Going to a special place...

This week’s piece is a chance for you to create space for yourself, maybe here at the end of a long week and maybe on a Monday morning when you see this.

You will need a few items for this exercise – do not pass GO if you have not collected the following:   

Ten minutes for yourself

A piece of paper

One of your favorite writing utensils

We are going to start with a meditation, and you can choose to do this either by reading the script below or by listening to the meditation below. Big choice. Go with your gut on this one.

Meditation - audio version

https://youtu.be/wdr3yt5KOwQ

Meditation - written version

Find a nice space, indoor or outdoor and get into a comfortable position, one free of pain.

If possible, find a position where your feet are on the floor, where you are sitting tall, extending each of those vertebrae to their greatest height. Let those vertebrae breathe life into your body!

Once you have the position that feels good, just sit with that for a minute. Start to slow down the mind as the heart and your emotional/spiritual self takes over command of the ship.

Now, in a completely different place than you were a few minutes ago, you are ready for a journey.

Take some nice, slow, deep, rejuvenating breaths.

Air in, deep into the recesses of those lungs, into the abdomen.

Air out, expelling all that does not serve.

Take as much time as you need here, enjoying the state of being, the state of breathing.. This is your time, and no one is rushing you through it.

Smile, and relax those face muscles. Smile at life, smile at the moment, smile at something that has made you smile earlier today. Smile at all of your loved ones.

Now, with eyes gently closing, take yourself to a special place, a place that you have not been able to visit because of the pandemic. Take yourself to that place right now. Smell the fragrances this place brings to mind. Touch the things around you. Listen to the noises of this special place. Feel the energy around you. Sit with this and enjoy being and breathing in this special place for a minute or two.

Let’s invite one person to enjoy this space with you. Maybe a person who, like this special place, you have not been able to see due to the pandemic. Or maybe someone that comes to mind when you think of this special place.

Invite them to join you. If you are at a beach, they are not sitting beside you in the soft sand. If you are hiking a forest or a favorite trail, they walk in stride with you. If you are in a place of prayer or meditation, they are praying/meditating next to you.

Enjoy this person’s warmth and presence, as you both soak in this special moment together.

Take your time here. This is your time and the clock has stopped ticking. Your heart is now the only beat of time present, and it is set to “timeless” mode.

When you are ready, a few more deep, rejuvenating breaths and then open those 2 eyes to join the 3^rd eye that is wide open at this point.

Paper and favorite writing utensil in hand, you are now going to write a hand-written letter to that person who joined you in the meditation. You are filled with healing energy and the writing itself is furthering your healing. There is something about writing on paper that reveals ourselves in a way that typing onto a phone or computer simply cannot. As you write, think of how this letter is going to brighten the person’s day. Think of how you are going to deliver it. Write in joy! Deliver the letter within the next week.

Repeat as needed.

After posting this piece, Veronica Hutchison, an amazing mentee of mine, writes the following along with the picture above: "Just listened to your newest Writing to Heal meditation. I found this funky envelope that I made at a "self care" Native Health Initiative event. Perfect for this letter!"

In the dark no more...

As a healer who has been doing my work in the dark, blind in a sense, today was a big day.

The visit was scheduled, not as a phone visit but as my first Zoom visit since the pandemic began 150 days ago. Usually, I see about 30 patients in-person a week. During the 5 months of COVID, I have seen about 30 patients in-person total, with the remainder conducted entirely by phone.

For someone who values that sacred space where the exam room creates a space where all other worries and commitments cease to matter for those 20 minutes, the only commitment being presence, this has been a big change. Put more bluntly – it has been really hard for me. I am sure most of the patients and providers of the world feel similarly.

That sacred space is now replaced by a phone call with interruptions and multi-tasking, my kids often seeking daddy’s attention as I sit in my home office (e.g. living room couch). Not being able to see people in these visits during COVID further dehumanizes the time together.

I signed on, not believing this was happening, but hoping I wasn’t about to hear an alarm clock that would wake me from a pleasant dream.

In a touch-less, 6 feet apart, face-covered-with-masks reality, I was about to get closer to the people I work with as a physician, the people who teach me about healing.

I hoped this would re-create the sacred space I have been so missing.

When the visit started, Ms. Armijo (name changed to protect patient confidentiality) couldn’t get the visual aspect on her tablet to work.

“Geez. I knew this was too good to be true,” I mumbled to myself. I think it was just life’s way of building the suspense, doing what all movie directors and novelists do so well. Make ‘em wait for the good stuff.

Then suddenly she was there, smiling at me. And I was able to smile back. No facemasks to spoil the moment!

I really did not expect the rush of emotions that rushed and gushed in those next moments. 

Here’s a decent recap of them put into words:

Wow!

I can’t believe this! I can see her and she can see me.

When I say, “I am really glad to have the chance to see you for this visit,” I won’t have to make a silly joke about what “see” means anymore.

I knew I was missing something big these last months, but wow, I didn’t realize how much the human connection was lost in these phone call visits.

Warmth. Connection. Healing.

Healing of a great chasm created by 5 months of practicing medicine blindfolded.

Sacred space

Wow!

In that visit, and in the few I have done since then, I take time to ask the person to show me something about their life that I would never get to see, never be able to fully appreciate if the visit was done in a clinic.

Ms. Armijo chose to show me her service dog that has been such a big part of her healing journey. I licked the screen, an appropriate dog greeting. In exchange, I share something on my end – the garden, a picture, etc. Two humans just trying to find real connection in a virtual world.

Appreciate these small moments today, tomorrow and next week. Those moments where the sacred spaces in your life suddenly return. Maybe not in quite the same form as they would have pre-pandemic, but good enough to make your heart skip a beat, for gratitude to grow.

Reminding us all that the sacred spaces are still much closer to us than we think or see when in the dark. May light similarly shine your way today! May your own light be the illumination.

Of Tree Lines and Tolerance

 

We climbed and climbed. Endless “up” it seemed.

Finally, we got to a place with vistas endless. 360 degrees doesn’t quite do it justice.

Christian, my running buddy and a professional trail runner, had brought me to Penitente Peak in the Santa Fe Mountains, 12,200 above sea level.

Our conversation over the first hours of the run had prepared us well for this peak. In fact, we talked about the Islamic tradition that talks about nature’s beauty as the first tier of heaven.

Well, we had arrived in a place that inspired nothing short of otherworldly splendor.

Being an animal not used to such heights, I stared at the bare faces of the mountains at our eye level. Beneath that nakedness, pinons and spruce trees.

I had never climbed high enough to see what the “tree line” really was. I was now here.

I stared for a moment, confused a bit as I saw a clump of trees very much making a wavy line at best. Gone were my notions that the tree line would bring me back to high school geometry, a straight line connecting two points. Gone was my conceptualization of a belt that the mountain would wear around its waist, somewhere around 11,000 feet high.

    

I think Christian saw my look of surprise as I squinted to make sure I was seeing it all correctly.

“What was the tree line’s teaching for me?” I thought as we began our descent.

My mind, and I assume most of ours, wants to see this world in a very straight-line way. Trees either grow or they don’t, with a nice geometry-teacher-approved-line separating the two realities.

Tolerance requires us to see the trees for how they actually are, even if it jars us from a cemented belief not based in reality. Much more messy, akin to a 4 year old with a paintbrush in her hand as opposed to a ruler-drawn line.

Tolerance is a mindset that appreciates and looks for the nuances that make people who they are, seeking to understand their perspective, affirming their humanity and their right to think and behave differently.

It is a heartset that assumes commonality despite outward differences toward things we care about passionately like climate change, racism, or our best choice for president of the country. That commonality becomes the basis for tolerance, listening, and being open to change ourselves.

I did some reading on tree lines. Yes, they can be well-defined, but they are often a gradual transition. Trees grow shorter and more sparsely before gradually decreasing to an area with no trees. And depending on how the sun hits and where the water runs, the tree line likely differs in altitude even within a single mountain. There can even be a double tree line, with bristlecone pine trees growing far above the tree line for pinon and juniper trees on the same face of the same mountain. Add in the effects of latitude and you see that a tree line ranges from 0 ft elevation in areas of Northern Quebec to 17,000 ft in the Andes of Bolivia.

Tree lines are much more dynamic and wavy and unpredictable than we thought, huh?

I am thankful for this first glimpse of a tree line, thankful Christian brought me to such heights.  In seeing it with my own eyes, I find a place for tolerance to replace a rigid notion of what is that I had carried into that run.

Maybe we just came up with a corollary (remember those from geometry??) about seeing the forest for the trees.

It is seeing the tree line for what it is – not a line at all.

It is seeing each other as clumps and groves with our unique way of being, beautiful growths within a 4-year old’s painting, more human and more unified than our politics or media leads us to think.