Two New Clients
Last week, Well On The Way® received 2 new clients, one was 6 months old and the other was 93.
PART 1
The 6 month old, we’ll call him Joseph, was particularly interesting in his clarity of communication. Joseph’s mother, Anne, was an osteopath and she had taken one Upledger CranioSacral class just before Joseph was born. Since then, she was taking time off to be home with Joseph. She wanted Joseph to be treated with CranioSacral Therapy (CST) because he was having digestive difficulties, constipation and crankiness.
Joseph is a robust bright eyed little guy. He lay for a moment on the treatment table looking at me curiously. His mom was telling me a little bit about him and his birth. My hands were immediately drawn to his head, holding him with one hand on either side of the head. Instantly, he began to scream. “This is about his birth,” I said. “He’s mad about being induced. He didn’t want to come out just yet.”
Joseph drew himself up into a little ball and wiggled up against me until he was upside down in my lap, held against my abdomen with his head touching my legs as I sat on my treatment stool beside the table. He was slightly right of center in a perfect fetal position. He was screaming.
Joseph was induced a week early because his position pressing on his mom’s sciatic nerve was causing her absolutely miserable back pain. I looked at him leaning on my right pelvis and asked, “Was the pain on the right side?”
“Yes,” she said, “At the end, it was.”
“Ok, ok, Joseph,” I said. “You can stay. You don’t have to go anywhere just yet.” Joseph stopped screaming and listened.
“The position you’re in, pressing on mom’s right sciatic nerve is extremely painful. If you can move over into the middle, you can stay.”
Joseph was very still and quiet for about 10 seconds. Then, with a quick little wiggle, his body moved and was centered along my pelvis and low abdomen.
“Good,” I said, “You can stay there as long as you like.”
He stayed right there contentedly for a while, then wiggled down so his head was further down and pushing against my legs. He began to scream again.
“You can push through if you want to or not,” I said to him. “We’re not going to force you. You decide.”
He wiggled back up and got real quiet and content again. He repeated this a few times as if testing us. He always wiggled back up into the “womb” rather than continue through to “birth”. I wasn’t going to hurry him.
Now I spoke to mom. She seemed pretty amazed at this enactment and confused about whether or not she had made the right decision.”Ann,” I said, “your concern about if the decision to induce was right or if you should have continued on in pain is adding anxiety to the situation. So what do you say we change the energy? We’re just going to take 5 minutes and change the energy, OK?”
“What can you say to yourself that is the exact opposite of what you’re feeling right now? Something like ’I’m the perfect mother? or ’I feel great?’ or something that feels right for you.”
Ann thought and said, “I’m the perfect mum. But it’s not the truth.”
“That’s OK,” I said. “It doesn’t have to be. It’ll work anyway. Just start saying it and I’ll join you and we’re going to say it for 5 minutes.”
So Ann began and I joined her and she developed a unique rhythm to it as we spoke so we were eventually singing it “I’m the perfect mum” over and over and Joseph was getting so relaxed and quiet as we sang. He was still upside down in my lap and in a deep sleep as we finished and we all three were just vibrating with this perfect mum energy. It was the end of the session and Ann packed Joseph up and he never did wake up. Her homework was to do minimum of 5 minutes every day “I’m the perfect mum.”
PART 2
A spry elderly gentleman opened the front door. “Mr. Wilson?” I asked. “I’m here to give your wife a massage.””Oh,” he said, “She’s very bad today. You’d better take a look. She collapsed and she’s not feeling very well. She’s in here, in bed.”
In the bedroom was a hospital bed with a frail white haired woman under covers so you could barely see her. Her body was a bit twisted and her head at a sharp angle to her body. She did not look comfortable. We went out onto the porch to talk.
“She’s 93 years old and I’m 92,” Mr. Wilson told me. “I’ve been taking care of her for 9 years, ever since she fell and hit her head against the air conditioner. They say sometimes Alzheimer’s can be brought on by a fall. Sometimes she doesn’t even know me. She said to me, “Who are you?” I said, “I’m the crazy guy who married you 52 years ago. She looked me straight in the eye and said, Baloney!”
Mr. Wilson laughed vigorously and I joined him. “Then she told me I was too smart to be doing such work. I oughta get a better job. I told her it was a labor of love.”
I was in awe of this man who looked about 70, but was 92 and was his 93 year old wife’s sole care giver. My mind was having a hard time catching up with what was going on and I heard myself asking, “You probably have a lot of family living close by, right?”
“Did have,” he said. “They’re all gone now.”
“Where’d they go, did they move away?” I can’t believe I said that. I must have been in shock.
“Oh, yeah, they moved away,” and he began to laugh again, like it was a private joke. He was laughing so hard he could hardly talk. “They all moved away–up to the North White Plains Cemetery!” And he kept on laughing and it was so contagious and good natured, I was laughing, too.
“I want whatever you’re having,” I told him and we laughed some more.
I went into the bedroom and gave Mrs. Wilson the first massage she had ever had in her life. It was light touch lymphatic drainage therapy and in the first few minutes her whole demeanor changed and she visibly relaxed. Mr. Wilson was amazed.
“Looks like she likes it,” he said. “Florence, you like it?” he asked. And she nodded.
