You never know what will happen when you take a health-related leave of absence from your beloved practice, or valued job, until it happens.
You find yourself infinitely moved by the message from your body , and then your medical practitioner, that says "Absolutely. Stop. Right now." It's the same love and concern and import as how you would feel about a dearest friend or a cared for neighbor. Only it's your self.
And if you're lucky enough to be in your 60s, it's probably not quite as much of a shock. Everyone realizes that at some point, sometime, we will stop working. Although many of us expected to "retire" at 75 or something.
You do find yourself studying and talking about and learning to be graciously appreciative for financial support, if you are lucky, from any quadrant. Or your partner paying for everything, learning to slowly toss aside feelings of the remorse or indebtedness, because they simply are not good for any relationships.
You learn slowly to figure out how to accept the generosity of others, either providing your health with supportive bodywork, visits to your home - fine tuned to your needs, loans of favorite books and activities, or small emails and texts just saying hi. That keep on coming and coming and coming.
You begun to realize that the scope if your world and life has shifted, but despite your challenges and limitations , your relationships can indeed remain vital and absolutely reciprocal.
And all the wonderful and exhausting activity of living a life prior to more serious health challenges, whether we have children ( and all that!) or partners or family members or dear friends: regardless of what fill our lives, quiets way way down , when our body calls for us to scale back and be quiet and allow the available resources to go toward maintenance and possibly healing. In fact, the feedback from your body becomes very a real , almost audible, almost palpable awareness. That you learn to detect and pay attention to or else, on a daily basis.
In the absence of expectations and appointments and demands from the outside world, life sorts itself out in an entirely new manner, where you begin to learn to hear and honor the flow of your own processes, and to respond with care and wisdom.
And for all of those that I have known in this situation, previously in both my practices, or now friends and acquaintances, there's an ever present awareness that there are multitudes of individuals in the world who need to stop, and for survival reasons, cannot.
Which mediates living a day today life where there is not an encroaching condition that is life-threatening, there is not severe pain; but there is simply the absolute necessity to be slow and be quiet and, in between the emotions and reality that are both so difficult - these must be felt and then composted, all these feelings.
And gradually you grow a very real gratitude that, if one needs to stop, somehow one is lucky enough to be able to do so.
Because our lives unfold. They are living things. Life grows ideas and hopes and dreams, and plans. And just look at all of the universal surprises and shocks and losses and disappointments.
And then the inimitable grace one finds, if one can settle down , snug, in what is.
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