Flow, grow, inside you always know

It always feels as though I'm getting away with some super secret operative,

this writing thing
this writing thing that involves my personal thoughts and opinions and feelings
this writing thing that I am able to do for longer than five, ten, fifteen seconds

Life is blessed and bountiful and every. moment. is. so. full

My goals lately are for mindfulness, of meaningfulness, and of minimalism in the moment

I would like to par down everything to keep it as functional yet comfortable as possible.

I tried to leave last year with the thought that I was in a deep thought cleansing and whatever I hadn't appropriately dealt with would carry into the new year. In some regards some things have carried over and now, accordingly, I have to deal with the leftovers.

I also strive this year to be the best me I can be. What that means at this point in the game is that I would like my WHOLE BODY HEALTH back. I can't tell you specifically what happened because I didn't seek out emergency care at the time and wasn't chasing a diagnosis and in my beliefs you can pretty much take care of *most* ailments within the comfort of your own home before requiring the help of professionals to muck things up or help out. Anyhow, I had some sort of something happen to me mid-October as a result of a lot of different factors and since then I have been struggling with this left side body pain and issues. I had an ultrasound on Friday to poke around all of my abdominal internals and I go again on Monday to get up all in my pelvic business. I've had ovarian cysts in the past and my left side is very susceptible, so I have a large hope inside of me that maybe this severe issue has a very simple root cause? I was very happily treating myself with acupuncture which was the only treatment that has made a difference in getting this muck out of my body and out of my system since October. At my worst I was seeing my dr 2-3x a week there for treatments and given that treatments are $50 a pop and I only made $7,000 last year, I don't have all the finances to tackle this thing with acupuncture alone (although by george, my chinese dr can fix everything and anything I swear they come from a superior culture of ancient wisdom)

Husband has been fantastic help but it has been a long few months. My best days I have my energy back and I'm feeling good and up beat and I can tackle any obstacle in front of me and victoriously charge forward and ahead into productivity and accomplishment to the m*th degree. My rougher days include a lot of pain on my left side of my body, pain that goes all through my left arm to my hand, over the inflamed knot in my shoulder, down to the internal pokey part that hurts and internally aches, into my pelvic hip area where some of the pain likes to hide by my sacrum/tailbone (left side only though!) and even sometimes down my leg. My worst days included a lot of chest pain and heaviness and tingling left arm and the fear that I was losing all fine motor ability with that left hand.

When I see my TCM dr I don't have to go into much detail at all, she checks my pulse and just KNOWS. The day I hobbled in to see her for the first time again she knew, she always seems to know, and I trust her intuition, and I can tangibly feel the physical difference after treatment, and what she does with those needles always seems to work. I don't know what she knows and I don't read chinese to peek in on her notes, but I have considerably improved with her treatment and after carefully following her emotional, spiritual,and dietary advice. The hope is that the benefits of her treatments will last so that I won't have to continue to see her, but every difficult journey feels full of obstacles which are two steps forward, one step back...

I haven't been to see her in three weeks about now and I'm feeling it. I was hoping yoga last week would have stretched out whatever internal gunk is clogging up my left side and it felt so good to streeeeeeeeeeeeetch again, and I haven't lost an ounce of my flexibility it seems, but it gave me dreams of circus high flying trapeezes and I got up and close with my being while twisted like a pretzel, and it gave me room to think
I can bend very far but what kind of force does it take to break me
or fix it?

A few weeks ago I finally caved, 1 because my insurance gaff was finally corrected and I could go back to the western medical dr without the know that some $700 bill was going to appear to haunt me and 2 because I've been dealing with these issues since Mid-Oct and I didn't want to take them with me into the new year. The first issue in October was a lump in my breast that appeared. It wasn't the same as a clogged duct but it was a legit tangible lump, it felt like the tip of a pencil eraser, it appeared and after I contemplated and decided sooner than later to seek professional medical opinion, it disappeared. I still had a breast ultrasound and they found nothing. But by the time I had the breast ultrasound, I was having other issues and got myself back to my TCM dr. I saw her as-needed every week.
A few weeks ago then I finally decided to scope this out with a different approach, so I found an internal medicine dr and subjected myself to an appointment. It is funny (but not entirely) how differently they approach the system of health and the body and how they cannot in their research connect my neck pain to my internal pain, even though I can tangibly feel the line within my body that is clogged, because they don't ascribe to the same system that TCM or other eastern practices of medicine openly acknowledge.

When I first wasn't feeling so hot and I had specific pain points show up, I pulled out a few books at home to self- reference (my whole collection is basically michelle's reference of info) and we figured out by deduction that I had a blocked/clogged sen line because I could find the different points on my body that correlated back onto the charts of health lines of the body but my pain also followed on that line.

When I first saw the Internal Medicine dr and tried to explain, they had to explain to me that their system doesn't even work like that. They are happy to work with me and didn't bash any of my beliefs, but they look at neck pain as just that. A pain in the neck. They offered me pain killers and I was all like NO WAY, I'm fine with dealing with the pain, I just want to fix the root cause so it isn't there anymore. He ordered these ultrasounds to rule out a lot of different things and bloodwork to check on my kidney functions and whatnot. Talked about how it could just be a case of inflamed stomach or colitis and surely a prescription for Zantac might be recommended. I just said OK. I'm just trying to get better.

Ugh. I got put on a prescription for that stuff as a teenager. The dr was more readily able to help me cope with the stress effects of my life by sticking me on antidepressants and giving me something to help calm the excess stomach acid (from the stress) rather than focusing on the root cause and helping me to remove the stress, encouraging new ways to deal with the stress that it might create less tension within my body, providing me with new perspective or vision of the stress or even talking to me about the shit american diet and how that was too acidic for my sensitive and finely tuned body.

My TCM dr is amazing. I love her. Her advice is not always easy but the best advice I have encountered yet. Things like, "Do not do anything that does not bring me joy" and my warm foods only- chicken soup/mush diet are attributed to her wisdom of practice. Husband and I swear by her help to get baby here.

I can't sing the praises of TCM enough as it has helped me feel tremendously better, but it is not a magical cure-all either, at least not on its own practice, or maybe it is, but it takes a lot of perspective shifting and prayer and thought shifting and diet shifting to really help it stick and stay, and that's what I want it to do, stick within me and stay in there and let me be whole and balanced and feel good.

I don't want to overstress on these ultrasounds. I knew going in that whatever was seen would just be a snapshot of that particular day, at that particular time. There are a million things I can do to help myself feel better and I don't need to focus on pain to help it grow and manifest. I've had to be very harsh in removing stress from my life as well- all undue pressure from outsiders and everything. Really it is fighting with my husband that makes the worst most damaging stress and it is difficult to remove him from this equation as he is so intertwined by this point, and that was the point, that IS the point of marriage, to intertwine yourself with someone else.

I don't seek an escape or refuge, just a transformation of self into a mindful and calm being that can withstand any storm and is contagiously calm and filled with a radioactive JOY of being, this is possible I feel

But how to get from here to there?

I suppose to just be. To just find every moment available in any given second and just be. Summon it from deep within myself, let myself let go of anything that doesn't make me happy or joyful. Pray for any other thoughts that don't serve me in such a way to fall by the wayside.

We can come up with many excuses in the moment to resist, how can I shift that to constantly be in awe and finding the beauty that is within it all, all the time? I focus on a state of gratitude, I wake up and my first thoughts of the day, my first prayers of the day, have and have been for a long time, thankful thoughts to god for today and this life and my children and every ounce of everything wonderful I have available to me. I try to be in a spirit of gratitude often.

All I can think of is that I need to work on it MORE. I need to trim my thoughts MORE. I need to change my action programming MORE.

I never said I was perfect but I also never said I was going to sit around being the same flawed being I've always been. If it isn't working, fix it, and I intend to do my best and model the best for my children. They are learning a ferocity of being as well.

When I left the ultrasound on Friday, I asked the technician if she could reveal to me if anything dire had been spotted, if this *thing* I feel inside of me that isn't just right, if it was cancer or a giant tumor or mass, could she reveal that to me? She told me that she hadn't seen anything of great alarm like a tumor or mass or stones and that there wasn't anything she would be rushing to call the dr about. Cryptic tech speak- definitely not as enthusiastic as when I had my baby ultrasound done and after like 5 minutes he was declared absolutely perfect and we were sent on our way- but she wasn't dire about it. I wish the whole thing hadn't been so painful on my guts or whatever it is that hurt, and the fasting for 11 hrs with no food or water or anything was the WORST. Managing 3 children with low blood sugar and no ability to eat or drink is a task not to be undertaken by the weak.

Part of me hopes it is just a hernia or something. That they will find it and it will be laughably easy to fix. Another part of me hopes it is something even less, maybe a pokey cyst on my ovary or something that I can take supplements or apple cider vinegar shots to help or SOMETHING

I'm not afraid to die, but I have thought about my mortality more over the last few months, and I would really like to be around for my children's lives. I would love to have the leisurely life again with my husband. I would like to raise my grandchildren and be in their lives. It gives me a will of hope.
There is no one else like me. There is no one who will mother my children like me. There is no one who can teach them the same things I have to teach them. I am not replaceable.

my husband is sweet and supportive and struggling within this too. It's a lot. It is always a lot, but having it all takes a lot more effort than anyone could ever have prepared us for. He wouldn't buy me life insurance for Christmas so I think he has more hope for things than not.

And in the interim, I wait, I eat my chicken soup and my mush and drink all the hot tea, and I rest, I try not to carry around my heft almost-one year old, I stop thoughts before they become too overthought. I try to focus on the moments in the now. I pray. I sit back and enjoy my children, I try.


And sometimes, still, even occasionally, when I wake up in the middle of the night, I find myself with the will to write.

I think there are many wonderful things within me still that haven't been unleashed yet through my writing and I know that if I take the concentrated time and effort to write, it will be there
I know it will be there
I have faith in it that it is there

Let me enter into today with a new resolve to record my widsoms within and to find the beauty within each inherent moment of my being and to savor and collect it as dew from individual blades of grass in the morning, it takes many drops to fill a pitcher, let me drink from the water and beauty of life today, everyday. Amen.