When It's the Healer's Turn to Heal: Illness, Rest, and the Sacred Power of Surrender

I haven't really talked in six days. I've been mostly in bed. I've been fighting bacterial pneumonia. I've been coughing a lot and remembering how to be sick. So, this one's for the healer whose turn it is to heal. This is the healer's journey. I'm your host, Inge Broer. And as usual, this probably won't be a very polished episode. I think in time you'll come to see that that is not something you'll expect from me very often. I described myself to a friend once as a um human slot machine of emotion.

And she laughed because when you know me at a distance, I present very put together. Got a good poker face. But if you go into the depth of me, there is a lot going on. There's a lot going on. There's a lot of depth. There's a lot of range. And today the range that I want to talk about is being sick. So for a long time when I was doing single sessions, I fought being sick tooth and nail. I simply wouldn't allow it. I wouldn't allow my body to express any mucus or coughing because what that would mean was uh loss of income.

It would mean having to cancel clients, perhaps rebook them, perhaps not. And so I would um I don't know I would somehow kind of fight whatever viruses would come my way in such a way that I they never really expressed. But I think that kept me on a bit of a high stress alert level. And looking back, I feel a bit sad for myself and for I mean all the people who cannot afford to be sick because I think what I was actually doing is I was just keeping myself at a stress level that didn't allow my body to really clear out, really move out the things that are that need healing.

In this case, I think I've been doing the same thing. I've been hobbling around with something for weeks, maybe if not months. And last week when I finally took my son to the doctor for what he's been hobbling around with and he was diagnosed with bacterial pneumonia. something in my body just somehow crashed. And it was something about um moving to the finish line of what was going on with him. Because if you're a mother, and you probably feel this too, when your kids are sick, there's like something in you that cannot relax until you know they're taken care of.

And so it's a little bit of that same what I'm calling cortisol fueled refusal to be sick. I used to do that with my clients like as long as long as I have clients on my roster like I will not be sick. I will not do it. As long as my kids are sick, I cannot sort of let go and be sick. Because there is a strange paradoxical true truth, a lived truth that letting yourself be sick is actually part of the healing. If you don't let yourself rest, if you don't let yourself fight the disease, the illness happening.

And here I am talking about an bacterial infection. I'm talking about colds. I'm talking about flu. I knock on wood luckily don't have experience with anything uh longer term or more complex. That goes for emotional healing too. We have to let ourselves actually feel the what we call negative emotions to heal them. Otherwise, they bang around in the background and they can bang around for decades coming out sideways. Yeah. So, every once in a while it's our turn. And there's this author I quite enjoy, Martha Beck.

I heard her say once, "How how does one not take on someone else's suffering?" And in her usual chipper way, she just says, "Oh, I say, it's not my turn. Not my turn. Not my turn." And with the years, I found that been that's been an extremely helpful view on things. So now it is my turn. The first thing that feels important and that is hard to do is to release any guilt about that. I know for me the week preceding actually like really getting sick like knowing it was coming but pushing it off. Um there was a bit of a sense of like putting my ducks in a row so that I could have this mini death just getting organized so that things could be taken care of enough.

very very very luckily my husband is also sick but not as sick as I am and has been able to hold down the fort. Luckily the kids are well enough to go to daycare. Luckily we have grandparents nearby. All of that has been absolutely instrumental so I could go into my big descent and there's funny things that happen when you're sick, right? So one of the features I became um very hypo aare of my breath. I'm very very very attuned. So it was a forced meditation retreat to sort of monitor how shallow how because I go a certain depth then the coughing starts.

If I move a certain way the coughing starts. So when it is our turn, it forces certain awarenesses. It forces a lot of the dayto-day to be handed off or be simplified. In my case, my appet I lost my appetite. I've lost 13 lbs in 6 days. Um I've lost my usual capacity to think. So it forces a sort of recommittal to the basics. So, the breath been six days of really watching this breath, studying this breath. And now that I'm getting better, I wonder if I can keep that contact. I can keep the appreciation of what my lungs do.

Noticing now how little energy I have without them fully functioning. There also needs to be a real letting others take care. And there was a day there where I felt like it wasn't recognized enough how sick I was. And I felt like I needed to um exaggerate it and make it bigger and more dramatic than it was so that I would be taken seriously. But I really didn't need to do that. I'm plenty sick to be taken care of and I don't need very much. There's something in that recognition as well that's very valuable.

When you're really sick, you need just somebody around consistent consistently, maybe to check in with you every once in a while to take care of the basics, to take care of the things you care about immensely, make sure they're taken care of, and I'm left to let my body do what it knows how to do. Also being taken to my appointment was very helpful. And one of the things I realized now that I don't think I realized before is that um even if right now is my turn to suffer, even if right now is my turn to be ill, that doesn't mean anything about if I belong or not in the healing work.

In fact, there's something a little bit sacred about living this fully in all of its layers. The ache of um needing someone else to take care of you, the hope that they'll pull through. There's the forced awareness of the basic functions like breathing. There's a stripping away of everything that you think is so important about you. And there's a in the middle of it, there's a sort of wisdom. There's a sort of wisdom that you learn in the middle of illness that you can't negotiate with a need. Um, you might have to grapple or accept or say surrender to your own powerlessness.

How to keep listening and showing up for what you what you are really needed for. Um, even when nothing in you wants to. There's something sacred in being shown how deeply you are needed when your presence falls away like this. Um, for me, seeing my two young children try to cope with mama being sick, um, has been heartbreaking and really sweet at the same time. And it does lead to very dramatic moments at night. Last night when my son peed the bed, he's been really good at the potty. He's almost fully fully fully potty trained, but I guess there's every once in a while there's still a night accident and that happened yesterday.

So, I was stripping the bed and then gave him options of where he could sleep the rest of the night in Papa's bed where I could make a little bed beside. But what he wanted was to sleep beside me and his sister. And it's a twin bed. It's so tiny. It's already too tiny for me and his sister. And I sleep poorly on it. And I'm not sleeping there the full night. I'm trying to weaner off breastfeeding at night. But he just had this full need for sleeping next to me. And I got so mad and I said all sorts of things that I shouldn't have said and eventually I surrendered.

Sort of put up my hands said, "Okay, we'll figure it out." And it actually led to some of the sweetest sweetest moments we've had as the three of us. um where my daughter was breastfeeding and then she she pulls away from the mess that she does and she she kind of settles in and she does a little sigh and she sleeps deeper and that's always so sweet when she does it. But now my son, her older brother, saw that as well. And he smiled and he looked at me and then we smiled and then he took his little hand and just super gently put it on his cheek on her cheek.

And so in the middle, it takes these middle of the illness moments to show what is just you cannot negotiate with the need of a child for their mother. And that is deeply healing for the part of me who thinks that I just don't matter. The things that I cannot be I cannot be delegated. Nobody else can do these things. Not strip the bed or whatever, but just be mama. So, in these moments where all our ego stuff is stripped away and we're uglier and crankier and stinkier than usual, um, we might find some gem, some some diamond that we might not find otherwise.

And there's also something in remembering what it's like to be so vulnerable that allows us to be a little bit more tender with others who are can hobble around life with such um I can do it, you can do it too attitude and that is great generally. Um I love a good pull myself up by my bootstraps. I think when we're in the healing arts, the healing profession, our job is not to um never suffer. Our job is to notice, is to be aware. It's to be awake with this life moving through us. Letting ourselves feel it.

Letting ourselves become whole, true, real. Letting ourselves feel each other and be felt by each other. And in illness, we can sometimes see the things we're too busy to see. Normally, I've had a few I won't call them obsessions, but I've had a few things on my mind while I've been ill that I know are related. And I think they're probably too personal to really name, but some of them are really collective and I have very big grief literally in my lungs. And a moment like a cold or a flu or a bacterial pneumonia um might be a moment to just acknowledge that.

I don't know if it's my time to process it or of course sleeping for six days and um staying in bed and quiet and watching my breath. Now taking antibiotics is um part of healing the actual pneumonia. But I can see and I can feel and I can be aware of the other dimensions because there's always a physical dimension. Yes. But there's also an emotional component, a mental component, a patterned component. And it's not that we're doing anything wrong. The illness happens. And it's a moment of awareness.

It's a moment of choice. And so now I feel I'm a bit more aware of how deeply I'm grieving something. I might need to set up some crying dates for myself. I might need to think up some rituals. And there are some conversations I need to have that I very much dread. And yet now that it's my turn, I can't look away. I can't pretend I'm here to help others heals while I conveniently keep brushing under the rug. What's mine to heal? So, we all need healing. And there's going to be times where you cannot be the one to hold.

And you're going to need to be held. You don't always have to be teaching or holding or going. Sometimes it's your turn. And it's simply part of the process. And I promise you, it's possible to do both in parallel. I don't know how many times I've done my own healing work while holding others in in theirs. Not with, you know, pneumonial bacteria and whatever. the thing I have right now. It's contagious. I wouldn't put myself close to anybody. Um, but yeah, the journeys can unfold in parallel. So, when it's your turn to heal, don't worry.

You're doing important work. This has been the healer's journey. I'm your host, Inge Broer. Music is by Lana Chakra. Thank you for tuning in and I hope I will be a little bit more upbeat next episode. Catch you there.