I’ve always felt other’s misfortunes deeply. In Italy as a child I would agonize over the paintings of The Stations of the Cross in church. It’s a series of 12 paintings which depict Christ’s carrying of the cross through town to the hill where he was said to be crucified. The paintings depict a young Jesus being stoned and nailed to a cross, hung and stabbed. I identified so much with his being rejected and abandoned and undefended.
When I was 2 my family had had to leave me. Being away from primary caregivers feels life threatening to very small children and that’s why they sometimes cry so desperately. There is a great gift in sorrows and losses at an early age and I know that the heart shattering experience of having everything and everyone I’d known in my life suddenly disappear has made me with deep and strong empathy for others. At times I’ve felt as if every sorrow and loss in the world was also mine.
Lyme Disease has accentuated this sensitivity.
A psychic once called me a hyper-empath and this resonated as truth. This morning I read about Chief Raoni weeping after being told that the president of Brazil had Ok-ed the building of a power dam which will displace 40,000 indigenous people and a huge portion of our Earth’s biology - (flora and fauna. When I read of it and saw him weeping I felt a contraction in my solar plexus and a deep personal despair.
Maybe in part it’s my sincere feeling and belief in our interconnectedness which makes me feel everyone’s misfortunes so deeply.
In one of my last posts I mentioned that Lyme, like everything in this dichotomous life duality of ying and yang and positive and negative has brought some gifts. One is that I’ve literally “lost my grip” on many things and broken them, and since my spatial and cognitive sense has changed I’ve been clumsier and hurt myself. This seems like a dubious gift, but I find myself exquisitely slowed down into being more aware of my actions and movements sometimes, even in washing dishes. We bought some square plates recently and they chip easily in our small kitchen’s somewhat diminutive double sink.
Mindfulness is one of the gifts this Lyme experience has heightened in me. It could do the same for other Lyme patients.
What I need now is to learn how to slow down and get this ‘ extreme ‘ mindfulness and awareness to work in my favour instead of against me. It helps me to be aware and mindful but when it crosses the line into the unfiltered barrage of impressions and feelings which the impact of spirochetal activity and by-products in the central nervous system can elicit I feel like a runaway train of emotions and unpleasant physical sensations.
What follows is an illustration of one of my over reactive episodes
(Not sure if this was necessarily ‘over’ reaction. The thing is that the nervous tension over things which happened and the length of time that I was in a state of heightened arousal was longer than in the past. This may be due to the fact that the tick bite I received in September of 2012 was a re-infection and many believe that these re-infections in Chronic Lyme can be severe).
Friday I had an appointment with my Naturapathic physician, Samantha Eagle in Brattleboro Vermont. I have a deep liking for and trust in Samantha, so I didn’t have the nervous “going to the doctor’s” feeling that doctor’s appointments sometimes bring about.
When I opened my door at 8 to let my dogs and 2 cats out I saw a power cable had fallen from the house across the street where my son lives, over his car and was lying across the road. My first thought “Hot dog ! Don’t want the dogs (and cats) electrocuted. I go over and pick up my son’s dog and walk him with mine in the morning and that was an added concern on this morning.
I had to : call my son, gather the cats back in, contact the power company, contact the association of the housing complex I live in, try to set up some warning for drivers, shower & eat breakfast, call the doctor’s in case the cable was not fixed in time, walk the dogs, contact a friend who was ill to whom I was bringing some medicinal herbs after my appointment and get to the doctor’s half an hour away in 3 hours.
I got rattled. That seems understandable to me, but the length of time I remained rattled was inordinate. My blood pressure was up 140 over 80 something I think. That kind of prolonged response o stress can release very harmful stress hormones into our systems and damage our adrenal glands heart and general health. For several days after I monitored my blood pressure and it was back to it's low 114 to 120 over numbers in the 50s & 60s.
I’ve been in this condition before. Dr. Eagle thinks (and I agree) that due to my medical history and diagnoses I have been bitten multiple times and have had Lyme Disease for a long time. My estimate is at least 30 years if not since childhood. It’s after the birth of my son Ben 31 years ago in 1980 that my health took a nosedive. After my 6 years of being the single caretaker for my mom who had Dementia and died in our home in 2005 my health took another major nose dive and I become unable to work as I had before.
So what will I do about this hypersensitivity and inordinate stress response ? Well, I’m lucky to have tools and to have learned skills which can help me to explore and modify this. Self hypnosis, meditation, behaviour modification, guided imagery, journaling, all have been paths I’ve traveled on before with success and good results. They’re part of my life but have taken a back seat to the more physical aspects of Lyme which I’ve been addressing.
It’s always a mistake to address a whole - separately. When we concentrate too much on the mental, physical or spiritual we become like an imbalanced footstool which cannot give up the support we need. Personal and spiritual integratio must keep pace with my physical healing. And yes, although I’ve said that I don’t believe we can ever truly remove the presence of spirochetes in our bodies I do believe healing and living a healthy joyous life in spite of this is possible.
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