New Beginnings

Every spiritual tradition that I have studied has in its creation stories a piece that goes something like this:

Before the beginning

There was timeless space

Infinite unity

Of All That Would Be.  

Out of the singularity

That was Eternal Becoming

Came a Word.

With the Word

Light separated from Darkness

And Time began.

The Word became incarnate

Dividing consciousness

Into material and immaterial.

At the beginning of time

The Word was one with All That Would Be.

The Word was All That Would Be.

Out of the Word was everything created.

All that was created

Came from the Word.

The Word is eternal and infinite

Always becoming

Always creating.

Echoes of the eternal Word

Rise up from the very ground of your being

Fall from your lips with every breath.

In communion with

What Is Always Becoming

Let us chant. 

Aum. 

A Parable of Forgiveness

Once there was a very old man who lived next door to me.  He'd lived there forever; I'd grown up with his children, and his wife was my confidant.  Long after I grew up,  I moved back into the old house to raise my own children.  He was still next door.

After living some years as friendly neighbors, sharing rakes and shovels and plates of Christmas cookies, I discovered that he had taken something from my garage.  Something that had been there from my own childhood, just some old junk of my grandma's, probably only worth ten bucks at a garage sale. It's value to me was mostly that it had belonged to my family for three generation. But still, he'd just come over and taken it.

I confronted the old man.  He sorrowfully professed his apologies but said the item had since broken and he'd thrown it out; there was no returning it.  I was vastly annoyed and wanted little to do with him after that, though still being close with his wife, I had to swallow my irritation and make nice.

Another while passed and my children began watching one of those antiques shows on television where people sell their attic-finds for pennies or fortunes.  They discovered that the item the old man had stolen was not worth the mere ten dollars I'd imagined but was being bought by collectors for a thousand dollars.  I began to doubt that grandma's junk had so conveniently broken as the old man had claimed.

My anger and resentment of the old man grew.  Bitterness galled in my belly when I saw him in his yard.  My relationship with his wife withered.  I realized that I had to forgive him for my own sake, if not for his.  I told myself that I hadn't lost anymore than when I was unaware of the actual monetary value of grandma's piece.  It was simply a bit of family history and I still had my memories of grandma, after all.  It took a long time of inhaling So and exhaling Hum, of praying for peace and seeking to see the divine in the old man.  But finally, I could smile at him and actually mean it.

Eventually, the old man's wife became ill and died.  My family and I went over to help him sort out his belongings and close up his house before he moved in with his daughter.  I found a note addressed to me in his wife's handwriting, wavering and spotty, clearly written just before her death.

The note revealed that in her last days, the old man had confessed to her.  For decades he had been breaking into my house and systematically stealing my grandmother's treasures.  After emptying the storage boxes in the garage, he decimated the long neglected attic.  He'd even brought in knock-offs to replace the valuable antiques he stole from the main house.  My beloved family heirlooms, the tangible bits of long ago memories, the irreplaceable things I'd so adored because I thought they held the imprint of my grandma's touch were all cheap fakes.  The dead woman guessed that the old man had sold my belongings for hundreds of thousands of dollars, at least a half a million, probably more.  She'd thought he'd been fortunate at his online trading, when in fact, his trades had been disastrous and it was the sale of my own goods that had kept the two of them out of financial disaster many times.

I was shocked into immobility while my mind raced.  What good had been all the work I'd put into forgiving him for the one theft I'd known about?  Had his apology that I'd struggled so to accept had any value at all? Could he possibly have had any repentance for the one when he still continued with the other?  Was my hard-won forgiveness worth anything at all in the face of this deeper and infinitely more personal violation?

Worse than the loss of the material goods he'd stolen was the sense that his theft had been from my soul.  He'd stolen forgiveness from me with his fraudulent apology, capitalizing on my own inner belief in turning the other cheek.  I wished I'd never wasted any effort at all on the struggle to forgive him for his now-petty crime.  I wished I'd built up the wall between our houses, cut off relations with his wife, guarded myself from his thievery.  He'd manipulated my goodness and his wife's to serve his own greed.  He'd exploited my trust to cover his poor judgement in stocks.  His rape of my innocence tainted even the memories his false heirlooms once inspired. I couldn't even think of my grandma without being ripped off by him all over again.

I doubted that all the novenas, all the so hums, all the praying in the world could ever give me the grace to forgive the old man again.

Day of the Dead

Partied down with the ER docs last night. I went as a middle-aged woman with dysfunctional bleeding. It was a heart-pounding, dizzying experience. My costume rocked! Risque cutaways at the bust and booty, super realistic-looking blood on everything. I got some drugs and spent a lot of time on my back with my feet in the air while men toyed with my ladyparts. I even got to bring home pictures. Best Halloween party I ever went to but this morning after kinda sucks!

Ha!  The backstory is that I’ve been spotting or bleeding for nearly six weeks.  While each burst of actual bleeding was accompanied by extreme anxiety, I knew that I wasn’t bleeding anything like a hemorrhage so I tried to breathe deeply. Compounding the panic was the memory of my mom’s odyssey with cancer that started with exactly the same symptoms at exactly my age.  She was dead two years later.

I tried some of my own healing arts but found that I couldn’t concentrate through the anxiety.  Not surprisingly, my efforts were ineffective.  Last week I started a round of visits to conventional medical professionals—I posted some of that story on my Facebook Page.  None of the medicos wanted responsibility for my long term care: the GP sent me to a gynecologist, after ordering a raft of blood tests and radiology; the gynecologist insisted that I needed to follow up with the GP, after ordering more tests, because they “only do vaginas and babies here” and clearly I had bigger issues going on. 

The ob-gyn did prescribe some Provera (synthetic progesterone, the hormone that down-regulates menstrual bleeding among other things) to shut of the faucet, as it were.  Being the crunchy granola, nuts and berries kinda gal I am, I asked for natural progesterone but she never studied the natural stuff and didn’t know what it would do.  I agreed to take the Provera after a two-day trial of over-the-counter progesterone, though I would rather have taken a prescription compound that was regulated for potency, if the progesterone didn’t do the trick.

It did seem to work fairly well—if I didn’t eat or ingest anything that inflamed the ongoing allergic cough I’ve had for weeks, or do too much (since hubby was out of town, as usual, it was hard not to overdo)—until Saturday, when it didn’t.  So I trotted off to the pharmacy only to discover that the script never arrived!  Argh!  I called the doc yesterday morning to have it called in again but couldn’t pick it up until evening.  I planned to start it this morning after the hormone cream I’d been using all day had worn off. 

Just before five in the afternoon, I heard from the GP’s office that my bloodwork, ultrasound, and x-ray had all come back normal; everything seemed fine (!?!) But about nine o’clock last night, the bleeding switch turned on overdrive and I started to bleed quite heavily.  By ten-thirty, I was checking into the Emergency Hospital.  They were so quick and efficient, I didn’t even have time to make the necessary Mom arrangements.  I ended up phoning and texting my daughter at her party, my husband in Indiana, and other moms to pick up my slack, all while lying on the gurney with my feet in stirrups or being briskly wheeled around the halls (wow, talk about dizzying!)

Of course, the ER ran their own blood workup and ultrasound but their results agreed with the GP.  Nothing obvious to be causing the bleed—which, while heavy, was becoming clear was not nearly the dangerous state I feared.  So they watched me take the Provera that the ob-gyn had prescribed and sent me home.  Within a couple hours, the drug did its thing and dried everything pretty much right up.

Now that major polyps, tumors, giant fibroids, etc, have all been ruled out, I have a couple more tests scheduled: still to come, endometrial biopsy for cancer and something long and painful for fibroids not otherwise visible on ultrasound. But it is looking like a hormonal disruption consistent with incipient menopause—also consistent with the autonomic nervous system dysfunction that I can’t get anyone to notice. 

Meanwhile, on this the Day of the Dead, I feel hung-over, exhausted, and used up.  I feel beat up on the inside, weak and helpless on the outside.  Getting out of bed to use the toilet seemed more effort than it was worth.  In the last couple hours, though, I have been able to scramble some eggs, shower off my Halloween party residue, and crash back into bed.  Had enough energy to write this post but I feel a nap coming on now!

Cast All Your Votes for Dancing

I know the voice of depression

Still calls to you.

I know those habits that can ruin your life

Still send their invitations.

But you are with the Friend now

And look so much stronger.

You can stay that way

And even bloom!

Keep squeezing drops of the Sun

From your prayers and work and music

And from your companions’ beautiful laughter.

Keep squeezing drops of the Sun

From the sacred hands and glance of your Beloved

And, my dear,

From the most insignificant movements

Of your own holy body.

Learn to recognize the counterfeit coins

That may buy you just a moment of pleasure,

But then drag you for days

Like a broken man

Behind a farting camel.

You are with the Friend now.

Learn what actions of yours delight Him.

What actions of your bring freedom

And Love.

Whenever you say God’s name, dear pilgrim,

My ears wish my head was missing

So they could finally kiss each other

And applaud all your nourishing wisdom!

O keep squeezing drops of the Sun

From your prayers and work and music

And from your companions’ beautiful laughter

And from the most insignificant movements

Of your own holy body.

Now, sweet one,

Be wise.

Cast all your votes for Dancing!

--Hafiz

Reluctant Mystic

(driving to yet another lesson, practice, class, one of my children’s activities, someone made a comment about my hysterical illness, to which I made the following reply.  While I sat waiting for said kids to be done with their activities, I continued my rant to myself.)

I don't think you have any idea how much energy it takes to live in my body.

I drive around town with the AC on max. My right side is so cold that the bones in my shoulder and behind my ear ache but my left side is still red, rashy, and burnt from what sun and heat come through my tinted windows. The stark summer glare through my windshield gives me a migraine in about fifteen minutes. If I make more than three in-and-outs of my car (into a store, a meeting, an errand, the house) even using my special SPF clothing and a sun-umbrella, I will be queasy and I can't bear to be touched. Tomorrow my muscles will ache as if I'd worked out too hard. The hotter the weather, the quicker I reach my limit. Today was 115F/46C.

My good days feel like I had the flu last week; most days feel like I had the flu yesterday; bad days feel like I have the flu now.  Everyday I over-react to minor variations in heat and cold, drafts like the air conditioner exacerbate the over-reaction but being too hot makes me claustrophobic in my own body.

My ankles swell and feel like overstuffed sausages. The joints in my toes ache. My elbows feel like live electrical wires run through them. My knees crack and pop and feel like dull pins are stabbing from the inside out. Water burns my stomach but I am so thirsty. My face itches from the inside. My eyeballs feel like they are filled with heavy, too-dense jelly.

When I try to do just a little more, maybe pick up some dinner between picking up kids, I exhaust my body and my mind begins to suffer. I inadvertently cut people off in traffic. I miss my freeway exit or drive past my turn. I constantly have to check my calendar because I can't remember what the next stop in my day is—even though I've looked a dozen times already. I can't remember what is planned for tomorrow or if what we did was last week or the week before or last month. I forget between the car and the grocery store what it was I came to get, even if it was only one item.

When I'm tired, which is everyday from the moment I arise to the moment I pass out, I cry too easily. A commercial for allergy medicine chokes me up. A casual criticism from a self-absorbed teen or distracted husband can make me cry so hard I ought to pull out of traffic.

I read a book, listen to a lecture, watch a documentary and often can't put more than the main theme into words. I have a thought, draw some correlation between the new subject and something I've known but before I can pull up my phone or a notepad or my laptop, the connection fades leaving a weird twilight in my mind, a sense of brilliance remembered, the comfort of darkness unreached.

I have moments of clarity after I've crashed on my bed with my feet up and my head supported. I litter my friend's Facebook threads with wit and thought that I can't sustain in a blog post or even an email. I owe so many people responses but can't wrap my brain around what I wanted to tell them.

And then I feel guilty. Because I haven't cooked a meal in so long I don't know when it was. Because my house is overrun by small animals that spring to life from the accumulated dog hair, cat hair, and dust. Because I flinch when someone wants to hug me. Because I can be cogent occasionally for other people but pick fights and speak rudely to my family.

And I am angry that this is as good as I get. That it costs me hundreds of dollars a month in pills and drops and remedies to maintain more-or-less this state of unwellness but medical professionals look at my blood-work and say nothing is wrong, maybe a shrink? That people who agree that I'm unwell tell me it is my fault:

“Just suck it up, get on with things”

“Mind over matter”

“Have more willpower, just do it”

“Exercise more”

“Eat less”

“Follow this diet”

“Read less on the Internet”

“Take this curative I'm pushing”

“Quit thinking so hard, just let it go”

“If there weren't some payoff for you, you'd be well”

“Pray more, confess sin, give it to Jesus”

Okay. the last one hasn't been said to me personally but it has been the fix suggested in get-well articles I've read online.

I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired. Yet, we are not entitled to exuberance and vigor. Bigger, faster, louder, brighter is not our birthright. Sometimes abundant life is deep and still and quiet and slow. And often it hurts.  A lot. In our New-York-minute, fax-it-yesterday, multi-tasking, texting-while-driving culture, maybe this condition is my divine gift to remember the timeless, the wordless, the boundless. The weaker my body, the more incoherent my nervous system, the more surely I meet God.  My visions come easier. My healings are stronger. My assurance of divine reality is more certain.

So then, why do I continue to fight against this thorn in my flesh? God wrote this destiny into my Being. Why can't I embrace the gift without counting the cost?  Why do I listen to the chatter and static instead of God's holy descant in my soul?  I long to be one with the Presence yet I fight it with everything I have. Was there ever a more reluctant mystic than I?

Sent from my iPhone

It's All in the (Renounced) Name... Or Not

[comment]  I don't know that you'll find as much relief in abandoning the label as you might think. ...[T]here is more than a rejection of a label involved, including yet another schism between you and the community of faith that, imperfect though it may be, has guided seekers for centuries. I just don't like accepting the hegemony of their "Believe this or you're out." I want to respond to them, "No, I'm not out, and you're not out, either. You reject me all you want: I'll not reject you."

Anyway, I'll say to you, "No, you're not out. Call yourself whatever, but you're not out, and Christ isn't done with you yet." :-)

No, I'm not Out but I want to be In in a whole different way.  You are a new reader so you probably haven't read enough of my story to know that I've already deconverted entirely about twenty years ago and only this last year and half come back to the Christian name.  So I know pretty much exactly what I can expect to find without using the label. 

It's not like I've been involved in a local church and been part of a physical faith community that I am now going to abandon.  This blog is my faith community and I'm not going to walk away from it.  Nothing external is going to change at all, nor is most of the internal stuff—I'm not leaving any of my barely-even-within-yelling-distance-from-the-box views on spiritual matters. 

The only thing that changes is the expectation I have perceived (most likely only from myself) that I conform to or rebel against conventional, stereotypical American Evangelicalism. Usually I like to live in that sort of tension—or, if like isn't quite the word, keep finding myself in that tension—but after all the work I've done this last year making peace with my demons, well, that sort of tension is just not something I am capable of thriving with for a while.

I certainly have HUGE issues left with Evangelical Christianity that will need to be addressed if I am to continue growing and not continue dying.  I am committed to working through them, eventually.  I want to exorcise enough of those old demons that I don't feel like I got kicked in the gut every time I hear my friend say, "Praise Jesus" when anyone else would say, "Oh, that's so great".

Should I have had any illusion about the existence of unexorcised demons, yesterday enlightened me!  My daughter's theater company rehearses at a local church campus.  We moms hang out in the church coffee shop.  A church member came in to solicit our attendance at a yoga class she is starting up during the rehearsal time.  I have been missing my yoga classes so I got excited—until she listed as her credential that she was Holy Yoga certified and explained how regular yoga is bad but Holy Yoga is good because there's all in English and with Christian music and prayers.  I heard her every word like a fist to the chest.  Yeah, I still got issues.

The whole point of the work of my last two years has been to tame the demons enough so that I can heal the schism between me and the two-thousand-year tradition of faith.  I have done loads of work finding out just what that ancient tradition is—since it is definitely not merely today’s conventional American Evangelicalism projected backwards in time, as I had been taught—I have spent thousands of hours reading hundreds of thousands of pages about the history of Christianity, theological history and debate, and the development of various streams of Christianity.  I probably have a graduate degree worth of education, if only I’d got academic credit!  

It is time for a “summer break” to rest and recoup from the work.  And as long as I continue to call myself Christian, I can't let go of the immediacy of the struggle.  After the hell of my last several years, learning to accommodate my hysterical illness, a need to rest is something I take very seriously.

This rest, different from previous times in my life, is one I can now take knowing that I have found a peace with Jesus and the Christian God that I never had before—as a Christian or as a heathen.  This is definitely giving myself a chance to "rest in the Lord" rather than a "shaking the dust off my feet" as it was when I ran howling into heathendom twenty years ago.

[comment] …as I read my comment again I'm afraid it looks like I'm dismissing the urge to step back and give oneself some breathing room, to distance oneself from harmful associations. I understand all that. 
But as you said, a lot of our healing can best be done in community, and I do believe that God has people within fallible Christian communities who can support and with whom seekers like ourselves can engage in the Christian mission of helping the hurting, etc. Here's the danger I alluded to: you might well be able to accept them if they're still calling themselves Christians, but ceasing to call yourself one might well sever some relationships or close some opportunities.

Ah, good, I was hoping you weren’t trying to tell me to “stay the course, fight the fight” without recognition of the natural rhythms necessary to success.  Because that would have inspired a whole ‘nother kind of sermon right back at ya.  Now I can address your larger point:  the mutuality of working, living, growing, and healing in community. 

I so deeply agree with you that I see your point as one of the rock bottom foundations of my continuing journey with Christianity—with or without taking on the name.  I have been deeply scarred, irretrievably bent/shaped/changed by Christianity. Learning to live with those scars, healing the remaining wounds, thriving in my own now-quirky way, is only possible by being in community.  In so many ways, deepest healing can only come at the hands of those that hurt—maybe not the exact people but those who represent them for me.  I cannot consider myself truly healthy until I can participate with my whole self in that community that taught me to be only part of myself. 

Finding myself, stopping the worst of the continuing damage, could only happen by stepping out of the Christian community and embracing heathendom in all its secular, passionate glory.  But having found that God is also a heathen, I needed to find that God could also be Christian.  That has been the great success of my last two years.  I found myself at a heathen as well, and will eventually need to find that I can be a Christian.  But that work is for the future.

For today, I have found it ironic—inspiring many a chuckle at myself—that, while I am demanding so insistently that I am relinquishing the name of Christian, I have subscribed to a half dozen new blogs (all overtly and directly Christian), started a new Pandora station on my iPhone (Mahalia Jackson), and also just bought myself a new Bible (that I’m actually reading without undue PTSD).  I may not claim the name anymore but I sure haven’t run very far away!

I’m Not a Christian Anymore

At least, not in any recognizable or meaningful way.  According to most people who care about such things, I haven’t been a Christian for a long time anyway and my insistence this last year in using the name Christian has been an offence—even with the Heretic disclaimer prominently attached.  I am not changing my doctrinal positions (I had none anyway) or a faith in God (I tried atheism before and that just didn’t work well for a mystic). Nothing about me has changed at all, just the name.  I’m still debating whether to rename the blog or not.

I cast myself as a Christian Heretic a little over a year ago as I was working through the process of integrating my religious past with my spiritual present.  In that time, I’ve made peace with the Christian God, found a sense of Jesus that suits me, and stared down the darkest and meanest of my inner demons. It’s been a hell of a year.  Embracing the Christian name was a big part of my journey.  It gave me the ability to work from within my heritage instead of fighting myself as an outsider.  I did so much work that I just need to rest.  My soul is battered and bruised and needs to spend some significant time in Gilead

There is a balm in Gilead

To make the wounded whole; 

There is a balm in Gilead

To heal the sin-sick soul.

And I don’t think I can do that while keeping the name Christian.  Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of my Christian community is online and remarkably supportive of my heresies, I have nonetheless felt a constant pressure to conform, perform, reform.  Simply to stand my ground feels as though it requires a continuous effort to hold against the current of conventional thought.  This is not an indictment of any of my readers.  You have all been uniformly fabulous, gracious, kind, and loving.  More so that I ever expected when I began blogging.  In fact, this pressure is probably all in my own head, the result of yet-unresolved issues.  But I need to quit holding an identity whose very name triggers these internal pressures. 

I need to rest, regroup, recoup, not to continue breaking down old strongholds.  That will come someday but, for now, I need a long sleep.  So I am stepping outside the Christian identity, back to the place where I meet Grace without any baggage. I long for a time when I can be comfortable being a Christian solely on my own terms, without needing to challenge the paradigm, but that day is not now.  Now, I can’t seem to be a Christian without feeling the desire to get all up in the face of conventional institutional religion. 

My insistence on using the word Christian to describe my spirituality has become a boxing-in of myself rather than the freeing, whole-self inclusive soul-expansion that it has been.  The word itself feels like a weight pulling down from the backside of my chest. It is time to let it go.

In My Very Marrow

In my very marrow, I hear a sound

A sound so still and soft, it is often mistaken for silence

A struck bell’s ringing echo

The pause between the lightning and the thunder

A breath of sound on a still wind

The hum of every idea ever thought

In my very marrow, I hear a sound

The shaking, shuddering, hideous sigh continuously birthing the universe

A star blinks out

Two elements combine

The heaving surf

A mountain grows

In my very marrow, I hear a sound

The aching tear in a broken heart

The baby’s first cry

Death’s last sigh

The pregnant impulse to begin

The whisper when worlds collide, the scream when atoms divide

In my very marrow, I hear a sound

Between the beats of my heart

In the glance of a chance-met eye

A groan remembered

A thought forgot

Rising in the chatter of a thousand children laughing

The smile of the old men


In my very marrow, I hear a sound

(© 2011)

Mourning the Loss of a Dream

Grief tightens my throat and tenses the back of my neck.  My belly aches; my eyes are hot with unshed tears.  Three times I have started the journey to become a doctor, moving my family across state lines to go to school, demanding sacrifices of my husband and children to my dream.  And three times, life has thrown me violently off that track.  I have wanted to be a doctor since I was five years old.  Twice I was in the process of pre-naturopathy prerequisites and, most recently, I was attending a homeopathic medical school with the intention of rolling into their doctoral program as it became available (it is still stuck in the planning stages, however).  Even after the homeopathy school fizzled, I looked into naturopathy again but was too sick to think about pursuing it. 

Today, I stopped by the Naturopathic Medical Center to pick up a remedy.  I haven’t been back there since before I even began to recognize the pattern that destiny was drawing in my life, since the last time I was applying there.  At least seven years.  The place has really grown up in the intervening years: a big new medical center to house the clinics and labs and the oh-so-pharmacy-looking medicinary.  I parked next to Physician Only parking spaces.  I walked past doctors and students in their white coats and intense expressions. 

In the medicinary, the clerk questioned my remedy request.  Their in-house policy (exceeding state and federal law) requires a prescription for high-potency remedies.  Since I lack their credential, I couldn’t buy the potency I wanted in my own name; they would only sell me a lower potency “suitable” for the uneducated layperson.

I bought the lower potency but walked back to my car with my mouth working hard and a harsh gnawing in my chest.  Why?  Why couldn’t I have completed this dream?  I could be one of those white-coated authorized people by now.  I could park in the best spots and order any damn thing in the pharmacy.  I could be someone my kids could brag about again the way they did when I was in school.  Best of all, I could be someone I would have been proud to be.  I fought long and hard with myself to believe I was even capable of medical school and I was so immensely gratified to find that I did very well in my classes. 

Obviously, destiny has another plan for me.  Each time I attempt to pursue medicine, I come closer to dying with the ferocity that Life requires to derail me.  I’ve been sick for three and half years; I may never fully recover from this last attempt. 

In memory of a dream that will forever remain a fantasy, here is my excerpted admissions essay to the homeopathic college.  It is still as true for me today as it was when I wrote it five years ago.

When I was five years old, I decided to be a doctor.  After a deep gash on my knee, which I was left to attend alone with only a wet cloth and a bandage, I discovered beneath the flowing blood and assorted gore a hard gleaming white thing that I decided must be my knee bone.  This sight, an inner mystery of the body revealed, awoke in me a fascination with how the body works that has never left me, although it has deepened and broadened to include the mysteries of the whole of Being—body, mind, and soul.  I decided then and there, in the attic of my grandmother’s house, that I must study medicine and be a doctor; I must bring this fascination with healing mysteries to the world.

Thirty-five years later, I still have a scar across my knee and I still feel that breathless awe in the presence of the healing work.  My family culture, learning differences I had not yet accommodated, and just plain life intervened and I never made it to medical school, but I have never stopped being fascinated by the healing process, by health and wellness, and by the myriad ways to affect it. I have been studying this process informally although seriously since my early teens. 

I discovered nutrition as a way to affect health as a teenager and began a never-ending, always-something-new experiment with foods, eating habits, and supplementation.  I continue to learn the food/health connections today with my family and my healing clients.  How we nourish ourselves through food, physically and spiritually, is the foundation upon which we daily create ourselves. 

Also in high school, I was introduced to psychology—the inner mysteries of the mind—and learned to observe.  I continued formal study of psychology through a Bachelor’s Degree, to the offering of a place in a doctoral program at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  Although I didn’t continue the credentialing process, I have never stopped observing, analyzing the patterns of the workings of people’s inner selves.  The incredible drive for wellness and wholeness in all that is alive is astounding.

Not quite ten years later, after dabbling with a few alternative health ideas, I entered a struggle with fertility that finalized my break with conventional medicine. Doctors ignored my plight, my midwife was not trained in miscarriage prevention, and I was left to find my own cure.  For three years in the mid 1990’s, I researched reproductive endocrinology and alternative therapies, diagnosed my own problems and prescribed my own treatments.  My midwife was my connection to therapies to which I had no access.  Her trust in my work and willingness to learn as I learned was the first indication that I had something to offer the world through medicine.  Her suggestion that I become a doctor made me realize that I had forgotten my childhood dream.

First, though, we had the joy of homebirthing my first daughter.  Homebirth pushed me firmly into the alternative health world—as if I had that far to go! But it was during my pregnancy that I realized the power of homeopathy: Sepia 200C saved my marriage and my sanity during my second trimester. My midwife gave me some of her own personal supply, which worked the miracle.  I still have that little bottle of Sepia grains and for years turned to it in times of need.

Since then, I have devoted my life to mothering and the study and practice of holistic healing methods. I have raised my children exclusively with vibrational medicine. In addition to homeopathy, other modalities I use are kinesiology, flower remedies, aromatherapy, botanical medicine and direct resonance healing.

So why, now that I have the space in my family life to consider medical school, am I wanting to study homeopathy? I have become more fascinated with the facilitation of healing through working directly with vibrational energy.  Of all the modalities of vibrational healing, homeopathy seems the most inclusive of the body, mind, and soul in equal measure.

Homeopathy is a study of the whole human Being:  from the physics, to the psyche, to the soul, acknowledging that there is no body without soul, nor mind without body. Homeopathy is poetry and science, psychology and theatre, cosmology and philosophy, and all at once.

And, lastly, I choose the homeopathic path because the formal study and credential will allow me to be what I already am—teacher, mentor, healer, parent—in a deeper, more profound way.  As a Wholistic Kinesiologist, I am fairly certain to select a healing remedy if I have a sufficient pharmacy from which to choose but, without a thorough education in homeopathy, I don’t know why it will work or why it is the right remedy.  I want to understand the homeopathic paradigm of disease and healing.  Without that understanding, I am still only able to offer superficial knowledge to others and that is neither sufficient for me nor for those whom I seek to help.

Grace. Between the Breaths.

THE SPACE BETWEEN THE BREATHS 

Inhale  

That tiny space between the inbreath and the outbreath is empty.  It is also full of possibilities.  It's the secret to finding God/enlightenment/nirvana here on Earth.

I've been putting my attention to these empty spaces.  I've been taking a lot more deep breaths lately as well.  For now- just breathe normally.  Notice that little pause—the space. 

Pause. 

Be aware of that space between.  It's actually a nice space to rest.  That small space calms the mind and the soul. The space is where God sits. The "I am".  So-Ham. Ham-sa.  I am using the space as sanctuary right now.  Life is not what I want it to be.  So I breathe.  It helps me manage my day without falling into a blubbering heap. It keeps me from screaming at the top of my lungs.  I don't throw things that maybe I would like to. 

Instead I breathe. 

Exhale. 

Today feels like a good day to exhale.
Exhale after holding in too much stuff. A sigh of relief.  Getting rid of negativity and tension.  

Exhale.

A teaching mentor I once had taught us to look for grace in our day—the transition between one activity and another—for these were the likeliest moments to redirect behaviors and attitudes gone off-course.  She taught us to rest in the grace, to rely on them to carry the momentum into the new action without our having to carry it ourselves. She said that the transition was our own moment to breathe between the first activity and the next.

Understanding the power of the grace moments took me the longest time; after all, they were also the moments most likely to spin out of control, and that was what I usually experienced.  The same potential for chaos in a transition is what allows for the calm at the eye of the storm, depending on the expectation of the observer. Being afraid of the chaos, I struggled to see the peace possible in the grace moment.

In many ways, both large and small, I am in a grace moment in life.  I am eight weeks from my forty-fifth birthday—a midlife birthday. I am a long way from young but I’m hardly old.  My children are reaching their teens, no longer little girls needing a little girls’ mommy, but neither are they young adults needing the more adult mother-friend.  We have delegated out nearly all our schooling so I am not the researcher/curriculum writer/teacher I used to be, but neither do I find myself with hours of time on my hands to take up another career (I think mostly what I am is chauffeur).

The first twenty-some years of my life I was a fundamentalist evangelical Christian. The second twenty-some years I renounced the Christian part but remained a fundamentalist in every fear-based, reactionary move I made. As I step into the third twenty-some and what I hope is only the beginning of the second half of my life, I’ve renounced fundamentalism and reclaimed Christianity, but not in any form recognizable or acceptable to my evangelical past.  The Christian I am now has more in common with the Buddhist I toyed with becoming, although both Christians and Buddhists in my past would (and have) winced visibly at that comparison.  I am a heretic by the doctrinal statements of any organized religion but I have found a communication with the Divine that is beyond words and sincerely hope that I can continually reach new depths of that communication.

This summer I choose to rest in the eye of the storm.  I am in the space between the breaths.  In the grace place where I can grieve the hurts of the past and hope for the joys to come. I am not what I was nor yet become anything new.  I am nothing.  In the grace potential, I am everything. 


(Edit: the blog The Space Between the Breaths, from which I quoted the meditation above, has been removed from the Web.  It was written by Zangmo, who commented below but is no longer available through Blogger.)