The Stitches Analogy

Julie: 0:08

Welcome to the podcast today. Everyone, thank you for being here and for the questions that come and inspire topics to talk about. The topic for today came from the observation that, in the work that I do, I talk a lot about healing with my clients, specifically healing our hearts, our minds, our bodies. But when I'm talking about healing and the process of healing, what do I mean? Since there are so many journeys that we go on that involve healing, and since healing is in many ways tied to the abyss, it felt like a good opportunity to talk about what I think it means to heal, especially in terms of journeys. We're going to call this the stitches analogy and before we dive in, let me just say out loud that this episode is most certainly not medical advice. I would not recommend that anyone do the things the way I did them, and if you are a medical professional, please know that I own all of my missteps here. And with that, let's get started talking about healing. First of all, let me just say once again that the journey does not see you as broken. It does not see you as deficient or lacking. Journeys see all of us as whole. That being said, even as whole beings, we can still get injured, we can get sick. We are impacted by the world around us. We live in a mortal world, after all, and all of those things illness, injury, hurt, loss, etc are part of this world that we live in. So there are times when we are impacted in a way that asks for healing, and while the physical impacts are easier to see, we have emotional and mental impacts as well, and if they remain unhealed, they can have a greater impact than we realize. Healing is the process of coming back to a state of health. That seems obvious, but what is less obvious is perhaps what health is and how our view of health can get in the way of what health can actually be in our lives, and I find it helpful to think of health in terms of balance in my many studies, because I am such a learning nerd. One of the most helpful ways I have found for me to think about healing comes from the study of Ayurveda.

Julie: 2:25

I'm not gonna go super deep into Ayurveda here we can have this conversation later if you would like but Ayurveda is a sister science of yoga, where yoga is focused on bringing together our mind, body and spirit in order to become the best possible expression of ourselves. Ayurveda is really more focused on the body part of that, so it focuses on the physical suffering that we experience, on how to take care of our bodies in such a way that we can be healthy and vibrant enough to live our dharma or our life purpose. It's hard to fulfill our potential when we're sick all the time. So Ayurveda as a construct and by construct I mean it's how we talk about something, so it's the words and symbols and metaphors that we use to communicate about that which is in communication. So in Ayurveda we use the elements as the language of our experience.

Julie: 3:23

In Western medicine we talk about bones and muscles and cells and pathogens. In Ayurveda we talk about ether, air, fire, water and earth. And the foundational premise upon which Ayurveda is based is that each person is made up of a unique percentage of each of those five elements, and we know that because nobody looks the same as anybody else. So that is their unique balance. And through a variety of things like food or movement or the weather, we can either bring each of these elements more into our lives or we can have a deficiency of those elements. Either way, it causes an imbalance in us, and the point of talking about. All of this, though, is what I said before. Every person has a unique balance. Some people need more air element than other people. Some people need more earth. There isn't a perfect and that's in quotes or even an ideal balance. There is just your balance. So, when it comes to healing, understanding that our own personal balance is the way that we're going to feel best, then we can see that understanding that balance is really a worthwhile pursuit, and this is a whole different topic for another day. I'm not going to go too deep into it, but what we think balance means for us may not be what our body and our mind and our emotions are asking for.

Julie: 4:49

A lot of times, when I talk to my clients about Ayurveda, they want to get all of the elements in perfect balance 20% of each of them but that's probably not what their body is asking for, or their emotions or their mental well-being. Better, instead, to understand their unique balance. What do they need? So, as we tune into that with patience and grace, we can actually help speed up the healing process, because we actually have a sense of what we need to do to heal, and that all leads us to the fact that healing is a journey in and of itself, and if we can see that healing is a journey, then we automatically know that there will be difficulties in the process of healing. If it's a journey, we count on journey elements to be involved. We will try things that don't work, we will push too hard, we will give up too soon, because that's what we do as humans.

Julie: 5:48

In the context of journeys, and specifically when we're talking about maybe those deeper hurts, those less visible hurts, we can often feel like we've healed something, we've done the work, only to find ourselves falling back into the same patterns or being activated by something that we thought we were over. We thought we moved past, but healing isn't a linear journey. Much like physical injuries, where we're talking about muscles and bones and fascia and connective tissue, there's really rarely one thing that is injured. Multiple systems can be affected and, as such, we may need to apply different types of healing for those different systems. Just because there is a system in this network that is still injured doesn't mean we didn't make any progress in a different system. We just have to be willing to stick with it long enough to actually get to the end, to finish the journey, because often I think we apply a lot of band-aid type healing attempts, especially to our intangible injuries, the ones that maybe we can't see.

Julie: 6:55

We work really hard on the surface, giving a lot of effort to see who, seeming like we're healed, seeming like we're okay. But true healing often requires us to go pretty deep, facing the things that maybe we haven't wanted to face, digging up beliefs and experiences and habits that often run below our approved again in quotes level of awareness. Sometimes these things are too painful, they're too raw to look at, but that wound will remain, regardless of whether or not we want it to, until we're willing to really get in and open ourselves to the truth. Sometimes these wounds are multi-layered, they're interconnected, they're spread out through different systems and we have to pay attention to the message that we're receiving in order to address what's really happening, so that we can get back to our natural balance. So let's get to the analogy here. Here's the stitches analogy.

Julie: 7:54

Recently I went to the doctor and I had a mole on my arm removed. It was no big deal, just one that had been on my mind. I wanted to be safe about it and it was actually a crazy day that ended up with a second trip to the doctor, in this case to the urgent care, to get even more stitches, but that is another story for another day. Focusing back on my arm, the cut to remove the mole was deep enough that the doctor had to put one stitch in a lower layer inside my arm, and then the more superficial stitches on the skin. That deeper stitch was absorbable, so when I came back a week later, it was to just get the superficial stitches removed. Two weeks later, though, even with the superficial stitches gone, the wound wasn't healing.

Julie: 8:38

Now, one thing that you may or may not know about me is that I am a total body nerd. I think our bodies are fascinating, and when I was in college, I majored in English education because I loved it. I really enjoy talking about ideas and writing and words and all of those things. I mentioned that so that, when I tell you my favorite class in college was anatomy and going to the cadaver labs, that you understand how much I really love it, even more than my major. Our bodies do these amazing things, and the more I study, the more I can see that our bodies are often trying to heal all the time. So if healing isn't happening, that's an opportunity to then go deeper like I do with my clients into those root causes, to what's underneath the surface.

Julie: 9:29

So when I saw that my arm wasn't healing, it was clear that there was something to miss, and my best guess because I'm not a doctor or a medical professional was that the stitch hadn't absorbed and that my body was sending a clear signal that something needed to be done. So I went back to the clinic and I explained the situation to a different doctor, since my regular doctor wasn't available, including my suspicion that the stitch was still in there. And since it was still in there, that's why my body wasn't healing correctly, because the wound itself was seeping. When I finally went, he explained that I was going to need to take some antibiotics for a few days before he could open it up, because infection would complicate things even more if he were to cut my arm open. I started my regimen of both an oral antibiotic and a topical one, because we were really going to hit this thick heart in order to get it to the point where he could actually get in there and see what was going on.

Julie: 10:26

And yet, four days later, the wound wasn't looking any better and I was scheduled to go in on that fourth day. But I was really worried that if this was an infection it was still going to be a problem because it hadn't improved at all. And he asked me a few questions about what I had noticed. And then he said that it felt like it probably wasn't actually an infection at all and I was maybe a little annoyed that I had gone to all the trouble and all the work of taking this medication and all of the side effects that have come with it, when maybe that wasn't the problem. But that's okay.

Julie: 11:03

We talked about how. What was more likely was that my body was rejecting something foreign, which again made sense to me because I figured the stitch was still in there and that we could actually just go ahead and do the procedure that would clean things out, get everything to where it could actually start healing again, and at this point the incision and the skin around it was so raw and so sensitive. I was just ready for the whole thing to be done. So we stepped in the procedure room got situated, he numbed my arm, he cut into the wound. I'm not going to go into any gory details, but after a few minutes he said that it seemed like he'd gotten the wound all clean and he didn't see any abscesses that my body might have built up in order to create a barrier if there was something in there, and I thought that was great. I appreciated that information. I really only had one question did he find the stitch? Was it still in there? So I asked him, and it turns out he'd been so focused on looking for the abscesses that he forgot he needed to look for the stitch the reason that the abscesses would have been there in the first place. So I said okay, here we go. He thanked me for the reminder, which was kind, and he dove back into my arm and about two minutes later which can be a very long time when you're lying there and someone's digging around in your arm I finally heard him say there it is, and he proceeded to hold up these tweezers that were holding an incredibly thin suture, maybe only a quarter of an inch long. It was a tiny little thing, but that was clearly what my body was working on rejecting, and it didn't matter how small I perceived it to be. My body was responding in a big enough way to bring my attention to it, and you'd think that that would be the end of the story, but no, it continues.

Julie: 12:56

Just over a week later, it was time to take these new stitches out. And, going back to my trip to the urgent care that I had mentioned before, the doctor had told me at that time that if I wanted, I could just take the stitches out myself I didn't need to go back in. And so I had done that. And so now here we are, a week after the procedure. It's time to get the stitches out, and I just decided to take them out. So again, this is not medical advice, my friends.

Julie: 13:23

I removed the stitches and the next day was able to see it was looking better already. Much of the irritation and the swelling was gone, and I was looking so forward to my arm finally being able to heal. But a few days after that it felt like the area around the scar was still irritated, like it wasn't closing right, and as I looked in my arm it looked like there was a small little divot that had maybe some dead skin or something I could see, and I thought, well, I'll just try to clean it out just in case. Like maybe there's something in there, it's making it so it's not going to close finally. So I grabbed some tweezers to pull out that small piece of dead skin. Only, it wasn't dead skin and for all of you who are really good at worst case scenario, like I am, no, it wasn't a parasite or anything like that either, thank goodness. But as I pulled along, thin fiber came out of my arm. It was about an inch or an inch and a half long. And in the moment as I'm watching this thing come out of my arm, I remembered that, before I had asked the doctor about finding the other stitch, he had mentioned putting a drain in to help that deeper layer of my arm to heal correctly. And this must have been the drain, the one that the doctor surely would have removed had I actually gone in to have him take the stitches out. So there we go. Today I have a pretty noticeable scar on my arm. It's dark, red, sometimes a little purple, and clearly visible against my relatively pale scale, relatively pale skin. And yet, as I look at it, it serves as a reminder of some things for me.

Julie: 15:10

Before moving on, maybe it would serve to take a moment to consider your own life. Have you had experiences like this? Have you been through something that you thought you had perhaps healed from, only to find out that there was more to do. Take a second and pause us for a moment, if you can, and either reflect or write your thoughts about your own experiences. I don't really want to belabor this point and I also don't want to tell you what you should take from this story. Analogies are great because they are somewhat open to personal application. So whatever you're taking from the story is important, it matters, and, if you feel it's helpful, please write those things down. I'm going to add some of my thoughts, just in case it adds to what you already understood.

Julie: 15:59

So first, when we talk about healing, it is work.

Julie: 16:03

It's a journey. So there's things that we need to do. It's not going to just happen on its own. Second, doing the work of healing can be a lot like this experience. It can be messy. It's a journey. That's what happens. We do work, important work to address what we can see, but that doesn't mean that there isn't something else An invitation to go a little bit deeper, to pay attention a little bit more when it comes to our own personal development.

Julie: 16:35

Often the healing work that we need to do isn't in the trials and temptations, because the solution there would be to add more, to do more. The trials and temptations is additive. Often the healing work is actually in the abyss. It's in the process of facing the truth and then being willing to make the sacrifice that is asked of us that we heal. Those beliefs or identities or fears that we're holding onto are causing harm to us, just like that leftover stitch was, and the journey will ask us to give them up, just like my body was doing by bringing my attention to the fact that there was something wrong. Now I could have, I suppose, decided that my body should just be able to absorb the stitch. That's what they're made to do, right, so my body should just get over it and do what it was supposed to do. But this happens with mental and emotional injuries as well. The assertion that it should just get over it would not have made my body any more able to absorb what it apparently couldn't absorb.

Julie: 17:41

I had to respond to what was not what I thought it should be. It's a lot easier to see that with physical injuries, but I think the lesson remains the same I have to respond to what is, to whatever injuries or hurts that I have, not the ones I think I should have or the ways. I think I should be over them already. So if something is coming up and asking for attention through our reactions, through our thought processes, whatever it is, it's something that's ready to be looked at and, in most cases, ready to begin the healing process, and not that it's going to be fast just because it was coming up. Nor is it going to be easy necessarily. But if we're able to notice it, if we're able to see it, as I was able to see in my arm that there was something wrong, then we can actually do something about it.

Julie: 18:37

And finally, often these experiences have multiple phases or journeys to them. I needed to have that mole removed. It was important, but it also brought other things to the surface that then needed to heal. There was the physical healing, but I also discovered in the process that I had some beliefs and some thoughts about this healing process that I needed to let go of in order to be fully healed. So any work we do to move through these abyss moments they're important it doesn't necessarily mean that all the work is done or over with just because we've taken a step or two. Often these feelings or thoughts or impulses will come up again and it's tempting to feel like oh, I thought I dealt with this already, why is this coming back? I should be over this. But in those moments, maybe it can be helpful to think back.

Julie: 19:31

On the Stitches analogy Every single problem I had was in the exact same place on my arm, every single one. But each issue was unique and different in its own way. It was never the exact same issue and they all needed to be taken care of in different ways. So please don't feel that the work you did before was wasted or that you didn't do it well enough, just because something is coming back to the surface for you. You did the work and it was enough, and now that you've done that work, the next phase of healing is ready to be seen.

Julie: 20:15

So, as I do this work with clients, I'm able to help them to discover for themselves what's ready to heal, what's ready to let go of, what do they need to do in order to move forward, and really it all ties back to coming to this experience of our wholeness. If something's coming up again, it isn't that we failed. It's that the journey knows that we can do this now based on what we've learned, based on the work we've already done that. This is ready, so take from the Stitches analogy what resonates or is meaningful for you. I learned a lot from it and I released some things that were ready to be released, and I hope you can find something in here that helps you to perhaps see these healing journeys in a different way, because life is a journey and it's time to start living like it. Thanks again for being here, everybody. I'll see you next time, .