Fourth Form of Madness

For the last three weeks I have been suffering with a dodgy eye. I have a flickering eye lid. Okay so maybe that isn’t the correct name for the condition but it feels like my eye lids is continually flickering. I keep on hearing myself explain to people that I am not winking at them but have this condition. Eventually this week I went to the doctor as it was starting to drive me mad. The appointment restored my faith in natural alternative medicine.

I haven’t been to keen on “modern” medicine for a while now. I suffered a neck and shoulder injury that hung around for 2 or so years. At first I was perplexed by the pain that I couldn’t get rid of. I couldn’t sleep, walk, sit or breath without pain. This was a whole new ball game for me as nothing had ever caused me such discomfort before and changed the activities I could and could not partake in. I went into a bit of a meltdown as the pain started making me reflect on various aspects of my life and being. During this time, I visited various doctors, specialists, physiotherapists and had a battery of tests done. All of them focused on the symptoms but not the cause. All of them treated me like a physical problem to be solved not as a holistic being enduring the many trails and joys of life with a psychological and spiritual side that are also susceptible to damage. I’m not even sure they may have considered that there may not have been solely a physical cause to the symptoms presenting. I felt a big disconnect between what modern medicine was offering and what I needed.

Returning to my present dilemma, I arrived at the doctors with my eye flickering in all it’s glory and after I gave him a detailed account of how long it has been going on for, how my eye feels weird like there is some kind of pressure problem, the fact that I have a reoccurring eye condition that attacks my eyes and causes damage if not treated immediately and effectively, he goes “Do you look at a computer screen?”. I wanted to say, “Of course I do, 99% of us look at a computer screen at some point in our day”, but my continuous flickering eye had worn the sass out of me so I said “Yes”. “Great” he says “That’s what it will be”. I started to express my concerns again about my eye but the look he gave me thinly disguised the fact that he thought I was a drug seeking crazy lady making another attempt to score. I snatched my $60 bill and made a dramatic exit by not saying “thank you”.

Then yesterday I was given a beautiful session of reflexology by a friend. My eye was still flickering but as I found myself relaxing into the session, I found my eye flickered less. This session was followed up with gong therapy at the Quiet Cone. I love gong therapy. There is nothing like lying back in a teepee, covered by snuggly blankets with the odd crystal or two strategically placed on the body and absorbing the beautiful vibrations and sounds of the gongs. There were big gongs, small gongs, deep gongs, high pitched gongs and gongs that sounded like crystal bowls. As the vibrations lapped against my body I found myself in a deep state of relaxation. Occasionally my body twisted and jumped of its own accord. My knees seemed to keep spontaneously spasming upwards. I was too relaxed to care and it was dark so I was guessing no one else in the teepee cared either.

Driving home that night I was amazed that all these memories kept coming up that I hadn’t thought about for over 15 years. The real amazing thing was that I felt exactly like I had at the time of the memories, the feelings were like the situations that the memories were based on had only just happened. I began to wonder if I had been carrying around these feelings/memories stashed somewhere out of the way in my psyche for all this time. Only problem with stashing memories/feelings is it is like listening to music with ear plugs in. If you don’t hear it, you don’t eventually get sick of the same old tune and turn the damn thing off! So on the way home, there was no need to play the radio to keep me awake. I had a whole bundle of repressed memories and feelings to acknowledge and to keep me awake on the long road home. That and my flickering eye, which amazingly isn’t flickering today.