Sometimes you’re just doing whatever it is you do, and you look down and realize the earth beneath you is saturated and before you know it the water is up to your knees, and the next thing that happens is you are swept away, deposited somewhere utterly new, and there is nothing resembling your former life left.

I don’t know about you, but this happens to me about every three years. I call it the tsunami.

The Great Wave, Katsushika Hokusai

In my observation, people who do healing work tend to get these reminders every so often to release themselves from attachment to anything. What is healing anyway? At its most core nature, healing is releasing. The things that cause trouble in our bodies and minds do so because we resist that release. Our immune systems resist intrusion on a cellular level, which is very useful when trying to not get the flu, but not as useful when we develop auto-immune conditions. When we break bones, they calcify and loose their flexibility. When we injure our soft tissue, our bodies create a resistance army of inflammation, tension and adhesion. When we experience emotional trauma, we lock ourselves down with fear and anxiety, create coping mechanisms to protect ourselves. Over time, our coping mechanisms become outdated, no longer useful, and we realize we are resisting the very things that could heal our wounded hearts and open us up to new experiences.

To heal we have to break apart spots of resistance in our emotional and physical bodies.

Change is inevitable. Jobs change, living situations change especially since so many of us are renting. Friends move away, or our relationships with them change. The nature of my work is change. Clients come to me in pain, suffering, transition, resistance and I help them release from it. In the end the goal is always that they don’t have to see me as often, or at all. Sometimes they find their way back to me, sometimes not. I cannot be attached to it.

I ebb and flow in my practice, most recently taking a very long break from full time bodywork. I was working in an office, feeling detached from it, but not quite ready to return to my practice when all of a sudden TSUNAMI! I got laid off. This cleared up time and space for me to do some pretty intense internal work around why I didn’t feel ready to start working as a healer again. With that behind me, I was able to start seeing a few clients here and there, becoming reacquainted with the physicality of the work and the strength I needed to rebuild to do it. I spent a lot of time in the ocean and the pond, floating, feeling myself being supported by the water. Then one day, I was just ready.

When you get swept away as often as I do, you learn to let go as soon as you feel your feet lift off the ground. You learn to trust that wherever you end up, you are resourceful enough to rebuild a life, find your work, and find comfort without attachment. Eventually you may even learn to read the signs before the wave hits, and get out your surfboard.

Cowabunga!

Surf’s up, bra!