Category Archives: A to Z Challenge 2020

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#AtoZChallenge: N is for Nontraditional Medicine

I bumped into a tweet about Seth Godin’s latest blog yesterday. The title is “All models are wrong, some models are useful.” This is how I feel about both traditional and nontraditional medical models.

Even traditional science is not a perfect representation of the human body, but it’s a good enough model to provide healing, and it’s a model that gets refined with time. Other cultures have medical models that are ancient in comparison to western medicine. They have been effective at healing, too.

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#AtoZChallenge: M is for Midpoint up the Mountain

We are midway through the month of April, midway through the challenge. It’s a good point for taking stock. There’s still a ways to go, but look how far we’ve come! It takes a bit of a nudge to keep the momentum going.

I’m also midway through the 40 days of saying my mantra.

Om namo bhagavate vasudevaya.

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#AtoZChallenge: L is for Little Gidding

“Little Gidding” is the name of the 4th poem in T.S. Eliot’s book, Four Quartets. It’s an important steppingstone in my transformation for three reasons.

  1. It was one of the poems recited at the professional training I attended for Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. The workshop was an introduction not only to meditation but also to feeling poetry deeply. The poems recited near the end of sitting meditation invariably caused tears to flow. This workshop occurred just before I left my first job as a doctor.
  2. The poem quotes Julian of Norwich in its closing phrases. “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” This was a comforting mantra to me in times of trouble. I closed many journal entries with these words.
  3. The penultimate stanza of “Little Gidding” begins like this:

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#AtoZChallenge: K is for Kairos

Soon after I started meditating daily, I decided to stop wearing a wristwatch. I began to observe that wearing a watch was adding to my sense of time stress. I was focusing on what was next rather than on what I was doing in the moment. After I made my decision to take my watch off, I remembered the advice of one of my med school professors.

“When you’re seeing patients in the office,” he said, “you should never look rushed. The patient should never see you looking at your watch. If you need to know what time it is, you can look at the watch on the patient’s wrist.”

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#AtoZChallenge: J is for Joy

One of my fellow A-to-Z bloggers, Jenny Writes, is using Joy as her theme for the whole month of April. For me, it’s a touchstone in my transformation. When I was at my lowest point, not knowing which way to turn, there was a compass needle inside me that always pointed in the direction of joy.

It was what allowed me to wonder about what came next. I could wonder without immediately shutting down out of exhaustion and grief. Due to some marvelous fluke, I received an advance copy of Jennifer Louden’s new book, Why Bother? It’s due to be released on April 21, 2020, and you can preorder it here.

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#AtoZChallenge: I is for Introversion

In 1983, when I was 29 years old, I took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a psychological test of preferences based on Carl Jung’s theories. The test was administered to a group of retreat participants from my church. I found out I was an introvert.

Suddenly, a lot of things became clear. It wasn’t that I was different from most other people, I just had a different preference, and a need for solitude to recharge my batteries. Now I understood why I felt compelled to be rude to my in-laws when they wanted to play parlor games long into the night.

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#AtoZChallenge: H is for Happiness

Happiness is like light in that it has wave/particle duality. It comes both as a flow of energy and in discrete foil-wrapped packets of dark chocolate. It is both an outcome and a process.

Happiness can be pursued, but it often arises unbidden, when my focus is not on being happy, but on being of service to others. I’ve been working from home this week, using earbuds when I place calls to my patients for comfort and for privacy, but my husband can still hear my end of the conversation.

“I’m sure your little chuckles help to raise your patient’s spirits,” he said yesterday.

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#AtoZChallenge: G is for Grief

There is so much grief in the world now. It’s our milieu, like air in our lungs or water in the gills of the fish.

Here is a stanza from Jane Kenyon’s poem “Let Evening Come.”

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

She wrote this poem when she knew she was dying. In honor of Poetry Month, please go to poetryfoundation.org and read the whole poem. It’s worth your while.

Question: Do you have a favorite quote or poem that helps you process grief when it’s too painful to face directly? If so, please share it in a comment below.

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#AtoZChallenge: E & F Are for Everyday Forgiveness

E is for Everyday

Everyday, humdrum, quotidian. It’s where the story starts. It’s the ordinary world before Rumpelstiltskin comes along with his call to adventure.

Most stories don’t spend very much time at this stage of the story; it’s just the jumping-off point. The truth is, it takes the protagonist a long time to live into this part of the story, to acquire the latent strengths that end up saving her life.

It’s always the forgotten talisman in the pocket that ends up defeating the trickster. Or the kindness to insects that bring their help to sort out the grain piles (an impossible task). Even Dorothy found out that you have with you what you need all along.

F is for Forgiveness

The theme of forgiveness, specifically self-forgiveness keeps repeating itself. I suppose it’s unavoidable when you’re writing a memoir. Today, I must forgive myself for posting my “E is for” post one day late.

Yesterday, I told my mastermind group that I had to forgive myself for not having the skill I needed to extricate myself more quickly from a bad situation in the past. I do forgive myself. I did the best I could with the skills I had at the time.

The day before that, an email from a writing support group suggested I try consulting a Deva Card. I went to the site, entered my intention to make gentle, steady progress on my memoir while maintaining my other commitments. I shuffled the cards and pulled the card for Forgiveness.

Now I remember writing a blog post about this before. Self-forgiveness is a talisman I’m holding in my pocket. Isn’t it funny that I had with me what I needed all along?

Question: What’s your favorite myth or fairy tale that symbolized an inner, hidden strength for the main character? Share it in a comment below.

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#AtoZChallenge: D is for Desire

When I was flailing, floundering in a toxic work environment, I didn’t know how to get out. My inner peacemaker was at war with my need to stand up for myself. I found my way out in a graceful way that honored harmony and let me survive.

I followed my curiosity to an Integrative Medicine Conference. I followed my intuition along nontraditional medicine paths, to Tai Chi and Reiki and Craniosacral Therapy. With each new skill, my energy shifted.

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