On Being a Time Traveler (Blog #1062)

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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Healing is like the internet at my parents’ house—it takes time.

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On Being Lighter Inside (Blog #1055)

Here’s something cool that’s come as the result of the healing work I’ve been doing these last few years. Last week when I saw my therapist and she brought up the subject of money (like, how to make some), I didn’t want to crawl under the table. Two years ago, I would have. At the very least I would have listened to her suggestions and thought, That may be fine for someone else, but it’ll never work for me. But last week, strangely enough, I was like, Okay, yeah, I can do that. The cool thing being that I haven’t been consciously TRYING to get more comfortable discussing personal business strategies. At least not lately. And yet somewhere along the way I apparently lightened up around the topic.

This being said, today when my therapist encouraged me to set financial goals, I started to squirm. Now, let’s be clear, I didn’t aim for the floor. I just shifted in my seat. Still, I can see that I haven’t COMPLETELY lightened up when it comes to thinking about my financial future and how I want to get there (uh, in a limousine, please). That is, there’s still some heaviness around the subject.

Along the lines of lightness and heaviness, last night I read a short story by H.G. Wells called The Truth about Pyecraft, Pyecraft being an extremely fat chap of a man who ingests a magic potion in order to lose weight. Alas, the magic potion turns out to be a stickler for words. Instead of losing FAT, Pyecraft only loses weight, like the thing that, along with gravity, holds you down. Still the same size as he was before, Pyecraft begins to float, all the way to the ceiling. Of course, this is a damn nuisance, not at all what he’d hoped for. And yet he can’t undo the spell, so he does the next best thing: he puts lead in his underwear. The next thing you know, he’s back on the ground. Still big as a barn, he’s actually light as a feather. THIS is the truth about Pyecraft, the truth only he and one other person know.

And me and you too, of course.

I’ve been thinking about this story a lot today, about how it’s really quite literal. Not in a physical sense, but in a psychic sense. That is, regardless of how much our scales say we weigh, we all have histories and issues that weigh us down and cause us to be mentally and emotionally heavy. THIS is the truth about Pyecraft, that you can’t judge a person’s psychic weight by their body. Someone could be the size of a junior high cheerleader and have the weight of the world on their shoulders. Conversely, someone could weigh four hundred pounds and not be worried about a thing.

More and more, I’m more concerned with psychic weight than I am with physical weight. Not that I want to let myself go, but my psychic weight has caused me more issues than my physical weight ever has. My issues around money, being good enough, being terrified (of life)–these are the things that have weighed me down, really kept me from soaring. This, I assume, is the case for all of us, that it’s not what’s visible that keeps us from moving forward, but rather what’s invisible. Our secrets. Fortunately, there are ways to lighten up, to heal. Especially in today’s world of abundant and mostly free information. (For those interested, here’s a website I ran across recently that lists books and therapies about healing trauma, many of which have been helpful to me.) Now, obviously you have to put in the time. You’ve gotta do The Hard Work. But it’s worth it. Any effort you put to being lighter inside is worth it. It’s the difference between It’ll never work and Yeah, I can do that. And that’s everything.

Quotes from CoCo (Marcus)

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It's enough to sit in, and sometimes drag ass through, the mystery.

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