Endo, Acupuncture and Leaning Into It

I've started acupuncture. So far, I've had two treatments and I'm not sure what to say about it except to say I'm encouraged and I like it very much. My accupuncturist is an old high school friend of mine and I think that helps -- I know she's not the "out there" type who will start ringing sterotypical chimes or chanting in some random way without warning. The description that I just gave is incredibly unfair to acupuncturists and proponents of Chinese medicine everywhere. Everywhere. I know this because of what I've experienced in my two go-rounds with the needles. Oriental medicine outdoes western medicine in its wholistic approach a thousand to one. Thank the heavens for humility and an authentic desire to listen.

Most amazing, incredible and, frankly, scary is my healer's insistence that I learn to lean into my pain. I call her my healer for I am not sure what else to call her, but I think that she would say that I must heal myself. She can administer my treatments, but I must do the work. But I don't want to call her my treater, and I don't want to call her my acupuncturist, and she is in a role beyond that of my friend when I am on her table so, for now, I shall call her my healer. I will assume that we both know what I mean and that you, my reader, do, too, even if I still have hepatic endometriosis at the end, if that ever comes. I very well might. I don't care. Centimeters of incremental improvement are enough, as is the incredible encouragement that comes from feeling heard and taken seriously.

But then there is the leaning into the pain. The pain. Yikes. When she says to lean into the pain, she means so much more than the hepatic endometriosis. There is no need to lean into that physical pain, it simply exists. Instead, she means, I am learning to mean, to lean into the direction that pain is meaning for me to take. What is that pain saying to me, to tell me about me? Where does it come from? Why is it here? What can it teach me? This pain as a gift -- a gift! -- to allow me to open to me, to my past, to the things that have sunk me below the surface of my life's water until I began to forget to breathe, held it all so tight that everything had nowhere to go except that one place where it had to live and learn to scream, my liver. Lean into that girl, lean into that.

Holy shit show. Holy shit.

Anger, sadness, grief, the sadness and hardness on myself. All the I didn't mean to's, should haves, could haves, would haves, twists and turns of fate.

Endometriosis is a bummer and a pain and a travesty to the hilt. I have also been telling people of late that it is an amazingly transcendent experience. Life's regularly scheduled programing -- the hurts that we all go through and the fun stuff, as well -- suddenly seem so much more manageable after these past few months (three months tomorrow) of getting through this. I find that when I laugh, I laugh harder. When I look forward, I really can hardly wait. I don't know how this story ends. I don't even know if it does. I surely hope this acupuncture is going to help. Lots of studies about acupuncture and endometriosis say it will. Yay.

I don't know how this story will end. But like I've said before, this is not it. Not for me. And whatever is your it, not for you either.

Hey you
Check out the view
Winding down the 1
Me and the miss
Sharin' bliss
And soakin' up the sun
And I feel like I've been resurrected
In my lifetime
I have never felt protected
And loved like I do
When I am here with you
Only You

And I know you've got something to believe in
Down deep inside your desperate soul
Hey friend don't you stop believin'
In the dreams that you had
The dreams that we all had
~Shawn Mullins, Beneath the Velvet Sun, 2000