Twenty-two years ago today, I was hit by a car as a pedestrian. My boyfriend and I were in a crosswalk in Oakland, talking about breaking up and then bam!
I’d just returned from India 3 days prior and it happened to be Ash Wednesday.
I would never be the same. As I lay on the ground, thinking I was paralyzed I heard sirens in the distance and the voice in my head said, “Those are for you.” They’re always for someone else when we hear them. Not this time.
As I lay looking up at the cerulean blue sky unable to move, it felt like a blow torch was burning through my left calf. So, when the paramedics arrived and told me what they were going to do might “hurt” all I could do was roll my eyes.
As they loaded me into the ambulance, I immediately began to give instructions, “I have Kaiser insurance. Take me to Kaiser.”
“Mam, we’re taking you to Highland Hospital. Kaiser has no emergency intake,” the woman informed me in a calm steady voice.
“But, but….” I protested as she put an iv drip in my arm.
When she pulled out the scissors to cut off the favorite brown velvet dress I was wearing I protested, “No, no, this is my favorite dress. Can’t you just take it off over my head?”
“We don’t know what other injuries you’ve sustained, so we have to cut the dress,” she told me.
I began to relax as the pain medication reached my bloodstream and I felt myself letting go. And so it went. My tight control on life immediately began to slip away. Little did I know how much life would change.
I had no choice but to let go.
I let go of the relationship I was in.
Let go of dancing, working, being the person who could get shit done.
I let go of my identity as an independent person who was capable and vivacious.
I let go of who I thought I was.
I humbly and gratefully moved in with my parents. Not easy at 36.
I had two tasks: to heal my body and my heart. I turned to yoga as a path to heal my body and to art journaling to heal my heart.
I had to face the plethora of feelings that came running through my life like marathoners. Feelings of anger, rage, envy, fear, sadness. I wrestled with grief and worked through those damn five stages.
I journaled it all.
The sadness, the joys, the loneliness, the frustrations. The anger, fear, rage. The prayers, the gratitude, the inspiration, the amazement. All of it came to visit, just like Rumi said, to clear me out for something new. Something unexpected.
I practiced yoga to restore my range of motion in the leg and art journaling to dialogue with my inner self and Spirit. To this day, I practice both.
As I look back, I was graced with so much along the way.
I became a yoga teacher.
I filled countless art journals.
I met incredible people all along the way.
I healed my body and heart through these practices.
And I still have these practices to support life’s continued twists and turns.
My journals became my life’s documents.
They feel like documents of becoming and blooming.
Each journal part of the tapestry of my life, my state of consciousness in relationship with the world at large.
I share some journal images with you in remembrance of this day that began my major shift of consciousness.
I invite you to join me to journal your life. Wherever you are, whatever you’re living through. It’s a beautiful, healing, creative self-reflective process.
Check out www.journalingheart.comand www.zentopaper.comfor my two online journaling courses.
