When Injury Brings Gifts

I don't know about you, but I am not skilled at being inside an actual integral pause. An integral pause is a time to recuperate from an event that affects one's life, like surgery, injury, illness, or a natural disaster. I don't include war because, in my opinion, it is a different category of trauma which usually takes place daily for a longer time. Integral means this pause is necessary to make a whole complete and is fundamental to the whole. The whole in this case is a return to health, a new normal, a transformation.

What is it like inside the integral pause and what makes it so important? Because my left wrist is broken and my operating system does not provide speech to text, I am now writing using the hunt and peck method. What's it like to put words on the screen at half the speed I'm used to? Laborious is the word that comes to mind, although my brain also seems to be working at half speed as well. To write a blog, you need to plan your time around fatigue, pain management, doctor's visits, and reduced mobility for all the tasks involved, like getting dressed, unscrewing pill bottles, and the mayonnaise lid that's always screwed on too tightly. Laborious work is frustrating and often leads to delays, giving up, and more stress, but that's only one choice.

Inside the pause, recognizing my limits is another choice and a gift. My old normal was to get it done and push myself to do as many things in a day as I could. New normal? I plan and do what I need to do in increments each day, or schedule no more than two hours per job early in the day when I'm least tired, like income taxes, but that only works if I follow the plan. This new normal is elusive; it seems pushing myself is a habit difficult to break. While I do plan, anything unexpected in life intrudes upon my planned day without thinking, and is a side-effect of one medication I'm taking. That medication spurs me into hyper-organizing every nook and cranny of our home, from clothing to food to pot lids. I suppose that's a gift, but the fatigue that sets in after my hyper-spurt wipes out the plans I made.

But I don't just have a broken wrist. A serious autoimmune disease has made its way into my body, too, forcing me to look at how badly I've mistreated it over the years. Seriously, what we put in our mouths as we go about our day can be appalling and definitely make our bodies sick. This integral pause is a wake-up call to change. It is a gift to research what foods reduce inflammation in the body and then feel how good my body feels after eating them. It is a gift to ask my body what it needs and get answers like Look at what trauma is still stressing you, or Crying is a natural response to any kind of grief. Questions like What part of you is telling you to push yourself and What if getting back on track meant no pushing?

When injury brings gifts, it transforms. I could choose to get back to that flow state where effort seems easy and time expands or contracts, producing rewarding results like a new balance between rest and work. From my broken wrist, the gift of family members pitching in to chop vegetables and do household cleaning is wonderful, and it provides more time together to chat or just work together.

When I get right down to the core of “living inside a pause”, a phrase so beautifully coined by Benjamin Murray, I hear the word “being”. It's a valuable practice and the opposite of doing. A wrist will heal quickly. How does one “be” with an autoimmune disease? The closest I can come to describing “being” with this disease is non-attachment. I don't have to tell its stories or give it more importance. It does not define me; it teaches me exactly what is important.

The integral pause leaves room to turn and face what is "now" in each day over the next two years. It is changing how, why, and what I eat, how I process stress, and how all my bodies work together: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. To get to the ultimate gift inside the pause, Barbara Brennan (1939–2022), world-renowned spiritual healer, teacher, and author, says we must ask,

“What does this illness mean to me? What is the message to me from my body? How have I forgotten who I am?” The disease is a specific answer to the question, “How does this pain serve me?”1 

I am exploring these questions to unlock healing at a much deeper level.

Is it easy to be inside the pause making changes when you're not operating at 100 percent? No, it's like wrestling with shadows, but it's also an opportunity to practice compassion with myself, practice laughing at my inability to negotiate putting on socks, practice the art of slowing down, practice being human, or practice being, and non-attachment to the outcome while seeing the gifts in front of me every moment.

1. Barbara Brennan, Hands of Light: A Guide to Healing Through the Human Energy Field (Bantam, 1987), 281, Kindle.