This morning I woke to the sound of a saw. Unlike most people who might awake to the sound of a saw on Friday the 13th and be absolutely terrified, I was instead filled with love. My darling husband who had woken early to lay floor in the attic, had waited a whole 45 minutes before using the saw. If someone told me a year ago that just about a year after buying this house I would wake up in my living room and hear the sound of my husband sawing in our bedroom upstairs I would say they were crazy.
The biggest surprise here is not the fact that I’ve become a DIYer in less than a calendar year, or that I can recognize the difference in sound between the three saws upstairs while laying in bed or that my husband would take to using the saw as an alarm clock for me. Nope the biggest surprise is that I would wake up at 6am when the alarm went off, realize I was still tired, tell my husband to wake me in 45 minutes and fall back into a deep enough sleep that he could do construction work directly above me. Ohhhh glory be for morning sleep.
I write this morning’s post not to the people who will walk through my office door in the next few weeks or months, but for the people who are still at the point of not being able to imagine a life of pure health. We all have the repeated experience of being astonished at where life takes us. That is the delight of life. Even the people who do walk through my office door very often can’t imagine a life without pain or a life with deep sleep, but they can imagine it a tiny bit better than it is right now.
I’ve been collecting phrases lately in my head. Little phrases that my students and patients say in my presence that make my blood boil. Phrases like ”I’ve resigned myself to never doing upwards facing dog again, but that’s okay.” “I’ll never sleep through the night, since I’ve been a mother I wake every three hours, that pattern won’t go away.” “I’m okay taking medicine if it helps me have a bowel movement every day. That doesn’t seem that big a deal.” “The pain really isn’t that bad, I’ve figured out how to do a combination of 4 Motrin and 2 extra strength Tylenol so I can go to work.”
These people, who I do hope your heart goes out to, mine certainly does, have settled into the idea that regardless of their age this life they are living is good enough. Why do they deserve a pain-free, healthy, vibrant life when lots of people in the world are in pain?
I invite you right now to take a moment and think about your body. Think about the top three things that annoy you (on a nearly daily basis) about your body. Maybe it is a digestive disturbance, a sleep issue, a temperature regulation problem, pain, skin condition, frequent colds, allergies, or something else. Now imagine waking up tomorrow morning and those three ailments are just gone, disappeared. What would your life feel like? What would you do with your body to celebrate? What activities would you add back into your life that you have been avoiding?
Now I invite you to think of three ways you could cure each of these ailments. Write the list down somewhere safe. Who could you reach out to for support through this process? What supplements have you used in the past to support yourself? What exercises do you already know that work for this ailment? What would you be willing to spend to be completely comfortable in your body again? How much time and effort would you be willing to commit?
I slept all night last night and woke up and realized I needed a little more because it has been a busy week, so I rolled over and slept an extra 45 minutes. That is really the equivalent hell freezing over in my world. This new life of sleep, it rocks. It is all I can do not to brag about it to everyone. So I ask you, what are you not imagining as possible in your life? How could you start believing that it might be possible?