This organic life

May 6, 2013May 6, 2013 / njmyers / 4 Comments

I need to put the hummingbird feeder out. The birds are due any day now or perhaps they’re already here and snubbing us because I haven’t put the feeder out.

This thought arises suddenly and makes me think of the miscellany of my to-do list. It is rich and shapeless, everything wanting to be done at once.

Sitting on the porch, watching the colorful birds of spring (indigo buntings, siren-yellow finches, rose-breasted grosbeaks) and wood ducks looking for a nesting place in our woods—this is high on my spring to-do list. Alas there is no water on our property so it is not prime wood duck real estate but they come looking every year because we have great tree holes. We also have a hawk nest this year so beware, little birdies.

Wood nettle shoots are at their prime. I must go out and snip another bagful. I took a mess of nettles to a church potluck yesterday (steamed briefly, tossed with olive oil, garnished with violets). Every year I introduce more people to this spring delicacy. It takes some faith to bite down on plants that will sting like crazy if you grab them raw but immersion in a hot bath makes them sweet and safe. I don’t like the more common ditch nettles, however. See my post last year on this.

Having dreams is on my weekly agenda. The only preparation I can make for the communal dreaming class I am conducting for nine weeks at church is to have dreams myself, and I don’t have a lot of control over that. As it turns out, I often don’t even bring up my own dreams because other people’s dreams fill the hour. The dreams are rich and amazing and reveal their meanings as we talk about them. I discover again that I am quite good at helping people interpret their dreams. Some shared images appear in our dreams. Speculating about what this means.

I am praying daily for friends of a friend who are being held captive in a foreign land. This requires making time and place for the prayer to be received (that is, knowing what I should pray) and offered. It is not a prayer to be breathed at my desk although I do that, too. I usually go out with the trees, to get their help.

Helper trees

I am thinking through and consulting others about aspects of a partnership between my congregation and a congregation in Kinshasa that I know well from two visits there last year. Especially, how do you address or get around the vast economic differences without opening great cans of worms? I write up a proposal and send it off to a few people for vetting. This is difficult and necessary headwork in a project that is, for the most part, a work of joy and spiritual enrichment.

I am deciding what to do about biking. What would it feel like to give it up? Why did I have a sudden surge of jealousy when Vic asked how I would feel if he decided to buy a new bike (and I didn’t)? On the other hand, why am I enthusiastic about the idea of funding scholarships for Congolese students instead of buying a new bike? Sorting out my own feelings. Sorting out the state of my body as well as my spirit.

I just arranged for an energy healing session to address my recurrent UTIs, which have now become resistant to most antibiotics. This is related to the biking question because I can’t afford to keep having UTIs and biking seems to instigate them sometimes.

And it relates, in turn, to dreams, because I had a dream in which energy healing was being done on an Atlantic beach. I was to take my turn at healing and being healed before even putting a foot in the water. The ocean represents Soul waters for me. Also, the Atlantic links us to Africa, so perhaps it is a reference to my next trip to Congo.

That trip is taking shape and moving up on the to-do list. I may post about that soon.

Maybe my to-do list is not shapeless so much as organic, one thing merging into another and branching into yet others.

Pain free in mind and body

January 7, 2013January 7, 2013 / njmyers / 3 Comments

I am grateful to be pain free! I bend double to put on my shoes and go through extreme yoga twists with gratitude for the restoration of my body. I have to smile when the yoga instructors tell us to protect our lower backs because my own experience suggests that it is not the human back that is fragile; it is the psyche.

Over the past several months my back has demonstrated entirely contradictory characteristics. It has indeed felt fragile, weak, and painful, but it has also felt strong and flexible. To be more precise, strength and flexibility are my back’s normal condition—what you see in the photo is what I could do up to mid-November of last year and what I can do today. But I experienced a six-week interlude in which various sections of my back—low-mid, lower, and right shoulder, in succession—simply stopped normal operations.

Depending on which part was on strike at the time, I couldn’t bend over, twist, or reach higher than my shoulder without risking painful spasms. For a while I could barely walk.

I wrote about this earlier when I had gotten through the worst episode, but that wasn’t the end of it. It seemed that my back wanted to give me a few more lessons so I would really learn what it was trying to say.

You could say that I injured my back and it is now healed. But this simply is not true. Nothing happened to “throw my back out”: the spasms came on gradually. And the restoration of function does not feel so much like healing as a rebound to normal, as if my back just decided to stop making such a fuss.

I also believe that calling this an injury is misleading and downright harmful because it might cause me to treat my back as fragile, in need of protection, and, above all, subject to further “injury.” And when you think it can be injured it will oblige you by taking the next opportunity to do so. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Dr. John Sarno offers an alternate explanation. The pain and weakness in my various back muscles originated in my brain, which slightly reduced the flow of oxygen to these muscles. Those back spasms were real but they were of mental origin. The cure was two-fold: to physically restore oxygen flow as much as possible through massage, Feldenkrais, and exercise and, more important, to get my brain to stop sending those oxygen-deprivation instructions.

My experience confirms Sarno’s theory that the back pain is a diversion tactic. The mind doesn’t want to face painful, conflicting emotions and therefore lodges its distress in the body.

Over the past six weeks, each time I identified a source of psychic discomfort the pain began to release. But one demo was not enough. One set of pains would go away and another would pop up. Even something as innocent as missing my comfortable home and diet routines while I was enjoying great family time at my son’s house was enough to cause my shoulder to seize up. It did so because I hadn’t consciously acknowledged this particular conflict. When I did, it let go. The situation didn’t have to change; I only had to acknowledge it—and chuckle. Conflicting feelings often get blown out of proportion when they stay underground.

I believe my brain has, at various times in my life, chosen my lower back, my upper back, the skin around my eyes (exzema), my plantar tendon (plantar fasciitis), and the back of my left knee to fool me into thinking my distress is physical rather than mental. This allows me to continue to think that I am a psychologically strong person who can handle anything. Thinking I can handle anything causes me to ignore psychic conflict—especially unacceptable feelings of anger, fear, and anxiety that arise even when I am doing things I want to do with people I love.

These conflicting feelings are inevitable. There is no reason to avoid them or protect ourselves from them. There is no more reason to protect our psyches than to protect our lower backs.

There is every reason, however, to be conscious of them, to grin and breathe deeply and say, hah, that’s happening, I gotcha! And keep our minds, bodies, and spirits moving.

Healing back pain

December 15, 2012December 15, 2012 / njmyers / 5 Comments

Several years ago a family member was suffering from debilitating pain in her back and other parts of her body that had built up for months, with no apparent cause or cure. In the course of researching what might be helpful to her, my husband and I came across Dr. John Sarno’s book Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection. Eventually the philosophy and instructions in that book became an important part of her healing so we’ve been recommending the book to other people, too. We’ve bought a number of copies and given them away or loaned them out. Right now we don’t have a single copy in the house.

Which is unfortunate because I really need it right now. I have been dealing with my own back pain of unknown etiology, as the physicians would say, for the past month.

Here is what I have remembered from the book.

1. Sarno says that back pain and many other physical maladies are psychogenic. Not psychosomatic—“all in your head”; the pain and physical symptoms are very real. But they originate in the psyche. The body becomes the repository of stress and trauma that the mind refuses to acknowledge. When it becomes too much, the body cries out in pain and protest and develops a real malady as a distraction from the subtle pains of the unconscious. “I’m hurting!” is the message, and we assume the hurt is physical—because it is at that moment. But it doesn’t start there, although the body often uses a physical incident or accident or even injury as an excuse to bring the pain to the surface.

2. Psychogenic symptoms tend to come on suddenly, go on a long time or recur mysteriously, and seem disproportionate to any physical trauma. They often move around to different parts of the back or body. They are not continuous, often showing up after you exercise, for example, rather than during the exercise itself.

3. The way to deal with such pain is to bring all our subconscious mental/emotional pain and stresses to awareness. It’s not quite that simple, but almost. Our psychic pain doesn’t even have to be resolved—only acknowledged. And then we can talk to our body pain, telling the aching back, in effect, “There, there. I know that I’ve been dealing with a lot in my life lately—there’s this and this and this that I know of and probably a lot more. I promise to keep these things in my conscious mind and deal with them there. You don’t have to carry them for me.” This acknowledgement—and not any kind of physical treatment, no stretching or relaxation or special exercise—is the key to healing.

That is as far as my memory of the book’s instruction went. So I mined my unconscious for weeks, dredging up all the reasons that my back might have begun twingeing early in November and then seized up seriously after Thanksgiving in painful spasms that came and went so unpredictably that I was on constant alert.

I found plenty of reasons that my psyche could have been generating this pain, and they were all issues I thought I could deal with. But the more I talked to my back, the worse it got. And nothing else helped, either. Not rest, not exercise, not ice, not heat, not meds, not herbals, not, not not. My back was becoming a mass of (k)nots, one gigantic “No!” Every time something seemed to make it feel better, a spasm would come on and I would feel utterly defeated. I felt like I was coming apart in the middle.

I needed help. This past week I scheduled two sessions over three days with my daughter, who lives a few hours away. She is a Feldenkrais practitioner and she has always been able to work miracles with my body. I wasn’t sure she could help me with this, and I knew both of us would be disappointed if these sessions didn’t help. But, God be praised, they seem to have set me on the path to healing, for a combination of reasons.

First of all, she was able to untie the knots that my body had tied around the pain, all up and down my torso, front and back. Until much of the physical tension that had become embedded from a month of pain and frustration—let alone what might have brought on the pain in the first place—was released, nothing could help. This is why techniques like Feldenkrais are crucial in healing back pain. Massage or chiropractic may serve similar purposes.

While she was gently probing my body, Joanna probed my psyche as well with gentle questions, bringing me to a deeper awareness of the causes for my psychic tension as well as my internal resources for healing. This literal joining of the mind and body was astounding, nothing less than miraculous. I was so proud of my wise and gifted daughter. Few healers possess such a combination of skills.

Finally, she helped me remember a key instruction of the book, one I’d forgotten: Don’t give in to the pain. This is important because, although the pain truly hurts, it doesn’t hurt you. That is, the pain does not mean that you are injuring yourself further.

I stood up from her table feeling assembled in an entirely different way but still afraid that the pain would come back. She helped me get over that fear, not by denying that it would return but by finding a different way of meeting it when it did. She helped me summon my inner strength, my inner athlete, the one who could say, “Bring it on! What’s the worst you can do? A few seconds of torture and that’s it!” She encouraged me to breathe through the pain. It reminded me a lot of Lamaze instructions on labor pains. Huff and puff your way through!

I’ve been practicing these instructions for the past two days and they are working. The pain did come back (when I got into the car, when I stood up, when I went up steps, yada yada) and I huffed through it and went right on doing what I was doing. And it didn’t last.

Then I walked two miles late yesterday afternoon, feeling fine, but afterward I hurt a lot. This was a familiar pattern. This time, however, I tried not to let the pain feel like a defeat. I breathed through it. I went to bed early and slept long. This morning I am fine, proof that, whatever last night’s pain represented, no harm was done. I believe I am on my way to healing.

And I just bought the Kindle version of Sarno’s book so I’ll always have it. Why didn’t I think of that before? Duh.

An anniversary and an encounter

December 7, 2012December 7, 2012 / njmyers / 1 Comment

looking at my CT scan last December with husband and Our Son the Radiologist

A year ago today I almost died in yoga class. Maybe that is why my back has been having severe spaz attacks for the past week, preventing me from going anywhere near yoga class. My health crisis last year had nothing to do with yoga but it is one of those association things. Like, I can never eat M&Ms since I got a terrible stomach upset, probably flu, after eating M&Ms as a kid.

Ah poor back, we have safely made it through the year with no more clots in the lungs so you can relax now.

It does feel better today, and I woke with a great dream this morning. I like this one a lot better than the rat dream I got on my birthday (which was, incidentally, about being kinder to my body).

A charismatic young man who is famous for his humanitarian work is featured in a grand convocation. His work, and perhaps mine as well, is to rescue people one by one. The image is of pulling people across a river with a cable strung from bank to bank. Among the crowds of people at this gathering he singles me out and we make an instant, deep connection. I become part of his inner circle. The dream ends when he puts his arm across my shoulder and says, “We will always be friends, we and our whole families.” I know this involves obligation in the African way but I gladly take it on.

For some reason this dream reminded me of an encounter I had last week with a neighbor.

He came up behind me on his bike as I was walking on the road just beyond the steepest slope of hill in front of our house. “Hello!” he said, and I jumped.

“You scared me. You snuck up on me!” I recognized him as the older man who farms a mile away and runs a stand that sells the region’s best sweetcorn.

“Yeah. I thought I was pretty quiet.” He pedaled ahead of me for a few yards and then turned around and headed back down the hill. “I am walking up Curran Hill for exercise,” he explained.

“Okay,” I said. “Good for you.”

He disappeared down the hill. I was puzzled. He was on a bike. He must have meant he was biking up the hill for exercise.

The hill we live on is the steepest one in the region and we often see bikers practicing on it. Slow, steady up and really fast down. When I bike I prefer to head downhill from our driveway, ending my ride with the gentler climb from the other direction and braking on the steep descent to our drive, which is 2/3 of the way down the hill. The steep side of the hill is a challenge for me to take on the rise. I was a bit surprised that Mr. Vite was up to climbing it repeatedly. But if so, indeed, good for him.

I was taking advantage of the sunny, mild late-November weather for a trash walk. (I could still walk and bend over then.) The roadside was nearly clean because I’d walked it just three days earlier. But in the 2.5-mile roundtrip to Red Bud Trail, I filled a small grocery bag with trash: beer cans, fast food wrappers, and a postcard from Myrtle Beach dated August 16. “Brady. Went golfing today. Saw 8 turtles. Miss you. Sheryl and Rick.” I gather trash out of anthropological curiosity as well as to keep up the neighborhood.

My bladder was calling me home by the time I approached the crest of Curran Hill from the gentle side and began the steep descent to our driveway. I was thus in a bit of a hurry. But there was Mr. Vite again and he was, indeed, walking up the hill, pushing his bike. The bike was apparently for a fast trip downhill to get the effect of a continuous hike uphill with the repeated climbs. Not a bad strategy.

He stopped. “Hello again,” he said. And then he added, “You seem like an outstanding person.”

I did not know how to respond to that but he clearly wanted to talk and I did my best, pinching my legs together. We talked for a minute about exercise and collecting trash and how long I have lived in the area. I was wearing a low-brimmed hat and he apparently didn’t recognize me as one of his customers. I told him I often come by his stand. And then he repeated, “Well, you seem like an outstanding person.”

I did not know what he meant by that or what, in our first encounter of only a few seconds, caused him to draw that conclusion about me (he didn’t recognize me and I didn’t even have the trash bag in my hand…). I wanted to ask but I really did have to go by then and so I just laughed and said goodbye and squirmed the last hundred yards to the house.

Now here is the dream connection. The young man in the dream was my inner Outstanding Person. Maybe he was shining through in that brief encounter.

May we, indeed, be friends forever, we and all our families. Happy anniversary.

Wisdom v. struggle

November 13, 2012 / njmyers / 1 Comment

photo by Nina B. Lanctot

For the third time in the last 12 months I have gotten the Wisdom v. Struggle essence in the personal blend my daughter prepares for me intuitively.

How many terms should I unpack and explain before I go on? “Essence” refers to a preparation an herbalist (in this case Merri Walters of Great Lakes Sacred Essences) makes from flowers or under the influence of places or celestial events. Essences have energetic properties linked to healing and influencing human emotions and development.

“Personal blend.” My daughter sometimes makes individualized blends of these essences for people who request them.

“Intuitively.” She makes her choices based on the energetic sensations she receives at the moment, from individual bottles in her collection, not on her knowledge of what the individual might need. Whatever the mysterious process involves, it works. The blends she makes for me are always spot-on, appropriate, revelatory.

I experience these personal blends as catalysts. They make things happen in my life and psyche that need to happen. They are not always soothing but they help produce profound, necessary change. The plants, rocks, and waters they represent have become my allies on my life journey.

So when “Wisdom v. Struggle,” drawn from the waters of Lake Superior, shows up three times in a row out of several hundred possibilities, I pay attention.

I like the first part of Merri’s description of this essence’s properties:

This essence is for those who are truly ready to see, who are no longer afraid of the unknown but are ready to sit peacefully and watch the great mysteries unfold…..no longer distracted by the irritations of this plane…..profound peace, the doorway to initiation and the mysteries of the cosmos.

Yes, yes, that’s me! I’m there, baby.

But she goes on:

This essence can also be extremely helpful to those who are still caught up in struggle, who seek wisdom, seek depth, seek to know the truths of all time but as they find themselves in perfection ~ their hearts desire ~ they become preoccupied by the flies that are there too.

Alas, that is also me. I am often preoccupied by flies.

The gray brown chill of November. The roofer who took our deposit and disappeared. My husband’s absence on my birthday. The prospect of a difficult conversation with a friend. Climate change. Whether the turkey that’s been in the freezer for a year will be all dried out and I should get another one for Thanksgiving. A low-energy day.

(What is it about the state of the world and the small disturbances of everyday life that makes these things weigh heavily, and equally, on a given day?)

On Saturday I asked for a special early birthday celebration, a visit to Jasper-Pulaski State Park an hour and a half away in Indiana to see the migrating Sandhill Cranes.

The cranes come through this area every year on their arduous trips, feeding and socializing for several months in the area. They gather by the thousands at dusk in large pastures in the park, where you can watch flocks soaring in just before sunset, a great bird O’Hare Field at rush hour. They socialize there for a little while then lift up en masse, sometime after dark, to roost in nearby marshes. They sleep with their feet in cold water. They get together in the pastures again at sunrise.

We watched the cranes flying in until we couldn’t stand up anymore, then ceded our choice viewing spot on the platform to people who were crowding in behind us, gabbling like cranes. Look at that. There come some more. And more! See that big bunch! See how they put their feet down. Ah, ahh, zoom zoom! They make it look so easy.

I thought of Wisdom v. Struggle. I thought of how I wanted to live like a crane, soaring with the thermals, landing on my feet, hanging out with the community. Following the journey where it takes me.

Sunrise. Photo by Nina B. Lanctot

Best of February 2011–September 2012

October 2, 2012October 8, 2012 / njmyers / Leave a comment

This is a reference post. Here are links in primary categories to posts I wrote at my old address, where it was impossible to assign categories. For future reference links to this post will appear in each category of the top menu bar.