It’s a funny thing, writing about my love of bodies, when this body I live in has experienced massive amounts of pain.
I was nine years old when I started to get migraines and stabbing stomach pains.
By age 12 I had developed chronic daily headaches (CDH). Every hour of my life consisted of a background headache or migraine.
If you’ve had a migraine, you know it’s not just a headache, but a sickness that permeates your entire body. These migraines lasted days or weeks at a time. Pain forced me to leave high school. I was put on several medications - too many medications, and was ordered into multiple treatments that went nowhere. I was unable to continue with daily life and became tethered to my bed.
I was told by two migraine specialists (one who was a guest on The View!) that I had the worst case of migraine they had ever seen in a youth.
It was a soul-destroying and achingly isolating period of my life. The school system didn’t want a sick kid in it. The western medical system didn’t seem to know what to do with me.
On my ancestor altar sits Henrietta Hall, my maternal great, great-grandmother. Migraines have different causes and triggers. Migraines are often hereditary, meaning that migraines are inherited in families.
When Henrietta experienced migraines, my great, great-grandfather would lovingly brush her hair.
My heart warms when I think of this, and how much the caring touch of my partner eases me, too.
My mother, her grandmother and great-grandmother have carried the pain of migraines with them. I wonder about this family lineage, and what we may be carrying from our cultures and our environment that have made our bodies more sensitive to migraines.
DIAGNOSIS AND THE STORIES THEY TOLD ME
Diagnosis is a funny thing. It validates your experience and helps you access the medical system. It also becomes part of your identity.
My diagnosis trapped me in a story of migraine with their ending. Western medicine issued a sort of spell on me, a kind of anti-medicine that I would have rather not ingested.
What the medical system told me was I was anti-social and trying to get out of school. I was too sensitive and depressed. I would always have migraines, unless they could find a pharmaceutical drug that worked for me. Other healing methods won’t work for me. Anything that wasn’t western medicine was frivolous, useless nonsense.
After too many drugs to count, my Neurologist recommended Methadone, which is an opioid, like heroin or opium.
I swallowed Methadone twice a day from age 19 through 24. During the time I experienced some of my worst sickness. It felt like every organ tissue throbbed and radiated pain. I was nauseated, fatigued, and severely depressed.
I acknowledge that many folks have been helped by the medical system. I am glad it’s there for a broken arm and an exam that may save my life. And for those like me who’ve experienced a lot of medical harm and trauma (I do not use that word lightly), we are not all able to leave the western medical system.
But there is no cure for migraine and refusing treatment wouldn’t have made it worse for me. I felt pressured to go along with their treatments in order to continue receiving medical care. I was not going to die from migraine, but if I stayed, I felt their treatments may kill me. I couldn’t live in such a tortuous body any longer.
At age 24 I left the doctor that was prescribing me Methadone and found an energy healer.
As you do.
BODY AS AN ENTRY INTO OTHERWORLDS AND LOVE SPELLS
Pippa was the most authentic witches I’ve ever met.
Pippa was an incredible energy healer with a degree in psychology. I met Pippa in 2005 at a Yoga class she was assisting. Pippa resembled my grandmother, who passed away from a brain tumor when I was 19. She had the same wrinkled, fair skin and freckles, with short red hair and sky-blue eyes.
We went for walks through the forests of the Pacific Northwest. This is where Pippa would tell me the most wonderful stories about the Otherworld, the Celtic world for the realms with deities and the dead. Pippa told me about the Beings that lived with the cedar trees and underneath the sword ferns. Pippa thought we were in a mesh of other energies, and that most of what I was feeling rooted in my own body had been seeded somewhere else. Meaning, the pain I was experiencing was not all mine.
After spending some time together, I started a weekly adventure of energy healing sessions with Pippa. In our sessions, information flowed through Pippa and I would sense it physically. She was not touching my body but working through distance in the same room. I could barely keep my eyes open or take in with any conscious effort the words that she was speaking. I let go of my thinking brain and took in what Pippa said through my body.
It didn’t matter whether the stories Pippa told me was true or not. What mattered was the doorways she opened for me. These doorways into my body resembled the otherworld she had showed me in the forest.
Pippa was one of the first people to show me how to feel my body. I had taken Pilates training and memorized anatomy. I had some knowledge about movement. But only knowing the anatomy names was not enough. Pippa taught me that to know my body was to feel my body, not simply know the names of “things”. I was introduced to how to communicate with the essence of my body’s organs and other tissues.
In our first session together, Pippa sat in a chair across from me and told me a story about my liver. As Pippa “read” what she felt from my liver, the right side of my torso throbbed. Entirely new sensations, language, information, and expression arose from my body. My body’s tissues were not just dead words that they showed me in anatomy books or were spoken at me in doctor’s offices. My liver is living dynamic tissue.
My nervous system receives information from my entire body and the world around me, making maps and telling stories. My cells themselves have a story of how they were formed and how they function. I could get to know their stories, with support from teachers like Pippa.
In a strange bit of luck, Vancity Bank decided to give someone like me, a chronically ill disabled kid on Disability Benefits, a small bank loan. Pippa became my mentor.
Layers of pain increased in my body as we began this deep work together. But as months passed, the migraines disappeared and other pains that had possessed me faded into a manageable background noise…
I feel hesitant after writing this last sentence.
It is wanted and needed to hear stories of transformation and the possibility of healing. I wrote in this article, What Does it Meant to Heal?, that my relationship with the word “healing” is complex.
Finding significant relief from years of chronic headaches and migraines isn’t the end of my story. My body continues to befuddle me all the time! No matter how many hours, years, and decades I put into understanding bodies, they remind me that they are a mystery you cannot solve. They remind me that I cannot control them.
Be a willing participant or resist them. I don’t judge either way. Bodies are freaking hard. Living in a body in this world with systems of oppression that uphold and maintain war, genocide, racism, the gender binary, heterosexism, sexism and ableism makes just existing so painful.
What I have learned, living in a body with pain most of my life, is that my environment and how I am responding to life completely effects my pain. Depending on if I have secure housing, financial support, friends close by, live close to nature and community - all of this influences the pain I am in.
Western Modernity suffocates us in individualism and teaches dominance, body hierarchy and separation. Indigenous knowledge and many cultures around the world understands that we are not separate from our ancestors. We are in a web of other bodies and consciousnesses, the living and dead. What has happened in the past is living with us today. What we do now is already affecting future generations.
What I received most of all from Pippa, was the understanding that illness is never created solely in the individual’s body. Our work together was not to “heal” me, but in a way to create new stories about the pain which I could take out of me and put into another context.
For a long time I carried the weight that pain was the fault of my body and mind. I saw many frustrated psychiatrists in my youth. I would be frustrated too, working like they did, through the mind and not the body and with no way to address the social determinates that cause disease.
Healing cannot be done alone because illness doesn’t belong to the individual.
It’s fascinating to me now, that all of this was never part of the stories the western medical system told me about pain. They made me the sole, lonely character.
THE THINGS THEY DIDN’T TELL ME
Doctors and other medical care providers didn’t tell me many things I wish they had.
They didn’t tell me that illness will make me honest about dependency. I will need others to survive. I will in turn support others in their evitable illness and death processes.
They didn’t tell me enough that my illness wasn’t my fault. MY ILLNESS IS NOT MY FAULT. The society I live in doesn’t have the social supports needed for people like me who live with chronic pain and illness.
They forgot to say that they aren’t the experts of me and they don’t know everything. They are often wrong. I understand why they felt they had to be the expert. I understand why they shoved me out of their offices so quickly and kept forgetting to read their notes before our appointments.
They didn’t tell me that I’d be given the unfortunate but empowering task of being my own advocate.
There is no satisfying ending to my story of pain.
Pain arises and falls and my life continues on. Life is cyclical and so is healing. As with the seasons and the planetary cycles and oceanic tides, pain comes in waves as does joy, sensuality and pleasure, sadness and grief. I think maturity means learning how to carry all of these emotions at the same time. Being in a body with illness reminds me of my mortality and how impermeant this state of being is.
What no one could have told me, was that I’d grow up to develop a love-affair with bodies and write strange articles about embodying your embryology.
As you do.
What stories about disease or illness have you carried that are not your own?
What pain have you carried that is not your own?
What can you add to the stories about your illness?
What stories need to be composted?
This article has been inspired by the incredible writer and speaker, Sophie Strand.
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