🎵"MY GOD, THE SOUL/BREATH YOU HAVE GIVEN ME IS PURE!" even though I have blood clots in my lungs and both legs!

This morning,

SHABBAT SHALOM,

I RECITE THE ELOHAI N'SHEMAH.

And then

all I can say is

Thank YOU God.

All I can do is recommit myself to living each day being grateful.

First of all, for every breath. And then for so many many things.

A few nights ago, I woke up in the middle of the night with horrific chest pain. My husband drove me to the ER at our local hospital.

The EKG and blood work ruled out a heart attack.

But a CT scan of my chest showed that I have pulmonary embolisms, small blood clots in the periphery of my lungs. The lungs are kind of like a tree, branching out in smaller and smaller branches.

To say I was shocked is an understatement.

How could this happen to me? Clots happen to people who are too sedentary, or to folks who fly or travel by car for excessive periods of time.

I'm someone who does yoga every day and walks as long and as often as possible.

And then yesterday, another bombshell:

The CT scan the hospital did on my legs showed blood clots there too.

THANK YOU GOD FOR THIS OUTCOME, BECAUSE IT IS VERY VERY MILD CONSIDERING WHAT MIGHT HAVE HAPPENED.

....a blood clot in the brain, for example....

I was only in the hospital for about 14 hours.

But life overnight has changed.

I am determined to keep looking at this situation as a 

BLESSING. I AM SO SO GRATEFUL TO BE ALIVE!

I took one photo in the hospital:

A nurses aide was taking my blood pressure with a piece of blue equipment, and this is what was written on the side of the machine:

My mother DENA ROTONDO RICCI has provided guidance for this book

"ANGELS KEEP WHISPERING IN MY EARS"

since day one, March 21, 2020, another Shabbat, when she delivered me the first chapter,

"MOM AND THE MIRACLE OF THE ORCHIDS."

Now, here SHE IS in the hospital 

SHE IS HEAR ME MOM YOU ARE HERE WITH ME IN THE HOSPITAL AND TODAY EVERY MOMENT I BREATHE!

AND I AM SO SO GRATEFUL.

When I told Mary THIS AMAZING STORY yesterday morning, she laughed in delight (she named the book.)

"I love these coincidences...
(which I call miracles and Rich calls coinkydinkies). The UNIVERSE IS SO SPECTACULAR, CAPABLE OF CONNECTING WITH US THE HEART/SOUL LEVEL TO THOSE WHO LOVE US!"

And then she said:

"Take this as emotional support because it's amazing, it's amazing."

THANKYOU 

MOM

and 

THANKYOU 

GOD ️🥰

Haw(k) A screeching hawk just flew overhead as I sit in meditation. Is it a coincidence that I am sending my sister Holly — I call her HAW — the Jewish prayer that one recites every morning upon rising? No, it’s one of the daily miracles that happen all around us if we just listen closely:

️🥰”My God, the soul/breath you have given me is pure. For You created it, you formed it and You made it live within me.” The Hebrew word for soul — N’shemah is the same word for breath!” enough Judaism lessons for one day. But it is Shabbat and on Shabbat you’re supposed to be peaceful and grateful and I am meditating on those a lot today.️🥰🪴🥳⭐️ Sent from my iPhone

HOW BEEBALM CALMS AND EXCITES ME

A few minutes ago when I didn’t know what else to do with myself

I stepped outside the back door and just stood in front of the billowing

beebalm,

as red as the plump raspberries that I had just popped into my mouth for breakfast.

Oh but the flowers were surely nutrition too:

with their bouncy spirit and shaggy petals

they look like tiny shafts of scarlet lightning exploding out of a towering stem.

What an excellent reminder to

STAY PRESENT

every moment today.

Flowers, says Eckert Tolle, are ready gateways to our spiritual life.

So fragile and fleeting, only lasting for a few brief days (oh but the beebalm stay for weeks!)

these docile blossoms remind us of the 

cosmic majesty of every living thing

that comes to BE and

disappears in no time at all.

Like all of nature, BEebalm call to us with their audacious PRESENCE!

At times like these, my head spins when I try to take in

the enormity of life forms that cover our mysterious planet.

I get the same kind of breathtaking headwhirl when I glance down at a butterfly landing on a flower.

And then too, my heart flutters when I stare at the hummers dancing and divebombing at the feeders.

Or gazing up  at the night sky at the stars. How do we wrap our

minds around the power and beauty and the wonder of Mother Nature and the Universe?

By closing our eyes and going inside ourselves to witness that very same STILLNESS that fills the world.

Back to the beebalm.

Thank you God for giving us these blossoms that are so jazzy and yet so calming too.

Thanks for kissing these shaggy flowers into existence and for all YOU do!

And especially, for letting Tuesday be another day of magic.

God In My Body Writing

 She’s not exactly sure what’s causing the anxiety that hit a few weeks ago, but she finally has come up with one way she can deal with it.

Write. But not just any kind of writing.  She’s got to write very, very slowly reaching deep into her body for feelings and sensations, letting them bubble up in whatever form -- sketches and scribbles -- that they happen to appear on her journal pages. Like yesterday, when she found herself cupping her open palms on either side of her neck. Then she caressed her breasts by resting them in the inside crease of her elbows.

What emerged from this writing surprised her. She wrote as though she was being nursed by her mother.

In other journal entries, she writes about feelings in her belly, her arms and thighs and hands.

Mary says this body-centered writing is teaching Claudia to comfort herself. Which is a good thing, except sometimes the writing takes her to very strange places she isn’t expecting to go. Yesterday she wrote:

“Count breaths. Count veins and capillaries. Be happy. Feather your fingertips up and down your thighs. Let warmish blood swell and rise and wash into arms and fingertips. Smell the sweat in your armpits. Linger in lower blood pressure, let your legs go limp. Let your lips sag and feel yourself drooling.” 

One journal page was devoted to the words written in giant letters: “BE IN GOD.” The next page read: “BE NOW.” And “FEEL PRESENCE NOW.” The word GOD appears between the letters, as do the words ART and TOUCH!

Sometimes the writing gets too intense. That happened yesterday when she wrote: “Now gently rub your thighs and realize that GOD is inside you always touching your body.” And then: “Dear God, time is erasing and maybe I am disappearing too. How can I learn to stay in God forever?”

At that point, she needed a break. She closed her journal and got up from the meditation bench. She needed fresh air so she put on her white cotton summer bathrobe. She picked up Poco and carried her outside. Together she and the dog – God spelled backwards -- walked through the sunny yard, smelling the grass and the flowers and listening to the birds. 

When she came back into the house, she wrote one more page in her journal: “Don’t be SCARED, BE SACRED!” She made note of the fact that her initials, CR, sit right in the center of the word sacred. “CR BE SACRED!” she concluded.

All this writing makes her feel like she’s melting. She thinks about Leah so many months ago, walking around the yard in February in her pale blue bathrobe, tramping through the snow. Leah – who was frozen – has given way to Claudia, who is anything but frozen. She is spilling over every which way, melting with words, with sensations, and sometimes with tears. The anxiety can be so incredibly painful.

Claudia wrote to Peg a week ago and asked her, “Do you think God in My Body Writing is connected to the book, Angels Keep Whispering in My Ears?” Peg said she was pretty certain that there’s a connection.

It doesn’t hurt to explore that connection, Peg says. Claudia agrees. Her challenge, though, is to make sure that every time she gets scared she will flip the word into SACRED!

Letting My Body Steer My Writing is Helping Me to Heal!!!

Thunder roared through the meadow a few minutes ago. A drenching downpour followed. 

I don’t know if there is a connection but somehow 

SOMETHING WONDROUS JUST HAPPENED. 

I breathed in the cool, rain-drenched air. I stared at the 

blazing red BEEBALM

and the dazzling purple CONEFLOWER.

I breathed in again.  I decided to hold THAT breath

for four or five moments.

Then I breathed out. 

And with no warning, no preparation

Something rather monumental shifted inside me. 

I went to the handsome oak desk that used to be my Mom’s.

I sat down on the beautifully embroidered chair seat and I opened this laptop.

AND THEN I OPENED MY PURPLE DECOMPOSITION NOTEBOOK AND 

BEGAN TRANSCRIBING ALL KINDS OF CRAZY THINGS THAT I’VE WRITTEN INSIDE.

It was the entire month of June that I confined myself to journaling. I actually filled the whole damn purple journal and then spilled into a new one.

(My body can tell that I’ve been away from the computer.  KEY difference. That is, my fingers are actually having some trouble locating which keys are where. )

The computer. So much a part of my writing life. But it’s a cold and mechanical thing when you’re hurting as badly as I was last month. I spent weeks wracked with anxiety. I filled a journal with sentences like this one:

“Dear God, Dear Mary, I am pleading with you for relief from this pain. Please help me figure this stuff out because it’s killing me.”

At one point last month, I was suffering so badly and writing so much that I came up with what feels to me like a new kind of writing. At least it’s new to me. 

I’m calling it “GOD IN MY BODY WRITING.”  I’ll explain and then give you a sample.

OK, so you all know what freewriting is, right?

That’s when you just sit down and write anything at all that comes into your head but the rule is you just keep writing you don’t lift up your pen and you don’t stop.

Well so MY NEW WRITING is like that, except I’ve prescribed another rule:

THE GOAL IS TO WRITE DOWN IN PRECISE AND SOMETIMES GORY DETAIL EXACTLY WHAT IS GOING ON IN MY BREATHING ACHING SUFFERING EXHAUSTED BODY AS I AM WRITING.

Here is a bit of what I wrote on the Fourth of July. In a way, what I wrote was about finding A KIND OF INDEPENDENCE. I’m searching for a way to soothe and nurture myself.

Here goes:

9:17 a.m. “Flesh in my breasts, I’m a baby again only this time my mother bares her nipples and I have one hand on top of her silky white skin and the other I am patting her bulging shape. I begin. My tender lips latch onto the dark nub of her, she is nursing me that bluish white milk you can see through I am calmly drinking NO THINKING NO THINKING JUST THIS A WHISPER OF “I LOVE YOU you little precious girl!” And when you are two you will grow pipecurls with golden rings.” 

A little crazy wouldn’t you say? But the key thing is 

This

Writing

Is 

Working

To

HELP HEAL 

ME.

Writing is therapeutic. So many experts agree on that.

 For example CHECK OUT MY BLOG POST ON DR. JAMES PENNEBAKER’S WORK; he found that students who wrote in journals about what was bothering  three times a week ended up at the college health center far less often. 

I have a whole shelf load of books about writing and healing. 

Writing drains feelings out of my brain heart mind fingers gut breasts toes knees and makes me feel

Contained.

Supported.

NURTURED.

As I said, I am calling it GOD IN MY BODY WRITING and I think it’s part of the book that I thought was finished. This is the book I call “Angels Keep Whispering in My Ears.”

When I write in this new way – letting my body steer -- the words are full of sweat and mud and pink flesh and bluish white breast milk. 

I am enmeshed in the sensations that I am creating in my own words.

Of course, it isn’t just the writing that has helped me get to this point. I am extremely blessed to have an incredible therapist who has been with me every step of the way as I opened the door onto PTSD that I had never before explored. More on that extraordinary journey another time.

Meanwhile, I feel so much better than I have in weeks and weeks. I am grateful to Mary and the Universe for helping me reach this point in my healing.

Writing can save your soul. I’ve always known that, but not as much as I do now.

I’ll say it again. 

Writing can save your soul.

I like the sound of that sentence, It’s bold. It’s calm. It offers promise! 

The important thing is that I am starting to see how, once again, writing – ART – is helping me feel whole again.