On Healing

“Before you heal someone, ask if he is willing to give up on the things that make him sick.” — Hippocrates

I spent my childhood in and out of doctors’ offices.

One of my distinctive memories of third grade was a get-to-know-you activity the first week of school. The assignment was show and tell, to bring an item to share with the class and tell a story about our summer vacation. Many of my classmates brought in pictures of their pets or their families. Some brought souvenirs from trips they’d taken. Still others held up trinkets and crafts they’d made in summer camp.

What I chose to share was different.

When the teacher called my name, I slid out of my desk and walked to the front of the classroom clutching a manilla envelope to my chest. I opened it up, gingerly pinching the corner of radiograph film that revealed an MRI image of my brain.

I told the class about my summer vacation, about seeing a neurologist, and all about how he’d put dye into my blood to take these cool pictures. I bragged that I got to speak to the doctor through a walkie-talkie microphone as I lay in the tube that whirred and clanged around my head. To me, these images were a treasure, a rare and precious window into the mysterious inner workings of my own body.

It would be many years later before I came to understand the worry on my teacher’s face, her furrowed brow and terse “thank you” when I finished as she called on the next student to share.

From a very young age, my experience of my body was confusing. The discomfort I felt was beyond the words and language available to me at the time, an experience I myself couldn’t understand, much less convey to the adults around me. I only knew that something felt wrong. It was as if my body was bound by an invisible straight jacket, compressed and constricted to the point where sometimes it was hard to breathe.

I couldn’t have been more than 5 years old the first time I fainted.

It was an omen that heralded a childhood marred by migraine headaches, sensory confusion and nerve pain, and often, an inexplicable, yet total loss of consciousness. And you can probably imagine the problems this caused for the people who loved me. My symptoms perplexed my family as much as a diagnosis eluded my doctors.

The most painful part of it, however, wasn’t just physical — it was emotional. I felt different, set apart from my peers, jealous of their apparent ease with each other and in the world. I learned to fit in by devoting myself to studying their behaviors, mimicking what they did and said while dismissing those aspects of my body’s experience that were too confusing to put into words. Puberty was a crucible that only deepened these patterns, and by the time I graduated high school, I’d learned to navigate the world by vehemently, sometimes ferociously, upholding the mental wall I’d created between myself and my body’s pain.

In college, a full-blown nerve attack landed me in the ER. A blinding, searing pain spasmed from my tailbone through my pelvic floor, radiating up my spine through the base of my skull and jaw. In an instant I was unconscious, floating above and away from the pain.

It was the first of many more episodes like this that would follow.

I used to keep a file of doctor’s notes and records from this era of my life, variations on the same theme: 20-something female presents with syncope, cause unknown.

After college, as I turned my attention to launching a career, it became a necessity to become even more adept at compartmentalizing my pain. I learned to grit my teeth and get through each day, only to burst into tears from the pent-up pressure of it all at the end of my workdays. As I chased new opportunities that led me to new cities, I tried again and again to start over, some part of me trying to outrun the pain that plagued my body.

Each new city brought new doctors, new specialists, and new tests to try to figure out something — anything — I could do to alleviate the pain. The neurologists examined my nervous system, the cardiologists evaluated my heart and circulatory system, the ob/gyns examined my endocrine and reproductive systems, and the therapists helped me navigate the emotional frustration and complexity of it all.

But wherever I went, the nerve attacks and fainting episodes followed. I began to wonder if I was crazy, if — as one doctor suggested — it was psychosomatic, entirely made up in my head.

I recently picked up one doctor’s account of his experiences and studies in the field of spontaneous healing and radical remission from terminal disease. In the book, he details the story of Juniper Stein, a woman whose story is so similar to my own, I could only weep with recognition at her symptoms and also with relief, of feeling that much less alone in my own experience.

And this being a book about spontaneous healing, her story is an outlier, a case that would otherwise be dismissed by most practitioners in our current medical paradigm.

In reading Juniper’s story, as well as the steps she took to heal, the parallels to my own experience are remarkable.

In the face of a diagnosis from which there was no return, Juniper began to experiment, fumbling toward anything that helped alleviate her suffering. She discovered yoga, and through her practice began to tweak and then overhaul her nutrition and diet. She abandoned the pain pills that only masked her symptoms and began working with an intuitive bodyworker instead to address her physical pain. She quit her job, moved her family to an environment more conducive to healing, and one step at a time, began to reorganize her entire life around her health and well-being.

In chronicling her story, the author makes it a point to share that while in hindsight, her path may look linear, it practice it was anything but. “Nobody told her to do any of it,” he writes. “She came to it all on her own, through trial and error, intuition, and developing a deeper connection with and awareness of her body.” 30 years later, Juniper still keeps the letter from her doctor, which sums up her experience and clean bill of health as “a unique form of remission.”

My purpose in relaying Juniper’s story here isn’t to change your mind or convince you to believe in something that sounds like an anomaly. Nor do I share my own story as advice to follow or dogma to defend. Only you get to decide for yourself how to define truth, which is and will be informed by your own unique life circumstances and experiences.

As for me, I am still one and the same with that wide-eyed 3rd grader, the little girl fascinated by the inner workings of her own body, who shared with her classmates in the spirit of awe and wonder at the miracle we are.

I believe we are all capable of healing.

And further, I’ve come to reframe my body’s pain as my greatest teacher, one that demanded my full attention in order to initiate me onto the path I walk today.

Western medicine and the pursuit of science are themselves a miracle, but they are on their own, incomplete, a puzzle with a missing piece.

That missing piece, my friends — is you.

While your wounding is no doubt different from my own, to be wounded, to be vulnerable, and to experience pain in some form or another is what makes you human, the common thread that unites us all.

I spent so much of my life trying to understand my pain, demanding answers to the questions of where it came from, why it happened, and what to do about it. These questions were helpful, in that they were the gateway to greater understanding and deeper self-awareness.

However, the answers to these questions matter far less to me these days than a newer, more interesting set of questions — questions I only found in deep reverence for and surrender to my own experience:

How will I respond? And what happens next?