Aligned & Awake: The Year My Neck Stopped Hurting
What a chiropractor in Madeira, my throat chakra, and Louise Hay taught me about the body keeping score.
Aligned & Awake
My reflections on life through travel, human design, energy, astrology, and emotional clarity. Not as a guru. Just one person figuring it out in real time.
The first time it happened, I thought I’d slept funny.
I woke up one morning completely stuck. The pain that makes getting out of bed a complex engineering project. Every movement required planning. Looking left was ambitious. Looking right felt reckless. Dropping something on the floor meant accepting it now belonged there.
For years, this became part of my life.
Every three weeks I’d find myself back on a chiropractor’s table. Same reception desk, same magazines fanned out on the coffee table, same conversation.
“How’s the neck?”
“Not great, Sharon, seeing as we’re both here again.”
I’d get adjusted, feel human for a while, and carry on until my neck decided it had another dramatic episode. The explanation was always physical: wrong pillow, too long at a computer, the wrong sleeping position. I also happen to have a very long neck. People commented on it when I was younger. My mother preferred to frame it more positively.
“You’ve a swan’s neck.”
Which sounds lovely until you’re forty-five and your swan neck is seizing up every few weeks like an old photocopier.
When my marriage ended and I started travelling, one of my biggest concerns wasn’t only money or figuring out where I’d live or navigating life on my own.
It was my neck.
I was already seeing a chiropractor every three weeks. How exactly was I supposed to manage that while sleeping in hotels, co-livings, guest rooms, and whatever mattress happened to be waiting for me on the other side of the world?
Every new bed felt like a small experiment. Would I wake up refreshed? Would I wake up crooked? Would my neck once again declare bankruptcy and refuse all cooperation?
For the first few months, things were surprisingly fine. I travelled, I adjusted, I carried on.
Then I was in Madeira.
At the time, my ex and I were still communicating, if communicating is the right word. His messages always seemed to be about him, his life, his thoughts, his problems. I can’t remember him asking how I was, where I was, or whether I was safe.
One evening a message arrived that landed sideways. I read it, put my phone down, said nothing. I knew I was angry. I also knew I wasn’t ready to respond. So I went to bed.
The next morning I woke up in agony.
I couldn’t get out of bed or turn my head. I lay there staring at the ceiling of my room in Madeira, wondering how I’d managed to become temporarily immobilized on a volcanic island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
In the middle of a divorce, thousands of kilometres from home, spending my morning calling chiropractors.
“Do you have availability today?”
No. Tomorrow? No. Next week? Also no.
Grand. Excellent.
I was beginning to think my recovery plan involved lying flat on my back until further notice.
Then by some miracle I found the name of a chiropractor on the other side of the island. He also practiced Traditional Chinese Medicine. At that point I wasn’t asking many questions. Could he see me? Yes. Perfect.
Somehow I managed to get into a Bolt (the equivalent of an Uber) and spent 25 minutes crossing the island, trying not to move my head. Every bump in the road felt personal.
His clinic was in his house. He spent over an hour with me without once making me feel like the next patient was already waiting, working through my neck, my shoulders, my hips, my back, the whole architecture of a body that had been carrying a significant amount of unspoken stress for years.
I’d spent years with chiropractors who approached my neck with the confidence of a man trying to start a lawnmower.
This was different.
He started asking questions. What was I doing in Madeira? Where was I from? What was happening in my life?
Eventually I told him. The divorce, the travel, the message, the frustration, the things I hadn’t been saying.
He listened. Then he pointed at my throat.
“You’re not using your voice.”
I remember staring at him. Of all the things I’d expected to hear that day, that wasn’t on the list.
He told me the neck connects to the throat chakra, to truth, to what we say and what we don’t. He said I needed to speak. Say what I feel. Say what’s true. And most importantly, stop letting others speak for me.
I left with those words rattling around in my head alongside the first full movement my neck had made in a very long time.
Then life started presenting the opportunities.
The divorce moved forward. The house sold. Conversations happened that I would previously have avoided. For the first time in a very long time, I started saying things I would have swallowed before. I told people when they crossed a boundary. I said no without writing a dissertation to support the decision. I stopped making myself responsible for everyone else’s comfort (this is still a working progress).
And a few months after this chiropractic session, I started writing. Writing in a way that feels liberating. The truth as I experience it, including the parts that would once have stayed trapped somewhere between my chest and my throat.
My neck stopped hurting.
The episodes simply stopped arriving. I still do the exercises he taught me every morning, in London, in Toronto, in Spain, in borrowed bedrooms and temporary homes. Full movement and zero pain. It’s been over a year.
For years I believed my neck was the problem. It was trying to deliver a message. A fairly aggressive one, admittedly. My body had practically hired a marching band to get my attention.
I simply wasn’t listening.
These days I use my voice. On the page first, then in conversations, then in the boundaries I’d spent years swallowing.
My neck, thankfully, seems satisfied with the arrangement.
There’s a book called You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay that maps physical symptoms to emotional causes. Hay believed throat and neck problems are often connected to repressed emotions, to the things we swallow instead of say, the voice we mute to keep the peace, the truth we’ve been storing in the body because saying it out loud felt like too much.
I read that and thought, “Ah, so my neck wasn’t broken. It was just waiting for me to start talking.”
We are not just minds dragging bodies around. We are whole systems, and when one part goes unheard, another part starts filing complaints. Mine filed them in my cervical spine, apparently, with the persistence of someone who had left seventeen voicemails and was absolutely done being ignored.
If something in your body has been shouting at you lately, it might be worth asking what it’s trying to say.
It might not be about your pillow.
Tell me…
Has your body ever tried to tell you something you weren't ready to hear? Tell me in the comments; I'd love to know what it was trying to say.