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Windowsill Broccoli Stqrts
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Growth is a process. Change is a process.
When I plant my garden as I have done over the past month, I consistently underestimate how long it will take to get that done, how much effort. And this year I have needed to be cautious about overdoing. After gardening a few hours, I stop to let my body regroup, hold off to do more tomorrow. I used to do full-day gardening intensives. Can’t now.
But what’s on my mind is that I don’t get up the morning after planting tomatoes and expect a harvest, despite buying pretty robust starter plants. In fact, I pinch off blossoms and baby tomatoes when planting so the seedling can use all its energy to establish itself in its new environment. For growth.
Garden metaphors are often used in considering the process of life and healing and they are apt. My point might be somewhat different than what you normally hear about planting and nurturing seeds. My focus here is on the reality of process. Planting is an event, more or less. The rest is a process.
Growth is a process. Change is a process.
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The healing process is rich with miraculous experiences, surprising awarenesses that deepen your relationship with self, with life.
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Transplanted broccoli. Would love for it to be ready for harvest now.
Waiting is tough. But there is magic in the growth process.
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If I start off on a healing journey, or healing/mentoring relationship and expect immediate results, I am likely to be frustrated and think it's not working, that I’m not responding, or, as a practitioner, that the sessions I’m offering aren’t effective. But there’s no real way to know how well anyone’s BodyMind will accept change, where it will reject possibilities, where it will suddenly flourish, then pause so that change looks like it isn’t happening any longer. In fact, the older we get, the more problematic this becomes because we are so fixed in our ways.
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Healing can be a slog
Knowing the process of gardening, the risks and challenges, doesn’t keep me from planting one. For me, it’s an essential practice. It helps ground me into life, something especially important after the physical challenges I experienced during the winter. That was a long, difficult season, one when I had to keep on keeping on, believing healing was possible while at the same time wondering particularly if my right leg was ever going to recover if I would regain the ability to walk with ease. I ran through a glass door at nine and fell on the glass, slicing my legs deeply. The surgeon who stitched me up had just finished stitching someone else and when he got to me, sometime after midnight, he was likely not at his best. He gave my parents instructions for recovery but as far as I know, did not suggest rehab, or if he did, my parents disregarded that. All these decades later, my leg is still screaming for the attention it didn’t get then.
The body remembers. Fascia — the web of connective tissue that defines our physicality — remembers and expresses all our experiences, but tangles them together. My cranial bones still hunger for the fascial unwinding that didn’t happen after my brutally slow birth, a process that certainly seemed to indicate I had changed my mind about sliding into the world. Even things that happen in utereo are held and remembered.
Which helps to explain why healing can be such a slog. But the process is also rich with miraculous experiences, surprising awarenesses that inevitably deepen your relationship with self, with life. When connective tissue unwinding in my foot suddenly pops all my cranial bones, that visceral experience of my body’s fascial web is pure magic. Still. After years of giving and receiving this work. Because I can’t predict what will happen, nor can my practitioner. He wasn’t aiming to adjust my cranial bones. Or my sternum. Or my thoracic spine. Or certainly the opposite ankle.
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String Beans, ready to harvest, 2020.
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Postcript . . .
BTW: pretty funny. The Oxford Dictionary online has two possible definitions of fascia:
a. detachable covering for the front part of a mobile phone.
b. a wooden board or another flat piece of material such as that covering the ends of rafters/ a further piece of chipboard acts as a fascia to disguise the ceiling fixtures.
I promise that neither of those is the fascia I’m describing. This from Wikipedia is close but still woefully inadequate:
Fascia is a thin casing of connective tissue that surrounds and holds every organ, blood vessel, bone, nerve fiber and muscle in place. The tissue does more than provide internal structure; fascia has nerves that make it almost as sensitive as skin.
The best comes from Tom Myers, an expert on this topic. Read it here and perhaps explore some of his videos. He says our muscles are zip codes in the fascial continuity.
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Try it . . .
BodyMind Spirit Healthcare: on Zoom or in-person for vaccinated, returning clients.
- Schedule a 20-minute call to chat about what's challenging your health. Or, request a free intuitive "Epi" (Epigenetics) health scan to help identify those challenges. The best way to do that is to text: 406-920-2691. Let me know three times you have available and I will either confirm one of those or make an alternate suggestion.
- You may also schedule through Schedulicity. (BTW, BodyTalk IS effective at a distance. Read how and why, here).
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