In the course of a day

I woke up today feeling very sad and fearful. I have been taking it super easy for the past few days thinking that my level of activity was causing the tenderness in my abdomen. I expected that this morning I would wake up and feel a discernible difference in how I felt. Alas, I did not. I tried for a while to convince myself that it felt different but it really didn't.

I felt myself going to a place of thinking that I should check out the western medicine scene and try to figure out what is going on inside. This is the part of healing that feels like a full time job to me. Sometimes I make light of it because I feel so privileged to be able to take this time, generally free of responsibility, to heal. When I feel physically good it is like a dream come true to just be able to live and explore and learn what it means to heal. Those are the days when the job is easy and joyful. The other days when I find myself caught in what has become a place I have visited a number of times in the past 7 months, a place where I am not sure if I am hearing the wisdom of my heart, a place where being raised in a society where western medicine is the norm, a place where the sensations in my body remind me of the severity of the pain I experienced and want to avoid if at all possible, a place of doubt and indecision, a place where the pressures of the opinions of others weigh heavily upon me, the job is hard. This is also a place where I need help and part of being in this place is that it becomes more challenging to ask for help.

Thankfully today the help manifested and I am ending my day feeling more confident and centered and ready for another day. This morning when I logged on to the tong ren class my internet was working well enough that I got most of the class clearly. I decided to go ahead and get a referral from my GI doctor to get a blood test and to have someone palpate my abdomen. I am not sure that I really think either of these things are going to be conclusive except to make the doctor want to do a CT scan which I want to avoid but what did happen is that I was able to cry when I got off the phone with the doctor. Crying has not been an easy thing for me throughout this journey and I value every time I am able. Then Melany took time away from writing her thesis to give me a treatment. Her treatment brought me deep relaxation and then helped release more tears and crying. She also accompanied me to the doctors office which is something that I wanted but didn't want to ask for. I then got tong ren and verbal support over the phone from my mom and from Eleanor and Hilary. Then I heated up some rocks and held them to my abdomen while I tried to log on to tong ren class with Monica (internet connection didn't really allow this though but they say the chi knows where to go). Then Ashley came over and we shared a mellow evening with miso soup, conversation, and some tong ren.

I am now feeling so much stronger and more able to believe that my body can heal from whatever this blip in the road is.

I also see how I still need to work on my ability to ask for help when I need it. Just when I thought I had this down.....

Today was a long day at the office.