Smoking
More Healing Tales
"Sally," A woman in her mid-twenties, had slept with the fan on and woke up not being able to turn her head. By the time she saw me, she could move it a little, but not much.
She picked out a chair and sat in front of a big, oblong wooden table, facing a desk. A South African woodcarving of what looked to be a hippopotamus caught my eye, and I put it on the table and asked her to fix her eyes on it. She could pick a spot on it she liked and settle on it. She was not to move her head from side to side, but could allow the kind of micro-movements we always needed to make in order to stay comfortable.
We talked about the hippopotamus a bit. She settled on its eye. She was allowed to turn her head if it became uncomfortable; otherwise, just to fix her eye on the hippo's eye.
"Now, without doing it, just in your imagination, just pretend, if you were to look to the left, what might you see? Not literally, not in the room, just what comes to you in your imagination?"
She said the name of her fiancée.
"What kind of mood is he in?"
"He's happy."
"What about to the right?"
She said the name of a co-worker. Her co-worker's desk was to the right of the office; she might actually be there. Her fiancée was miles away.
After some more questions and responses, Sally
agreed that there were things she was not looking at that she should
be: the happiness of her marriage, and the stress at work that was
demanding a lot of her time. Her neck seemed to be telling her,
"Well, if you're not going to look to the right or left
of you and just have tunnel vision, you don't need me to turn. I
might as well not turn at all."
By the end of the session, most of the stiffness in her neck was
gone. She made a quick recovery.
Slightly over a year later, Sally again requested help, again for a stiff neck. She had been suffering from a stiff neck and lack of mobility for two weeks.
With the lesson of the healing metaphor from the prior session poking itself into my dim memory, I picked out a similar woodcarving, this time a rhino, and asked her to fix her gaze on the rhino's neck; however, the idea of needing to look at things in her life now seemed stale. To pursue this same approach, to use this same metaphor, seemed to put me in a role that felt stiff and somehow false. That was a hippo; this is a rhino. They are entirely different animals. She had fixed her eyes on the hippo's eye the whole time during that session a year ago, but now, having fixed her eyes on the rhino's neck, I said that she could look anywhere she wanted. I asked her to consider the differences between her and the rhino (she's not made of wood, for example, so the unconscious implication is that she can move.) We played a game where she held her arms stiff and pretended that they could not move, and then let them move. Then the game was to imagine she had to draft a business letter but certain key letters on her computer were out. Then, to add the letters, until she had the full alphabet to work with.
Fixing her eyes again on the rhino's horn, she imagined, whimsically, what was to her left and what was to her right. Work and family issues surrounded her - there was "too much on her plate." She was being asked to get involved with too many things. This time, she agreed, she felt she was seeing too much. Her neck seemed to be saying, "You're being asked to look everywhere and take care of everything. It's too much. I'm going to stay stiff and prevent you from seeing all those calls for your assistance."
At the end of the session, I asked her to move her head. To her amazement, she could move it with nearly the full range of motion. It wasn't totally better, but it was much better. "You have a gift!" she said.
She reported later that she made up something like a meditation and her neck got better.
Same healee, same neck, same problem, similar African woodcarving, same healer, but the cause of the problem was entirely different. If I had been locked into the earlier solution, "Your neck is telling you that you're not seeing," we would have had no success. Discovering the opposite possibility, "Your neck is telling you that you're seeing too much," was the healing insight.
Healing is a process of discovery. If you want to heal yourself, you do not want to approach the unconscious with a stiff-necked stubbornness. We're always students. To approach your problem with openness to learning what it has to teach you can be the beginning of healing.