Her question:
Dear Rue,
I have had fibromyalgia for at least 20 years and what you said in the interview about chronic fatigue resonated with me. I feel not just physical pain but so much emotional pain and blockage. I meditate daily, I read self-help books, tap, and I still have this gnawing feeling inside of me and sadness.
I have never been able to pinpoint any event or anything traumatizing that caused the fibromyalgia. I had a successful career.
I know I have something inside that I need to get out. I can feel my energy block.
Can you guide me in a direction to help me resolve this? I am 62 years old and do not care to continue this the rest of my life. How many sessions would I need?
My reply:
There is a simple answer to your questions, which is not really an answer, and a rich and complex answer which is much more interesting and evocative but even less of an “answer.” :^)
The simple answer: I can’t say for you or anyone how many sessions you need. Every person and their needs and situations are different. And I can’t calculate a percentage of “successful solution-finding” for the same reasons.
I will try to explain the complex answer, which is actually simple too, but it needs some explaining because no one tells us this. For many of us, these are new ideas, but you will feel in your body right away if these ideas resonate with you.
We will start with the premise of your question, which may be that “there is something wrong with me, and I need to find a person and a technique that will fix me.”
How many sessions and for how long is a common question. But it comes from the wrong direction, I think. It emerges from a place in us that is assuming that someone else has the answer, and the authority. That perspective leads us to believe that we are needy and dependent on what a doctor or an expert or even “higher consciousness” can produce.
There are so many ways that our culture reinforces this consumerism concept. It is kind of like basing our entire worldview, even our spirituality, on a sort of market economy of producers and consumers and cost effectiveness. I think it tries to apply linear thought to a profoundly multidimensional, associative, fluid, heartful way of being and knowing.
A better thing to ask would be: How can I be thinking and acting in a way that will lead to unwinding and easing what is too tightly held in me, so that my life energy can flow freely?
From years of working with people with chronic physical and emotional pain, I believe that the cause lies in an impoverished view who we think we are. Seeing and thinking of ourselves along the spectrum of being small, powerless, and victimized makes us curl up around ourselves to protect that vulnerable center that we feel inside.
I believe that our pain and tears are the anguish of our soul, feeling trapped in too small a shape. That is your gnawing sadness inside.
I think we would better serve ourselves and life itself if we put our attention and intention toward learning how to be a source ourselves, a producer, a partner and collaborator with the subtle energies of spirit and soul, and partners with the rest of life, seen and unseen.
That is how I approach my own life, and how I think of working with someone. I think that each of us is goodness embodied. My job then is to continually hold up a mirror to the person I am working with, so that they become familiar with seeing themselves the way I see them.
For many people this awareness of their “Self Light” comes as a revelation. Who has ever shown or told us this about ourselves?? Usually not our parents, our teachers, our clergy even. No one showed that to them, so they couldn’t pass it on. But for many of us, me included, being raised without that knowing sent us off on a spiritual quest to find a deeper truth within ourselves.
Think of what the world would be like if every baby came into the world knowing themselves as embodied goodness!
We can learn to experience ourselves in a way that expands us, and restores us to a feeling of openness and flow. It doesn’t mean we ever become completely free of wounds, challenges, problems, pains, doubts, and all the rest of those feelings and experiences that constrict us. It does mean that these constrictions take place within a larger context of flow. They are capable of being healed, transformed, and restored to openness and flow themselves.
Then we can engage and co-create with others in ways that feel right to us. Then our actions and choices can carry and assist the power of the flowing energy of the universe itself. This is true healing.
I believe that fibromyalgia is a message to our Humanity—indeed, a cry to the best in us, to say that we are selling ourselves short. People with FM are like the canary in the mine. Remember how the old time miners used to send a canary in a cage down into the mine to see if there was enough oxygen down there to support life? If the canary lived, the miners would be sent on down to work. If the canary died, well, I guess it was too bad for the canary…
Perhaps like all illness, fibromyalgia in our times is a message that our bodies are sending to our conscious awareness: “We are not getting enough spirit in here! Open up! Relax and enjoy yourself! Stand for why you believe in. Live your purpose. Be intentional. Stop apologizing for yourself. Take responsibility, and apologize when it is appropriate.”
This is wellness. You can “get well.”
So…this is a really long response to your question, and as you can see, not the “answer.” But it gives you a sense of how I would approach our work together, which is quite different from the approach of most practitioners I have found, even spiritually focussed ones.
The bottom line is that you are the boss. You would be the judge of when you felt that you have gotten enough of this new perspective anchored in your body and your behaviors that you are good to go, for now, or for forever. That might be just a few sessions, or it might be many, spread over a long time. You choose!
With love and blessing to you,
Rue
Snail image by Ukrainian photographer Vyacheslav Mishchenko http://www.vmishchenko.com/#gallery-Snails
