"Crazy feelings of love can make you wobbly, out of balance, and finally ill if you don't listen to the stars that shine from within." Marta Luzim
I believe life is a series of trapeze swings. What happens when you let go of one trapeze bar and you are left flying in mid-air? This is where I found myself six years ago when my mother and sister died four months apart. My mother passed away in a psychiatric ward, unconscious on a feeding tube because she refused to eat. Her heart couldn't take the strain. My sister chose a long suicide of breast cancer. She made the decision following her diagnosis to simply die, no treatment. Eight years prior, her husband had succumbed to leukemia and at that time my sister attempted suicide and failed. When she discovered the lump, she found her way out without any intervention. My sister kept her diagnosis secret for two years, until the week of her death.
The moment after her funeral ended, I began to relentlessly regurgitate. This was the beginning of a chronic condition that caused me to vomit without provocation, sometimes leaving me incapacitated for hours. After two years of misdiagnosis, I found myself in a hospital with a rare digestive disorder called Gastroparesis ---a partial paralysis of digestion. I had lost the beats in my stomach that allowed food to move down ---anything I tried to ingest - even water - got stuck and came back up. To make matters more difficult, I was told that this condition is most commonly found in diabetics, which I am not. The ailment I had is called idiopathic gastroparesis, meaning the cause of my symptoms are not known beyond that is it associated with severe trauma. I called it a broken stomach heart lined with terror and grief.
As a healer experiencing this agonizing setback, I knew I had to rise like the proverbial phoenix from my own ashes. My story has everything: grief, remorse, guilt, anger, death and reincarnation. Not the reincarnation of the dead, but reincarnation of my inner self that I had lost through irrational, routine rhythms of life.
