My prior post was written mostly with my motorbike friends in mind, but as an afterthought I sent along the text to the folks in the lightning and electric shock survivor's forum. I didn't feel like writing the same account of events two times, so forgive the double duty.
This portion of what happened is written mostly for the benefit of the lightning group, wanting to share an insight which may be helpful in the spiritual aspect of healing. It is written in that frame of mind at any rate. You motorheads have proven yourselves to be fully rounded people from all walks of life, so when it comes to major illnesses, accidents and mishaps no one is exempted. We come into this life naked and without exception will leave the same way... no pardons on this one. So, if the following is not actually of use to you, hopefully it will at least be kind of interesting.
As mentioned in the last post I had an experience where the heart suddenly changed it's pattern of moving the blood and stepped up into double time. The problem is that instead of the nice pulse of warm blood flowing through the arteries and carrying to the extremities and everywhere in between life giving oxygen and nutrients...in this erratic pattern it was more like a kind of shaking of the heart resulting in a spattering of blood into droplets which then cool quickly, don't really go anywhere and clot. The heart muscle can not sustain this racing and the clotting would soon clog up the arteries and here we go again with another heart attack.
I woke up from a deep sleep feeling good to discover several nurses standing around looking at monitors and in hushed tones conferring. A medication was set up as a drip to thin out the blood so that it would not clot and a second medication to try to get the heart beating in the correct mode and speed. It took several hours before my heart “flipped” and resumed normal function.
I found this very interesting and asked both nurses and two doctors why the heart would do that, just suddenly go wacko. They all described the phenomenon as “irritable heart”, with the idea that often after a heart attack the heart is susceptible to this kind of action. As a doctor explained it to me...
“What is the heart all about?... regularity! Doing the same thing it just did before, steady and dependable from the time we are in the womb to our last heart beat in this life. One after another just like before. And it is Mr. Dependable, set upon doing it's job. Then this heart attack comes along and throws a wrench into the works.”
“So the irritable heart is majorly pissed off?”, I asked. The doctor laughed and said that yes, it was kind of like it was having a tantrum, but a serious tantrum that could be life threatening. This made it sound to me like the heart was intelligent and could sort of “decide” to have a fit in an angry state. Wow, that was something to think about. And think about it I did through the whole weekend. I reminded myself of how the body learns things, demonstrates a kind of intelligence on it's own. I thought about my own experience as a swimmer where after lots and lots of repetition my arms and legs and lungs, body position, etc. knew exactly what to do to move me through water quickly and efficiently. Then I thought about musicians whose fingers remember what to do, when to do it, at what pressure to make beautiful music. Fingers can remember all the notes in a song or complicated musical composition. Wow again. This seemed important to me and then I realized why.
When we were struck by lightning (those of us who were) it was a sudden and rude interruption of our lives, changing things in sometimes major ways for ever more. In a nano second... boom! Enough energy to light up a major city briefly, lights us up to one degree or another doing damage either immediately or later on or both. That's if we live through it. Twenty five years goes by and some new medical problem surfaces without anyone connecting it to the lightning event so long before. Often it is something to do with the nervous (or electrical) system. Yet no connection is made to the catastrophic lighting strike.
In my own case I was struck through a telephone in the summer of 1995 with lightning passing through my ear and out through bleeding burns between my eyes, out the forehead and crown. I was unconscious for several hours which means that I had a traumatic brain injury. Just like with the heart.attack where part of the heart dies, part of my brain had a train wreck. All of that lightning energy passes through the front lobe of my brain and there is damage, if not from the electrical component then from the microwave aspect of lightning energy which is full band with, sound , light, electric, micro wave and the rest of it... passing through the front lobe. Pretty amazing that I can sit here tapping out this message.
There were immediate negatives in memory loss, slower cognition, dyslexia, irritability, sadness, depression and no doubt things I did not see myself, but registered with others. That's why we lose jobs, can't sleep right, have divorces and often feel a lot of anger about what has happened wondering how exactly we deserved this with no way to get our lives back..Why me?
A few years went by and I developed Guillane Barre Syndrome which has symptoms like polio and for which there is no cure or treatment. My doctor at the time felt very strongly that the lighting damage set me up as more vulnerable for the GBS. Seems reasonable to me. Who knows, it may also have left me more vulnerable for the heart attack. Maybe.
The point is that just as the heart attack is a major event to the heart, so is lightning to our whole being. What made me think about my lightning friends was the business of problems surfacing later and the anger many of us have not been able to let go of, even after years have gone by. When I have tried to help through the years I have at times become frustrated with individuals who will not let the anger goand don't want to. I'm convinced that it is toxic and prevents healing. At some point we have to choose between either being a victim or being a survivor. The victim identifies with the negative parts of what happened and hangs on to it as if it is dear and is the essence of who they are. Their anger takes over their lives and I believe it stands in the way of any possible healing.
Let it go. Bury who you were and move on with who you have become. If you become your anger nothing can help you. And people will tire of your darkness and leave you alone, else you will infect them with your toxicity. Self medicating with griping, booze, drugs won't help you heal.
So with this understanding I think that we have to send healing energy to our wounded hearts so they don't need to be irritable any longer and we need to do the same with our whole selves to heal from the lightning. Or from anything else,for that matter. A motorcycle accident leaving us in a wheelchair. A limb removed, parts that don't work, people who have left us behind. We have to send healing, loving energy to what remains through gratitude for what we have and acceptance of what is gone.
Sometimes it is just a trick of the mind in how we think. Immediately after being struck I had a lot of noise inside my head, tinnitus, and it was irritating the more I resisted and resented it. All the time it was there and making hearing what I wanted to hear... conversation, bird song, wind whispering through tall grass difficult or impossible. It was getting to me until a kind of intuition told me to think of it a different way, to pretend that I was hearing what others could not... cosmic wind or perhaps the sound of angel wings. What an amazing difference. So I kind of allowed it, accepted it and pretended that I was privileged to be able to hear it. It is all still there so many years later and doesn't bother me. I ignore it even when I am actively listening to it. Or at least I ignore the negative feelings about it. It just is. At least I can hear. I may not walk real well, but I can walk. I may need to use spell check constantly and fix everything I write, but I can write and read and have friends and build cool bikes I can ride off into the sunset. So many things I can do! Why waste my time with the things I can't do? That's how I see it anyway.
So, I have an ongoing wish to become “graceful”, no ambitions for ballroom dancing, but I want to be graceful about letting go of what is toxic in my life , wrong thinking, judging or blaming or any of that. Let it go for the waste of time it is. The benefits are wonderful, I find, and leave me with an attitude of gratitude (rhymes doesn't it) and a general state of
fulness. Along with those good things there is a readiness to enjoy the very fact that I am alive.
I'll quit now. I did want to share what I think is a valuable insight into letting go of darkness and gathering as much light as we can... then naturally sharing it with others. Why make difficult what is easy? Why suffer if we don't have to? There are different kinds of healing. This kind won't replace the leg that is missing, but it can help us use and appreciate the one which remains. I also wanted to acknowledge that it may be natural for us to be angry about what happened. It may be natural, but that doesn't mean it is helpful in our healing. An “irritable heart” can kill.
Wishing each of us well,
SB
