I can’t say that the last few days of being down with a sprained ankle and a head cold have been exactly unproductive, though it often felt that way. In my skewed way of looking at the world I had to work really hard at letting my body rest and be happy about it. You see I am one of those people whose Things To Do List is yards long. Most of what is on the list are things I want to do as compared to the things I have to do like sleep and eat, but sitting on the couch with my leg elevated has never been one of those listed items. There was one thing that helped me get through this inactivity besides my new laptop and that was the weather. It has been cold, dark and rainy and for a few days I got to enjoy watching the snow falling.
This forced inactivity has given me the time to sit and pull a description of my massage therapy practice together and to learn the hard way that Facebook Pages is not operating correctly. It seems like FB could disable that part of the program if it isn’t going to work as I have now created 2 pages for my massage practice, one that I cannot find or edit and another that I cannot invite anyone to look at. Yesterday it seemed like all of this was a giant waste of time, which is something I detest, until I remembered that it did enable me to help my husband promote his new book and poetry readings from “Dog Whistle Politics” which is for sale at www.lummoxpress.com (Shameless Plug!).
Now that I am past the Facebook frustration I am actually glad that it happened. I really like the Facebook Event I ended up with much better than the first one that was lost in cyber-space. It’s just one more time I get to learn the lesson of patience and giving up control. Living as a Recovering Control Freak can be so exhausting at times. If you have ever watched the sitcom “Friends” and have laughed at the character of Monica then you could be laughing at me as well. I didn’t end up in Fat Camp as a child, like Monica, but I was only 5lbs away from being the skinniest girl in my class, even though I ate like a horse and I would wear a t-shirt with a couple of fried eggs printed on the front so we could all laugh about my flat chest.
Yesterday my leg really felt good, in fact it felt so good that I was glad that some bruising showed up as I was afraid that my husband might think I had been faking the whole thing. But by taking fast action and following RICE (Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation) and Reiki (a life-force energy process) I turned what could have been a 2-week recovery process into just a matter of days. And by using Arnica sublingually in a homeopathic form and topically as a cream I was able to further reduce the swelling and bruising that normally happens with an ankle sprain.
In fact it felt so good that I was willing to do some light grocery shopping with my husband as driver. But this is where the story changes. After the third time of circumventing a large grocery store I started thinking and feeling like I didn’t want to do this anymore. My ankle was starting to hurt and I was frustrated at how I had to go back to the Jelly aisle. I was looking for the Organic Peanut butter which was on sale and not to be found in the Natural Foods aisle, only to discover after going to the Jelly aisle that the Organic Peanut butter that was advertised as being on sale was actually Peanut Butter SPREAD and contained sugar and palm oil as well as some nuts. So now we had to go back to the Natural Food aisle, as we needed the nut butter to make the snack we were taking to our celebratory final Mind-Body class on Tuesday.
So I am starting to grumble, fuss and fume about all of this when I remember the newest acronym I’ve learned, SBRC (Stop, Breathe, Reflect, Choose) and I put a halt to my negative thinking. “Good,” I thought, “my ankle hardly hurts now!” and we continued on with the Peanut Butter mission. A great example of mind over matter and pushing through the pain, I reflected yesterday. And then today comes and I find that by not really listening to my body which was telling me that it had just about had enough and concentrating only on my ego control freakiness, my ankle once again hurts and all I want to do now is sit with my leg up!
So in closing I say to any that will listen, the Mind-Body Connection is not a one-way, top-down conversation, but an active listening dialog. And whether there is empirical data or not many of us out here know that it is a two-way street that takes us towards wellness and not what the pill-pusher doctors or the cut-it-out surgeons purport to be for our own good. I say, let My body decide!
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