Ep123: Severe Congenital Hip Dysplasia: Lifelong Mystery, Solved with Aimee Takaya

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What happens when a decade of deep somatic healing leads you to a diagnosis you never saw coming? 

Today’s episode is raw and vulnerable, as Aimee Takaya shares a life-changing discovery she made: she was born with severe bilateral congenital hip dysplasia. She takes us through the shock, the grief, the unexpected wisdom of her body's compensations, and more! 

This is a story about the limits of somatic work, the grace of acceptance, and the courage to finally get the structural help you've always needed.

Aimee takes us through:

• Why her severe hip dysplasia went undiagnosed for 37 years

• How the body creates protective patterns that mask underlying structural issues

• Why she chose to stop exercising entirely to protect her body

• How somatics helped her function despite bone-on-bone arthritis

• Explore the emotional journey from shame and anger to gratitude and advocacy

And so much more!

Connect with Aimee:

Instagram: @aimeetakaya 

Facebook: Aimee Takaya 

Learn more about Aimee Takaya, Hanna Somatic Education, and The Radiance Program at⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠www.freeyoursoma.com⁠⁠⁠.⁠⁠

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A: Hey there listener, welcome back to the podcast. It's me Aimee Takaya and today I'm going to be sharing with you a personal story that is currently happening real time in my life. It's the next leg of my personal somatic journey that I've been on. So this is going to be a little different than a regular interview. 

It's kind of going to be story time orienting to some of my origin as a somatic educator, in my own body, as well as basically giving you some really kind of recent information that I have been processing about my body and about the kind of challenges that I faced most of my life. So please stay tuned. It's gonna be a doozy. 

A: Every day, there is a forgetting, and every moment there is the possibility of remembering. Remembering who you truly are, awakening to your body, to the inner world, to the experience of being alive. Here is where you find the beauty, the joy, and here is where you free your Soma. I'm your host, Aimee Takaya. I'm here to help you move from pain to power, from tension to expansion, and ultimately from fear to love. 

Hi everybody, welcome back. I really haven't done a solo cast in a while. I've been meaning to, especially because my life changed on January 20th. On January 20th, I found out that I was born without proper ball-and-socket hip joints. 

I got the diagnosis of severe congenital hip dysplasia, bilateral, which means it's on both sides. So this was pretty major for me and I'm gonna go into a few things today in this podcast episode about, first of all, why it took me this long, 37 years old, about a decade of somatics under my belt, decades of teaching movement in yoga, working with some of the most high level alternative functional movement, yoga, education people, and yet this got missed.

So I'm gonna dive into that. I'm gonna dive into why I didn't seek this information out or didn't try to go a more allopathic route for my healing and why I'm doing that now, right? 

Along with just like what I'm processing about this information. So first of all, I really just need to orient new listeners. If you haven't heard my first-ever podcast episode, Releasing My Forgotten Belly, pause this, go back. It's like 40 minutes long. It's the first episode I ever recorded of this podcast. 

And it's my origin story in some ways about my somatic awakening as I was traveling through India, and I began to realize how contracted my stomach was. And I began the process of consciously learning to relax my stomach so that I could breathe better, so that I could walk better, so that a lot of function might in my body returned, right? 

So this is kind of the other end of it. This is like the next layer of my journey that I'm going to share with you because I've discovered that in having basically non-functional hip joints my entire life, some of the contractions in my body that I had thought were trauma, that I thought were shame, that I thought were injuries from my yoga practice. It's not that they weren't those things. 

They were also those things, the contractions and tension that I held. But some of it is actually the way my body organized itself to be able to get me around doing the things that I wanted to do with my body in my life, despite the fact that I don't have proper acetabular sockets in my hip. So let me just break it down, like kind of go back a little bit to what hip dysplasia is because it's one of the most commonly like misunderstood and misdiagnosed issues. 

It affects one in 1,000 and women, first-born women, are the most likely to get or have hip dysplasia. And what it is is that as the baby is developing, the woman's uterus, right? If she's never had a baby before, it's tighter the first round and so there's less space for the infant to develop in so everything gets kind of mushed together more. Also because it's a baby girl, there's not testosterone flowing through the woman's body that would be there to produce testes and little boy penis and all that. 

So testosterone makes your tissues much firmer and harder and the absence of it or less of it makes the tissues softer and more pliable. And so what we get then is the baby's all squished in one position and the femur head, the top of the leg bone, doesn't quite go all the way into the acetabular socket while the baby's developing and therefore the socket itself becomes shallow, which basically means that the kid comes out, the girl comes out with very unstable hip joints, right, that are not actually being held in place properly.

And so this causes the person's body to have a strange gait. Like when they're walking and moving, it almost looks like a little bit of a waddle. They might complain of leg pain early on. There might be a noticeable limp from side to side. A lot of it is there's wide variation in it but it's often mistaken for other things, right, and it's often missed, especially if there's other factors that are covering up the dysplasia, right, or just a lack of education about it, honestly. 

It's not something that most doctors are looking for, right, and most parents are looking for and know how to identify. So I had all these signs. It's kind of crazy, like I went in to the orthopedic doctor on January 20th. I got an x-ray and in my mind I was thinking that I'd probably been living with like a torn labrum, right, or something.

I thought that after years of, you know, all the somatic work I've done, I felt like my body had improved so much and I, you know, had more functional movement and more calm and relaxation in my body than ever before. And yet there was this ongoing like stress that I was specifically experiencing in my legs when I would exercise, when I would go on a long walk, when I would do anything weight-bearing. 

I would often have a lot of leg pain that I would then have to do a lot of somatic movements, which were pretty effective, right, but I would have to do a lot of somatic movements every day if I was pretty physically active in order to function well, in order to feel okay. And I started feeling like I needed to see what was actually going on.

So I went in there thinking, okay, they're going to tell me I have a torn labrum, maybe I'll have a little orthroscopic surgery and they'll clean that up. Instead, they take the x-ray, right, the physician's assistant comes in and she tells me that I have end stage osteoarthritis bone-on-bone in my left hip and I have an extremely shallow socket in my right hip with a tiny bit of cartilage left. 

And basically, I need two full hip replacements and that is like what needs to happen. And I mean, I didn't really know fully how to process that at the moment when she's telling me this, like I'm kind of just like looking at the x-ray and she's showing me like a normal hip socket and she's explaining all of the hip dysplasia things to me, right, which I've since then like processed more and understood more about how they measure it, how they figure out whether you need surgery or not, right. But at the time I'm just kind of like in shock, right. 

I couldn't get this woman's face out of my head for days. Part of it was that she was really baffled that I'm just like walking around like having a relatively normal life, not in excruciating pain based on the x-rays that she was looking at. She also could see by the level of kind of, you know, lack, we could say lack of cartilage, lack, complete lack of an acetabular socket on the left side that I'd been living this way for probably five to ten years that the bone had been rubbing on the bone inside my left hip for a while and her face was sort of horrified. 

And I kind of would, you know, sort of had to digest this like horrible information meaning wow, like first of all, somatics is freaking amazing. And I was like running up mountains during the pandemic, you know, because I was able to have hands-on sessions with my dad and I was practicing like 30, 40 minutes a day. I would do my somatic movements before I would go running and I'd do it right afterwards to keep myself out of pain. Little did I know I'm like banging my bones around inside my body running up these mountains like that. 

I should not have been doing that. Basically, I had to like kind of go whoa, this is crazy. I've been living on right on the edge of some kind of like really serious disaster where I'm immobilized, right? 

I've been living on the edge of this for quite some time and I didn't fully know that, right? I kind of felt it in my body, but like it's kind of hard because I was born with this level of, I guess, deformity or instability in my joints and it's been difficult to walk most of my life and somatics has dramatically improved my ability to move my body functionally. 

And so from my end, not knowing any different, you know, not knowing what it would be like to have functional hip joints, I've just seen such dramatic improvement in my pain and my well-being and my functionality that I'm sitting there learning that I have this like severe condition and she's asking me like what level of pain are you in? And I'm like well if I don't do X, Y and Z and I do my self-care things, then I don't have a lot of pain, you know? And I don't think she could fully understand how that was possible given my X-ray, but it is, you know? 

And that is really some very inspirational information. Like I could definitely feel like some pride that I felt that like wow, like I've taken really good care of myself to not have this like kind of fuck me up, right? And then on the other side of that was like kind of a bit of terror and like shock that I have actually kind of fucked myself up a lot actually that I've lived in such a way that was so demanding on my body, assuming that I had acetabular joints, assuming that I had a functional body and that my body was just deficient in some way, you know? And it really caused me to like look at my attitude towards my body classically throughout my life and also kind of attitudes that I've absorbed or taken in from other people. 

And I look at that totally differently. I was like holy crap, like I have never been able to walk functionally. It's always been hard for me to do the things that are just simple and everyday for other people because there's a literal deformity in my body that prevents functional movement from actually taking place. 

A: Did you know that your muscles are holding on to thoughts, memories, and feelings? If you have a tight neck or back, you're not just getting old. You're experiencing a buildup of tension from the life you've lived. Most people don't know this, but there is a part of your brain that can reverse and prevent chronic tension. When you relax your muscles, you not only move better and regulate your nervous system, but you also free yourself from the grip the past has over your body. So you can live with freedom, confidence, and enjoy your life now. How does that sound? Join me, Aimee Takaya, and discover what my clients are raving about at youcanfreeyorsoma.com. 

A: It was huge. I hear about it with people who find out they're autistic or something. They find out, like, oh, wow, nothing's wrong with me. There's just something wrong with me. I don't know if you've ever heard that line before, but a friend of mine, when she was diagnosed with whatever her condition, she's like, oh, wow, so there's nothing wrong with me. 

There's just something wrong with me. And that's kind of what I've been going through since January 20th. I've been in this state of total awe and gratitude and appreciation for the incredible tools that I've had. 

I've also gone through the whole gamut of emotions from anger and frustration and resentment of both of my parents for not figuring this out or for not finding out sooner. But I can't go very far down that road because to wish that this got figured out when I was a kid, because it's bad enough, the severity of my acetabular socket on the right side being as shallow as it is, right? And that's my good hip. I would have had surgery as a child if they had found this out. And I had all the signs. Like I said, I was knock, knee, I was pigeon-toed, I walked with a waddle, I couldn't run very easily, right? 

I complained of leg pain, you know? And so of course it's like, yeah, why couldn't my parents have figured this out sooner? I would have had a totally different life. But again, I can't go too far down that road because it's to wish that I'm not the person that I am right now. And I love the person that I am right now. And the person that I am right now is beloved by many clients and colleagues. And, you know, the work that I'm doing in the world is in part because of the hidden nature of this issue. 

And the fact that I worked so fucking hard to overcome these challenges that I was born with, right? I didn't know that that's what I was doing. But that's what I've been doing. I've been masking functional movement pretty much since I started yoga. I've been trying to make my body do things that my body is struggling to do because my body's super busy doing something else. My muscles in the center of my body are constantly engaged and holding my legs onto my pelvis. 

That's their full-time job, all day, every day. They're holding my legs onto my pelvis and making it so I can walk and move. It's incredible that the doctor literally said that to me because, okay, here, we'll go back to the doctor's office. I'm sitting there. I'm kind of in shock. She's sort of horrified and in shock too. I can see by the look on her face. 

And I'm just kind of trying to gauge it because, you know, again, I thought I was going to be told I had a torn labrum and I'm just like, so does that mean that both my labrums are torn? And she looks at me. She's like, oh, the labrums have been gone a long time. 

And I'm just like, whoa, okay, no labrums, no cartilage on the left side. It's really bad. And I know that it's bad because of all the things I've done with my body that have injured me. And I kept having these like crazy flashbacks of like these moments in yoga or these moments carrying my 50 pound backpack and traipsing all over the world and carrying heavy things. 

And like this kind of horrible chronic pain that was, I didn't know this at the time, me grinding away the cartilage in my left hip as my muscles struggled to hold my legs on my body. And here I am being like harsh on myself. Here I am being mean to my body. Here I am being condemning. Here I am letting people, you know, act like I'm lazy, act like I'm, you know, whatever, like, out of shape, you know, just not sporty, like all this bullshit that was said to me as a kid, because that's the kind of shit that was said to me. 

And maybe some of you can also relate out there when you know, you have a health issue as a kid growing up in like, whatever, 80s, 90s, maybe even they still do this nowadays, they just act like it's your disposition. It's like, Oh, she's just not sporty like that. You know, she's just a chubby kid. She just likes to eat. It's like, yeah, I liked to eat because I was living with pain all the time. And food is a really easy way to help yourself feel better when you don't feel good. Right. And I was in pain all the time. 

I'm starting to really understand. And especially my left leg, but really both of my legs have been in some kind of pain my whole life. Really, I don't think that I ever really knew that the sensation in my legs was pain until after doing these water therapy trainings, doing the wasu trainings last year. Wow, the water training combined with the somatic release, I've been doing my own retreats, you know, you may have seen them flow your Selma. Well, I'm getting also trained in the water therapy as a practitioner, right. And so I went to three trainings last year. 

And when I was at the trainings, I would just make it into this retreat for myself. I'm giving and receiving water therapy for five days. I'm also doing my somatics morning and night, like clockwork. And I felt such deep, deep relaxation in my body, I felt my legs and my hips and my back just surrender and let go of all of this tension. And the crazy thing is, though, is that because of this underlying issue, which at the time I didn't know about, I would feel that as my nervous system upregulated, and as I moved around, and as I, you know, started doing the functional things I was doing, the pain would come back, you know, but then I started realizing like it would never registered its pain before, it was just how my legs felt. It was just this is how my legs feel, right. 

But then releasing relaxing to that point that I could feel the pattern come back. Now I had the contrast, right. It's like if the whole page of paper is red, and you put a red mark on it, you're not going to see that red mark very clearly. 

But if you paint that whole page white, right, and then you put a red mark on it, you're going to see that red mark show up so much more because of the contrast, right. And that's what it was for me with the water therapy. It was like, I'm seeing that I carry tension and pain that I've never truly registered as tension and pain, because my legs always feel this way. And that was a huge revelation for me. It was quite disturbing. 

And it had me questioning like, what is going on, right. And maybe I should finally get an image. So let's hop into that. Let's hop into why did I not get an image of my hips? 

You know, it seems to make sense. Oh, you're having hip pain. Well, you should go get an x-ray. 

Oh, you, you injured yourself in yoga, you should go get an MRI. Like, why did that not happen? Well, when I actually started sitting with that question, right, and letting go of kind of the shame around it, I started discovering that there were many reasons why I had not done that. 

And one of the first reasons that came up was actually shame. I believed, right, I had a perception that the pain that I was in, and the issue that I had specifically in my left hip was from me injuring myself in yoga, being, you know, a hardcore yogi, being a masochist, being tough on myself, being unrelenting. And I was very, I felt a lot of shame about that because I hadn't done that consciously. I hadn't gone into my yoga, you know, just consciously planning on like beating myself up and like hurting my body. 

But I did that. And when I started to come to the, you know, realization during my somatic education program, that that is what I had been doing, I had been being violent towards my body and myself as a yoga teacher, who's trying to help other people heal. And I also kind of sat with the reality of in that kind of setting in that structure, in that perceptual reality that I was in, I also helped harm other people through the way that I was teaching and through the way that I was, you know, inviting them to practice their yoga, which was not very somatic, right? And so I had to go through a whole lot of shame that came up about that. 

And my mentor, Eleanor Chris Wilhanna, this was, you know, back in like, 2018, 2019, she was so understanding and really wonderful with me. She kept really reinforcing that this experience of shame that I was going through and this reconciliation and this reparation that I was doing somatically with my body was going to be of great value because yoga teachers, you know, as they somatically awaken may also come to these conclusions and they're going to need my understanding and my acknowledgement and my support, right, as they choose a different way of being with their body. 

So shame, right? Not wanting to see, literally not wanting to see the damage that I perceived that I did to myself. That I had this little kind of glib thing that I would say which was like, I don't want to go get an X-ray or an MRI. They're just going to tell me I need surgery and I don't want to have surgery. 

I want to heal this naturally. But underneath of that was I don't want to see what I've done to myself. Assuming once again, not knowing but assuming that it was something I did to myself, not something I was apparently born with, right? The other thing that prevented this from occurring was that I was ashamed also of poverty or of being poor or of not having enough money and not having the right job and all these kind of things, you know, all of this stuff by the way is, you know, as they say, water under the bridge or like, not something that I was doing consciously at the time, but that when I reflect on it, I can see clearly like this was a factor in why the image hadn't happened yet. You know, so every time that I had public health insurance, right, which was quite a few years of my life, I would be really ashamed of being on public health insurance. I'd like never go to the doctor, right? 

So if I didn't want to, you know, be on health insurance and felt this like weird shame about going to the doctor, being on public health insurance, it was another kind of thing that kept me from getting that image, a thing that kept me from getting treatment, right? The other thing is that I was actually getting, you know, relief and I was getting change and I was getting a lot of help with hanosomatics, you know, hanosomatics was helping with the pain a lot, right? And it was diminishing the pain a lot. And, you know, I had been through physical therapy when I was 19 for a neck injury and a car accident. And that took me over a year to come out of the pain from that. 

And hanosomatics was much, much faster. And so I wasn't seeking out other help because I felt like I was getting help, right? Beyond that, you know, the pain in my body and the pain in my pelvis was not just the hip dysplasia. Like maybe that's like the foundational piece here that was missing in my understanding. But it was also sexual trauma. 

It was shame. It was different kinds of emotions that I was holding in my pelvis. And as I started on my somatic path, I was working through and revealing and releasing and integrating those experiences. And that wildly brought down the tension and pain in my body as I calmed my nervous system and learned to let go of these things. 

And so, you know, I'd say the number one factor why I didn't seek out the allopathic help and get an image and learn about this sooner was because I did have really effective tools that were working for me, right? And then, you know, maybe this follow up question would be like, well, then why now? Why do you something about it now? If you have these great tools and you've been out of pain and you're sitting here telling us the story, not in any pain right now, then why get these hip surgeries? 

Why get the image now? Well, I'll tell you, it was the watsu trainings and finally kind of discovering that this sensation I have in my legs is probably pain and that maybe I haven't defined it that way, but that somebody else would describe this as like nerve pain or something, right? Or fatigue or exhaustion, muscle strain, right? That I'd been living with is like my normal. Well, the other piece of it is that over the last couple of years, my body's just been saying no to more and more things that it used to say yes to. 

My body started saying no to running, right? So, I switched my activity from cardiovascular, you know, and running to being at the gym and doing just the elliptical, you know, and doing weightlifting. I weight lifted for the last year and a half, but I would notice that there were certain things that I just couldn't do without creating more pain in my body that would take me a lot of energy to unwind, specifically things like squats, you know? 

So, I did lift weights, but I would not do like a full body workout, right? And my body started saying no to certain calisthenics that it used to say yes to. My body started saying no to yoga, right? And lunges in particular started feeling really uncomfortable and not like my body wanted to do them. And I think in part, this was because I was releasing through my somatic practice a lot of the muscle patterns that were part of faking it and acting like I could do something that my body was actually not functionally able to do or that my body was really functionally struggling to do because of the dysplasia. And so, as I got more and more relaxed and more and more at ease in my body, my body was like, I don't want to do this thing to like make myself do this, you know? 

Like it didn't make any sense. My body was like, no, I'm not doing that. And since I'm living in a very somatic way, I was listening to those cues. 

I was listening to the no of my body, which just meant that slowly my activities were becoming more and more limited, right? I had this project for the last three and a half years. I right around the time that I started my business and ran the first round of my radiance program, I did some jackknife setups and really, really irritated my pelvis, really irritated my back. And I started seeking out help from other hanosomatic educators to figure out what I had done and what was going on. 

My walk changed after that significantly. Now, I understand that I had obviously like really irritated some muscles in my body because jackknife setups are not something that someone with hip dysplasia should be doing. But at the time, you know, I just wanted to learn more about what was going on and what had been going on in my body. So I started working with a mentor in Portland, Lawrence Gold, and he watched me walk and he told me that my sacrum was twisted. And that made a lot of sense to me. And he said, well, the regular hanosomatic cat stretch series does not help to untwist your sacrum because it's a complex issue, right? So I purchased his program, I started practicing these very unusual advanced somatic movements to untwist my sacrum. 

And they were pretty powerful. And I saw a lot of improvement and a huge reduction in the amount of pain that I was in, and a lot more function. And frankly, working with Lawrence Gold was just life changing. I flew up to Portland twice and did hands-on sessions with him. And it dramatically changed the way that I practice. And I learned a bunch of techniques and skills from him. Specifically, I mean, one of the things that most of my clients know that I learned from him is deeper levels of facial and jaw releasing that I did not learn in my training. 

And I have since continued to innovate on those in my one on one sessions. And I'm just so grateful, right? So this is kind of showing how that, that injury and not going the allopathic route and having surgery, but instead, using it as a catalyst to dive deeper into my somatics, took me on this journey where I learned so much. And I would never go back and change that, right? 

Because it's so valuable what I learned from Lawrence Gold. At the same time, I kind of got to this point where not enough was changing. I was doing the things that, you know, his videos said to do. And yet I felt like there was something else that was missing here. And I really got this message from my body. This is last year, actually, that my next layer of healing was going to come from spending more time in my parasympathetic nervous system. And that's why I chose to go to the watsu trainings. 

I also went to a five rhythms dance retreat last year. And during the five rhythms dance retreat, you know, I was dancing, I mean, like, what, six hours, seven hours a day? It's kind of crazy, like with the hip dysplasia, I'm just like, look back on that, like how much I was gyrating and shaking and just doing these really intense, you know, movements, TRE kind of like movements. 

And I was releasing a lot, you know, I had a really specific moment there where I just released a bunch of shame about being seen, I released shame about being sexual, I released shame about being desired. It was wonderful, you know, and I had a cranial sacral session during that retreat with an amazing practitioner and he actually helped me move my sacrum back into alignment after this like long journey of trying to turn my sacrum, turning it and then having it just go right back into that pattern. 

He helped me turn my sacrum consciously. And I was able to do that after the dance retreat. Last year in June, I laid down in a hotel room, and I consciously turned my sacrum back into alignment and I did my entire somatic practice with my sacrum and alignment. And it was wonderful, I got all this like popping and like change all down the left side of my spine, you know, I felt this like incredible sense of balance that I hadn't been feeling before. And then it seemed like I was able to hold it, it seemed like it was sticking, right? And I thought, okay, I turned my sacrum, now I'm going to have this functional body. 

Now I'm going to be able to move so much better and easier than I've been moving. But I discovered that it didn't really change the feeling inside. In fact, there was this feeling inside that kind of got worse. And I didn't know what it was at the time, you know, this again was like June, July last year, that the day after I had turned my sacrum back into alignment or two days after I was just crying and crying, I went and saw another cranial sacral therapist. 

I was down in South Carolina. And she just acknowledged how much I was holding in my pelvis. And I could tell she was kind of like baffled, right? And a lot of body workers have been baffled by me because it's been dysplasia. And there's no amount of muscle releasing or emotional releasing, right? 

Or structural kind of shimmying around whatever you want to call it structural reorganization that can give me acetabular joints that I don't have, you know, and that's been the hardest thing to swallow in all of this is that, you know, everything that I've done, all the different kinds of releasing and transforming that I've done, it's not been in vain. I have become so much because of that. And yet at the same time, I have always needed surgery. 

And I've always needed this allopathic, very literal shift in my body that that is that it's this is the only way, you know, this is the only way to have a hip joint. And it's shocking to me, you know, it's still to this day to this moment, I'm kind of blown away by it. It does feel like this powerful catalyst for other kinds of stability in my life to start happening, though, you know, like my financial situation, I'm turning free or Soma into an S corp this year, I'm finally getting my shit like organized, it's going to take a minute, right, to get that all of that organized, because I've been running like, you know, everything just meshed together, which I know is not the way to do it, right? 

But I've been, I've been at it, you know, I've been creating retreats, I've been creating, you know, online programs, I've been working with a ton of one on one clients, and I've been so passionate about it. But now it's time to get the structure sound. Now it's time to actually get the foundation set up. And so that's what this year is for me. I'm going to have my first surgery on May 13. And then I'm going to have the next surgery sometime a little bit later in the year, I'm hoping to find out sooner and then later when that's going to be. 

And I'm going to finally have hip joints that are functional, right, they're going to be artificial. But they're going to be a hell of a lot more functional than anything I've ever experienced before. And so, yeah, I'm excited, I'm a little bit terrified, I've never had major surgery like this, like I've had my wisdom teeth removed, that's about it. And, and I'm going to have to take some time off. And all of that just wasn't in my plan for 2026, honestly. 

But it's the way it goes sometimes. So what does that practically look like? Like, what's kind of been my current process? Well, I've been letting myself feel a lot of different things. And by that, I mean, when I'm feeling upset, and, you know, angry, or afraid, I don't immediately try to put a spin on it so that like, everything's okay, I don't try to go, but look at how far you've come. But, buh-buh-buh-buh-buh, like, I really have learned that all of that's fine and good, and the positive spin on things will come. 

But it's actually important for me to just validate and be with the shitty feeling I'm having, and really taste it, really let myself be in it. And I won't stay in it forever. But when I let myself be in it, it doesn't have this kind of background power over me. 

It doesn't, like, stay so long when I actually give it my attention. And so what that looks like is some days like I'll just lay in bed and cry, you know, or after a long day of working with clients and my body's exhausted, my body's tired, maybe I'm not in, you know, what I would call pain, but maybe I am in what somebody else would call pain, who hasn't lived their whole life with lots of chronic pain. But I just let myself lay down, and I don't expect myself to do anything else. I let the dishes pile up that night, you know. 

I eat something really simple for dinner, and ask my husband to feed our son. And I give myself that space to just rest because I've been working my body so much my whole life. You know, the other thing that's been very confronting too is that I basically made the choice after I found out on January 20th, you know, what's actually been going on in my pelvis, I made the choice to just not exercise anymore. 

And that felt like a really bold, really scary choice, because there was a part of me that was like, Oh, we can find a way, we can find a way to exercise, because I've kind of been an exercise addict most of my life, you know, and some of that has been about like trying to prove to the world that I can, when inside there's been this feeling that I can't, and there's been this literal reality that like walking is hard for me. 

And I don't know why, right. And so I've overcompensated by being very athletic for what I have to work with. And so what that's meant is that a lot of times the pain of the hip dysplasia was covered up by pain from exercising. And I just assumed that everybody has pain in their body from exercising. 

That's just how it is. But I did sort of notice that I didn't really have that pain in my upper back and shoulders and neck from exercising, but I would almost always have pain in my hips and lower back and legs from even just going on a long walk, right. So not exercising has been very confronting. I have gained 10 pounds, right, because I'm also not starving myself, but I'm not, I'm not exercising. And so I've gained some weight. And that's just sort of a reality. It's like, can I let myself be that too? 

Can I let myself gain 10 pounds, knowing that I'm protecting my body from further injury during this time when I'm still delivering on all of the things I'm delivering on. Some days I do eight or nine hours of deep intimate hands on body work and neuromuscular facilitation for people. It's a big energy that I hold space for. I'm sometimes working with people who have, you know, really deep traumas that are coming up and I show up with my whole being and I have my hands and, you know, my body touching their body in some way. 

It's very intimate. And so I realized I just don't want to, you know, create an extra stress or harm in my body when I'm doing something so sacred and necessary for other people, you know, that service comes first in this circumstance, right, my body also comes first. And so if exercising is going to make it harder for me to deliver on this thing that I, you know, need not only economically for my financial position in the world, right, and to feed my family and pay the rent and all of that. 

But it's also something that I really have a lot of high integrity in performing well. Then I'm gonna gain that 10 pounds and exercise later when it's not so freaking hard on my body to do it. And the really crazy thing, since I have pretty much stopped exercising, I've stopped getting up and down up off the floor, I've stopped squatting, I've stopped doing all these things that I normally do every day. I have even less pain in my body than ever before. 

Like I have very, very little pain or discomfort, because now I realize that all the things, the basic things, the functional things that I was making my body do and figuring out a way to neuraly program my body to do, right, we're actually causing a lot of strain and stress in my body that I then had to do lots of somatics and lots of self care to deal with, right, to make up for. So the whole thing has been wild. 

What I will also add is that I've really, really deepened my understanding that your body, my body, they are at the end of the day always doing something to take care of us and protect us. And the things that seem dysfunctional, right, even the things that we don't like about ourselves that seem like we should just like get rid of that, or why is that happening? That's not right. 

It shouldn't be that way. If we dig deep enough, every single one of those things makes sense. It makes sense on some level. 

It's totally understandable on some level that your body's doing what it's doing. And there's sometimes incredible wisdom that can be found in this thing that we're labeling dysfunctional, right? When we dig deep enough, it's kind of like a shadow work. 

It's kind of like digging into the trigger, right, to find out what part of yourself needs more support or what part of you needs to be loved more, right? And the patterns in my body where I'm kind of limping and leaning to the right. And, you know, my sacrum is out of alignment with my sacrum up and back. 

That thing that I was trying to correct for three years, it makes sense because when I turned my sacrum back into alignment, I could feel the bone rubbing on the bone. And it's really a weird feeling that I did not like. And I was feeling it for a while before I actually knew what it was, right? 

Until January 20th. I didn't know what the sensation was, but I knew that, wow, I got my sacrum in alignment. I'm walking so much more functionally and yet with certain movements and certain ways of sitting, there's this like deep, hot, kind of hard kind of weird feeling. What is that? What muscle is that? I was trying to figure out what muscle is that? 

It's like really deep down here, like near my ischial tuberosity, like super deep though, like what is that? And then now I'm like, that's the bone rubbing against the bone. That's the end stage osteoarthritis that has this physician's assistant looking at me like I'm some kind of alien. And that's why my body's limping. That's why my body's leaning to the right because that sensation, my nervous system registers that as dangerous. My nervous system says, that's not a good idea. 

My body's super smart wisdom is having me lean away from that to protect my bones from grinding together and deteriorating further. So again, I didn't know exactly how to tell this story. I feel like I'm just kind of like, just coming out at you guys, right? Hopefully you're following. Hopefully this is all making sense. 

If you have known me and been one of my clients, I'm sure you've heard me talk about this a little bit over the last couple of months because I've been very open with people about it. But I feel like I'm becoming an advocate. I'm becoming an advocate, first of all, for hip dysplasia because it's incredibly misdiagnosed. 

It's missed entirely for people for decades. And I feel like I'm becoming such an advocate for the things that we label wrong and bad and dysfunctional about ourselves that are actually our body doing a really good job of something, protecting us usually most of the time, keeping us safe. Now we could argue that we want to grow and growth doesn't happen with total safety, right? 

But it also doesn't happen with a lack of safety. It's got to be a give and take. It's got to be a dance, right? 

Because we also can't grow if we're just always in fight or flight and we don't have safety. So it's that, that juggling act. It's that little bit of give and take, as I said. So wow, this is my story right now. I feel so blessed that I'm finding out now, even though I wish that I had found out earlier, in some ways. I'm also like, there's no better time than now. 

We just bought a house. I have a place that is like fully mined to recover in. I have sold out retreats. I have two online programs that I run. I've got wonderful regular clients and collaborators. 

And I feel very supported. So it is a good time in some ways, although it's going to take some kind of juggling of things to just really take that time off, right? But I do feel like it couldn't have happened at a better time in the sense of where I'm at psychologically and emotionally. Crazy thing is, you know, for a couple of years, I have supported people in choosing surgery, in preparing their bodies for surgery and in recovering from surgery. And, you know, I always kind of felt in the back of my mind, like, should I look into this too? 

Do I need surgery? Would it benefit me to choose this? Because I've literally been people's mirror and guides for that process. 

And so at this point, I do feel prepared for the surgery because I'm going to be able to recover so much faster, I hope, than someone who didn't have all of this knowledge and somatic release in their body. You know, that's my hope at least. So we'll see. 

I'll be updating you all with part two of this story as it unfolds. Yeah. And what a crazy thing. It's going to be a book someday. Like, there's obviously so much to this story that I didn't touch on today. 

But these are kind of the highlights. And yeah, if you are a first born female, and you have hip pain that doesn't seem to go away, and it feels like clicking or grinding or limping, you really got to make sure that you get checked on your acetabular joints to see if you have hip dysplasia, because it's not something that physical therapy or even somatic release will fully resolve because it's the shape of your joints, right? So let me know if you've got questions. Let me know what you thought of this episode. I always love to hear from my listeners. 

So please reach out on Instagram, send me an email. This is always a conversation, even though it's also a story. And I know that many of you may also be living with issues, birth trauma, physical challenges, right, that have prevented you from feeling normal. And I do feel like this is not just an issue that I'm experiencing, but that many other people are experiencing, having judgment over themselves about things that they literally really can't control, right? 

But that the world doesn't understand. So hit me up. Let me know what you thought of this podcast. And we'll talk again soon, because I like to keep you guys in the loop. I like to keep my channels open to receive thoughts, feelings, ideas, even when it comes to my own journey, even when it comes to my own experience of life. So thank you so much for listening and we'll be in touch. 

Hey there, friends. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I would love to hear your thoughts. Follow me on Instagram at AimeeTakaya and send me a DM about this episode. I'd like to thank you for being part of this somatic revolution. And if you'd like to support the podcast and help more people learn about somatics, consider leaving a review or a rating.

And finally, if you'd like to have the experience of relief in your tight hips or back and learn to understand what your body is really saying to you, visit YouCanFreeYourSoma.com. I can't wait to share with you what is truly possible. Bye for now.