of problems on stairs and walking generally. It’s my fault for letting the problem go on so long without consulting another doctor or professional like Ellen.

It’s true that I moved from New York to Philadelphia in late 2010, leaving me without professional help in my new home city. My new apartment has a world-class gym downstairs, and I convinced myself that just getting back to regular exercise and my physical therapy would get me on track. Arriving in Philadelphia on a cane, I gave it up in early 2011. Progress at last!!

In reality, I wasn’t making progress at all — or inhabiting my body.

Muscles, nerves, my entire physical core was busy adjusting to the injury, with strained muscles remolding themselves, working to hold up my body in new ways. The fact that I couldn’t see — looking into a 7’mirror —  just how out of alignment I had become, reinforces the fact that I was not inhabiting my body at all.

This concept called body inhabitance — the focus of Ellen Gayda’s upcoming workshop on October 16, 2011 — applied to me, too. To say that I was out of touch with my body is an understatement. Having recovered in record time from hip surgery in 2006, I refused to accept this debilitating physical condition called ‘gym injury’.

Just a Little Bit of a Fraud

This writer who was busy telling readers the story of how she finally made peace with her body from 2004-2005, coming to love the woman in the mirror and working hard to remake her into babe status, which she achieved and celebrated — was gaining weight, and not a little. One can’t be in the gym every day for an hour doing intense exercise and then stop, without paying a heavy price.

I was a pretty messed up woman physically, the day I met Ellen Gayda. Eager to get on her massage table for a new opinion on my injury, Ellen said “not so fast”.

She startled me with her questions, moving from a discussion of my exact injury to personal questions that I’ve discussed with a psychologist years ago. Ellen never doubted my very real physical injury for one moment. But early on she began probing my relationship with my physicality, if my mind and body operated in harmony and if I actually inhabited my body or dragged it along with me because we are inseparable in life.

I was honest with Ellen, answering all her her questions — many of them focusing on my relationship with my body since childhood — truthfully. This is easy for me to do, not only because I’ve been analyzed and read many psychology books, but because I took a very personal journey into my body when I picked up the camera and began photographing myself about eight years ago.

This journey is the focus of my unpublished Sensual and Superyoung book — which became it’s own little disaster in 2005.

The day I looked in the mirror and admitted that I totally loathed my body about eight years ago, is the day I took responsibility for my own body inhabitance — or so I thought. Never had I worked in such concert with myself on diet, exercise, keeping a journal, and dealing with my physical self up close and personal with the camera.

Reflecting now on this self-centered Anne trip, I’m not certain that the journey to the new me was as holistic and cohesive as I believed at the time.

Philadelphia body psychotherapist Ellen Gayda of bodyword.com

Making Good Progress

A few weeks into my treatments with Ellen — which began in mid July — my progress was amazing.  Her incredibly powerful massage treatments had diagnosed my dislocated pubic bone problem immediately; she snapped it into place; and we moved to put my body back together again, as it’s supposed to be. I usually see Ellen back-to-back with my chiropracter who works in a complementary way to her and has also contributed heavily to my progress.