This month we are focusing on relationships: the relationships we have with our loved ones, our Inner Spirit, our bodies. It seems like the perfect time then for me to relate a story I have been longing to share for the past few years. The three-chapter saga you are about to read is a true story, recounted with the permission of the woman who lived it whose name has been changed for privacy. When I asked if she would allow me to share her ascent from hell into vibrant health, she didn’t hesitate for a minute. “Sure,” she said, “as long as you think it would help somebody else…”
Help? Indeed, I have a number of students who have heard only parts of Laura’s story whose lives will never be the same. So Laura, thank you for your courage in sharing your story. I celebrate your undying tenacity to heal yourself–today more than ever.
The first time I heard Laura’s voice it was straining through the other end of the phone. She was telling me of an unusual spinal deformity which had made traditional exercise increasingly painful for her. Laura had never attended one of my yoga studio’s classes but had heard of me through a mutual friend and felt a private session might be the answer. We scheduled a time to meet and planned to work together for an hour each week to see if yoga could help heal her.
My first impressions of Laura were of a bright, vibrant woman in her late 40’s, full of vigor and positive Energy. At our first meeting, she told me that her back condition had not been a life-long burden. Somewhere in her mid-40’s she had begun to experience searing back pain that made her favorite pastime of running impossible. The sensation was like that of a searing-hot curling iron on her lower back every time she exercised or had to sit in a car when her job called her out of town–which it often did.
It was subsequently discovered that Laura’s lower back had inexplicably begun to bulge and curve, creating a significant bump. Doctors had been consulted, specialists enlisted, yet no one could find a cause for her spontaneous deformity. They labeled it adult idiopathic scoliosis which indicated a curvature of the spine with no discernible cause.
Slowly the condition had grown worse, depriving Laura of the pleasures of biking and eventually even walking for more than ten minutes at a time. The only thing that was left, she told me, was her current outlet of dancing. She would put on her favorite music, close the blinds at home and dance her heart out as a method of keeping her cardiovascular system healthy. The fact that only this more joyful form of exertion proved to be painless was indeed significant, I discovered later.
My initial session with Laura went well and we adjourned with plans to meet again the following week. As I collected my things and closed the door to the yoga studio something about our session nagged at me. As usual, my work with Laura had centered not only on the physical but had also included a general awareness of her personal Energy. I sensed that her outgoing, positive exterior was only one level of a rather complex and sensitive spirit.
But there were other things, too. Laura’s feet were bruised and included a number of blackened toenails. Her midsection was gaunt and bony, her arms and legs lacking in muscle tone. More than anything else, though, was the undeniable pronouncement my Spirit Guides had immediately planted in my heart: Laura’s condition, They had said, was entirely energetic.
Rather than jump on this information too soon, I bided my time through another session before solidifying my hypothesis. I looked for ways Laura’s Energy might be informing her body’s condition. From one exercise to another I tried to read her vibration more carefully, sensing into every move she made and every word she said. And then, through the grace of Divine Intervention, it hit me.
We were standing up and breathing, imagining taking in life force and expelling it out again consciously. As I watched Laura breathe, something in her midsection caught my eye. Instead of breathing into her belly and filling her middle like a balloon, she was lifting her ribcage and sucking her stomach back every time she inhaled. I casually pointed this out and asked her to try it again, encouraging her to puff her belly out like an expectant mother when she inhaled. She tried it, but with very little success. Her body, it seemed, would simply not perform the movement.
I asked her more about this breath style. Had she ever taken a singing lesson or breathing class that talked about diaphragmatic breathing? No, Laura replied, and what’s more she had never consciously taken a breath that pushed out her belly in her life. Not to calm herself, not to release stress, I asked? Shyly, she lowered her gaze and murmured again, “No…”
As she left that day, the Guides led me farther along the path to insight. To my amazement, They told me that Laura had caused the deformity herself. I could sense the Guides were indicating that something about the way she was using her body had caused her back to bow out of alignment. In my mind, They kept replaying the moment when I had discovered Laura’s difficulty taking a deep breath into her belly. Still, I was stumped and could not make out how there could be a connection between breathing and what Laura referred to as her “bump.”
The following week I was feeling a bit desperate for insight. Nothing we were doing with yoga seemed to help Laura’s condition or her pain. Many movements were altogether impossible to manage without discomfort and we ended up having to modify even the simplest stretches for her use. Still the cause eluded me, until Laura herself unwittingly supplied the missing piece.
During our third session together, we worked again on the belly-breathing technique. Laura was struggling significantly, unable to get her abdominal muscles to relax even after many moments of lying down and resting on the floor. As in our last session, I pointed out that the movement was similar to distending one’s belly like a pregnant woman, and that’s when she began to laugh.
Laura snorted and said that the last thing she ever thought she would be doing was attempting to make her belly look bigger! She tried to keep her voice light as she began to talk about years of “sucking in her gut” to make her midsection look as flat and skinny as possible. I was surprised to hear this powerful woman in the prime of her life talking about her body like a teenage girl in the middle of a self-image crisis. In a light and conversational way, I asked her to share with me what that image was about for her. With disarming honesty and heart-wrenching vulnerability, Laura honored me with the private story of her own personal hell.
Unbeknownst to me, Laura had been a lifelong anorexic and bulimic. She grew up with a mother who was a beauty pageant queen and was grooming her two daughters to follow in her footsteps. As children, Laura and her sister had eaten dinner at the kitchen table while their mother ate standing over the kitchen sink. From there, the anorexic mother would chew and then spit each bite of food into the garbage disposal rather than swallow it. Laura was raised to believe that the only thing others valued in a young lady was physical beauty. Her mother taught her that a skinny figure would guarantee others’ loyalty and friendship. From an early age it seemed Laura was destined to have an eating disorder.
Yet, that was not all. Laura’s father was a man struggling with manic depression at a time when such conditions were all but unknown in mainstream society. The instability of never knowing what state of mind her father would be in when she saw him made her years at home nearly unbearable. She lived a life of paralyzing uncertainty which resulted in battles with anxiety for years to come.
Laura and her younger sister grew up exercising viciously and competing over which girl could stay the skinniest. Controlling their intake of food seemed to be the only thing they could control in their unpredictable lives. When Laura began college, she maintained her merciless exercise regime to avoid gaining weight as her blooming body matured. As it happened, even Laura’s grandmother was anorexic.
My heart felt sickened as I heard the story of a young woman deprived of her joy. On and on into her adulthood Laura had continued to torture her body. She told me of how she would take her children to the local recreation center—not to play with them, but to put them in the childcare room while she exercised for hours a day. Laura had become a slave to her eating disorder. As she told her story, the Divine Insight of the Guides came into perfect focus.
It always takes a bit of courage to share theories with people when I receive direction from the Guides. But I sensed that Laura had trusted me in revealing some very intimate history, and I felt that at the very least she deserved a chance to hear the Truth. What happened next would change Laura’s life forever, and start us on a Journey to unraveling the most mysterious case of body-mind-spirit connection I had ever encountered…
Please stay tuned in the coming weeks for chapter 2 of “Laura’s Hope for Healing.” Simply click to follow our blog!
Grace and Clarity 