Recently, I talked with someone who is recovering from having two kidney stones removed. This is the second time she has had kidney stones in three months. I knew it three months ago, and still know it today, that her body is telling her something. The body is a miraculous and highly evolved communication tool, that is, when we take notice and participate in the conversation. More often than not, we think we are in charge of this vehicle called the body and often the body placates our desires to keep moving on with life, until it has had enough of us not listening.
I have spent many years working with the body and dissecting my own through various means and methods of illnesses, injuries, alcohol, moves, pilgrimages, endurance hikes and runs, weight training, silent mediation retreats, detoxes, colonics, nutritional experiments, and you can pretty much name anything else. Using all of these things I have listed as learning tools to understand more and more what my body is telling me on the deepest and most subtle level. Also, I have listened to others and recognized that each body has a specific way of communicating with its inhabitant. It is like learning the rules your landlord has set for your building.
Thus, the body is to be honored and nurtured. It is not here for us to trudge it along. It is here for us to experience this life and all that it has to offer. It is like the saying, “we are here to thrive, not survive.” The body wants to take us to remote villages in a foreign country. To spend time with a loved one over coffee. To observe the beautiful artistry of a painter. To taste the exquisite flavor french cuisine. To feel the warm embrace of a loved one. And, yes, to even feel the tears that roll down our cheeks as we experience something that opens our hearts to what no words could express. Yes, something that enables us to experience all the senses and beyond, deserves to be served, honored, loved, and, above all, listened to.
As I said before, this woman had a kidney stone three months ago. In her current state, she thought she had the flu, which happens to be exactly what she said to me when she was describing the prior kidney stone months ago: she was tired, achy, feverish, and had a headache. These symptoms lasted for three days and seemed to pass with the exception of the headache. Thus, she continued on with her life and her work duties which she had over a weekend. It was not until Monday morning that she woke to find that she was experiencing some level of pain and that there was blood in her urine. “At this point, I knew I had another kidney stone,” she told me.
She diagnosed herself based on her previous experience with kidney stones. Once she saw the blood, she pieced it all together from the flu to her current state. She knew what to do and made an appointment with the doctor, had a CT, and then went into surgery just three days after seeing the blood in her urine to get the two stones removed.
I listened to her explain this story to me and wondered, what if we didn’t get so far down the road of our symptoms? What if we didn’t only correlate what the body was telling us with a specific illness, injury, or disease? What if we didn’t go from healthy to hurt in less than an instant? It seems to me that in society today that we only know when we are sick. We do not understand more of when we need to rest, relax, or just be loved and nurtured. As Billy Joel sings, “I don’t know why I go to extremes?” There has to be progression and not a shift from one extreme to the other. How can we be aware of this progression and not just at the opposite ends of the spectrum: happy, healthy to sad and ill?
In this instance, I caught myself wondering what signs her body was giving her prior to the flu-like symptoms? How was the body relaying to her, “do you hear me now?” What happened in her body prior to it saying, “I have had enough and it is time for a rest. Even if that comes via a surgery.” The body doesn’t care about insurance, co-pays, deductibles, or sick days. It has assuaged you long enough. Now it was time to listen. The unruly child must be reigned in and stopped. The tenant must listen to the landlord. You have no choice. Rest, recuperation, healing, it is.
The healing process is a beautiful, fine art. It is a blank canvas waiting for its painter, you. And when you pause and listen, you are handed the brush and asked to receive and reflect. Healing is the yin to life’s yang. Above all, it is a process with ebbs and flows and one that moves with the continuity as a river, which takes nothing less than courage. Courage to ask yourself deep questions. Courage to listen to what you may not want to hear. Courage to make a commitment to treat your body and life in a whole new way. Courage to embody the lesson you are learning fully as to not repeat the lesson again because remedial classes are always possible, i.e., another kidney stone three months later.
Now she is recovering the day after her surgery, Friday, and if she doesn’t have a fever in these next 24 hours she can still travel this weekend with her family as planned. I could feel her energy over the phone and I sensed how much pain she was in. The more earthly part of me wanted to “oooh and ahhh and cringe” with her shortness of breath, difficulty talking as she adjusted positions holding the phone, and her sense of malaise. I caught my face cringing and wanting to pick her up from the pile of pain she was in. I also felt I wanted to make sure she understood this was time to take care of herself and go into, almost, an educational lecture on energetically healing and loving her own body.
I stopped. She is not in the right space for this. So I did something more vibrationally uplifting. I saw, with sacred sight, who she truly IS. I felt only love for her. I kept seeing her, even energetically in her voice, as a completely whole and loved being. She is not sick or ill, she is only having that experience at the moment. But I, I can remind her of who and what she truly is.
Although, since it is a passion, I wanted to delve deeper into her experience and discover what her lesson was so that she didn’t have to go through this again in three months, I reflected on my lesson at hand. That no one needs to be fixed, cured, or saved. Why do what is already done? Thus, I remained in love and told her a joke, in which I could hear her energy raise in vibration through her voice. I was not on the phone to be her teacher but to be a student along with her, just with a different curriculum at hand.
In closing, I want to emphasize that as higher vibrations set a deeper foundation on this Earth, it is time take responsibility for our health and well being and to be active in our healing process. Can we move beyond correlating what the body is communicating to an illness or disease and listen more subtly to the needs and wants of rest, relaxation, and love that the body yearns for prior to becoming forced to stop? What would it be like to pick up the cues before the cues? They are there. We only need to be aware of it.
In Light and Love and Wholeness.