i am grateful for:
1) migraines. the one i got the day before yesterday was (i think) the worst i’ve had. yesterday i read up (again) on migraines and on the “call 911” list of symptoms: thinking “this is the worst headache of my life” and “it gets worse when i lie (lay?) down.” i had those. i also had projectile vomiting so bad i was standing in a pool of puke while still producing more into the sink. luckily the little smiling voice was still there at the back of my brain to make note of and laugh at the absurdity. i was slick with sweat, alternating chills and overwhelming surges of heat, and knowing, probably, that this would pass, but not knowing how i would get through the passing. and this was all happening at a peaceful meditation center where i was waiting for three days of silence to begin. i had already sat for three separate hours, dressed “modestly,” and was ramping up to spend three days watching my bodily sensations. which is part of what delayed me getting my meds. i thought, well, it’s just a small headache, i’ll see how well i can watch it. yeah, not so well. or, well, all the way through. as i waited for my doctor friend to come get me (i was worried i could have a seizure, or just dehydrate to pieces), the nice course manager told me that the whole style of meditation was popularized because one dude had really bad migraines. goenka-ji. he was wealthy and had traveled the world for a remedy and found none. then, a friend said, “nothing else has worked, try meditation.” so he went to his friend’s teacher who asked, “why do you want to do this?” goenka replied: “to get rid of my migraines.” and the teacher sent him away: “you can’t have an agenda here, you must just observe.” and so i’m not sure what happened next exactly but i imagine goenka either pretended to just observe or actually at some point traded his agenda for just observing (if i had to make a cynical guess it would have been right about the time he stopped getting headaches so bad they made him projectile vomit). and then he loved it and taught people, and the migraines, of course, never returned, allegedly. so i am grateful for migraines, one of the worst states of being ever, for: connecting me to a vital meditation lineage that i might be able to fully take advantage of some day; teaching me that i have lots of unfinished emotional business (migraines are often an escape valve for excess unresolved stuff); guiding me to get help, which might guide me to a larger, more vibrant version of myself i might not have otherwise found. also, i’m so detoxed! (and kidding, mostly. i just want to eat ice cream and drink salty miso soup.)
2) emma forrest’s memoir, your voice in my head. i read the first 20 pages and then was like, “oh, actually it’s not healthy for me to read about suicide and loss.” then even my other books–about stress & cancer & meditation–seemed more depressing, so i finished it and i’m so glad i did. raw and funny and beautiful and real, a wonderful ride with genuine insight and love and hope. yeah, hope. for health and healing and loving the self. actually, the book i was reading just before, when the body says no; the stress-disease connection, told the story of a woman who cured herself of ALS by slowly loving each part of her body, “i love you, hands,” she said, to gradually “unfreeze” her whole self–muscle lockup is a symptom of ALS. and that seems like what emma has done, unfrozen herself with authentic self-love, which i think of as intimate self-presence-ing (rowr). i don’t know if that makes sense out loud, but i am grateful to all the people who are doing and telling about the hardest work: communing with despair and the light, not losing sight of either, but reaching for the love harder, opening to the light more, and trusting that there is a wholeness, a softness, that we can all truly have.
3) friends who come and get you from migraine crises and know not to force chit-chat and take the less windy route home.
4) friends who make up a tidy, sweet guest room with dim lighting, a soft place to land.
5) ice packs
6) baby a. and his redonkulously fuzzy hair and adorably ambitious foot-crawling: knee-toe, knee-toe.
7) b. for loving me across states. and making the house so nice and clean to return to. sometimes cleanliness is a sign of love, of respect, of grace, really.
8) not really being so tuned in to the media right now. i know it’s another bad point in a lot of sad stories. and i don’t need to bathe in it all the time in order to justify my citizenhood (right? right.)
9) the lovely elderly psychic couple i met over breakfast at a b & b.
10) home.
