Living a Healed Life

Posted on March 22, 2019 by barbmorris

A woman meets her soul: photo of child and bear

The source of your woundedness isn’t what you think it is. The reason you feel broken isn’t what other people did to you. You don’t feel broken because of the things that have happened to you. The source of your wounds is your beliefs. You feel broken because of your thoughts about those people and those events.

This is good news.

You can’t change other people, and you can’t change the past. What you are totally and completely in charge of is your thoughts and beliefs. The source of our sickness is who we believe ourselves to be – our foundational metaphors. If we’re swimming in a polluted worldview, our lives will be sick. (Last week’s very long post goes into this concept in detail.)

We heal when we learn to think healing thoughts. It’s that simple.

Two things I’m not saying: I’m not saying that others’ bad behavior is okay. I’m not saying you should overlook someone else’s violence or tolerate boundary violations, and just think happy thoughts. I’m not telling you to forgive, although that may happen.

I’m also not promoting the Law of Attraction – the belief that my thoughts make things happen in the physical world. This is different. The work I’m talking about changes who I think I am, which then affects the world around me. There’s a big difference between the magical thinking of manifesting 101 and the hard work of learning to think healing thoughts.

I am talking about solid neuroscience. We see what we tell our brains to look for. If your worldview is negative, you’ll find ample evidence to prove your beliefs, and you won’t change your mind. Your polluted metaphor has shaped your brain in profound ways. Your current worldview is like an eight-lane neuron superhighway that’s easy and automatic. And so very unhelpful. Our brains want to stay on this wide, fast, easy street precisely because it’s easy and automatic. Back in cave woman days, when resources were scarce, our brains evolved to favor the easy and automatic. Learning new ways of thinking and building new neuron pathways requires energy, so our brains, still stuck in survival mode, resist it.

Most of us aren’t currently living in food scarcity, in fear of saber-toothed tiger attacks. We can afford the resources to rewire our brains, if we choose to. But, because learning to think healing thoughts is uncomfortable and often not supported by your family and friends, you must make it your priority. Your health and wholeness must be your priority. If it’s not, you won’t do it. Why not? Because rewiring your brain is freaking hard, scary work.

Why does healing feel so scary? Why do we resist it?

1.This wounded place is familiar. When we accept the healing that’s always offered, we choose to travel an unfamiliar road into unknown territory – the opposite of easy and automatic. Our brains resist this.

2. When we regrow and expand parts of ourselves on our journey toward wholeness, it can hurt, just like when blood flows into your leg that’s been asleep, or into a frostbitten hand. You get a functioning limb at the end of the process, but the process can hurt like hell.

3. We’ve constructed our lives based on being one particular shape. When we let our shapes flow and grow, the lives we’ve built will inevitably be disrupted. Healing leads to change, and change always destroys one thing while something new is created. Metamorphosis is naturally destructive.

When we regrow and expand a part of ourselves, our new shape can cause friction. We rub against others differently. They might not want to stay connected to us. We might not want to stay connected to them!

4. These newly grown or uncovered parts, like babies and puppies, will be messy and disorganized, at least for a time. They are raw and vulnerable and sensitive. So healing can cause feelings of incompetence and lostness, which are especially disruptive for those of us who put a premium on feeling competent and confident.

Our armor has been our protection. Our armor has also been constraining, a too-small skin. Armor has kept us safe, but it’s also been heavy, clanky, and inflexible. When we uncover, shed layers, grow new limbs, we can feel raw, exposed, and ungainly.

So why choose to heal, if healing is uncomfortable, painful, and disruptive?

We are created by God, the Ultimate Wholeness, in whom we live and move and have our being, to be whole, holy, and healthy. The Holy One wants us to heal.

A healed life is a powerful life. When we stop spending our time and energy staying small and playing nice, we can use our time and energy to change the world. We can stop scoping for danger and worrying about being acceptable, and start seeing the broken places around us where we can bring healing. We can use our anger for good, rather than stuffing it because we’re afraid someone (looking at you, patriarchy) won’t like us.

Because we’re adults now, and we can keep ourselves safe. Because we have an inkling we’re not living the life we were put on this earth to live. Because we know there’s more joy and love on the other side of healing. Because once we see the ways we’re choosing safety and smallness, we can’t unsee them. Because choosing to stay armored and small requires more energy than finally shrugging off the armor to run light and free.

Because living as people who trust ourselves and our good hearts, people listening to our souls, is our calling.

The choice to heal, to learn how to feel fear and act in spite of the fear, makes us invincible. Unstoppable. And legions of invincible, unstoppable warriors leading healed lives will change and heal our world.

Two of my favorite “thought work” resources are Kara Lowentheil’s blog and podcast, Unf*ck Your Brain (heads up: Kara uses salty language) and The Work of Byron Katie. These two resources are very different in tone but their aim is the same: choosing thoughts deliberately.

As always, if you’d like to talk more about these ideas and get some immediate clarity, please schedule a no-cost, no-obligation call with me here.

Image: The Bear and the Child, kid-lit.net, photographer unknown

What is healing, anyway?

Posted on March 16, 2019 by barbmorris

In “A letter from God to her daughters who observe Lent,” I suggested that, this Lent, rather than “focusing on the ways you’re not good enough and the ways you fall short, you commit to your own healing.” To my astonishment, the post has been viewed over 45,000 times. Clearly it struck a chord with many of you.

But what exactly is “healing”? Like most important words, “healing” means different things to different people. This post explores what I think healing is, the number one reason we don’t heal as well as we could, and ways to explore what healing might mean for you.

First, some etymology. Our modern English words health, healing, whole, and holy all spring from the same root in Old English, hāl. So our healing and health are rooted in being whole, and our wholeness is a blessing to the world. We’re holy wherever we are on our journey to wholeness simply because we’re created by and rooted in the Holy One.

“Soul” is another big word that means different things to different people. When I think of my soul, I’m imagining the place within me where I experience connection to my Source. The soul is like the stem connecting the pear to the branch; the channel water follows from the underground aquifer to the spring; the tree’s taproot reaching down to nourishing soil. Our souls are the conduit for God’s healing—healing that’s always waiting for us.

Our souls speak in metaphor and image. What healing is for you depends on your primary metaphor. (A metaphor is a sort of shorthand label for a worldview – a frame through which we perceive our lives. I’ll use both words interchangeably in this post.) That frame, that metaphor, is profoundly important.

We have metaphors we live within, whether we are aware of them or not. We swim in our metaphors like fish swim in water. It’s crucial that the water you swim in is healthy, unpolluted, life-giving water.

So many of us are swimming in polluted metaphors, because we live in a culture steeped in judgment, conflict, and competition. We live as though life is a courtroom, or a war, or a test. Or all three at once.

So many of us learned in school that the goal of life is to follow the rules and get it right, whatever it is. In this elementary school worldview, we compete for good grades and approval. We are pupils and God is the strict taskmaster doling out affirmation sparingly, and only to those who achieve perfection.

So many of us learned in Christian churches that life is a courtroom, and God is a stern judge who demands retribution for our infractions of His law. We are so bad, in fact, that He needed to send Jesus to die for our sins, because we could never otherwise repay Him for our transgressions. In this metaphor, we are defendants constantly trying to prove ourselves worthy of love and acceptance.

I learned the war metaphor growing up in a family with addiction, scary conflict between my mom and dad, and physical violence. I woke up this morning, as I often do, already tensed for battle. “Life as war” is the metaphor I automatically gravitate to. This worldview tells me that every day is a battleground where survival is achieved through appeasement, keeping my head down, and staying camouflaged. In this metaphor, I am caught in the crossfire, vulnerable to collateral damage in someone else’s war. And those in charge, including God, don’t care in the least about me and my well-being.

These three polluted metaphors have common elements. They’re highly regimented and rule-bound, full of fear and straight lines and doing what you’re damn well told. All three feature a separate and distant God who rules from the top down. These metaphors say “need to, have to, can’t, shouldn’t.”

Friends, here’s good news. These metaphors are not the truth. They are, to put it bluntly, incorrect. These worldviews are socially constructed by institutions that benefit when we stay in line, stuck in fearful consumerism, competition, and addiction.

I know these metaphors are false because they aren’t grounding, loving, and compassionate. Love created us from Earth to live lives grounded in the deep knowledge that we are lovable and so very enough. We’re created to live in joy and purpose by the Holy One who is the source of joy and purpose. We don’t have to prove anything.

When you read the descriptions of these three metaphors, how does your body feel? Does your upper body tense? Does your breathing become more shallow? Do your eyes squint and your focus narrow? Does your heart rate increase?

A metaphor that creates stress is a destructive metaphor.

Healing happens when we live within healing metaphors.

Our worldviews must grow from the bedrock truth of our goodness to be healing for us.

Perhaps true repentance is trading in a polluted metaphor for a healing metaphor. The word often translated as “repentance” in the Bible is the Greek word “metanoia,” which literally means to have a “new mind.” To have our minds blown open. Our metaphors live in our brains. We can change our brains. We can have new minds. If one or more of these destructive, poisonous metaphors feels familiar, you can choose a new one. A healing one.

[Biblical Interlude: (Some readers don’t give a rat’s rooty-poo about the Bible. For others, scripture is deeply important. If the Bible is unimportant to you, feel free to skip this paragraph.) In Romans 12:2, Paul admonishes his readers not to be conformed to this world, but instead to be transformed by the renewing of their minds, so that they will know the will of God and be better able to follow it. In chapter 8 of his letter to the Romans, Paul contrasts life in the flesh and life in the Spirit. He says that life in the flesh leads to death, and that life in the Spirit leads to more life. (The word “flesh” is better translated as “world.”) I understand Paul to be talking about living within rigid and static metaphors – living in a false metaphor rather than a worldview that springs from our belovedness. Life in the Spirit is life lived within a changing, flowing, healing worldview. And what is choosing a new metaphor but a “renewing of your mind” that will lead to transformation?]

Your true self, your soul, speaks in metaphor and image. Because we live in a culture that considers knowledge to be only that which can be weighed and measured and proven with numbers, many of us have lost touch with our soul’s wisdom. You will never fully heal if you’re living in a damaging metaphor. We heal when we relearn our soul’s native tongue, and dwell within metaphors of wholeness, joy, and purpose.

What metaphors might create groundedness, wholeness, and peace for you? Perhaps one of these: A Redwood tree. A spring of living water. A hummingbird flying from flower to flower. A boat sailing on the ocean. A pilgrim on a journey. A butterfly emerging from her chrysalis. A snake shedding its skin. A bird incubating eggs. A stream flowing in the desert. An oak tree. A peaceful cloister. A lively temple. A warm house. A growing garden. Granite. Sunlight. Flame. A mother or father caring for their child(ren). A community. A loving friend. A soccer team. Bees in a hive. A fern unfurling in springtime. And so many more, probably as many more as there are souls. I want to keep going with this list! Your soul’s metaphors may be numerous. Your soul may fly from flower to flower like a hummingbird, too.

In these metaphors, God is interwoven, part and particle of the world, feeding, healing, growing, and wild. These metaphors are open-ended, flowing, growing, and use words like “choose, desire, want, will.” Many of them are drawn from the natural world, because, after all, human beings are just fancy animals.

How do you feel when you read these? I can feel my breath deepen, my heart slow down, my arms and neck relax, and my focus widen.

When I feel that my body is tense and anxious because I’m falling back into my familiar battle metaphor, I remember, eventually, to choose a different one. You’ll know when you’ve connected to a healing metaphor when you feel more grounded, whole, and peaceful.

Traditional spiritual practices for getting in touch with our connection to God and our soul’s wisdom include formal worship, chanting the psalms, silent retreats, Lectio Divina, Centering Prayer, walking labyrinths, pilgrimage, and daily prayer time.

Here are some less-traditional ways to explore what your soul’s healing metaphor(s) might be.

Stream of consciousness writing (Morning Pages are one example)
Meditation
Vulnerable conversations with trusted friends
Intuitive painting
Collage
Art journaling
Contemplative walking
Photography
Reading and writing poetry
Reading and writing fiction, fairy tales, fantasy
Yoga
Running
Sitting on a rock, under a tree, atop a mountain, next to a river…
Dancing
Playing
Gardening
Building something
Sweaty physical labor
Working with a coach or spiritual director

There are so many more methods for connecting with our soul. They seem to involve getting out of our thinking heads and into our bodies.

This “Soul Whispering Process” has been helpful to me and my clients. It might be helpful to you, as well. Download it here.

Choose one or two of these, or something completely different, and practice them consistently. Be patient.

Parker Palmer says the soul is like a wild animal to be approached slowly, quietly, and reverently:

“Like a wild animal, the soul is tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, and self-sufficien: it knows how to survive in hard places…. Yet despite its toughness, the soul is also shy. Just like a wild animal, it seeks safety in the dense underbrush, especially when other people are around. If we want to see a wild animal, we know that the last thing we should do is go crashing through the woods yelling for it to come out. But if we will walk quietly into the woods, sit patiently at the base of a tree, breathe with the earth, and fade into our surroundings, the wild creature we seek might put in an appearance. We may see it only briefly and only out of the corner of an eye—but the sight is a gift we will always treasure as an end in itself.” Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness

Awareness of the metaphors in which we dwell is crucial to our healing. If you tend toward stress, scarcity, and fear, you’re swimming in a polluted worldview. You have the power to choose life-giving, free-flowing, healing metaphors to live in.

Let’s give Mary Oliver the last word:

“What I want to say is
the past is the past,
and the present is what your life is,
and you are capable
of choosing what that will be,
darling citizen.
So come to the pond,
or the river of your imagination,
or the harbor of your longing,
And put your lips to the world.
And live
your life.”
from Mornings at Blackwater

Image: The Bear and the Child, kid-lit.net, photographer unknown

It’s Not Your Fault.

Posted on October 25, 2018 by barbmorris

It’s not your fault.

Repeat after me: “It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault.”

The behaviors you carry into your adult life are not your fault. They are simply how you learned to cope with the stresses and strains of being a child in your family and in your culture.

They are not your fault.

They are, however, your responsibility. Once you are aware that your automatic behaviors in stressful situations aren’t serving you, it’s your responsibility to learn new ones.

Here’s what happened. You came into this world with an incredibly malleable, adaptive brain. Events happened in your family that began to shape your brain even before you were born. Every event in your childhood was an opportunity for neurons to connect. Every repetition of an event and your response to that event strengthened that neural connection. Over time, these connections learned to function like superhighways in your brain. Stimulus leads to response without your conscious awareness, producing the same result.

It’s neurobiology, and it’s not your fault.

For example, let’s say one of the adults in your life got mad often, and you frequently got hurt when they got mad. You probably learned that angry adults are scary and your job was to either hide or placate. That was an adaptive, rational response when you were seven. If you’re still responding to angry adults by hiding or placating when you’re 57, that’s a problem. You’re not a child anymore, and you have power now.

Building new habits to replace the old habits that no longer serve us – that’s what coaching is.

We start by learning the cycle: an event produces thoughts, thoughts lead to feelings, feelings lead to actions, and actions produce results. You can interrupt that cycle in only two places. You can change your thoughts, and you can change your actions. Feelings are a result of your thoughts, and the only way to shift them is to shift your thinking.

To heal and to make different choices, you must cultivate awareness of exactly how this cycle is operating in your life. One powerful tool for developing awareness of the cycle is the Awareness Wheel. Grab one here, and read these two previous posts for more information.

Sometimes just shining a light on what’s going on with us will ease our suffering. To really heal ourselves, though, we need to heal our brains. One powerful way to heal our brains is through an inquiry method, such as Byron Katie’s model which she calls “The Work.” (There are other forms of Inquiry. I’ve included links to two of them at the end.)

After you’ve identified a thought that’s not serving you, The Work asks four questions:

Is it true? Yes or no.
Can you absolutely know it’s true? Yes or no.
What happens when you believe this thought?
Who would you be without this thought?

The deeper you go into Questions 3 and 4, the more healing occurs. Take your time here. Katie’s website is full of resources, and I’m always happy to talk you through this process.

The final step is to turn the original thought around, and to find evidence for why it might be as true or truer than the original thought.

The purpose of this process is to find the truth. Inquiry is not about denial. It’s about truth. The truth will set you free.

Here’s how The Work could look for a child growing up with a violent parent. One painful thought learned in this situation might be, “It’s my job to keep people happy.”

Is it true? It sure feels true, so YES.
Can I absolutely know it’s true? Not really, so NO.
What happens when I believe the thought “It’s my job to keep people happy”?

I’m always being nice and going out of my way to accommodate others. I don’t say what I think and I never disagree with anyone. I’m always paying attention to how others feel to the point that I don’t know how I feel anymore. I feel tense in my stomach and my breathing is shallow. My shoulders are a little hunched and my arms are tight.

Who would I be without the thought “It’s my job to keep people happy”?

I’d say what I think. I’d let their anger be their problem. I’d pay attention to what I’m feeling and give myself love. I’d feel so much more free.

Two possible turnarounds:

It’s not my job to keep people happy.

Of course this is true, because I’m not actually in charge of other people’s feelings.

It’s my job to keep me happy.

Who else’s job could it be?

Repeating this process over and over builds new neural pathways. This is how you heal your brain.

Resources:

The Work

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

Unf*ck Your Brain (This podcast and blog is the work of Kara Loewentheil, a Harvard-trained lawyer turned life coach. I think it’s f*cking brilliant, if you don’t mind swearing. Kara’s method is more streamlined than The Work.)

As always, I offer a free consultation. Please email me or use the contact form to set up a convenient time.

photo credit: Daoudi Aissi on unsplash

Your feelings are not your problem. Your feelings are your solution.

Posted on October 9, 2018 by barbmorris

My mom was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of uterine cancer when she was 62. By the time it was found, the cancer had metastasized to her lungs, although we didn’t know that right away. The lung cancer would kill her a year later. My mom had been very healthy her whole life. Her plan to live to be 100 was one I heard often as a child. Her cancer was completely unexpected, which was why it was found too late to save her life. I was devastated. Everyone who knew her was devastated.

And she didn’t want to talk about dying.

We were living in Illinois, so I took both my kids, six and ten at the time, to Arizona with me for the summer. In June, the kids and I took a road trip with her to visit her favorite aunt in New Mexico. She went swimming with her grandkids. She took walks with her dog and her husband. She still didn’t want to talk about dying.

In July, my mom was slowing down. By August, I was doing all the cooking and cleaning for her and my stepfather. She had to sleep sitting up because she couldn’t breathe lying down. And she still didn’t want to talk about dying.

We went home to Illinois at the end of August. My mom’s last words to me were her promise that she’d call me when it was time for me to return and say good-bye.

She died September 1^st, alone in her bed, never having asked me to come back.

I was heartbroken. I didn’t know I could hurt like that. I was also deeply angry. I was angry that she’d never let me tell her how much I loved her, and that she didn’t let any of us say goodbye. This was no accidental death, like my dad’s. My mom had plenty of advance warning. Hers could have been a much better death. It didn’t have to hurt so much. She could have died surrounded by people who loved her. She was a nurse. She knew how to do this right.

Grieving her death while I was so angry was harder and took a lot longer than it would have if she’d done it better.

I held onto this anger for years. I tried to let it go, but it stuck around. It persisted, despite therapy and many attempts to forgive.

I didn’t know at the time that I was carrying a lot of what the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy model calls “dirty pain.” Mixed in with the clean pain of my heart-rending grief was a ton of unnecessary suffering. (The Buddha and many healers since have put it this way: “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” In other words, pain comes and goes, as a result of injury or loss. Suffering hangs around, tied like a yoke to the thoughts we’re having about our pain.)

And then one day, almost twenty years after her death, I did something that helped my anger loosen its grasp. I filled out an Awareness Wheel about how much I still missed my mom, as a teaching example for a small group I was facilitating. (Download one here. The rest of this will make much more sense. And here’s a previous post about the Awareness Wheel.) I was encouraging this group of wise women to go deep in their choice of issue to work with. They encouraged me to be brave, too. What follows is verbatim from my Awareness Wheel that day.

In the middle, in the Issue circle, I wrote “I miss my mom.”

I Notice/Observed: “Tears, heaviness in chest, avoidance of talking about her, distracting myself, tightness in arms/neck/shoulders.”

I Think: “She shouldn’t have died so young. I wonder how she is. I hope she’s happy. I wish she’d had a better death. I wish I’d been able to say goodbye. She was selfish in her dying. I wish she was still alive. People should have talked about the family history of cancer.”

I Feel: “Sad, furious, love.”

I Want (for myself): “To feel at peace. To have you back. I Want (for you): That you’re happy. I Want (for us): That you know I love and forgive you.”

I Do (Past): “Stuff feelings. Be mad. Grieve.” I Do (Present): “Feel my grief. Acknowledge loss and your impact on my life.”

It’s useful simply to fill in a wheel when uncomfortable feelings arrive. It’s even more useful, after you do your wheel, to identify which thought is causing the most suffering. You do this by reading the thoughts you wrote and feeling how they feel in your body. Many of my thoughts were painful, but “She was selfish in her dying” felt like a knife to my gut.

I questioned that thought using Byron Katie’s method called The Work. (More on questioning our painful thoughts next time.) Simply put, through a series of questions, we get very clear on the results our thoughts are producing in our lives. Then, we turn the thought around and kindly investigate how the opposite might be true. This process wiggles the thought loose just a little and begins to grow new brain connections. Healing begins at the cellular level. We feel a little relief, at last.

When I gently investigated my thought “My mom was selfish in her dying,” I began to see how my mom had been generous in her dying. She let me take care of her. She spent time with her grandkids. She was trying to protect us.

When I let go of the thought that she’d been selfish, I can just love her and miss her. I can see that she was doing the best she could with an incredibly scary sad thing. I can see the ways I’d been selfish in her dying, by wanting her to do it my way.

This is how healing has happened, for me. I still miss my mom, of course, and letting go of my anger is ongoing. Now, though, my grief is mostly good, clean, healing grief. I can tell when it’s mixed up with dirty pain, because they feel different in my body.

Martha Beck has said, “If a thought causes suffering, it isn’t true.” That’s an audacious statement. It’s a core belief of my coaching work, because I’ve found it to be true.

When you pay attention to uncomfortable feelings using an Awareness Wheel, you find the thoughts causing suffering. When you question the thoughts that cause you to suffer, you begin to change your brain. When you begin to change your brain, you heal. And that’s how your feelings aren’t your problem, but your solution.

Interested in talking further about this? Contact me here to schedule a conversation. I’d love to explore with you!

Things that bother only burros.

Posted on June 8, 2018 by barbmorris

Love Does That

All day long a little burro labors, sometimes
with heavy loads on her back and sometimes just with worries
about things that bother only
burros.

And worries, as we know, can be more exhausting
than physical labor.

Once in a while a kind monk comes
to her stable and brings
a pear, but more
than that,

he looks into the burro’s eyes and touches her ears

and for a few seconds the burro is free
and even seems to laugh,

because love does
that.

Love frees.

~ Meister Eckhart ~

Give Yourself Gentle Fences

Posted on June 3, 2018 by barbmorris

Choose to put some gentle fences in your pasture … Be in integrity with yourself. ~Sarah B. Seidelmann

Choose to build some gentle fences in your pasture. Choose to give yourself the gift of good grass and clear cold water. Keep yourself out of the weedy patches and away from traffic. Your life is tenuous – this ligament between body and soul is flesh and bone, easily fractured.

Give yourself gentle fences. Because you love your soul, your spirit, give yourself structure and safety. Your spirit is captive to your mind. Teach your mind to be kind.

What would gentle fences look like for you?

Would gentle fences look like saying “Yes” to a yearning? Would they look like committing to a dream? Would they look like saying “No” to someone? Would they look like more white space in your calendar?

Would gentle fences look like carving out time for what feeds you, consistently and intentionally?

Would they look like noticing when you’re not kind to yourself, and learning a different way?

Would gentle fences look like noticing what you do that takes you away from your priorities, and choosing not to do that anymore?

Here are some gentle fences I’m building. I’m committing to consistently writing. I’m putting boundaries around my creative time. I’m not consuming media that leaves me feeling pummeled, and I’m taking a walk instead. I’m examining my habits in light of my priorities and making changes.

I’d love to hear what gentle fence you’re building for yourself in the comments.

Want to talk further? Contact me and we’ll set up a time.

(Sarah is a physician turned shamanic healer. Check her out here.)

Photo by Richard Austin on Unsplash

Posted on May 3, 2018 by barbmorris

THIS IS A SCENE FROM MY CAMINO NOVEL-IN-PROCESS. PLEASE SEE THE FIRST EXCERPT, “THE MESSIES,” WHICH INTRODUCES THE NOVEL AND WHY I’M POSTING THIS WRITING IN ITS RAW STATE.

So here our three travelers are, Hope on the floor and Martha and her mom on a soft couch covered with an Indian throw, safe and warm in the arms of the Hospital of the Soul. Hope is happily eating sugar cookies off of prettily-flowered china and chattering away. She licks her fingers with gusto and relish, licking the sugar and crumbs off, then swiping the crumbs off her plate with her finger. Hope is content, and so is Martha as she watches Hope’s contentment. She’s aware in a corner of her mind how truly bizarre this is – sitting in the warm living room of a house in Spain called the Hospital del Alma with her dead mother and her little daughter who until just a few hours ago was curled up in a chest freezer nestled in her chest, naturally, right beside her heart.

Martha realizes that her heart has been keeping Hope alive all these years, and the Hospital of the Soul is the perfect place for the three of them to be.

I wonder if others can see all three of us, or if I just look crazy and alone from the outside. But I choose to believe the evidence of my senses – here these two are. Hope is eating cookies. My mom is next to me, drinking chamomile tea with honey. I feel warmth from the wood stove. I can see and hear María outside building a mosaic in the patio’s east wall. A pine tree I don’t know the name of overhangs the glass ceiling of this room.

I am simply grateful to be here.

I love this space. I love the earthiness and the colors and the constant surprise. I love the hospitality of it – not a Parker House hospitality, but a hospitality of the heart and home. This is a place on the Camino designed for one purpose only – refuge for peregrinas’ souls. A Hospital of the Soul. I love the complete lack of expectations and judgment. “Come in and sit.” That’s all. Warmth, nourishment, comfort, welcome. All it needs is cats.

And at that moment Martha see kittens in the back, on the patio, and the place is complete. She could sit here forever.

This magical child who’s evidently not an apparition will need some clothes. Are those rubber-toed red sneakers adequate to the task of walking at least a little every day? They’re from a time when support in kids’ shoes was nonexistent. Martha hears herself worrying about Hope’s shoes, because she has no idea what she’s going to say to Maria at dinner when she asks for their story.

Here’s all she knows: she retired from her teaching job, a job she loved for many years and was good at, because it was time. Class sizes were growing, the kids were getting harder to reach, and she had less time and creativity because of mandated curriculum and tests every other week, it seemed. So it was time. She would have done a few more years, but then the district sweetened the retirement deal for older teachers and she jumped ship.

My kids didn’t need me, I’d seen The Way and done a little research, and I knew I needed a Thing to Do right after retirement. An intentional journey wanted to happen and the Camino met that need – cheap, flexible, set up for solitary walkers. A week after I turned in my school keys I was on a plane to Madrid, then a train to León, a bus to Pamplona, and another bus to SJPP*.

Everything had been pretty normal for the context of doing this crazy thing of walking 500 miles to Santiago, for the first week or so. Little stuff had started happening around then. She’d found herself taking unplanned side excursions and detours, sitting by the side of the track for a few hours, walking by herself a lot. These things just seemed to happen. But once on the Meseta, they’d come fast and furious, getting odder and odder all the time. The voice in the Templar church. The cougar who talked. The jar of messies. She was beginning to get used to it. Retrieving her daughter from a freezer in her chest and having her mom come along to help thaw her out was only the latest. It was also, she knew, of a completely different order of magnitude of crazy. These two seemed to be real people. Her mom she could explain, sort of. This little girl dressed in clothes from the 1960s, not so much. What will they tell Maria, she wondered.

Just then Hope got up, wiped her hands on her 1960s trousers, and climbed into Martha’s lap. She put her arms around her mom’s neck, said in a muffled voice, “Thank you for unfreezing me,” and fell asleep. Martha glanced at her mom and found her mom looking at her. They shook their heads, smiled, and returned to silent fire-watching. El Hospital del Alma, indeed.

Eventually they heard the back door opening and María making noise in the kitchen. “I’ll go see what I can do,” said her mom. She heard her mom ask in Spanish how she could help. María evidently found her something to do, since the next sound she heard was voices and occasional laughter. The sounds of wine glasses being filled, along with cooking noises and smells, came from the kitchen. Her mom came to her with a glass of Riojan wine.

Martha reached out a hand to take it, saying, “Mom, I’m so glad you’re here with me. I don’t understand it, but I’m glad. I think I might be crazy.”

“You’re not crazy, sweetie. You’re wondering how long I’ll be here, right?”

“Thanks, Mom. Of course I am. And I’m also trying to just be here now and enjoy this gift. Since I’m not crazy.”

Her mom smiled and returned to the kitchen. Martha sat, a daughter she didn’t have this morning on her lap, and drank her wine. I’ll take it, she thought. I’ll take it. I won’t get to keep it, I sure as hell don’t understand it, but I’ll take it. I’ll enjoy every minute I get with these two, and I won’t mourn them before they’re gone.

Supper starts with a salad of baby greens and peas, because it’s June in Spain and Maria’s garden has just started producing. The flowers and tomatoes will come later, in a month or so. Chicken and rice, and quejada for dessert. Hope has been pulled up to the table on a stool, and she’s digging into her chicken, cut up for her by María, and her rice. She eats the peas with her fingers, eschewing the lettuce. It’s her first real meal in decades – she’s been kept alive by Martha’s heart but she’s hungry for real food.

This meal is delicious. “Gracias, María. Es delicioso,” Martha says. María responds, “Y gracias para ustedes. I am happy you are here.” Hope keeps shoveling it in, humming happily. Then she looks up and says to Maria, “I’ve been frozen next to my mommy’s heart for a long time. Today she found me and unfroze me, and here I am!”

Her mom added, “And I was walking along and saw Martie sitting on a rock in a field of poppies, this one on her lap, and I thought they might need help so I went to see what was up. As I got closer I could see that I knew them. Then I saw that they were Martha and Hope, both of whom I was surprised to see. Martie because I’m dead and she’s alive, and Hope because I hadn’t seen her since she was a little girl.”

Okay then, thinks Martha. She won’t be any help explaining this to me, or anyone else. Maybe when you’re dead you just take weird shit for granted.

María simply nodded and took another bite. “There were angels all round you three,” she said. “You were glowing when you entered my house. It’s called El Hospital del Alma for a reason.”

*SJPP is Camino shorthand for St. Jean Pied de Port, a small, charming Basque French town that’s served as the Camino gateway over the Pyrenees into Spain for a millennia or more.

Barb Morris

Writer, Teacher, Facilitator, Artist

Tag Archives: healing