Baby Ziggy and the Bison Bone

When our dog Ziggy was a very little puppy, we took him to the local animal feed store for some treats and toys. We piled pig ears and training treats and Kongs into the basket. He was all for it. Wriggling so much that he was turning his teeny little body into a furry horseshoe as his butt jostled close to his head in pure excitement and true exuberance. We got to an aisle with elk antlers, which were new to me as a dog owner but the one he was given was already a hit, so I thought we’d get some more. As I was sucked in by the various bone offerings on the shelf, I noticed a bison bone. I held it up to his little face to sniff and he yelped, tucked his tiny tail between his legs, and RAN away from me. I laughed at the time, realizing that Ziggy was already imprinted with the message of whom to fear and whom to stay away from. He already knew that this animal was bigger and more powerful than him. This information was clearly coded quite deeply in his emotional DNA.

How do I know that I know things when I’m often unsure of their beginning in my consciousness? Sometimes, I’ll have a moment where something is so obvious and clear to me, yet I know I’ve never been faced with it before. I don’t usually question this wisdom until I see it in my kids. Like the time my youngest started folding the word ‘muggering’ into his repertoire. He’d say “stop muggering me” or don’t be a “muggering.” Finally, we looked it up one day. Sure enough, muggering means to annoy and fester. Yeah, his usage wasn’t always correct (“don’t be a muggering”) but at four years old, this wasn’t uncommon for him. The fact that he was ever even using it correctly at all, meant that I had to be bearing witness to his immeasurable and inexplicable wisdom. This isn’t a piece about past lives or karmic odysseys. It is simply to say that I believe we are all fumbling to put sharp points to the notions, ideas, and knowledge we are already equipped with when we enter this crazy world because we know we know more, we just don’t know how or what to do with it, or more importantly, where it came from. And while this last question may not seem material, if you’re me, you spend a lot of time in the headspace that ponders this in order to bring clarity to all the possibilities inherent within that answer.

So, what if we just blindly accept this concept and allow it to serve us when we’re at our lowest and most desperate points? This is where you find me while I’m putting these thoughts to paper. I’ve been ailing for over a year with symptoms that resemble what it feels like when you’re first getting the flu or a very bad cold. It starts with the aches and fatigue, which then turns into a tight chest and mucusy buildup in my sinuses and lungs. Last stage is that I spend about a week or two coughing up less than pretty remnants of the episode while I wait for the next one to begin because this happens around twice a month for me. For over a year. At first, I found myself in urgent care settings as I was sick during the holidays of 2019. Then I started seeing a GP who was convinced it was either seasonal allergies or it was in my head. He actually said this. I’d never had seasonal allergies in my 41 years on this planet, but I allowed for the idea that it was possible because I knew this couldn’t be in my head. When the wheezing got so bad that I couldn’t breathe without laboring, I found myself in the office of a pulmonologist doing a breathing test, the results of which came back “within normal range.” So, the Pulmonology NP maintained my GP’s hypothesis that I had developed seasonal allergies and prescribed a daily regimen that included a steroid nose spray, antihistamine tablet, and a preventative steroid inhaler to stave off the wheezing. Smack in the middle of this part of my journey working with the pulmonologist, the Coronavirus outbreak takes place. The world is locked down within a matter of weeks and I’m now terrified of getting a virus that will piggyback and exacerbate my current symptoms, amplifying them to the point of hospitalization or worse, expiration.

Also, during this unbelievable time in our world’s history, my family and I move 1600 miles away to start a new life in Idaho. The move is a blur. My sister-in-law comes to help us make the trek from Texas to her home in Utah. After spending a couple weeks with her family, we would complete the final leg of our trip and drive to Idaho. While we are with her family, the kids are busy exploring their cousin’s rooms and pulling apart, toy by toy, every inch of their basement and playroom. The adults take turns napping just about every day for she is battling Epstein barre syndrome and me this undiagnosed nag that allows me to neither rest nor rally. I don’t have an episode the entire time I’m there and start to wonder if maybe this thing is behind me. Turns out it’s all a mirage. My body is just waiting until we close on the new house so we could have a full-blown Goliath sized episode in our new abode. Until then, I lean on the caffeine in Diet Dr Pepper and comfort of junk food to get me through the daylight hours. I take the kids for ice cream every day and we laugh as often as possible, even when doing so makes me feel like a traitor to my own experience. I’m scared of the impending physical struggle of having to unpack and sort out 2400 square feet of new house while settling kids into a life where they don’t get to meet neighbors or play at parks because we are only four weeks into this pandemic so life is on pause everywhere around the globe, even in Idaho which we promised them to be full of adventure and excitement. Her family sees us to Idaho and they all help unpack the house. It’s such a welcome surprise to have family help like that. It was foreign to us up to that point. When they shoved off to head back home, I felt it coming. I pushed it aside with a swift “not today, ok? Not today.” And in the relegated corner of my life, this thing grew in size and power.

In Idaho, I start seeing a functional medicine dr who ran all the labs and drew all the blood and looked at all the things. He immediately saw some data points that needed to be addressed from the standpoint of deficiencies and dysbiosis, but nothing like the smoking gun I was expecting now that I was seeing the type of dr I knew would look at my case holistically. I bought all the supplements, I took all the vitamin D, I drank all the concoctions. And like with all the specialists I had seen up to this point, I was checking all the boxes. When the episodic nature of my life found me exhausted and desperate, and there were no other boxes to check, I made an appt with an energy healer. She had crystals all around me and her loving dog at my side while she extracted all the ancestral energies wreaking havoc on my soul and cut cords with the inappropriate energetic relationships that were tethered to me but not welcome to be as such. It was a wild and oddly comforting experience. But then…because I knew I wasn’t yet hitting the core of it all…I sent a text to a healer I had known since I was pregnant with my middle child. She was my chiropractor, or so I thought, but she had also been the role of therapist, confidant, hole plugger, answer teaser and mind mender when I would show up in her office and start crying at the mere sight of her kind eyes and open arms. I told her it was a text I knew I needed to send for at least 6 months. Why wait so long you wonder? I guess because I had to miss Christmas and daily cuddle time and girl scout cookie season and dinner every night to really know that this thing was relentless and that I was powerless over it. I had to rush out of a recital because I couldn’t fake a smile any longer with my breath stolen from me the way it was, only to find relief in an inhaler which was causing my whole body to break out in hives. I had to ignore friends and commitments and dates planned for months on end to feel the weight of this thing. It was the summation of all this suffering and missing out that had to happen for me to respect the power of the lesson before me.

My sweet healing sage responded lovingly, as I knew she would, and we set up our first call. I told her all about the past year, my symptoms, and the fallout this had all taken on me as a mother as well as on my three little humans who were making the best of a very crummy situation but who didn’t deserve this version of their mother, lying couch side while they fend for themselves and keep their littlest sibling entertained so that I can attempt to get a few more winks in, falsely believing this would recharge me to make it through the rest of the day. She helped me understand in that first conversation that my body had, in fact, birthed a brilliant red herring in an effort to get me to look inward. Her words knocked around in my ears while the message was attempting to find its home in my heart. It all made sense. But it’s explanation made nothing of an illumination to the solution. How was I supposed to distill this into a plan that led to my health and liberty from this selfish thief who had literally taken my breath away for the past year. I sit with those words as I write them and I understand, in new ways, the symbolism of such a theft. There was, indeed, an awe-inspiring lesson in this struggle of mine. Because, as it were, I was to start listening to myself first if I wanted to breathe…if I wanted to live. The sweet sage I chose to turn to during this impossibly difficult time imparted the wisdom of the inner knowing. She maintained that my body knew the way to garner my attention and that my heart intuitively held the answers. She said it was screaming to me that it needed me to stop and look more closely. Look at all the parts, examine all the things, feel all the feelings. To use this experience as food to nourish my soul. Not only to nourish but to drive it toward a path more in line with that which makes my face smile and my heart sing. So, bit by stumbling bit, I started to take bites of this wisdom and metabolize it in my daily practices. I heard her voice ringing in my ears when I had what was about to be the start of another episode. I turned inward. I listened wholeheartedly to my inner compass, me heart. I parted the Red Sea of unfolded laundry and tasks unfinished to sit down on the couch with a novel I had been devouring in the odd 10 and 15 minute increments I was able to steal for myself in the weeks before. This time, I sat with it for an indeterminable amount of time. Yes, it meant my kids were on iPads so that I could have this time to myself uninterrupted. And when I felt guilty about this, my healing sage reminded me that the kids are gonna be alright. And moreover, this was a bit like how they encourage adults on planes to put their oxygen masks on first before helping those around them. Because if you’re not well enough yourself, you’ll never be able to help anyone else. If I wanted to avail myself to my children, I was going to have to breathe deeply first. And so I did. And then I did this again the next day. And the next. Until I was out of the grips of that most recent episode trying to claim me. As I write this, I’m a week out from that experience. So in no way am I pretending to have seen the illumination I was hoping for when I first started on my journey inward. I’m not the apostle of self-love or self-healing. Not even close. I’m just acquainting myself with the feelings of rapture that are born out of what I formerly regarded as selfishness but what I now know to be the lifeline and connection to the version of myself I absolutely need to be if I have any hopes of doing more than just surviving life. Of late, I’ve taken a long bath, baked cookies for myself, stared out the window, read my book, read my book, and read my book some more. I’m a lover of words so taking in the written word is for my commentary on the human experience what sunlight and photosynthesis is for plants. I will continue do all of these things with faith, above all else, that I’ll be able to clap back when my soul is served up another sojourn in the land of the unwell. In the meantime, I’ll keep practicing loving on myself.

One serendipitous sidenote: while on this wild ride of physical pandemonium and learning to love the call inward to my own wisdom, the universe has been kind and sage enough to serve up to me various examples, stories, podcasts and movies wherein the lesson is exactly what I’m chewing on at the moment. Stories of people rendered physically defeated by undiagnosable ailments which left them fraught and seemingly helpless. A chef who couldn’t see for months, only to find out that the stress that comes from his perfectionism and lack of self-care were his predators. A musical conductor whose sister helped her understand that she was hospitalized and unable to move because she had not completed the stress response cycle and her body was revolting. The list of examples go on, but it is with sincerity that I intend to draw upon their experiences as I amend my own story. To learn to look to myself for the next right thing to do. To listen to my inner voice when I’m lost. To lean on my heart for the answer when I’m struggling.

And so it seems, as I took the long way to my conclusion that like baby Ziggy, I have evidence of similar imprints on my emotional DNA that have the potential to lead me to safety and growth beyond the threats of capable predators. When learning the concepts of turning inward and listening to my body for the answers, it was as though I was re-learning them. They weren’t foreign to me. This language wasn’t in a tongue I’d never heard but rather appeared before me like a hieroglyph that I’d studied in some other lifetime. Perhaps written by a woman who came before me, who birthed an ancestor of mine, and who passed on this lesson for me to inherit. In this lifetime, in my case, the very capable predator was dressed up as physical symptoms refusing to go unnoticed…until I remembered the lesson of the bison bone. My growth and survival, as it turns out, relies upon my turning toward what I already know, using the lessons of those physically manifested cues as a roadmap. Perceiving them to be not so much as muggering me but rather as brightening my sensory experience so that I can find my way home.

To be continued…