An Important Vision of Healing

There's a tape I listen to that helps me to relax and heal without fail, so I use it nearly every day. Andrew Weil, author of Optimal Healing, produced it; but the voice is not his that walks me through the relaxation breathing, it is a colleague's.

At the end of the relaxation phase, the voice of Weil's colleague then asks me to go to a place I find especially beautiful.

It may be corny, but I always go to Middle Earth from Tolkein's The Hobbit. (This photo of Kirk, my loving husband, is set in a type of earthly place that reminds me of my healing place; I love camping for this reason, I think.) It is spring there in my healing place, and I lay on a bank beside a lively stream. The air is filled with magic and the otherness of a place imbued with the power of myth. Nearby is a hobbit hole, where a river stone fireplace burns with ancient oak and cedar. There is an overstuffed chair with a side table, set with a hot pot of tea and a cup ready for me should I need it. But normally, I spend my time outside in the spring air laying on the bank.

In this visit to my healing place, four small sparrows came to me. One landed on each knee; two on the grass beside me. I watched them and imagined they were symptoms I wanted to heal. One was my red blood cell count; another: my white; the third: my platelets; and the fourth: potassium. The birds were small and forlorn, since they had no mothers to nurture them.

The voice on the tape, then asked me to create a healing image. For this, immediately, four well-fed ghosts of the baby sparrow's mothers--for they had been killed off by the chemo--arrived from the sky and began feeding and nurturing the babies. Soon, the babies began to thrive and grow as I watched. I imagined this was my counts pulling up to the levels I needed to thrive and grow, as well.

At this point in the tape, I am asked to see if the images before me have any relation to what I have experienced or am feeling in the real world. I realized it did. For I have sought the spirit of the mother--that nurturing that parents give children--for much of my life, but not always in the places that were safe. As Tess, my therapist, says, I have often taken of my shoes and walked in that brier patch one too many times. Always expecting that it will not hurt me to look for comfort in the wrong people or the wrong places.

When I awoke from the relaxation, I knew I had just been given the chance to remember something very important. And for that, I am so grateful.

I recommend this sort of activity to anyone seeking healing about anything. I found the tape at Half-Priced Books, but I have not seen it anywhere else. But you don't need the tape, for I often do the relaxation without it and on my own. It is, I find almost every time, a well-spent thirty minute space of time spent focused on myself.