Since last Monday, I have been grappling with a pinched nerve in my neck. I have pulled muscles before, even in my neck, but this experience has taken “pain in my neck” to a whole new level that I have never experienced before. Now, if I ever call anyone a “pain in the neck”, it will be possibly one of the worst things which I could ever call a person.
In the beginning of this pinched nerve mess, I started out thinking that I could just stretch my neck out, with some light exercises. This plan, instead, took things to a whole new level of miserable and excruciating. I then assumed that a day at the beach, vacillating between hot sand and cold water would do the trick, all the while downing Aleve and Advil like candy. That ended up being a sand-filled, “how am I even going to get up and out, from this beach chair?” disaster that sent me to an Urgent Care the very next morning. In conjunction with my doctor’s orders, I got prescription strength Aleve and Advil, and I rested on the couch, all this entire past weekend, watching an entire season of “Love Island”, and other stupid, mind-numbing shows, on the couch, with the kind, cuddling company of my daughter. (They say that love and laughter is the best medicine.) While this was peaceful and enjoyable, by Sunday, my restless self was still in a great deal of pain, and so I caved to starting steroids. Since this pinch nerve situation happened last Monday (and I am still not even sure how it happened!) I dreaded every single night (as did my husband), because until last night, I could not find one comfortable position to prop myself up into, in order to fall to sleep. For a week and a half, it took me a good 45 minutes to an hour, until I reached utter exhaustion, to finally fall asleep in a strange contortion of me being twisted in tandem with a heating pad and a mountain of pillows. I looked like a living Picasso painting.
But then, yesterday, I remembered that a wonderful acupuncturist had cured a pesky eye twitch of mine in just a couple of sessions, a few years back, and I thought that it couldn’t hurt to see what she might have to say/do on the matter of my neck. And last night, after a few needles and ear seeds later, I had the best night of sleep I’ve had, since this whole fiasco started. My arm and thumb still feels a little numb (in case you’ve never experienced it, and I hope that you never have to, pinched nerves in your neck radiate through your entire shoulder and down through your arm all the way to your fingers and thumb), but the pain is gone. I have one more session today, and my acupuncturist is confident that I will feel better by the weekend. She didn’t “tsk tsk” me for going to Western Medicine first, and using her as a last resort. In fact, she told me to continue following their orders, too. “We will work in tandem,” she said, “to get you better.”
I am a believer in the yin/yang of all Healing practices. What I love best about Eastern practices is that my acupuncturist started yesterday’s appointment with, “Okay, what is your body trying to tell us, my dear?” Sometimes Western medicine seems to just want to put a quick bandaid on to the symptoms. But Western medicine is backed by a lot of science and technology, and in my life, I have witnessed that all healers have the same thing in common: A deep calling to help others to make themselves whole again. Just like there are many paths to God, there are also many paths to healing. And ultimately, I think that our minds, and our bodies, and our spirits feel appreciated and “seen”, when we don’t take them for granted. Our bodies notice when we take a pause, and we show that we are willing to amble down different paths of healing, in order to make ourselves whole again. And so this helps our cells to relax, and they jump aboard the healing process, too. Pain is just a cry for help, to set things right. There are so many different healing modalities available to get any of us to wholeness, if we willingly surrender our controlling ideas of “how and when” we should arrive at “whole and well.”
“A healer’s power stems not from any special ability, but from maintaining the courage and awareness to embody and express the universal healing power that every human being naturally possesses.”
― Eric Micha’el Leventhal
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
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