Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
T. S. Eliot
After some time at the massage clinic, it dawned on me that I had been subtly and gradually increasing the amount of time I worked there. Still, it was enjoyable and I didn’t feel any exceptional stress. I enjoyed the clients and I enjoyed the different therapists. More than anything, I enjoyed the massages. Anything that eased the pain even for a short time was pretty darn nice.
I also enjoyed being out in the world again after the months of isolation I’d gone through when I’d first been at home. Isolation had been a necessary part of my healing but the time had come to move along.
The atmosphere at the clinic was quiet and there were no demands made on me to do more than I felt I could handle. It was my choice about how much to do. It’s important to remember this.
I even managed to get some reading done while clients were in the therapy rooms. I was still determined to find a cure for what ailed me. I intended to prove to myself that my disability wasn’t real, that I just needed more time than I’d thought I did in order to get back to my old self again. Maybe even try to get my old job back again.
Three years had now passed since my retirement and my mental energy was slowly but steadily returning. My body, on the other hand, generally lagged far behind any recovery in my psychospiritual state. Apart from the times I zoned out on the massage table, I still lived with the persistent stiffness and deep aching that had become so large a part of my life.
Thus, I remember the amazement when, as I was sitting in my recliner one day, I suddenly realized – nothing hurt! I sat very still and did a mental body scan to see if I could find any pain anywhere and there was none, absolutely none. I just sat there, elated, and thought, “Wow!” Did I dare hope that somehow I was miraculously cured?
Well, no. As soon as I moved, there was the pain again. But there was no doubt, there it was. Or rather, there it wasn’t, at least for that brief moment. Before, the pain had always been with me in varying degrees; whether I was sitting still, moving, lying down, it was never gone. It even lurked at the edges of awareness during my restless sleep. This short time indicated to me that it was possible to be pain free somehow.
I didn’t know what brought that moment on or how to make it last but years later, even with pain still very much a part of my daily life, I have hope. I’ve developed other pain issues that may or may not be related to fibromyalgia but the fact that the “uncurable” fibromyalgia part of the pain is much lessened gives me hope that these other things can be worked with, too.
By now I’d read so very much about so very much that I felt unfocused. There was no structure to my reading or my accumulating information. I needed a way to organize it. A few years earlier I’d joined The Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.), founded by Edgar Cayce, the most renowned and the most documented psychic in the United States in the early and mid-20th century. For a while I’d also been a member of a local Search for God group affiliated with the A.R.E. I greatly enjoyed the metaphysical discussions and group meditations we had at the meetings.
While the conversations and studies were enriching and enjoyable, though, they weren’t enough to provide a framework for all the information from my readings. Still, at least I’d found some like-minded people with whom to discuss unconventional spiritual inquiry that didn’t get me looked at with suspicion or uneasiness. Now I was once more getting some of that antsy feeling but what to do about it?
Antsy or not, I certainly wasn’t able to take up running and weight lifting and all those things again. I could no longer even do the gentle Tai ch’i exercises that I had done for some time previously. I still didn’t recognize being antsy as guidance from my Higher Self; it was just uncomfortable, a sort of pressured feeling. I didn’t like it. I don’t like being pressured. Neither did I know what to do about it.
Then one day I got a routine fund-raising letter. It was from Atlantic University (A.U.), the fairly recently revived institute for graduate studies also originally founded by Cayce. I absent-mindedly glanced over it and was laying it aside when I was suddenly struck by what I was reading. I grabbed it back and thought in amazement, “Oh, wow! You mean we have a university?” I read it more thoroughly.
Avenues were opening up again and by this time I was more conscious of them. One of A.U.’s offerings was a graduate program leading to a master’s degree in Transpersonal Studies. I decided to look into the degree program because I felt that having the credentials of a degree might someday be important. If not, at the least this might be a way to take my information overload and put some structure, some focus, into it. But I also had to consider how this would impact my life, since graduate school is not inexpensive. I was very much aware of my financial limits, not to mention my physical and mental energy limits. At least I thought I was.
I obtained documents and transcripts, winced as I raided my shrunken savings account and, with much trepidation, enrolled in the first course. I was unsure of my ability to take courses again. I recalled that earlier overwhelming time as I was finishing my bachelor’s degree and the crash it contributed to. I was frightened something similar might recur. A.U.’s distance study option was my best choice. That way I could allot my study time in accordance with my energy levels and physical condition and not according to a set classroom schedule.
I loved the subjects and the studies from the very first. When I discovered I already owned some of the assigned textbooks, I was confident my reading and these courses were compatible. I trod gingerly and slowly through the assignments. Whether that was due to my condition or my penchant for procrastination is hard to say. I know I was terrified that I’d push myself too hard again and I had no intention of allowing myself to fall back into my previous state. Nothing was worth that.
Well, we all know about good intentions and that famous road…
And did I mention I was terrified? I was scared stiff. As if having a stiff, rigid body wasn’t enough. Still, something wordlessly told me, “This is it. Do this.”
I took only one course at a time but I often had to request extensions. When I finished I didn’t immediately sign up for another course, either. I felt uneasy spending that much money when there were other more pressing and immediate needs. Besides, I had to be careful not to overextend my still fragile energies.
And yet, I kept on. I took my reading assignments into the massage clinic with me and the quiet atmosphere was conducive to studying.
Eventually my time and duties at the clinic expanded and I did more than answer the phone and make appointments. There was linen saturated with massage oil to be laundered several times a day and a whirlpool tub to be cleaned and disinfected after every use, as well as water glasses to be washed and dried, and just general tidying up.
Not only did my duties expand but so did my interactions with clients who sat waiting for their appointment times. As I got to know many of them personally, conversations became a regular part of my “duty” and my reading there was curtailed. Remember, none of this was forced on me as my “job.” It was my choice.
While this might sound as if my condition was pretty much back to normal, I was doing all of this in spite of continuing fatigue and chronic pain, not to mention a brain that still didn’t work as it once had. The work was enjoyable but I pushed beyond what my body and mind felt inclined to do. My marathon training had taught me to ignore pain and that you can always do more and go farther than you think you can.
Well, most of the time.
Some parts of my body, my shoulders and neck in particular, were more flexible and less painful, thanks to regular chiropractic adjustments and the massage therapy. In other ways and with other body parts, though, I had more and more difficulty.
My lower back and hips hurt worse and became restricted in their range of movement. It was difficult for me to walk without support. My legs could hold me up and they could walk but they couldn’t do both at the same time without a great deal of effort. I ambulated awkwardly, bracing myself against walls and furniture as I moved around. Walking was extremely hard physical work and I was tired after an afternoon at the clinic, afternoons that imperceptibly grew into full days.
Does any of this sound familiar? I was heading right into the same sort of situation I’d previously got myself into, taking on more and more and assuming I could do it all simply because I wanted to, because I willed it, because I “had” to, because I didn’t want to let anyone down. The massage clinic was more laid back than the laboratory and the frozen blood facility had been but that didn’t really hide the fact of what I was doing, though it did disguise it for a while. And, as they say on TV, “But wait! There’s more!” Oh, yes, a lot more.
The clinic owner and another massage therapist and I decided that we’d like to open a small store and sell things like herbs and herbal teas, supplements, essential oils, incense and crystals, and other similar items. I would run the store while the massage therapists remained at the original clinic site.
We were enthusiastic but we had no initial bank funding, no business plan, no marketing studies, none of the things we’re told are essential before starting such a venture. The store simply sounded like too much fun for us to worry about those things. I certainly needed some fun in my life. Things had been down and tense too long.
Without our personal credit cards we wouldn’t have had even a shoestring to start this store. I got busy online and started ordering the things we felt would sell well. It was pretty much by guess and by golly and by what we thought we’d buy if we walked into such a place. The clinic owner rented a storefront just around the corner, had the windows painted with our logo, and in a couple of months we had a small but pretty good grand opening.
Our “alternative” store turned out to be a pleasant place for me to do my reading and studying. While that was nice, it also indicated that we didn’t have a lot of trade. I enjoyed the quiet atmosphere and the low customer volume but that’s not good for business.
Before long it was obvious that the store wasn’t even paying the rent, though we were actually doing well enough for a little startup on an out-of-the-way street. We had a small but fairly steady customer base already but we just didn’t have the wherewithal to support the store until it took off on its own. Now what to do?
“Coincidence” struck. An office space downtown had just become vacant. It would work very well for us if we combined the clinic and the store in the same location. That would eliminate one rent payment. The store would be the two connecting front rooms, there would be two massage rooms behind that, and still another two rooms in the rear would serve for an office and perhaps a “wet” room in the future for steam baths and such. This location had much more traffic both in cars and in people, so that boded well. Up we packed and off we moved.
The new place didn’t have the panache of the old place but what made me most uneasy was that now I wouldn’t be responsible for just the store, I’d be running the store and be the clinic receptionist again. The other receptionist had moved on to another job.
I blamed my unsettled feeling on the disappointment of having to leave our nice little first store. You’d think by this time I’d have had a better idea of what I was feeling, but not me, oh, no. So much for all the reading and studying I’d been doing about listening to your Higher Self and getting in touch with your intuition, etc.
I’ll make a long story as short as I can. We fared well at this location. The store clientele grew and we became known in various small circles as the place to find herbal teas and other unrefrigerated natural foods like granola and organic pasta, organic cookies, etc. Oh, those cookies were good!
We increased our inventory of herbs, vitamins, and supplements and added some books on herbal medicine, other forms of alternative health therapies, and new age spirituality. We stocked some CDs of meditation music as well as incense, various crystals, small handmade jewelry items, beaded bags and other similar objects.
We drew the attention of varied groups of people. Our customers might be leftover hippies, Wiccans, or just other folks with non-mainstream beliefs. They ranged from earth mothers who insisted on feeding their babies only natural foods, to Goth teens looking for incense. We did our best to accommodate special requests for things, a particular herbal tea or a specific supplement or hard-to-get incense or candles, etc.
Most of our regular massage clients had followed the clinic move so they added to the traffic, too. It was an eclectic and interesting mix of customers. Still, since we were more openly “new age” now, we lost some long-time massage clients who’d been told by their churches to stay away from us. That was sad.
In a short time the atmosphere became imbued with a sense of serene peace in spite of the increasing customer volume and sounds of traffic from the street. People sometimes came in just to soak in the calmness or to sit and talk to us for a while. I often found myself listening to them pour out their woes, fears, and troubles. It seemed that something about the place loosened whatever might have tied their tongues and they felt safe in coming to us in this way. Some people left invigorated, others left soothed, many seemed to find something beneficial we weren’t consciously providing.
One surprising customer was a young soldier who turned out to be one of my former students from the frozen blood center. We didn’t recognize each other at first. I was surprised to discover that she had been instrumental in obtaining recognition of Wicca as a legitimate religion on the local army base. She looked around, nodded admiringly, and remarked that we’d made our store a sacred space. Ah, she’d put her finger on it.
What really amazed me, though, was how my personal interest in herbs turned me into the resident expert similar to how I’d unofficially been considered one in the lab. I had reference books handy but I often surprised even myself when the answer to someone’s question would seem to just pop into my head without the need for books.
Perhaps this was what the psychic had referred to years before. I don’t know how 12th century Native American lore could apply to a current knowledge of herbs, many of which were certainly outside the ken of that medicine woman. Maybe it’s not specific knowledge that we carry from past lives but rather a certain facility. I still have no idea how to explain my ability no matter how many books on herbalism I read. I have to admit that my herbal knowledge and my finding rapport with so many customers and clients, in spite of my innate reticence and shyness, certainly evoked echoes of the kind of person I was supposed to have been in that lifetime 800 years before.
There was more going on in my life than tending the clinic/store and my course-taking. My partner was going through a stressful time at work and was unaware of how he was spiraling downward in much the same way that I had. He worked hard, overworked, actually, and was going to school as well. He thought he was doing well because he worked and tried so hard, but his job performance was slipping badly (Sound familiar?). I felt that I needed to lift my still flagging energy to support him in his free fall, while he could not be available for me in ways that I needed him to be. Imagine two people so stressed out they can barely remember their own names (I actually did forget my name one time), both trying to make something normal out of their topsy-turvy lives. We finally parted over some inconsequential thing.
I hoped it would not be a permanent split but we had a lot of things to work out, both individually and as a couple, before I felt we could be together again. I continued to live in my house in town and he invested in a doublewide mobile home that he put on some rural property we’d purchased when things were looking rosy several years before.
Then, shortly after he committed to the purchase of this home and moved into it, he was forced to retire on disability also, with a diagnosis of dementia. With less time in civil service than I’d had, the amount of his disability income was barely sufficient to cover the monthly payment on the home. There would be nothing left over for food, utilities, and other expenses.
After some deep soul-searching and discussion we decided that the best option was for me to move back in with him and put my little house up for rent. My house was finally paid for (getting that house was another of those convoluted things that would turn out so well in the long run, but who knew?) so the rent would cover much of the necessities that his annuity would not. I really wasn’t ready for us to get back together yet but I didn’t see any other option if he wasn’t to lose his house and maybe even the property.
If for any reason things didn’t go as planned, well, there was always my security house to move back into if I had to. I rented the house to a woman who’d been one of our regular store and clinic customers and who at the time “coincidentally” had to move out of her apartment. Don’t you just love the way these things work out? And for the next four years she was a reliable renter.
I moved along quite slowly in my A.U. program, with stretches of time between the courses that I knew would not permit me to finish the full curriculum in the time allotted. Not only was I reading like crazy again but many of the courses were experiential. That meant that I needed to set aside time to do things like guided meditations, various forms of artwork, dream recording and in-depth interpretation, among other activities. Some of these assignments would lead to some awesome Adventures.
Graduate work required that I do more than regurgitate data, as had my undergraduate work. I had to think. I really liked that part but thinking takes a lot of energy, both psychic and physical. While my course submissions were acceptable to my mentors, I wasn’t satisfied with the amount of time and energy I gave to them. Perhaps you wonder why that might be. After all, part time volunteer work shouldn’t be all that demanding, should it?
Well, I was no longer part time. At some point between the store’s move and becoming moderately successful, my schedule had become full time, 40 hours a week, even sometimes more. Still volunteer but full time. Not surprisingly, I was getting stressed out again.
I finally had to acknowledge that I was not getting better and I was not a fraud. My disability was not imaginary or unreal. No amount of willpower or wishful thinking was going to change that. I no longer got my full accrual of massages because I “didn’t have time.” All I wanted to do was go home and rest. I loved the store and the clinic, I loved my courses, I loved my partner, but something had to give, and it appeared that it could be me. Again.
Finally I woke up and recognized that I was back in the same trap of stress, strain, and responsibility, just with a softer atmosphere and different type of people. This time I saw it but even so, I was slow in waking up. I didn’t wait for a crash but stated my need for fewer hours and less responsibility. Thus it happened that the lady renting my house came to share my duties with me. She, too, had fibromyalgia, so the idea of free massages was enticing.
Nonetheless, I’d waited too long. Even reducing my involvement once, and then yet again, still wasn’t enough and it wasn’t too very long after that, five years after we started up the store, I simply had to leave it altogether. I knew I was on shaky ground. And did I mention that I was terrified? Scared stiff?
I felt a strange mix of disappointment and satisfaction. I was pleased that I’d recognized my needs and not let myself go too far this time, at least not to the point of a crash, but I still missed not being involved. Old habits have deep roots.
Nonetheless, I felt too tired to invest more energy in my coursework even though I now had more time. Being behind in my assignments was a stressful situation that I didn’t quite know how to address. I didn’t want to push myself harder, perhaps into another collapse, and I didn’t want to not finish. The whole situation was an exercise in learning to make choices and in discovering my limits. Life being life, I should have known I’d be given another chance.
A year or so after my departure from the store/clinic, the owner decided to sell it and my renter decided that she would move on. I chose to sell my house. That seems like it should have been a difficult decision. I’d lived in that house for nearly 30 years and even though it had been rented for the last four years, I still saw it as my refuge, someplace to which I could retreat if I ever needed it. How could I burn that bridge? But being a landlady is also stressful, always needing to be available if and when there was a problem with the house.
All the same, I was rather puzzled that I could make the decision so relatively easily and not feel more deeply the pangs of letting it go. I tend to imbue possessions with personality and then I get attached to them, so it still seems strange to me that I didn’t feel more sense of loss. But it was apparently the right time and the right thing to do. It was as if once again there was something that said, “It’s time. This is what you need to do.”
It sold quickly. I had no idea of the synchronicity that was going to be involved in this event. I realize now that letting go of this place of “refuge” also symbolized my still vague commitment to making the Journey. Once begun, there was no going back.
And I piddled along with my courses.
Six years after my initial enrollment and approaching the time limit to finish my degree requirements, A.U. announced a new program. By paying the entire remaining amount of tuition up front instead of for one course at a time or in installments as I had been, I could take two courses at a time and finish the curriculum much more expeditiously as well as avoid any future tuition increases.
My first instinct was to say, “No way!” How could I justify spending that much money and put myself at even more risk of a crash by overextending my physical and emotional abilities when I felt like I’d just narrowly escaped all of that? Still, I’d been out of the store business for a while and I hadn’t gotten involved in any more ventures in the interim. Almost all of my available time and energy could go toward my courses.
Once again, it “just happened” as I was debating with myself about this, I got a credit card promotion that offered a very low introductory rate for the life of the loan. I was getting better at noticing coincidences and that one was hard to overlook. Monthly payments and courses would end at the same time. It sounded doable. I could always revert to my old single-course status if I really had to.
I enrolled in the new program and once again entered upon something with a lot of trepidation. What made me think I could finish two courses in less time than I used to have to finish one course? Why in the world I was doing something so scary when I’d only recently come from a situation where the specter of crash had come very close? Didn’t I ever learn? I knew that I could always quit, but that was only a sop to my fears. Deep down I didn’t think I would. And that scared me even more. Had I really learned? Life requires risks and we’ll never now how far we can go until we try it. Something was saying, “It’s time. Finish this now.”
Things were stressful and yet there was always something that showed up to make life work. Not in the way I’d wanted, perhaps, and maybe not easily, but somehow things always worked out. I’d like to think it was because I’d been prudent in my earlier days and so had resources to draw upon, and that’s probably at least partly true, but I also believe there was some sort of unseen support system that seems to have been preparing for each eventuality so when it came up, there were options to choose from.
There was even the serendipity, the synchronicity, of my new educational expense for that year helping to compensate for the federal taxes on the profit I made on my house. I would be hard put to imagine a better way to have this work out. In my still vague and unconscious way I was aware of this but, characteristically, I didn’t examine it very deeply.
So, although well along on my Hero’s/Heroine’s Journey, I was finally starting to become more aware of just what I was engaged in even though it would be quite a while before I could put a name or a meaning to it. I had inadvertently stepped onto my path of Adventure when I crashed and now I was beginning to recognize signposts along the way, dim though they still were. I had no idea what might lie ahead.
Sam, hurry up and post the rest of this. I’m not one to read in chunks. I want it all, and the suspense is killing me.
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I’m working on it, Sharon! LOL The next “installment” needs some editing and rewriting before it’s ready but it won’t be long. Sam
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Sam, I didn’t know that you are a fellow fibromyalgia sufferer although, in truth, I can hardly put myself in your category. I have had a much milder version. I could continue to work, just not as aggressively as before. And I never had severe or debilitating pain. Just a dull ache and a brain cloud. The brain cloud was the worst of it…I always felt as though my head was trying to work through some indescribable film.
I moved to Maine, started reading about supplements, went organic and seem to have conquered the thing. I feel for you and admire your tenacity.
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Hi Kendra, Yes, I finally realized that my “fibro” isn’t the kind all experiencers have but then again, maybe other folk don’t need the cosmic 2 x 4 I needed to try to knock me back on track. Although there are physical changes/responses that have been shown to be present in most cases – like brain responses, substance P levels, and nerve excitation, e.g. – I’m not sure that all cases are caused by the same thing. At least for me, I believe there’s an underlying “mistake” in how we think and in what we believe about our world as we experience it. I noticed that once I began to be more open to “gray” alternative thinking instead of clinging to my rigid black and white beliefs, my body began to become more flexible as well. Still very far from what it once was but not that far from what it will be. *S* Herbs and supplements have also helped me, and my intent is to become free of the need for them, too, at some point. If the physical body is a reflection of the condition of our soul (and I believe it is), then working to bring my unconscious into consciousness where it can be worked on is the essence of healing. Since I have this blog, now I can chronicle how well that goes. Sam
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