A very hard fall in the middle of orange blossom time terrifies me and opens the door to releasing ancient rage and grief
still locked in my body despite all the years of emotional releasing and healing.
Day by day, more of the lush creamy white oval buds on the orange trees in the orchard all around me are bursting into starry fragrant flower. The annual Bacchanal is upon us! The whole valley is thrumming with the hum of bees. I love it. Love the feeling of growing intoxication. The overwhelming, captivating, utterly distracting enveloping power of the scent and of the everywhere vibrating hum.
As I wander on the trails, the hills are covered by clouds of ceanothus–barely bluish-white all the way to deepest sky blue. Nightshade, morning glory, old man’s beard, lupine, mustard, sour grass, poppy, little blue and little yellow nameless (to me) complex flowers poke through the green chaparral in our mountains.
In my own gardens, fat buds on all the rose bushes start unfurling. The honeysuckle vines grow their carpets of delicate, fragrant flowers. The gardenia bushes are heavy with tightly curled lengthening buds and their first opened flowers.
Everywhere new life rising: lushly, juicily, abundantly. Magic and grace abound.
I began my late March “time-out for silence and solitude” week with one of my favorite evening hikes. A fire road trail with distant views of the valley/civilization on one side and the total wildness of the towering hills on its other, the trail begins and ends at the top of town streets. At each end there is a house visible.
My body “knows” the trail well. I rarely depend upon my eyes when I wander here in the dusk-into-darkness hours. Starlight and a night sky brightened either by the moon (in its waxing phases) or by the diffusion of reflected light from “civilization” give the level parts of the trail a luminosity that draws my feet onward. I always love the sense of feeling so safe in my aloneness in the quiet darkness of this semi-wild place. The sense, when vision doesn’t predominate, of being melted into the middle of the sounds of night.
In the midst of all this luscious wonder, I hit the ground in a sudden, really hard fall just a few hundred yards from the trail’s end. I have a long history of tripping and falling more often than do most people I know. (It runs in the family: my sister has much the same experience.) Usually, I hit the dirt at least 3 times a year. Although, last year I had a record 14 months without a single fall. Over the years, I’ve learned how to sometimes “catch up with myself” and avoid the full fall. That or, if the fall seems inevitable, I’ve learned to surrender into it, to relax and fall softly.
This fall was a completely different experience from any other in my long history. No warning stumble or trip. Just upright one moment and then on the ground with such force it felt as though I’d been lifted and body slammed by some invisible Sumo wrestler. As I hit the ground, I heard a pop in the hip I landed on. The rush of adrenaline and terror was instantaneous! My first thought: “Oh! I’m a goner now, I just broke my hip!” Two years ago, I’d been diagnosed-by-the-numbers as having osteoporosis. Many falls before and since without ever having broken any bones had made it clear that good muscle tone counted for much against the fragility implied by the numbers. But, the pop I heard shook me to my core. So did the wrench to my shoulder that came as I’d landed on my elbow. The kind of wrench that might well have damaged my rotator cuff.
I lay there on my side, trying to breathe deeply, doing Reiki and praying hard. Praying that I hadn’t broken my hip. Praying that I hadn’t torn my rotator cuff. Praying that I wouldn’t have to do the work of learning how to allow in and receive help under such extreme conditions. Praying that I would be able to get up and walk the 300 or so yards to where my car was parked. Giving gratitude that the fall had happened so close to the trail’s end, to my car and to a visible house. Though, at some point, I realized that with windows closed and TV on, no one would be able to hear me if I had to call for help!
I prayed and Reiki’d, all the while feeling overwhelmed and terrified by possibility of being unable to take physical care of myself. Feeling grateful that I had good medical insurance, that I had a Medical Savings Account and long-term care insurance if I were to need ongoing care. But overwhelmed at the prospect of the complexity and challenge that I might be facing. The physical pain I experienced as I lay there seemed, by far, the least of it!
After a bit, I found the courage to risk trying to move. I found that indeed I could stand, albeit shakily. And, blessedly, I could walk! No broken hip after all. Slowly, dodderingly, my whole body trembling with the vibrations of so much adrenaline coursing through me, I walked to my car. After a few minutes of trying out my shoulder’s mobility, I felt sure I hadn’t torn anything there either. As I sat trying to calm and settle myself down, I was filled with such enormous gratitude to Spirit. I had been taken to the precipice in a very scary way. Yet, I hadn’t been sent all the way over the precipice into what, for me, would have been the abyss! Then, very cautiously and slowly I drove myself home, stopping for some take out dinner at our health food store on my way.
Still vibrating with the intense adrenaline rush, I–as I drove the four miles to home–went through the endlessly, overwhelmingly scary images of what might have been. I felt so vulnerable, so frail, so fragile, so unstable. Fearful. As if I might no longer be able to trust my body at all. A sense that it was no longer safe for me to go wandering alone on trails or paths where/when no one else was around. No longer safe to go wandering in the darkness. How could I live without these solaces for my soul? I felt utterly bereft. Angry. Despairing. Aware that this was a taste of what might come with being much older. Feeling that it was way too soon for this. Why me? Why now? And in the midst of all the catastrophizing, waves of such complete gratitude to Spirit/the Grandmothers! A commitment to them and to myself that I would choose consciously to go forward with healing my debilitating woundedness around receiving help before I came to really needing it!
By the time I reached home and doddered to the door of my tiny cottage, the most intense agitation was passing. I seemed able to just be with what was so: As I felt able to walk again, I would just commit to walking more care-fully on paved or fairly smooth footing, during daylight and in places where others would be passing occasionally. I was on the other side of the emotional upheaval, surrendered into my new reality: my enormous sense of vulnerability. No conjecturing anymore about how it would be or not be for me without my former freedom. No conjecturing about how long I would feel so fragile and so unstable. Just being with what was now so.
I did wonder about where I had been in reverie when the fall came. I had a sense that that might be a clue about the fall. Nothing. Complete amnesia. I did remember that I had been drifting in and out of rememberings about the wounds to my younger sexual self at some point earlier in the walk. But nothing about what realizations or thoughts had just preceded the fall. That seemed significant. It seemed to suggest to me that I needed to not bring conscious focus to this unraveling process, at least while I walked or hiked. It seemed being engaged in the conscious remembering as I walked had resulted in my momentarily disconnecting from my embodiedness. That this disconnection had opened me to the fall.
As I tended myself that first week with Chinese plasters, homeopathic Bellis Perennis 30X, and arnica lotion, I immersed myself in reading, listening to books on tape and watching rented videos. All ways I’ve learned to engage my conscious mind so that it doesn’t interfere with the healing process needing to unfold undisrupted on an organismic level. And, I did go for several very careful, slower than usual walks every other day, feeling my way back to some trust in my body again.
I could feel the physical healing from the fall progressing slowly. It was odd to be able to do balance poses in yoga but to feel so uncertainly balanced while moving. All seemed headed toward some normalization until four days later when I stumbled and fell again! Softly, relaxedly this time, on my other side. In my own graveled driveway! Coming home in late afternoon daylight from a short and, till that moment. more stable walk. I just sat there and wept in despair and confusion!
This second fall felt so unfair! I had already made an extra second appointment for the following week with the Feldenkrais-healer I usually work with on a once every other week rotation. His amazingly clear, uncontaminated work seemed the best place for me to begin to honor my new commitment. With him I could deepen the practice of openly letting in help while feeling my way through unraveling the psychic woundedness this brings to light. His proven psychic trustworthiness could be a foil for illuminating all the permutations of my learned lack of trust. What more was Spirit asking of me?!
“Just” to feel my helplessness, my real need for support (!) and all my grief, sadness, upset and anger about finding myself in this state! So, I sat with those feelings, with the overwhelming, very edgy vulnerability they bring with them. I railed and ranted and cried. Then I just “was” in the middle of this newly exaggerated place and went on with life until the appointments. Without any more walks since this second fall had, by shaking up my whole body, disarranged whatever healing had been going on till then.
The work with Marty that next week and the two weeks after that has been profound. The work on my right hip and shoulder took me deeper “in” than any of the re-organizing work we’d done before. It has released some encapsulated body-holding of the ancient woundedness I’ve worked on so deeply and long in my emotional/psychic healing journey.
It stuns me how raw and undigested the material is when it pours out of my body. Despite all the familiarity with it and all the processing of it I have from the earlier emotional work I’ve done for years and years. The hate and rage I feel again/anew for the woman who so damaged my innocent, trusting tiny little self; my devoted, adoring young self; my blossoming-into-womanhood young adolescent self so astonishes me with its raw ferocity. The grief I feel again/anew for the wounds, torments and pain to which I was so repeatedly subjected takes my breath away.
I am yet, as I write this, still in the middle of feeling and integrating what’s continuing to well up from the body-releasing that the healing work since the fall has engendered. Again/anew I am amazed by how those younger, incredibly vulnerable me’s managed to survive the emotional torturing that passed for mothering in my life. Again/anew I am filled with awe at the ferocity with which I’ve dedicated my life to learning to re-mother all those sorely unmothered selves. Again/anew I am awed and filled with gratitude for how much that wounding and that healing journeying have made me the who that I am; have brought me such profound learning that I’ve been able to share with other similarly wounded, equally dear beings.
And, I am aching with all the damaging messages I’ve incorporated from that “mothering” about needing, wanting, asking for or receiving support and help of most any sort. How endangered I feel when help is offered, when I consider letting it in, when I consider that I might need or want it! This is the center of my healing work right now.
(My hip was fine after two and a half weeks. My shoulder now very close to 100% as well. My center of gravity feels lowered and my feet are hitting the ground now with a sturdy solidness that makes me image them as old-fashioned flatirons!)
Originally published April 2004
