A friend of mine caught the flue recently and when the worst symptoms were gone, he didn\u2019t feel well for another\u00a0several weeks. He was terribly impatient. I would have been, too, and each day\u00a0he woke up, he was bummed out that he still didn\u2019t feel strong and healthy.<\/p>\n
He is not alone. We human beings\u00a0are impatient about a lot of things. But however we feel, things take as long\u00a0as they take. Like healing. It has its own time line. We can fight it if we\u00a0want to and spend precious time being angry and feeling like a victim or we can
surrender and be kind to ourselves. I turn to my cat as a role model for\u00a0patience.<\/p>\n
Years ago, I was relaxing in bed, watching\u00a0TV and knitting a sweater, when I heard a loud bang. It sounded like a statue\u00a0or a huge book case had fallen down the stairs. When I got up to see what had\u00a0happened, my cat, Star was lying in the hallway in front of my room. She let out\u00a0a terrible moan. I\u2019ll never forget the sound of it. I sat down next to her and\u00a0looked up. She had been sitting on a perch at the top of the stairs and she\u2019d\u00a0fallen fifteen feet. Her balance is impeccable like most cats, but she must\u00a0have been asleep, turned over, fell off her perch and landed hard on her right
back leg.<\/p>\n
I was devastated as I watched herb\u00a0try to stand up. She couldn\u2019t get up and I took her in my arms and palpated her\u00a0legs. I wondered if she had broken something but she didn’t flinch when I\u00a0touched her. She was horribly freaked out, so was I, so I put her to bed with\u00a0me. She fell asleep immediately but when we got up in the morning, she still couldn\u2019t\u00a0stand up. I called a vet who couldn’t see her due to Covid so we ended up at a\u00a0pet emergency hospital. They wouldn’t allow me to go into the back of the\u00a0hospital to soothe her. She was in her carrier and I sat there in my mask for\u00a0seven hours. A neighbor had driven me to the vet and he stayed with me the\u00a0whole time. An entire day and a thousand dollars later, they brought Star to\u00a0me. Her x-rays hadn’t shown any breaks or contusions and the ultrasound didn\u2019t\u00a0show any fluid build up. That was a blessing, just like my neighbor was.<\/p>\n
When we got back home, I put Star\u00a0on my bed and I watched her heal. She was relaxed and she surrendered to what\u00a0had happened. She stayed on my bed for two weeks. I fed her there, I carried\u00a0her to her litter box and I stroked her fur while she slept. She had no anxiety\u00a0or guilt or impatience. Those things have nothing to do with cats. Sleeping has\u00a0everything to do with them.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a miraculous thing that we are\u00a0built to heal, but unlike animals, human beings fight it and become impatient.\u00a0\u201cThis is taking too long,\u201d we think. But when it comes to healing, there is no\u00a0such thing as \u201ctoo long.\u201d There is only \u201cthe amount of time that it takes.\u201d We\u00a0can eat healthy, sleep and exercise but healing still takes as long as it
takes.<\/p>\n
After Star spent several weeks\u00a0resting on my bed, one day when I was upstairs getting something to eat, she\u00a0appeared at the top of the stairs. She limped for a while. I was afraid the\u00a0limp wouldn\u2019t go away but after a few days, she was walking normally again. I\u00a0marveled at how she had allowed herself the time that she needed and when she
was stronger, she was through.<\/p>\n
Granted, we have many things to do\u00a0to keep our lives together and our pets don\u2019t, but we could do a lot more\u00a0self-soothing and a lot less blaming and wishing something else was going on. Cats
don’t don’t beat themselves up. They soothe themselves, they live in the now, they\u00a0sleep when they’re tired and they eat when they’re hungry. They\u2019re graced with\u00a0the inability to think into the future or the past, to tell themselves stories\u00a0with bad endings, and to wish something else was going on. They just relax and heal.<\/p>\n
Healing comes when we meet our\u00a0wounded places with compassion. The following words from Stephen Levine are at the
heart of this blog. \u201cTo heal is to touch with love that which was previously\u00a0touched by fear. When we\u2019re in pain, it\u2019s not a good idea to beat ourselves up\u00a0and cause ourselves more pain. If you had a broken leg, you wouldn\u2019t keep\u00a0kicking it. So why would thrash yourself when we get sick or wounded. We are\u00a0all broken and wounded in our individual ways. That\u2019s the nature of being alive.<\/p>\n
Being wounded asks for our\u00a0kindness. The more I stroke my cat, the more she relaxes and the better she\u00a0seems to feel. I\u2019d like to have the same compassion for myself instead of being\u00a0anxious and frightened and wondering, \u201cAre we there yet?\u201d Getting better is a
natural process but it doesn’t happen in a straight line. It has dips and peaks\u00a0and our job is to do the right thing to heal and be patient. When we know what\u00a0to do and we refuse to do it, we\u2019re hurting ourselves all over again and\u00a0extending the time it\u2019ll take to feel better.<\/p>\n
I knew a woman who went dancing on\u00a0high heels a few weeks after a hip replacement. It added weeks onto her healing\u00a0process and she never put two and two together. Another woman whose doctor told
her she was dehydrated, refused to drink water. \u201cI don\u2019t like how it tastes,\u201dbshe said.<\/p>\n
Human beings are pretty stubborn,\u00a0sometimes it serves us well, but at other times we simply refuse to do what\u2019s\u00a0good for us. A friend of mine pointed out that people don\u2019t like doing what is\u00a0inconvenient, like seeing a doctor or doing physical therapy.<\/p>\n
Islamic Persian scholar, Rumi,\u00a0said, \u201cThe wound is where the light enters you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Buddhist poet and singer, Leonard\u00a0Cohen, said, \u201cThere is a crack in everything. That\u2019s where the light gets in.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n
There is healing at the end of\u00a0convalescence. There is relief at the end of pain. When the clouds part, the\u00a0sun shines through. We don’t know how long it will take or how it will occurbut if we work with ourselves instead of against us, we see that the body is a
miraculous thing. It is programmed to heal if we just let it do its job. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A friend of mine caught the flue recently and when the worst symptoms were gone, he didn\u2019t feel well for another\u00a0several weeks. He was terribly impatient. I would have been, too, and each day\u00a0he woke up, he was bummed out that he still didn\u2019t feel strong and healthy. He is not alone. We human beings\u00a0are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":2763,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2764"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2765,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2764\/revisions\/2765"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}