Bodies Unbound

Chapter 5.

 I am planning a trip to my cabin in the Sierra for ten days even though I hate being alone.  Every spiritual teacher I have ever read, listened to or met has in some way said that you can’t trust your choices as long as you can’t face your fears.   As long as that fear is there you can never trust that you are loving for the right reason.  If you use romance to keep away your fears, how can you know if you love that person or are just tricking yourself?           

            I have been to workshops to find and face this place in me that is afraid.  There is a Vipassana Meditation retreat in the foothills of California at North Fork.  There they hold ten- day retreats in absolute silence.  They provide two light meals a day for the one hundred fifty people who show up for each retreat.  It is free.  The only thing they insist on is that you show up for each sitting and complete the course. There is a monitor who counts heads to make sure everyone is there for each meditation period. 

            The first day, the meditation hall looks orderly and everyone is sitting with strong resolve.  By the second day you can sense agitation and restlessness.  By the third day the intensity of the place has risen.  People have built forts of blankets, extra pillows for knees or to sit higher on the meditation cushion.  Then people stop showing up and the monitor is off to find them.  People hide in their rooms, get sick, need to sleep, anything to avoid that place inside them.  People are trying to think of ways they can be called away on an emergency.  That place that has been avoided by talking, eating, comfort, jobs, and relationships is starting to arise to the surface of their consciousness.  The inner operation has begun.

            On the third day of my first retreat I met the grief of leaving my son when he was three.   I had done countless kinds of therapy to resolve this but it always came back.  I had come to accept it as a part of me that couldn’t be healed.  I, in some ways, felt like a shrine, a warning of what happens to a woman who leaves her child.  Each time I remembered putting my son on the plane with his father I fell apart.  “How could I let him go?  What kind of person could let their child go?”  I would picture his little tear stained face and scream inside. 

            For days I tried to fight off the memory with the meditation technique, but the feelings grabbed all my attention and the pain it caused in my body was unbearable.  I finally talked to the retreat leaders, a couple who volunteered to sit with us for these ten days.  They were available for instruction.  They listened to my story with great compassion then told me to feel the feelings without the story.

            I went back to my meditation torture chamber.  “What good is that going to do?” I asked myself.  I was pissed off they didn’t have a better suggestion.  Soon the feelings were alive in me again.  I thought, “Well, just try it for a second.” 

            I let go of the story, the words to criticize myself, even the words of the facts of what happened.  It was as if the story was keeping the feelings about two feet away from me.  When I dropped any words to describe it the impact of the emotions were like a kick to my chest.  My chest, neck and head began to burn with an intense fire.  I burned for a long time.  At last the burning ended.  The sadness I had carried in me for over thirty years, this self-hatred and grief had just burned itself out.  It wasn’t me at all.  It was something I believed.

            For a few days I felt as if I were freezer burned.  If I experienced the slightest breeze or if the air conditioner came on my skin felt as though it had been physically burned.  Then, that too disappeared, never to return.

            With the story gone from my body, new insight came.  Though I was not a conventional mother I had stayed alive for my son.  I had gotten sober and have remained so for 27 years.  When I was five years sober he came to live with me.  Though my son is still very angry about me leaving him, he calls on me for help from time to time and I can be there.  I am there for my grandson Tiger.  I also saw the family pattern of my grandmother dying when my mother was four and leaving my mother motherless.  My mother had put me in a foster home for a while.  It was a family pattern, leaving children.

           

            I am fascinated about the connection of our minds and bodies.  In my thirty-two years of being a massage therapist my constant question was what kind of thoughts created that kind of problems in the body.  It eventually led me to be able to read bodies.  Reading bodies I can tell in an instant what is unconscious in a person.  For instance if the left foot is sticking out at an angle there is an unresolved issue with the mother, the right, the father.  Rounded shoulders and upper back pain is always related to affairs of the heart; abandonment issues, a broken heart, etc.  Lower back is financial, always a lack of some needed support.  Large stomachs are related to mother issues.  Scoliosis, or a twisted trunk is usually about the upper part of the body, the mind and heart, not being able to communicate to the lower nature; sex, a need to belong, power, etc.           

            While I was wrestling with the demons of fear about Wyn not responding to my gesture of reconciliation, my right arm began to ache and became unusable.  I could not lift it from my side.  It was as if my arm was showing me my dilemma.

            “You are so helpless you need someone, (Wyn,) to do everything.  You are not even capable of lifting the slightest object,” said my arm.           

            As the realization hit me that I had married Wyn to save me financially, to protect me from my intense pain body, from all my fears of abandonment and of being alone, – as this awareness exploded in my consciousness the ache in my arm became unbearable.

            I was in Santa Barbara for my grandson, Tiger’s, first violin recital.  I drove there from Ojai with my left hand.  My son, Hesu Whitten, a chiropractor in Santa Barbara, was also at the recital.  He adjusted me.  Every bone in my body was out of alignment.  His expert hands put into place my neck, the entire vertebral column, hips, shoulders and arms, with the accompanying sounds of release and movement of bones, muscles and tendons.  Had I not been aware of the issue that had caused every part of my body to be out of place, his adjustments would not have worked.           

            I awoke the next morning and the pain was gone.  It was gone, not because the adjustment had fixed it, it was gone because the issue was gone.  Once the awareness comes there is no need for the illness.  It is the belief in some conflict that keeps the pain in place.

            I recently did body work on a woman who was going to school to become a therapist.  She was looking for a place to do her internship.  She had been on many interviews and not been hired.  I saw how her shoulders were rounded protecting her heart.  Her back was so tight and twisted from tight muscles she flinched every time I tried to put the slightest pressure into my strokes.  Her neck was unmovable.

            “Where do your people come from?” I asked her.

            “From Russia.  We are Russian Jews.”

            “Ah, that makes sense.  You are carrying the pogroms, the persecution in your body.  Your family probably didn’t know how to talk about it.”

            “No,” she said.  “No one ever talked about anything.  They didn’t smile, they weren’t happy.  They were critical about everything.”

            “They internalized what happened to them,” I said.  “You have done the same thing.  You are carrying their story in your body.  You did not become a therapist to help others you became a therapist in the hope you would receive the love you have never had.”

            She gasped and began to cry.           

            “Do you have a spiritual path to help you?” I asked.

            “I guess you could say I am a Zen Buddhist.”

            “Good.  Are you familiar with the story of the Bodhisattva?”

            “Yes.  They are people who have awakened to the Truth of Life, but have come back to help others.  In fact they have vowed to come back until all human beings are saved.”

            “You have decided to become a therapist.  You have gone through years of training.  If you choose to stay with the Russian Jew story you will perpetuate it and it will kill you.  You body is in so much pain it will create an illness that will take you out.  If you choose the Bodhisattva story you will not only heal yourself but all those who come to you for help.”

            In that moment her shoulders released.  It was a beginning.