Blocked meridians

Last week I had a deep-tissue massage with Natasha, my Russian massage therapist.

For those of you who have heard me talk about Natasha, you already know that she is equipped with hands of steel and a baffling ability to kick-start my digestive system. (If you have no idea who Natasha is, read THIS. Then you’ll understand what she means to me.)

Even though I adore Natasha and entrust my body to her, I do not look forward to our sessions. I equate getting a massage from her to running a 10K: I sort of dread it, but I know I’ll feel euphoric and resilient once it’s over. It will somehow make me a better human being.

Every time I have an appointment with Natasha, she flattens me into a pancake with her Eastern-medicine techniques, but I accept her poundings without a whimper. In fact, it’s become a point of pride that I manage to avoid crying out in agony when I’m with her. I have learned to rely on deep breathing and other mental trickery to stay calm and contain the wailing inside my own head.

But last week, my visit to Natasha was different. My muscles seemed tighter than usual; I felt edgy. She noticed too, and was thus “going easy” on me. (Which, let’s be frank, means nothing.) When she got to my foot – the back of my left ankle – I almost jumped out of my skin. It hurt so bad. (Later, after my massage, I checked out the big anatomy chart hanging on her wall and wondered if my Calcaneal Tendon or Flexor Retinaculum was perhaps the culprit.)

How could the back of my ankle be sore? It hadn’t bothered me before, but that is precisely Natasha’s forte: she locates tender, raw, uncomfortable places on your body that you didn’t even know existed and makes them feel like spaghetti. I found myself groaning out loud, “Natasha, I can’t do it! I can’t.”

She relented – a little. She kept her magical man hands on the back of my ankle but released some of the pressure.

“What is wrong with me?” I moaned.

“It’s your heart,” she said.

“What is wrong with my heart?” I cried. Natasha has a track record of diagnosing health problems through massage, so my first thought was that I was maybe having angina or the rumblings of a heart attack.

“No, not your heart,” said Natasha. “Your emotional heart. You have pent-up feelings. You have tension. Your meridian is blocked at the back of your ankle. Your foot and heart are connected. Energy cannot get through.”

I really didn’t know what this meant, nor was I able to engage in intelligent conversation while sprawled on the massage table, so I shut my mouth and let her proceed. The discomfort in the back of my foot was a tangible thing.

“Yes, yes, you definitely have a blocked meridian,” she whispered. My eyes were closed, but I could imagine her shaking her head in doleful solidarity. “I will unblock it.” Which she did by kneading her fingers into the molten core of my blocked meridian and sending a hot thread of pain up my leg and into the upper half of my body. I felt something burning; I felt something begin to give. And then, as I was practically panting, she stopped.  

Before I could catch my breath, Natasha moved swiftly from my left ankle to my right. Which – no surprise here! – likewise needed unblocking. She repeated the entire procedure, while my palms grew damp and I licked the sweat from my upper lip. Just when I thought I might physically break, Natasha began to murmur, “It is hard, being a mother. It is hard, being a woman. You feel love for others and you take care of them, and it is not always easy. There is stress.”  

Oh yes, Natasha, there is stress.

“There is worry, there is frustration, there is anger,” she continued. “And it goes into your foot and stops your energy from flowing.”

Her voice, a thick Russian-y intonation, made my eyes leak. How does she always reduce me to weeping? And how does she so beautifully unblock my meridians when I’m pretty sure that her own meridians must be suffering? After all, this is someone who’s gone through a nasty divorce and has a son with a brain tumor. If anyone is dealing with more than her share of sorrows and burdens, it’s her.      

But, now that I’ve given it more thought, I believe all of us women are carrying more than we ever thought we could handle, whether as moms or wives or friends or just as people. There’s hardly time for tears or woe; we forge on, even if our loads are heavy. Maybe our blocked meridians are the glue that prevents us from completely falling apart. Maybe they are the small price we pay for being alive and being needed by others. Maybe blocked meridians aren’t so bad after all?

But I will say this: it feels freaking amazing to have them cleared out, even if it’s only for an hour or two.

Thanks, Natasha. I love you.

Keep calm and (try really hard without much success to) meditate on.

What do you say to someone who is prone to worrying and doesn’t do a terrific job of managing her stress?

You tell her, “Get the Calm app.” Right?

Only, I suppose, if you are my clever friend Liz, who suggested this exact thing to me a couple months ago when I was losing my sh** over one of life’s latest crises.

Liz tends to be ahead of the curve on things like meditation apps, so I listened up. “Calm is better than Xanax,” she told me. “I do it fifteen minutes each day. Taking this time for my mind and body has been transforming.”

Liz and I are similarly wired, so I asked for more details. She said, “In the past, I hadn’t noticed how wound up I was doing simple things like grocery shopping. I’d be irritated and in such a rush, literally feeling my muscles tight and stressed. Now, I’m more relaxed. After meditation in the morning, which is often in a random parking lot after I drop off the kids at school, I feel like a Zen surfer dude gliding through the day.”

I can describe myself using many different adjectives, but Zen is not one of them. I could see the benefit of having a tool right on my phone to help me glide through the day. So I hopped over to the App Store and purchased Calm without a second thought.

When you open Calm, the simple words “take a deep breath” greet you. Beyond that, Calm offers a treasure trove of resources for the habitually anxious, including guided and unguided meditations, sleep stories, and programs for managing stress and promoting gratitude. Best of all, there is a daily exercise that fosters mindfulness and concentration.

Calm encourages you to find a quiet, comfortable spot where you can close your eyes, maintain a wakeful posture (as if a string is pulling you up from the top of your head), and disregard the rest of the world for a while. The lulling voice of Tamara, the narrator – plus the background noise of chirping birds and lapping water – is reassuringly Xanax-like.

Since downloading Calm I’ve been doing it almost every night in bed before going to sleep, but I confess that meditation does not come easy for me. “Return to the breath” is Tamara’s mantra, but it is so hard. I try to concentrate on the air as it moves in and out of my body, but my mind begins to wander like a hyper puppy off-leash. Tamara, ever merciful, instructs me not to fret: “There is no judgment. Let go of your thoughts and imagine them floating away like leaves on a stream.”

As if it’s not challenging enough to follow Tamara’s basic directions, I am plagued with a host of other disruptions that make meditation even more difficult. I’m sitting in my bed, for instance, legs crossed and hands resting lightly in my lap, when I hear my son padding down the hallway toward my bedroom. “Owen is supposed to be sleeping!” I hiss to Tamara. He opens the door. Although my eyes are closed, I can sense him staring at me. He closes the door and races back to his room while shrieking with laughter. I silently appeal to Tamara for support. “Return to the breath,” she says.

A similar incident happens the following night. I’m trying to do Calm, but this time my daughter Caroline barges in. “She should be doing her homework!” I think helplessly. Caroline watches me in what I can only assume is fascination (I’ve never seen my mom so still and quiet before!) and then she asks, “What’s up with the hippie hobby, Mom?” I cannot answer because my brain is mush and I’m getting pissed, so I keep my eyes shut and ignore her. All while – yes, you got it – attempting to return to the breath.  

But the worst interruption to Calm comes from my husband. It’s another evening and I’m just getting into my groove, working on “softening my forehead,” when I hear him hollering for me downstairs. The string holding my spine straight snaps in half. The direction of the stream turns and every messy thought comes crashing on top of me like a tsunami. “What does he want?” I ask Tamara in sheer desperation. I climb out of bed and find my husband in the kitchen, checking his email.

“There’s a message here from Apple indicating that somebody in our family bought an app called Calm,” he says.

“That was me. I bought Calm,” I say.

“But Calm is freaking expensive!” he says. “It was $63.29!”

I’ve only purchased one or two apps in my life, so I have no context for this discussion. He goes on, “Every app I buy is only a couple bucks. I’ve never spent $63.29 on an app!”

“But Calm is different,” I say. “It’s got all these tools and activities. It offers something new every single day. It’s like a meditation curriculum.” I know I sound lame, but I’ve come to believe in Calm, even if can’t achieve it myself. 

“Well you better be doing a lot of Calm to make it worth the price!” he says.

Let me tell you: there is nothing more buzz-killing to Calm than being told by your spouse that you need to do a lot of it to justify the cost. My inner surfer dude wilts a little bit. 

***

I keep thinking of Liz, who, as you’ll recall, mediates in her car in random parking lots. “I’m concerned that someday someone will knock on my car window thinking I’m asleep or dead,” she says. “But so far I haven’t been interrupted.”

Perhaps I need to take my meditation on the road.

***

In my bed, in a car, wherever I can find that sense of peace that continually eludes me, I’m holding out hope that Calm is going to help. My husband and kids can complain and laugh all they want, but the truth is this: if I can be more serene and composed in my daily life, they will directly benefit. All for $63.29.

It's a complete steal, if you ask me. And much less than a yearly Xanax prescription.

Nothing and everything

Owen, age 9

Recently, my son gave me a scare.

I was getting breakfast ready when he slunk into the kitchen, obviously trying to stay out of my line of sight. “Good morning, buddy,” I said. No response from the normally chatty Owen, who was covering his face with his shirt.

“Why are you hiding behind your shirt?” I asked. “Come on out and have something to eat.”

“I can’t,” he mumbled through the fabric. “Something is wrong with my face.”

“Something is wrong with your face?” I shouted. Breakfast is too early in the day to lose my grip (yet, pathetically, it happens all the time).

“There are dots all over it,” he said, at which point I demanded he let me see. He sighed and pulled his shirt down into place. His face was covered with garish purple spots. Nearly 10 of them, in fact. My jaw dropped as the word PESTILENCE flew into my brain (followed, irrationally, by MEASLES, MUMPS, RUBELLA, and SCARLET FEVER).

“What is wrong with you?” I shrieked. I didn’t know if I should touch him or place him in quarantine, but I went ahead and made sure he didn’t feel feverish. I also took a soapy rag to his cheeks, chin and forehead to see if this was some sort of joke. It was not.

At this point, my husband had entered the kitchen and was surveying the scene with his usual mix of mild concern and amusement. “I’d call the pediatrician, Laura,” he graciously offered up.

Right.

As I was reaching for my phone, Owen’s eyes grew large and he gave me a look. You know that look, don’t you? It’s a blend of fear and guilt, and I can recognize it on my son’s face a mile away. I set down the phone. “Buddy, before I call the doctor, please tell me if there’s something I should know about your face. Did you do anything to it? Anything at all?”

And with that, Owen nodded slowly while he slipped his hand into his pocket. He brought out a little rubber pencil-topper, similar to an eraser but just for decoration. The tiny alligator head sat in the palm of his hand. “Owen, what did you do with the alligator head?” I asked. None of this was making sense. Then, he mimed using the alligator head as a suction cup on his face, and everything was suddenly, absurdly, clear.

“Oh, my GOD, Owen used the ALLIGATOR HEAD to give himself hick—,” my husband started yelling with glee, but I cut him off with a look of death before he could finish. As far as I’m concerned, “hickey” does not need to be the newest addition to my son’s vocabulary.

“Owen, did you really use the pencil-topper as a suction cup all over your face?” I asked. He nodded. “Did you do it just now, after waking up?”

He shook his head. “I did it last night in bed when I was trying to fall asleep.”

Twelve hours out and his hickeys looked as good as new; I supposed they weren't going to fade anytime soon. An executive decision needed to be made.

“Well, I’m so relieved you aren’t sick. You are going to school and you’ll have to hold your head high,” I said briskly. “I’m going to call your teacher and the school nurse and tell them about your bruises”— I glowered at my husband here – “and let them know you’re not contagious.”

To his credit, Owen went to school and survived his classmates’ stares and curiosity. I, on the other hand, didn’t make peace with his hickey situation as easily: it was just another piece of evidence that I’m woefully unprepared to handle the ludicrous things my children choose to do.

***

I met some girlfriends for coffee after Owen had gone off to school. Our conversation began like every conversation does – “What’s going on?” etc. etc. My customary response to this question is “Nothing” because, mercifully, we are healthy and fine and life is trucking along mostly uneventfully.

But I’m starting to think “Nothing and everything, both at the same time” is a reply that’s much closer to the truth. Because like everybody else, I’ve got my ordinary stuff going on that no one wants to hear about (like how I need to clean the toilets and stop at the grocery store to buy spaghetti for dinner), but if I scratch at the surface there is so much simmering underneath (like the gargantuan concerns I have about my kids, my work, the world). These things have the power to take my breath away if I dwell on them, so I avoid it. But they’re always there.

Back to coffee: when my friends started in with their usual questions that particular morning, “Nothing and everything” was the only way for me to respond to them. Because, really, how else does one begin to explain that her son has given himself a face-full of hickeys with a pencil-topper?