Give thanks for your wounds, they’re where you had to grow.
Leonard Cohen says the cracks are where the light gets in. Same sort of idea, really. The Japanese art of repairing pottery with gold and lacquer is a celebration of this idea as well. Celebrate your broken places, and your healing, too, of course.
But … what if … stick with me here, what if our Energy Bodies, which are basically our Avatars, or Devas, the intelligence that runs us, and takes us seriously when we say shit like “I’m so fat” or “I’ll never get this right” or “why does it always” and so on – also take us seriously when we say things like, “You know, I really don’t want to end up old and broken and in pain and not in control of myself when I get old, so I’m going to start working on that.” It gets very happy about that, and it wants to do everything it can to help us do that. So when we inevitably lose interest in that, like so many of us so often do, it says, “Well, you said that’s what you wanted, so … let me break you in just the right way so you won’t have a choice to ignore it anymore.”
What if our broken things are actually doors that our Devas open and shove us through? I mean, really. I fell down some stairs in 1998 and busted my tailbone and have never been quite the same since, but recently, I have been struggling with the aftermath of that more and more, and now, well now the chickens have come home to roost. A disc ruptured just bad enough to give me options. Just bad enough to open a door.
I had said a couple years ago, I don’t want to be a burden to my kid and age badly so he has to deal with my dysfunctional self. My parents, bless their hearts, didn’t do that to me, and holy crap am I grateful for that. So I feel like one of the best gifts I can give him is my health, and I set an intention to start working seriously on that – and I did, to a point. But. Right? You with me? Yeah, thought so.
I needed that door to be busted wide open and the comfortable space of inertia where I was lounging to start to disintegrate around me like a real game of rocks and lava.
And so it did. And it has been made quite clear to me that my options, and there are more than one, I really do have a choice, are 1) spend a few minutes every day doing things to strengthen and maintain strong muscles so this doesn’t happen again, or 2) ignore it and spend the rest of my life getting old and progressively more broken.
Option 2 sounds terrible, right? But isn’t it just a little tempting? In a perverse way, of course. But isn’t perversity part of free will? There’s something just really tempting about surrendering to entropy and gettin’ on that long, downward tornado slide.
Ah, but I know, personally, the women on my mother’s side all live ridiculously long lives, well into their 90s if some external thing doesn’t get them. And I never smoked, didn’t drink much, have never been a red meat fan, am generally really careful about what I eat, and drink lots and lots of water. I’m probably going to outlive them all. And if I’m going to do that, I do not want to spend thirty-to-forty solid years suffering for my sins of omission.
However … I have the discipline of … something very undisciplined. I’d look it up but I don’t have the discipline. And staying with a program of “exercise” is not something I have ever managed to do beyond maybe six months. But this time, well. This one has played into my beliefs as well as into my physicality. This one has morphic resonance.
Morphic resonance is a phenomenon which became the life-work of a scientist called Rupert Sheldrake, and if you have not yet Sheldraked you definitely need to. A morphic field is something which holds a pattern or a blueprint that is … somehow accessible to our unconscious. A morphogenic field is the set of patterns that allows cats to cat, dogs to dog, trees to tree, humans to human, bugs to bug, fish to fish, and so on. There are certain behaviors that some scientists think are hard wired into us, but Sheldrake postulates that they are, in fact, part of a field that is constantly being updated. Think of the Hundredth Monkey Theory. Teach one monkey to do something, and it will teach others, who will then teach others – but once about one hundred of them know, suddenly all of the monkeys know, even ones who are miles and miles away from the original monkey who learned the thing. The morphogenic field got updated with new information. Or like mice running a maze – once one mouse figures it out, it’s that much easier for the next one, and easier yet for the next one, and suddenly, all the mice know this maze. The morphogenic field has been updated with new information.
So, to apply this to my own personal morphogenic field, a disc has ruptured, and once that happens, it is way easier for it to happen again. The body knows it can get my attention this way, it knows how to make this injury happen, and clearly it’s not afraid to do it.
In other words, that door got blown off the hinges, and there is no going back to 100% uninjured anymore.
And honestly, is that such a bad thing? I am recovering, in fact I feel way better than I have in years. I have learned how to manage this entire complex of bullshit so I can keep it much more under control, and in the process, I will be able to age with more strength, mobility, health, and vitality than would have otherwise been possible.
I am … honestly a little frustrated with myself that it took a ruptured disc to get me to this point. But I also know myself well enough to know that is what it takes. I fricking hated gym class as a kid, and my constantly on-the-boil resentment ensured that anything gym-like was branded indelibly in my mind with all things bad and wrong with the world. That has not mellowed one bit over the years, and so, in order to get me to do anything about keeping my body from crumbling into ruins, it takes something large and painful and permanently threatening.
Boy, I sure do wish I could outgrow that shit.
But until I do, I will continue to use imagery and metaphor to trick myself into doing the things that will let me realize my intention of aging without ill-health, pain, and a lack of sovereignty. The cracks are what lets the light in. Injuries are doors into places we have been resistant or reluctant to go. They are all opportunities to change something that can ultimately make life better. We just have to learn to take the opportunities that can make the best difference when they show up, instead of ignoring them because they’re not easy. If we aren’t challenged, we don’t grow. Alright then, challenge accepted. Who’s with me?