In Flames

Me walking barefoot to the river

I am walking to the river.

I am walking to the river because my heart is broken and it keeps demanding that I be out in nature. I suppose because it’s closer to God out there, and nothing short of being embraced by the entire Universe could ease this.

So I am walking to the river, barefoot because it feels better to have all that extra sensation and information coming from the bottom of my feet. The way to the river from my house is past one of the very wealthy sections of my town, where the mansions pepper the edge of the water and the properties have seven-foot-tall brick walls lining the sidewalk, so us common folk can’t see in.

When I was a little girl we used to spend summers in Israel and me and my sister and my cousins used to take long walks barefoot there too, and I remember these pale pink concrete walls lining the sidewalks in front of some of those houses, though I think those were built not for privacy but to protect against gunshots from Arabs. Of course I wasn’t aware of that then. I couldn’t have been more than six, and what I remember is how light and free I felt, how I would graze my fingertips across the surface of the concrete as I walked, feeling the bumps beneath my fingers and the hot pavement beneath my feet, inhaling the fullness of unhindered possibility and joyful presence with every breath.

I’m walking to the river, trying to take a full breath now but it’s not happening. Outside my awareness my arm reaches out and skims the brick wall, searching for something it can’t find.

Let it Be

My view of the river

A few minutes later I’m sitting by the river, on the concrete wall high above the water with my shoes beside me and my feet dangling in the air. I’m listening to this gorgeous, epic, gospel cover of The Beatles’ “Let it Be” by Carol Woods & Timothy T. Mitchum and that’s when I realize it.

For the past four years I’ve been living in resistance and fear that the man I loved would leave me for this other woman – a woman who’s been in his life for a very long time and with whom he still has some unfinished business (to put it as euphemistically as possible). For four years, I’ve been so absolutely terrified of this potential outcome that I’ve never allowed myself – not once – to imagine it all the way through. To picture him leaving me for her and to feel how that would feel. But as I am sitting here watching the water and letting the power of the phrase “Let it be” sing its way into me, I find myself opening to brave the unspeakable.

I dive into what will surely be my death, the worst possible scenario. I play it out. I imagine them together, cuddling at night, watching a movie before bed. I see them eating breakfast together. I see the love in his eyes as he looks at her. I see them walking down Main Street together, holding hands. All of it, I see all of it.

And I die.

I fucking die.

But then the realization comes. I’m finally on the other side of it and I finally get it. I get that the resistance and the fear is so much worse than if it actually came true. I get that the resistance and the fear is where the dis-ease is. And now, considering that for the first time in years I could be free of this resistance, the full-blown experience of FREE washes over me. I recall the sensation of my arm reaching out to touch the brick wall as I walked here. I get that for four years, my resistance to and fear of this dreadful possibility has been perpetuating Multiple Sclerosis in my body. I have been making myself sick.

In-flame-ation

Here, let me show you what I mean. Put your palms together. Now rub them together while pressing them into each other. Do you feel the heat that you’re creating? That’s what happens when we’re in a state of resistance. The resistance causes friction and the friction causes heat to build up. When there’s too much heat in the body, it goes up in flames. It becomes inflamed.

MS – if we’re to believe the prevailing theory – is an in-flamm-atory demyelinating condition. It is the literal, symptomatic manifestation of too much heat in the body. I’m hot as hell (and I don’t mean that in the much more pleasant interpretation of the phrase).

And the truth is, the last four years have just been a particularly acute version of what all of us experience on the daily. We’re all living in resistance because we’re unconditional beings living in a conditional world (as Michael Brown puts it in his book Alchemy of the Heart), and as a result, we’ve all had our hearts broken as children. We’re all in perpetual resistance to our authentic nature because we learned very early on that we needed to shut up and sit straight and behave ourselves for God’s sake if we were to be accepted and loved. So we do. Or we do the opposite and play the role of the rebel. But whichever role we choose, we’re in resistance to the free, uninhibited, authentic, magical beings we were when we arrived in this world, and as a result our bodies are boiling, which is why phrases like “lose my cool” and “blow my top” are so pervasive.

So I’m sitting by the river. And it’s a perfect day – 85 degrees and very little humidity. My skin is cool but there’s a fire raging inside me, and it has been for the last four years, and surely the charring started long before that.

But I don’t want to be in flames any more.

So I’m moving on.

I feel like I’m dying, but there is no rebirth without a death before it. And I understand now that my resistance and my MS are one and the same, so I have no choice but to just…let it be.

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Tags: inflammation, let it be, Michael Brown, river