Giving Birth To My Heart

I had begun a blog on Sweets N' Treats and my fun gathering with friends, but have deferred to a much more pertinent topic and need to share such a revelation.  The past two weeks have been challenging beginning with the physical realm of chronic conditions - the significant IBS that affects energy, feeling sick, headaches, and limits my world to just attending to the daily necessities; the migraines that while debilitating, I push through the days and sleepless nights.  This is not to bring out the violin - NO - this is to illuminate how compassionate I feel for the many clients who enter my life on a daily and weekly basis with chronic conditions.

We talk about how for them, it never feels like life will get better.  Somehow, I tapped into that scary abyss myself and while it truly sucked, I had an ability to feel my physical and emotional pain and finally have some major acknowledgements.

It is so easy to blame parents and circumstances for why we are the way we are, but, as I was speaking with a therapist colleague the other day, she mentioned, the past is just to establish a base, context and understanding, but never to dwell there.  So true.  My folks so desperately did not want their only child to be hurt, spoiled - all good intentions - but the world was a scary, dark, dangerous place from my lens, and with the unrest at home, it, too, was an unsafe place to be emotionally.

From my experience, I learned to be independent, to be stoic, to create a pollyanna-like world, one in which my optimism would supersede any negativity or harm.  While talking  and blubbering with Lindsay, my oldest, last evening, I had this epiphany and it continued into yoga today.

I finally admitted that I do, indeed want to be taken care of, that I no longer want to do this on my own and have been working on establishing a medical team to do just that.  My past few years in particular, have been a great example of the failing healthcare system in our country.  I have had to pull together my team, TRY to get them to collaborate and communicate, which often did and does not happen.  I am stepping into a place of now expressing my dissatisfaction, asking for more help and feeling deserving of this care.

I am so aware how this impacts who I am as a healthcare professional.  I do care, I do create collaborative teams, I do work at creating a better healthcare system for all.  And, I will not stop!

Back to today.  At yoga, we worked hard and a lot on exposing the hear.  My immediate visual was giving birth to my heart - kinda graphic, but beautiful, both visually and metaphorically.  I have been told by countless alternative providers - massage therapists, therapists, energy workers, channelers - that my heart was broken and I learned to wall it off.  It shows up in my posture - the hunched shoulders that were to hide my fatness as a child, the mid-back tightness that has been impossible to manipulate even by some of the strongest chiropractors.

What I realized today, was that this dark period was needed to bring forth (birth) my heart, opening me up to really living, really being able to not only ask, but to receive.

I wish you all an open heart, trusting that you are whole, healed and loved.
Namaste
Julie