ON LISTENING TO YOUR BODY
(How Mustang Summer Came To Be)

Talk about lessons coming to you and nothing being wasted in the universe. I had been working on my book and still doing work on myself, when I started experiencing some weird moments of suddenly crying for no reason (yeah, right), and waking up in the night several times a night because my upper back hurt. I had been getting some massage done for myself at the time and everything in my life was going smoothly (for a change), so I couldn't quite put my finger on what was going on.

I finally started to let myself take a moment to think about it. I recognized that I had been working pretty hard and hadn't taken enough time to listen. As it happened, I had a last-minute cancellation, so I flopped down on the couch to watch the last episode of Seinfeld. Just letting my mind go by watching TV allowed it to finally bring the reason for my tears and aching back to my attention. I had a story to write!

I had been having these memories coming up during this time about a period of time I call The Mustang Summer. I suddenly knew that I had a full blown story coming out of me, and what I was experiencing was a combination of birthing process and a final release of old grief and
sadness relating to my father's death. The reason I had been feeling this when I did was because it was April and my dad died on April 29. I knew this as I started to write. The story wrote itself. I finished it sometime after midnight and had another revelation. I was writing this story as a gift to my mom and my sister because it was my mom's birthday, Mother's Day, and nearly my sister's birthday. My sister had been experiencing some serious health concerns and I knew both my mom and sister would enjoy this remembrance.

As soon as I finished the story and cried my eyes out, I became aware that the pain in my back was. comp1etely gone. Even after I had just finished with a massage, the pain had still been there. As soon as I wrote the story, it released the old emotional pain and grief. Then I noticed the pain in my back left. I slept completely through the night for the first time since mid-April.

This is a perfect example of the body attempting to communicate with you, but being too busy to hear what is being communicated. The longer I went without listening to the message, the more intense the physical and emotional feelings became. Whenever memories can't (or won't) be released, or emotions don't get expressed, they get caught halfway between. This always causes some kind of discomfort until it is completely released and dealt with in whatever fashion may be appropriate for the individual undergoing the process. The act of writing, in this case, fully released it and immediate comfort, on all levels, settled in. It was an enormous relief.

This is why it is important to take the time out to just relax for a bit every day. One needs to check in with one's Self every day for continued physical, emotional, mental and spiritual health. In this frenetically- paced world, this basic human need gets overlooked. It is treated as less important than the other pursuits that we allot our time for. Even in our recreational time or vacation time, people play hard and continue to keep doing. We become human doings instead of human beings because we have forgotten how to just be, if only for a few minutes each day.