where soul meets body :: water (and other!) therapy, pt. 3

"In the water...
I feel like everybody else."

CONTINUED FROM... "new beginnings :: water (and other!) therapy, pt. 2"

It was an activity that I could actually participate in. I could go to the pool, I wasn't hindered by the physical limitations and challenges that come with my present health condition.

I could do it.

I could do what my friends were doing and honestly, it just felt so good to feel normal and to be able to do what everyone else was doing and could do, and not feel any different.

Going to the pool is one of those “normal” things that I have just never felt I could be a part of. Oh, I hate wearing swimsuits, I refuse to get my hair wet or buy a swimsuit, that's just not my thing, has been my mantra for years.

And I am not saying that was wrong or bad in anyway, it simply was where I was at and I honestly didn't feel anything from it. It's not like I felt I was missing out on anything, I was just like, it's just not my thing.

And it's okay it's not my thing.

Well, now it IS my thing because not only it is a huge aspect of community and relationship building with a lot of the women in my life here now, but also, God knew I needed to just get in the water and know it is fine.

That there was something “normal” that I could do like everybody else.

That I can get ready and go to the pool and bring my beach bag and help the kids get all their little floatie toys out and sit and just enjoy a common summer pastime.

Like I said, I left that day feeling I had just entered a whole new world.

A world I never felt or even wanted to enter before.

And to top it all off, as I texted my friend later and told her this was epic, I am shopping for a swimsuit and I am ENJOYING shopping for a swimsuit... and she was like, OMG, so that means you're coming with us AGAIN?!? She was for sure it was a one time deal and was excited they won me over to the pool and that I had such a good time.

Just in being there. Enjoying one of life many simplest of things, yet that again for me, was one of the most profound.

Anyway, so got the pool pass for our condo association pool down the street last week and today was my first time going by myself and braving the afternoon out there even if people would see me if I decided to do some exercises, but I came home from recovery and have been in the midst of dealing with and working through some difficult things last night and today and my heart just felt so heavy.

I just longed for the pool.

To just go and bring a couple books, read with my feet in the water, move around a bit.

Again, I feel restored. I began reading something before I left and continued reading it while there and the words again pierced my heart and ministered to me in the direct area of my pain.

Things I am excited to hopefully post later that I've been wrestling with and chewing on for a while, but first things first, I am just grateful for that time at the pool and my new water therapy which I am calling not just physical, but mental therapy as well!

To be able to feel connected with the world, connected with something “normal,” be a part of a commonality we all can share of just being able to go to the pool and enjoy the cool water on our hot, hot skin on a scorching hot day.

There is something so refreshing, healing and restorative about the water.

It was ironic I ran into someone at the grocery store that I haven't seen or talked to in more than a year, someone from my parent's church that was at our wedding and we got to talking about random things and she had mentioned that she was doing water therapy and taking her three little grand-daughters to the pool a few times a week and how much it has been helping her with pain management, and the different exercises and things you can do to give your muscles a workout that doing it out of the water won't feel as good.

“There's just something about the water,” she said.

And I just nodded and said, uh huh, and I agreed.

It didn't hit me until just now, why even today just walked around in the pool moving my arms and legs around in there a little bit and even just sitting on the steps and reading,

When I am in the water, my body feels new.

It is the closest my body has ever felt to normal since before I got sick.

A normal that I have not tasted or seen in so long, "normal," felt so strange yet exhilarating to me.

My body feels made new, it is as if I am not even aware of the physical limitations and pain such movement out of water would normally bring.

Wow. I just realized right now as I was typing her words... there is just something about the water. It has been this mysterious thing that at the same time can remain a mystery because it is more beautiful that way.

In the water, I feel like everybody else.
I can move easily, uninhibited, hardly aware of the pain.

In the water, it just dawned on me why I have been so excited about my experience at the pool for the first time last week in more than 14 years, and even in being excited and ENJOYING shopping for a swimsuit last week... it just hit me why I long and have looked forward to going to the pool again and why today I didn't want to leave...

When I am in the water, it is the closest I feel, or have felt, to normal.

I feel restored almost.

I feel made new.

Just writing those words and finally realizing why I have been so longing to get back in the water these last few days and finally getting a chance to do so today,

I am reminded of a glimpse of a vision I got the other day.

Dance has continued to be one of those things that has also spoken to me in this season, a love and a passion of mine for a long, long time, since I was a little girl prancing all about the house.

Well, watching this season of So You Think You Can Dance, a favorite and beloved summer love that I've shared with me and several friends who have gathered to watch it together over the years, as well as talk about with friends who don't live here, this season has been different for me.

This season of the show, for whatever reason, has single-handedly unlike any others, renewed and reminded me of the passion and love I have for dance.

Last year, I remember it being difficult oftentimes to watch it and come home, as in the past I would always finish watching or having a fun time at girls' nite and come home energized and inspired and dance or choreograph dances.

Last year, I couldn't do that. I got sick in March 2010, and at this time last summer I was just beginning to wrap my mind around and realize that this was most likely a chronic condition and all the levels of processing on that hat continue to re-surface or that you deal with at various levels as you continue to walk through it.

Or another term I want to steal from Breck because again she put it so poignantly in her blog, something called “emerging levels of awareness.”

That different things come to you at different times, the most unnerving and confusing are the ones you thought you had and you already had acknowledged, processed or dealt with...

Then it rears its ugly head again or just when you think you've wrapped your mind and hands around it and embraced and accepted it, it grows a new head or that which you were once holding, now is pricking and piercing your skin.

Like trying to wrap your arms around a cactus or hold one in your hands.

Eventually your hands get used to the feel of the prickly parts of the cactus and gets used to it, only to find a fresh wound or that a new one is now piercing your skin as you are trying to figure out where the bleeding is coming from when it has not made you bleed in months, and where it is all coming from.

Okay, back to where I was going with this, so last year, there were would be times it was hard for me to watch the show and it only made me feel more sad that I couldn't dance.

This year, it has been a much different story.

This year, my heart has been pierced by the beauty and the wonder of an art that has the capacity to move our hearts in a way like nothing else.

Instead of wondering if I will ever be able to dance again, I have been filled with this sense of, I will again dance.

Images of me doing routines in my head that only my heart and my soul recognizes.

Images of me one day running, skipping, dancing, laughing, just dancing around and singing and shouting for joy.

Images of me dancing, doing something that although physically I cannot do right now, my heart and my body still knows how, as I've been reminded and encouraged every time I listen to a song on the radio and start immediately choreographing it in my head – I am reminded that dance is still, after writing, the language of my soul.

A way my soul expresses itself in way nothing else can.

I am reminded when I hear songs on the radio and everything within me cannot help but groove and dance along to the beat, that dance will always be a part of me.

Even in a season where I can't literally dance, I am still dancing.

The moves and the choreography live on in my heart.

It still gets me going. It gets my heart and my soul thumping.

I am reminded that dance will always be a part of me and instead of grieving the loss that physically right now I can't, which I have been down that road and back and grieved and processed that and that was all necessary, healthy, and good, things are different now.

I don't feel like I can't because I can.

And I know that one day, I too, will again dance.

Dance with all I've got.

I've often thought about the last time I really danced.

It was at my friend Nia's wedding and though I was in tremendous amounts of pain and was experiencing the crazy that my body was on in the first two weeks of going gluten free for health related reasons and being put on the diet by a doctor that quickly earned my and our respect, yet my body was like going through withdrawal and trying to adjust and then being on a busy wedding weekend where I was low on one of my medications due to other issues with a different doctor we are not going into now, one of the ones I really need to function, as well as it being cold out and SNOWING that day, crazy and yes at the end of the month of March...

Yet, I danced.

Not all the dances, I had to save up my energy for the really good ones, but I danced.

Why?

Why did I dance?

And why did I feel so free and dance like I never have before?

CONTINUED IN... "and so i'll dance :: water (and other!) therapy, pt. 4"