On Being a Time Traveler (Blog #1062)

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This afternoon I saw my upper cervical care doctor and told him I’ve been out of sorts this last week–my skin’s flared up, my sciatic nerve’s been “talking to me,” my shoulder’s been pinched. “You probably need an adjustment,” he said. “Let’s put your head on straight.” (Ha.) This after his telling me two weeks ago that I needed an adjustment but that he wanted to wait, to see if my body would correct things on its on. (This was like a dare, I guess.) And whereas things were better last week, they were–apparently–crap today. “We want to push your body to take care of itself so it doesn’t get dependent on the adjustment, but sometimes we push a little TOO much,” he said.

Ugh. Balance is such a delicate thing.

Thankfully, I’ve felt better since the adjustment. Immediately after, I felt my shoulder relax. Not completely, mind you, but some. So far, this has been my experience with healing. Things get better–some. Then the slip back–a bit. Then they get better–some more. I’ve felt and witnessed some amazing things in my body and have ultimately found myself going in the right direction, but it’s not like I feel fabulous all over every minute of every day. Still, I’ve felt fabulous enough, especially compared to how I used to feel, that I absolutely believe my body is hard at work and can turn this ship around. My job, of course, is to do everything I can to support us and, perhaps more importantly, frickin’ be patient.

You know, some ships turn around faster than others.

More and more I believe that my body is on my side, that, given the right help, it’s completely willing and able to let go, change, and heal. Granted, figuring out what the right help is can be frustrating. Having tried dozens of different therapies and modalities over the years, I know. Whenever I have a pain it can feel hopeless. And yet time and time again, especially lately, I’ve witnessed my body rise to the occasion both in the moment and over the course of days, weeks, months. (Which, incidentally, in the grand scheme of things is no time at all.) So I can’t say that miracles aren’t possible because I’ve experienced them.

Caroline Myss says a miracle is something that happens faster than your watch. To me this means that whenever something happens faster than we THINK it should or are accustomed to, that’s miraculous. This is why I say I’ve experienced miracles. Because although the healing I’ve been experiencing lately is taking time (just as everything on planet earth does), it’s taking LESS time than it was before. For example, yesterday–in an hour with my new therapist–I processed and healed with my mind and body a topic that I’d previously–over the course of six years with my therapist and this blog–only processed with my mind. Was it instant? No, but it was pretty damn fast. Pretty damn miraculous if you ask me.

As far as I can tell, a situation like this is the closest any of us will ever get to time travel. What I mean is that every single person on this planet gets 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365.25(ish) days a year. But not every single person experiences the time they’ve been given the same way. Better said, not everyone has the same relationship with time. What I mean is that if it takes one person six years to process a trauma and another person one hour, isn’t time moving more slowly for the first person and more quickly for the second? And if things used to happen slowly for you and now they’re happening faster, hasn’t time effectively sped up for you, even though you’d never know it to look at a calendar? Even though you could never prove it to anyone else?

Something else Caroline says is that the more psychic WEIGHT you have, the longer you have to WAIT for things (a new job, a new lover, a healing) to happen. Weight=wait. This is why a master like Jesus could make things happen in an instant. Faster than your watch. Because he wasn’t heavy, he wasn’t psychically anchored to the past or the future (which, by the way, don’t exist right here, right now). This is why he taught his disciples to give no thought for tomorrow, to stay in present time. Think of a ship that’s bogged down with cargo. The heavier the cargo, the slower the ship. But throw the crap overboard and watch the ship fly. Less weight=less wait.

Along these lines, and maybe I watched too many episodes of Quantum Leap when I was a kid, I’m beginning to see each of us as time machines, always and forever determining the rate at which change happens in our lives. For example, earlier today I told a friend about once when I left a relationship because I found out there were too many lies, too many drugs involved. Well, I had some shit at this person’s house, and it took me 48 hours to gather it up. This after years of observing bad behavior and not putting the pieces together. Now, I hope, I’d be out of there in five minutes. Or never get involved in the first place. In this sense we truly do determine WHERE we as time travelers want to GO by deciding how much TIME we’re willing to spend there. How do you get out of a bad situation faster? Easy. Throw your personal crap overboard and, in so doing, change yourself and your life (two things you can’t separate). That’s the damn deal. Time only changes when you do.

Quotes from CoCo (Marcus)

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No one is immune from life’s challenges.

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The Place Where Quantum Leaps Occur (Blog #339)

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This afternoon I read about fifty pages in a book called Reality Is Not What It Seems by Carlo Rovelli. The book is about quantum physics, and I stopped reading it (for now) when my brain melted and ran out of my ears. Seriously, the book is well-written, but the subject matter (get it–physics–matter?) is dense.

Apparently, part of quantum theory states that electrons orbiting an atom can change orbits, much like if you were orbiting the sun on Earth then suddenly found yourself orbiting the sun on Saturn. But here’s the deal–electrons don’t take a bus, or even a straight or curved line to get from one orbit to another. They’re just in one place and then the next. This phenomenon is what’s properly called a “quantum leap.” (And here I thought “quantum leap” was a television show starring Scott Bakula.)

Holy atomic hopscotch, Batman.

One of the big names in quantum theory is a guy named Werner Heisenberg. He’s dead now but was the one who came up with the idea that in between being at one point and another, an electron is “nowhere.” He formulated this theory one night while in a dark parking lot. There were a few street lamps around, and he saw a man walking across the pavement. He could see the man under one lamp and then the next, but not in between them. Of course, he imagined the man’s trajectory in the dark spaces, but it was as if the man simply disappeared then reappeared elsewhere. So Heisenberg thought, What if subatomic particles behaved like that?

Well, it turns out they do. Crazy, right?

Recently I asked my therapist for her opinion about a psychology book I’d just finished reading. Rather than give me a direct answer, she said, “Let me ask you a question. Do you think I’m more competent than you are–at life?”

“Well,” I kind of sputtered, “No. I don’t actually.”

“Good,” she said. “I’m glad you can see reality.”

My therapist went on to say that in terms of her profession, she obviously has a specific set of skills that I don’t, just like I have a specific set of skills that she doesn’t when it comes to dancing. So in these aspects, perhaps one of us is more competent than the other. Sometimes one person “knows” more than the next. But my therapist’s point was that when it comes to handling life in general, she and I equal. I said, “My only hesitation in answering earlier was that at one time I would have said you were more competent at life than I was.”

Y’all, I can’t say when this change in my thinking took place, I just know that it did. At one time I thought anyone who was smarter, richer, more talented, or better looking than me was better than me overall. But now–I’m glad to say–that thinking seems utterly ridiculous. This shift in perspective is so great, in fact, that I feel like an electron that’s made a quantum leap. It’s as if I’ve suddenly jumped from one orbit, one way of being in the world, to another. Quite literally, I’m on a different path. When I think about Heisenberg’s parking lot/street lamp story, it really does feel as if I used to be “there,” then I was “nowhere,” and now I’m “here.”

(I don’t know what my deal with quotation marks is tonight.)

Granted, I realize this isn’t how the changes in our lives and thought processes actually occur. Presto, change-o. Despite the fact that I can remember one point of light in my life and compare it to another, current point of light in my life and feel as if I’ve made a quantum leap, I can also remember walking through the dark in order to get from where I was to where I am now. But I can’t say when the shift actually happened. I’m glad I did, but I can’t say when exactly I stepped into this current point of light.

This is the beauty of walking through the dark.

If you want my honest opinion, some days I think I’m still walking through the dark. I mean, life has been a real bitch lately. As an episode of Breaking Bad points out, sometimes you’re looking for a light at the end of the tunnel, and all you get is more tunnel. Maybe it’s possible to be in the light and in the dark at the same time. Going back to quantum theory, there’s something called indeterminancy. Inderterminancy states that when, say, an electron does move from one point to another, it doesn’t follow a predictable path. In fact, it behaves as if it were following all possible paths. (Wrap your head around that.) But the point is that when an electron is in between points, when it’s “nowhere,” you don’t “know where” it’s going to end up next. So perhaps this is the beauty of walking through the dark, of those times in our lives when it feels as if we too are nowhere. Nowhere, it turns out, isn’t a bad place to be. Rather, it’s the place where quantum leaps occur, the place where changes can happen in an instant, the place where all possible outcomes are exactly that–possible.

Quotes from CoCo (Marcus)

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Take your challenges and turn them into the source of your strengths.

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