On Courage

Lone Cypress, Pebble Beach, CA.

Or Resentment. Or The Cold Dead Arm. Or Blue.

All working titles for this exploration of how a series of neck injuries lead me on a journey of discovery about resentment, the power of offering love to your hurts, and the tenuous line between reckless and courageous.

Healing is a journey; there are just so many things to heal along the way. I feel those words with both a heavy “oof!” and a spark that is ready and willing for it! You get to a place of maintenance, and something else goes awry. Ugh. You put to bed one layer of the embedded wounds’ onion, only to discover the next layer hours, days, or years later. Oof. Frustrating, to be sure, but also, so much beauty to behold in the recovering….or re-uncovering. Peaceful accepting sigh.

Way back when I was 14, I landed on my head in gymnastics doing a back handspring. I had been scared of this motherfucker for the better part of a year, and, one day, threw caution to the wind and just went for it. Trouble is, my spotter was not aware of my spontaneous bravado, and, somehow, I flipped right back onto the crown of my head—kapow! Ouch. Perhaps more to my ego in the exact moment than to my actual neck, but ouch just the same. By the next morning, though, putting on my shirt was just too much to ask: my neck crunched, and my head stuck, locked to the left. Did I go to school anyway for the next 3 days with my head stuck like that? You must not know my family if you even need ask! You bet I did. Eventually, we got an x-ray at the military hospital and the wise technician said, “Look how her neck is completely straight and rigid? That means it hurts.” YA THINK!? Anyway, it found a way to start rotating again, and the pain eventually went away, though it was never actually corrected. The back handspring never did become my ally. But I do seem to have retained this certain occasional reckless bend that masquerades as courage, where I fling myself into the unknown thinking I have a safety net only to discover I, in fact, do not.

A few decades in the future and many, many hours in shoulderstand later, on a crooked neck, no less, I started having some weird symptoms. I now know the pressure in my head, stiffness, and blackouts I experienced were from inflamed cranial nerves. My neck had lost its curve and was increasingly side bending. I set out on a quest to heal that neck! It was a harrowing quest, with many head-scratching physicians shrugging at me and loads of ceremony and lots and lots of acupuncture needles attempting to open my meridians. Eventually, there was enough healing that we reached a peace, my neck and me. So I carried on with my headstands and shoulderstands with a whole lot of care and attention. In hindsight, while I may have been plenty strong to hold those positions, it was not at all a healthy endeavor for the crooked bones in my neck.

We carried forth with a shaky camaraderie, my neck and I for another seven or eight years or so. I had moved East from West and spent a lot of time traveling to the Midwest Inbetween to visit family and my favoritest yoga studio. It gave me the chance to feel myself a part of a community as I looked for my way in my new home. Many an 18-hour-drive-all-in-one-day-later, I went to a recommended chiropractor there in the Show-Me State. Immediately after the adjustment, something in my neck didn’t feel right, like there was a triangle of plastic wedged in there between the vertebrae. So, I dutifully went back the next day and said, “Fix this.” And she said, “Ok.” CRRRRACCKK! Oh. No.!! the plastic wedged in deeper. The discomfort quickly turned to agony, so hot and inflamed, again unable to turn my head and stuck with it to one side. Turns out, the maladjustment not only herniated the disc but also tore the disc away from the bone. Something was pushing directly on a nerve, caustic fluid (did you know disc fluid burns when it’s out of its little sac?) was seeping onto the squished angry nerve, the vertebral bones pressed into each other, and the disc itself was being pinched. Quadruple whammy. And it’s right up there by your head so you can’t get away from it. C-section and a broken pelvis being the most painful thing, and a fractured lumbar vertebrae being the third, this was definitely the second-most painful thing ever experienced in this active and frequently injured body of mine.

That’s the pain. On to the healing.

Fortunately for me, I found a miracle worker of a chiropractor in my new home who actually refused to adjust my damaged neck, which was exactly right. He only treated me with the gentlest of care and his magical, ultra-hot, healing laser! Also, fortunately for me (No thank you surgical scar tissue!), by this time, medical science had figured out that a herniated and torn disc heals on its own in 6 months with the much the same results as the used-to-be-standard-surgery, without all the scar tissue and trauma. So wait 6 months, I did. I mean, I didn’t just sit around and wait, but it was quite different than other injuries I have had in that there was not much I could actively do on my own to make things immediately better. I used kinesiology tape like it was the hottest fashion walking the red carpet, lasered every week, and discovered how arm balances in yoga sometimes can indeed be therapeutic. And I cried. A lot.

I didn’t see this injury as “energetic” or having anything emotional connected to it. It was, after all, a traceable and annotated sequence of events.

And then, I had an incredible reiki session from my-friend-who-has-no-idea-how-powerful-she-is. The ripped and oozing disc in my neck hurt my neck of course, but there was also this unremitting pain that radiated down my arm with little relief for months. There was constant loud pain in my body, and there was also numbness and disembodiment. As woowoo as I am, I harbor a bit of skepticism and caution about reiki, not because it doesn’t work but because it is a tremendous power opened in a practitioner, usually without enough support and guidance for the tremendous responsibility part that goes along with it. I need more boundaries; not someone inside my energy field looking for things, but someone who can see what I am showing. Now, that is tremendously valuable. This reiki practioner did just that and gave me actual relief! And such a vivid, lucid hallucination about the emotional and energetic aspects that were, indeed, a part of it all.

As my reiki friend held her hands over me, I both saw and felt my arm hanging from my neck like a dead thing, like Jamie Lannister’s severed hand before I knew about Jamie Lannister’s severed hand: cold, heavy, and stinky. It was like that dead weight was bolted to my neck, and it was those bolts that were driving into the nerves deeper and deeper. Those bolts gripping my head and making it throb. That arm weighing me down in a dank pool of resentment.

I had no idea I felt resentment! It wasn’t my arm I was dissociated from, it was this life-draining burden of bitterness that I carried instead of felt. It was like something outside of me, over there. Reiki brought it into me, and an ocean of grief washed over me. I saw Solace as a living, breathing muse come and whisper sweetly to the rot in this arm. She cooed to it and stroked it. She didn’t blame it for hurting me; the hurt was hurting, so she soothed it where I blamed it. What this resentment was longing for was Justice, and I saw it would come in my forgiveness. There were vivid ocean waves crashing against craggy rocks and clear clean pools. I saw myself take the arm, take this load, and swirl it gently in an eddy of waves that cooled me, washing me free.

I felt Grief wrap her wings around me, and I listened. I heard my own silent screams that had never been voiced. All this just waiting for someone to listen, just waiting to pour out of me. And I saw as I came back to myself, there was no evil in any of it, no punishable offense, nothing worthy of that level of self rebuke. There was just the felt sense of the ocean, me wrapped in blue, my friend at my side, and this incredible soothing, gently rocking the grief inside. This, the pure power of compassionate presence and a whole lot of magical woo: several onion layers peeled at once.

It seemed like the onion relayered itself with the birth of my son. I have thought this was a new trauma, which it is, but it brought all the old ones along for the ride too, the whole body of old hurts ripped raw at the surface. It’s not just like having a cold dead arm hanging from my neck, the whole of me is flayed open, all the tender bits exposed and ripe for provocation.

My yoga Teacher Kofi Busia keeps saying to me in a thousand different ways, “You feel the way you do because you refuse to trust your body,” followed always by my same helpless reply “I know but how the heck do I trust what I don’t trust especially when it is not working properly?!” I’m the scared baby penguin, shakily stretching a toe out every now and then to test the treacherously slippery ice, so quick to draw it back again! I’m afraid of this part of me that can be reckless. I’m afraid of deciding I am safe and my body has healed enough, only to fling myself into the void with at best no spotter to catch me and, at worst, reinjuring myself. The fear is valid because I keep doing just that, and it is also what’s keeping me bound because it is not the whole truth.

I had once reached a pretty good balance, well, I thought so anyway, of Cautious and Bold that kept me from veering too far into Reckless. Willing to take risks, some, yes, but staying this side of just plain dumb. In childbirth, I lost my bold and only have the cautious for direction.

Be bold, be cautious. Be bold. BE CAUTIOUS!!

I know the answer lies somewhere in that great Inbetween, not in Missouri!, but somewhere inside that can go slowly and test things without shrinking from every little baby penguin risk. I can learn to trust this body again without having to fling it into a back handspring along the way. I can take tentative steps, and still take steps. I can listen to the hurts and offer them love and the light of healing. And little by little, stop being ruled by the resentments harbored for all those hurts. This, perhaps, is what it means to live courageously: certainly not by reckless split-second decisions, but by loving every little piece of me I discover along the way.