Hemorrhoids Self-Care (10 min)

Hemorrhoids is a problem people don’t like to talk about. But it is very common condition. According to the U.S. National Institutes of Health, as many as 75 percent of Americans will be affected by hemorrhoids at some point in their lives.

With hemorrhoids, there is a swelling of the veins of the anus due to too much contraction in this area. This distension of the blood vessels, like varicose veins in the legs, results from excessive blood accumulation in this area. The blood that is stuck in the anus veins is blood that in the normal course of events would have returned to the heart but instead has been held onto down below.

Emotionally speaking, hemorrhoids suggests that you have difficulty in letting go and this difficulty is manifesting at the key point where your body let’s go naturally every day. Hemorrhoids suggest fear of the future, low self-esteem and a lack of happiness. You are so afraid of what might happen that you can only let go with pain, even shedding blood in the process. Pain in the anus can also indicate guilt or even an unconscious desire to be punished. “I deserve this, I was not good enough.” Or it could mean you are in a situation where you are getting royally screwed and your body is manifesting the pain of that experience. They may also be brought on because you are stressed about deadlines or you are dwelling on the consequences of something you said or did or anticipating something bad happening in the future. You are expressing this insecurity through a continuous and unconscious holding or tightness in your anus which, in turn, shows up as hemorrhoids. The simple idea your body is expressing here is that by holding down there you are hopefully preventing the bad thing from happening. It doesn’t make sense to our logical brains but that doesn’t mean it isn't true. A dog that doesn’t want a bath is going to resist and hold back like crazy even though the bath is inevitable. The level of the intelligence of our emotional self (which is what controls our muscles) is like that of a dog. So, like the dog holding back from a bath, you hold your anus tight as a technique, however silly it may seem, to avoid something bad happening.

The tension associated with the holding in the anus could be very specific. For example, it may be related to your relationship with a work colleague, a friend, a spouse or a significant other. Or it could have to do with the death or potential death of someone important in your life. Or it might be driven by simple physical imbalances: for example, it could be from too much sitting or lack of fiber or straining too hard from constipation. Whatever the cause, or combination of causes, the muscles in your rear sphincter have forgotten how to relax and are carrying a continuous tightness or holding. This, in turn, makes it harder for the blood to do its thing and return back up to the heart, leading to the painful bulges in the anus called hemorrhoids. And when the hemorrhoids arise, it is at a point where you can’t use your intellect to reduce the pain or make them go away. You have to speak the language of your body which is loving kindness and movement.   So, how do you speak this language in the case of hemorrhoids? Chances are that if you have hemorrhoids, you have a higher than normal resting muscle tone in your anal canal. This is another way of saying that the smooth muscles of your anus are tighter than average, even when you're not straining to go to the bathroom. Making things even worse, the connective tissues that support and hold these muscles in place become weaker with age, meaning that the hemorrhoids may bulge. Bulging hemorrhoids irritate and erode the overlying skin and the pain or itching can come on suddenly and very strongly. These bulging protrusions can also cause also sorts of problems, from bleeding to itching to blood clots.

So you are going to have to retrain the muscles in this part of your body. And that means you have to give yourself a number of days or even weeks before you’ll see a change. Doing these exercises once or twice a day will quickly remind your anus muscles how to relax and restore the healthy range of muscle tone to this sensitive area of your body.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.