Apr09
Posted on Apr 9 by Ruth Davis
Like with any behavior, thought or pattern we’re trying to release, if we focus on it, it continues to manifest. But if we shift our thought and attention to what is NEXT, even AND ESPECIALLY if we don’t know what that is, then that first thing loses energy, lessens its hold on us and it eventually releases. For the last four weeks I’ve been in pain and for the last two, I’ve been writing about it. Because that’s how I needed to move through it. To get to know it, describe it, feel it with words. I needed to engage with it, be with it, learn from it. And then, at some point, even though pain was still with me, I didn’t want to give it my full and undivided attention anymore. I was ready to release it. I stopped using the word pain and now I simply notice the different “sensations” when I sit or stand or bend my legs. Sometimes it’s tingly, then more like thumbtacks poking, with fire. But just a small fire, and it...
Apr02
Posted on Apr 2 by Ruth Davis
It is Sunday, day 23 of this sciatica journey and it is still too uncomfortable to sit in a chair for any length of time. So I am lying on my back in bed with the ice pack under my right butt cheek. My computer is propped between my belly and my bent knees and I have two pillows tucked under my neck and shoulders so that I can see the screen. Yes, everything hurts a LOT less than it did a week ago. I am able to stretch my arms above my head without feeling the clenching in my hip. I can bend at the waist and get up and down from a chair with no pain. I can even lie on my back with both knees tucked into my chest and rock. But I still can’t sit or stand long enough to drive or enjoy a meal, much less work with a client. I remind myself how big a shift this has all been, emotionally, physically, even spiritually. And that healing takes time. My muscles...
Mar26
Posted on Mar 26 by Ruth Davis
I have been lying on my back for the last two and a half weeks with the most intense episode of sciatica. I’ve had lower back pain before that has left me on my heating pad for several days. But this sharp, lightening bolt pain that shoots down my leg is like nothing I’ve experienced before. But then, this place in my life is like nothing I’ve experienced before either. Yes, it started with some irritated disks, but, with my back already tender, I didn’t slow down. Instead, I must have moved just enough to tweak something in my piriformis, the muscle that stretches across the lower back between the pelvis and the head of the femur. The muscle tightened and shifted my hip in the socket and somewhere in the midst of all of the shifting, my sciatic nerve got caught in the middle. It was as if all of the things I was dealing with in my life – a shift in my work, the grief that was triggered with the loss of my first best...
Mar12
Posted on Mar 12 by Ruth Davis
It is springtime in the Arizona desert and, as I drive the streets that line the bases of the mountains, it is as if the whole earth is lit up with the yellows of poppies and brittle bush and marigolds. Bursts of orange African daisies and purple lupine and verbena appear on the roadsides between stretches of sidewalk and graveled hiking trails. I tell you this because the last time I spent the spring in Phoenix, I couldn’t tell you what was in bloom, or dormant, or what colors appeared anywhere. I wasn’t really present. I was merely here counting the days until I’d be back at the beach. This time is different. Completely. I am present. Open to what happens each day. And I haven’t even thought about when I’m heading back to the beach. Because life happens where we are, in the present moment. It is in the NOW that we hug our friends and feel the love. It’s being here in the moment where we notice the colors popping and feel the intensity of the...
Mar05
Posted on Mar 5 by Ruth Davis
I was listening to one of my coaching clients share some of her weekly successes. She had cleaned out an entire closet, paid her bills early and had scheduled a long-overdue manicure for herself. She was moving so quickly through the list that there was no pause for honoring her accomplishments. And when she did pause, it was to counter the success with a “but I didn’t….” I had to stop her. I gave her a big shout out for each of the successes. And I asked her to join me in a big WOOHOO! YAY! I DID THAT! celebration. And then she said, “Wow, I didn’t even realize how much I’d done.” Often we are so focused on plowing through our to-do lists that we don’t honor the work we’re doing. We don’t take the time to celebrate our successes. We don’t breathe in how good it feels to accomplish something. No wonder we still feel overwhelmed with what ELSE we have to do. And when we counter what we HAVE done with a BUT, (yes, I did...
Feb26
Posted on Feb 26 by Ruth Davis
Several weeks ago I found out that my very first childhood friend had suddenly died. Though we hadn’t seen each other since we were thirteen, we’d recently connected on Facebook and the loss struck me deep and hard. She was one of the last friends who knew me as a child, before my brother died. I met Ellen in nursery school. She had a playhouse fort in her backyard and she liked to play TV tag. We were inseparable. We both had older brothers. We both had basements. We both had black cleaning ladies who sometimes stayed overnight in their own rooms. Her mom, Jackie, had a wide, full, white-teeth smile and thick black hair with what seemed like natural curls, but I’d seen her with pink foam rollers in her hair on the morning after a sleepover. Jackie let me call her by her first name. She never got mad at us. She always answered the phone “yell-o?” She’d hold the receiver in the crook of her neck while she stirred the pot of Spaghettios on the...
