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| April 2006 We've been blessed with rains almost everyday this past month. The ground in my little meadow is so over saturated that water stands in little pools in all the low spots. Since I don't sleep out in my tent during the rain-the dampness feels quite unpleasant-I've been getting used to sleeping indoors in a real bed these days. Through the French doors and windows, as I do morning Reiki or my yoga and free weight exercises, I watch the leafing out of the layers of deciduous trees and bushes between my house and the greening mountains. My miniature garden gives forth small portions of daffodil, yellow Dutch iris, purple bearded iris, bright red rununculus, fat rose buds and the first roses of the season. Tiny yellow multiflora roses bloom on the climbing bush just outside my desk window. The apple trees are filling with pink blossoms. In the mountains, apricot colored carpets of monkey flower add their sweet faces to the spring landscape. The trails are slushy marshes with new rivulets every which where. The seasonal streams are boisterously flinging themselves over rocks, boulders and downed wild shrubbery. Finding solid footing is a challenge in many places but always worth the effort. The carpets and draperies of endless shadings of green are luminous and breathtaking on the few days that the rain is either absent or light enough for trail wandering. New birds grace my feeders, the seed strewn ground beneath them and the berries on the tree sized privet hedge just outside my door. A flock of exotically beautiful cedar waxwings-the first I've ever seen-repeatedly swoop onto the berries, feast and chatter for a bit, then swoop off to other nearby trees. A flock of hooded grosbeaks (looking like orioles with rust colored rather than yellow bodies) have joined the regulars at the feeders. The meadow vibrates with mating, nesting, joyous bird activity. In the midst of this exuberant awakening, I'm at last beginning to emerge from my doldrums. At the far end of five months of struggling physically and emotionally with the intermittent pinching pain in my lower mid back, the hovering dark cloud and the heaviness in my heart have both lightened. After so many different treatments and so much emotional releasing work endlessly focused on trying to unravel the pinching, I finally gave up trying to fix the “problem.” It became startlingly clear that my endless efforting (without any appreciable effect) to change it, to resolve it, to make it go away was what had generated the despair in which I'd been mired for months. The pinching itself, neither constant nor intolerable, was something I realized that I could-if I had to-easily live with for the rest of my life. The pinch-pain wasn't the problem. It was my way of relating to the pinch pain that was the problem. I stopped everything but my regular every-other-week massages. And, I continued not taking the weekly doses of Fosamax that I'd come to believe were the likely cause of the pinch-pain. I made peace with my body as it was being. I gave up trying to make it be any different from how it was at the moment. The miasma in which I'd been living began to lift. I stopped feeling helpless, hopeless or despondent. I came back to my ordinary peaceful, unstressed, and usually quite pleased with life self. A self that now included a sometimes-pinching pain in her mid-back. It felt miraculous, a powerful metaphor and parable for dealing with all of living: give up struggling, surrender into living with whatever is so in the moment and life gentles. Six and a half weeks sans the Fosamax (that I'd been taking for six months) and three weeks after giving up the struggles to make it go away, the pinch-pain is all but gone! I'm now absolutely convinced that it was a side effect of the drug. When the pain started five months ago, I'd immediately remembered the “possibility of skeletal-muscular pain” listed in the small print of the drug insert as a potentially serious (“notify your doctor”) side effect. My gut sense then was that my pain was connected with taking the drug. Yet, I chose to read my gut reaction as a lingering resistance to taking this drug that I'd had to work so hard to see as a source of healing energy. And, I chose to continue taking the drug, to act in opposition to that resistance. For years I've been committed to honoring and taking my gut reactions seriously. I've been committed to acting on these messages of inner knowing even when my mind (or anyone else's) might see them as coming from my woundedness, my resistance, my fear or my confusion rather than from my elemental wisdom. This commitment grew out of understanding that one can only ever start from what one's reality is in a given moment, regardless of whether that reality is born of one's wholeness or one's woundedness. As I reflect on the whole experience, I'm curious about what led me to choose to go against my gut knowing all those months ago. How was I able so blithely to violate my own commitment? I'd been profoundly affected by the news both of my seriously worsening (despite two years of an alternative regimen) bone density numbers and by the incidental diagnosis of an existing vertebral compression fracture in my thoracic spine. Fear-inducing (though ultimately distorting) statistics indicated that these factors predicted a high probability of hip fracture with quite terrifying attendant risks to health and mobility. All of this left me feeling the urgent need to do something radically different from what I'd been doing. I was swept away into seeing Western medicine as the only safe way to stem my physical downward spiraling. I was in a terrible place, too filled with fears of the imminent possibly of becoming incapacitated to be able to heed my own inner knowing. I remember feeling that I had to take this-before then unacceptable-road in order to buy time to safely consider designing a new set of alternative strategies. The urgency and the fear stirred by the diagnostic-prognostic information from Western medicine led me to choose against my own inner knowing. Heeding my fear trumped heeding my resistance. It's been a tough road these past months. Yet, even as I've struggled and suffered with the consequences of that choice made in fear, I see that I've done important work and growing. On the practical side, I did use the space I bought to gradually develop and keep to a solid regimen of weight-bearing, bone-stressing exercise and yoga to help stimulate my body to build new bone in a natural way. I began learning and practicing Tai Chi both to build bone and to enhance my balance. I read extensively and changed my supplements and herbal supports to a more effective bone building combination. I now include a lot more vitamin D, some vitamin K, some strontium and an herbal brew of nettle leaf, red clover, horsetail and orange peel. On a deeper emotional level, the current more loving, compassionately self-mothering me has been able to hold me gently and keep me safe as I've spiraled into the old pit of despond. As I've been revisiting that old and (in the past) recycling place of hopeless despair that marked so many of my earlier years, I was never moved to beat up on myself for being pulled once again into the dark places. I didn't fight against them or challenge them. I went for the whole dark ride knowing and trusting that there was more of me than the part visiting in the pit. This time there was no doubting that I could and would return to that more of me whenever I had completed this orbit. And, as I've written here before, I trust that this visit to the pit has been an important (if as yet not quite decipherable) part of the passage into taking my work and my stories further out into the world. All this knowing notwithstanding, I'm so grateful to be emerging into the light again. And, I'm so grateful to be making health-building choices that are no longer based in fear. To visit the Bulletin Board Archive Table of Contents Site Directory (for non-frames viewing)
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