I can feel my breath; it’s labored as the massage table under me seems to push back against my lungs’ desire to expand. I find myself here after coming to the awareness that I needed to settle down my nervous system after a series of weeks that became months of “doing vs. being.”
It has been a daunting, fast, and furious process to navigate my ailing 91-year-old mother’s moving into assisted living. It has also been a parallel process for me while watching my mother’s slow but equally seemingly fast aging process, a deeper awareness, a deep sense of mine. That said, not in a gloomy “I’m aging” kind of way, but rather a significant, freeing, in my-bones, more time-orienting perspective of truly realizing a deeper level of freedom, that of letting go. The tears that came as I drove away from her new home and the truly incredible staff who will take care of her came like a tsunami.
Relief
And while on the massage table, I reflect on that moment and become even more conscious of not only letting go but of “things” letting go of me. The antiques that were carried across the mile when we immigrated from the UK to the US and then back and forth across the US seem to taunt me as I peer at them across the room from me. I’ve carried a lot of things, let alone emotions, for her over the years, literally and figuratively. Many of these antiques had become a symbol for much of the responsibility I had held as an only child to a mother with unhealed PTSD. Packed up and moved to their next destinations, the antiques are no longer hers nor mine; they have been returned to the great void where things and objects go when they are no longer emotionally and spiritually attached to by the humans that owned them.
Goodwill.
And on the massage table, I can feel the emotional attachments that held them to me, unwinding as the cords cut; I am no longer feeling as if a puppet on a string, the Pinocchio who became carved from a piece of word into a real human, committed to good deeds and ensuring his life by taking care of his maker.
Relief. Time orienting.
Nothing is permanent, and neither are we.
What we all seek, whether we can vocalize it or not, is a greater capacity to meet life’s impermanence with grace, patience, acceptance, and less resistance to what is. No matter what kind of healing work we are doing, you name it, all of the work, no matter the theory, the approach, the language around it, the research, the learning of it, the process, no matter what or who teaches it, that the most important thing is how does it enable us to meet change through the lens of now, not through the lens of the past, and what held us to it.
It is the actual winds of change that serve as our greatest teachers. The day-to-day events of our lives are the places where all of our healing work is tested. The art of being a therapist, a healer, is to keep this awareness close to our hearts.
It is very easy to get caught up in our quest for the “right” modality or to find ourselves focused on the “how,” but in that process, perhaps forget that there is an underlying need that we, and our clients, seek, and that is a sense of peace, both internally and externally. And, at the end of the day, in our search for internal and external peace, our healing work must enable us to navigate the numerous changes that life will and does give us because only change is what is guaranteed, and in the depths of change, there can be stillness if we walk towards, instead of away from facing it.
