I know it's been a while. I've been moving through my own struggles in life. I was living with a lot of swelling and pain in my body, and I've been working it through, learned a lot. I'm on the other side of it now, recovering nicely. Quite thankful on that, but it did make me aware of a lot that I had not dealt with. We think we've looked at everything and healer type people are supposed to be perfect and always healthy. Well, gosh, every one of us has stuff! Anyone who tells you they've dealt with everything and everything's just fine. Okay, well, they can see. I hope they have, and I hope they are, but there can be some speed bumps that come up that you don't expect. Like for me, this, it had started with one foot, under my foot bothering me, and slowly it got to be more. Anyway, let me just start with some history here, because I knew my first thought was to do with my overuse of my body. Let's just say I had a history, a big history of physically pushing my body past its ability and capacity at the time. I did this again and again. As a child I rode horses and competed at horse shows in summer. Now, in English riding, there are some rules. How you hold the reins and where your feet sit in the stirrups. Like hands together down low, not flailing around in the air, and how your heels are down in the stirrups. Just the ball of your foot in the actual stirrup. These two things strained my wrists, fingers and ankles and feet a lot over the years. Now let's move forward. I've always been a craft type person. Knitting, sewing, like knitting as a teen. I was knitting sweaters, hats, and later on, blankets that my children used to like to curl up in. I sewed my own clothes and lots and lots of cooking and baking. Let's just say my hands have been really busy over the years. In my twenties, I did a three-year Crafts and Design program at Sheridan College. Talk about using my hands! Wow, it was a super creative time, and I loved it. Designing and drawing and photography, silk screening fabrics, weaving. Where I spent most of my time was in the ceramic studio. My hands and arms were pushed far beyond the strength and ability they had at the time. We had to mix our own clay body to make pottery with. I'd be lifting, this scrawny little 20 something, lifting a 100-pound bag of clay up into the mixer. That's several types, because you wouldn't be just using one ingredient in the mix, so you'd be doing this again and again. I remember the strain. It was so hard to do because I didn't have the muscles. Before you start making pottery on what's called a wheel, a throwing wheel, you have to wedge it. It's kind of like kneading bread but requires a lot more muscle. Then when you're throwing wet clay on a potter's wheel, it makes such demands on the wrists, the fingers, again and again, and your hands are in wintertime, cold water again and again. My wrists used to ache when I'd get home. Especially when you start to create bigger pieces, you're dealing with a lot more weight of clay. You're pushing your wrists super hard, bending them to center the clay, before you start to pull it up into thinner walls. Let's see, now we can fast forward to last fall. I was having fun learning how to dehydrate foods from our garden. It started when we had way too many tomatoes! I was using my hands way beyond their capacity again, chopping and slicing far too much. This is around when I started having my hands swelling and my wrists and oh, my goodness, my feet and ankles. Anyway, it got really painful, and I continued to persevere. Thinking, all right, I've got to work through this and sort it out. I was working on myself, and I could get it settled down to a certain extent. It wasn't until I realized that I had been holding myself back, really forever, in thinking I didn't deserve care. I was taught to take care of everyone else and I didn't clue in to taking care of myself. I had pushed and pushed and pushed my physical body all my life. I had to get the big lesson of caring about myself and loving myself and asking for help. Once I settled into that, which wasn't easy, I started to move forward. Got some help and looked for other resources that could help and through a variety of things, moved this forward. Now today, I can walk more easily and use my hands more, they're still weak. I have to rebuild muscles, but things are coming along nicely. What I wanted to point out is at times in our life, like when I was in a lot of pain, frustrated and struggling in my life at that point. It's what we do at those points. Do we give up and wallow in it and self-pity and think there's nothing we can do? Or do we rise up and go, all right, how do we solve this? What needs to happen? When we can settle down and look at things more calmly. Often the reality, the true self within can give us a little talk, that little intuitive voice inside. If we can accept that we need some help, and then sort out a lot of what's going on. Wow, the ...
