I grew up in an affluent neighborhood in an affluent town, often surrounded by affluent and ambitious peers. I am, as my father is wont to describe himself, a scion of a once-wealthy family. My childhood memories of the old family places are filled with the mildew-scented trappings of past-due luxuries; the frayed and decaying artifacts of the finest that money once bought, in an era bygone.
Dissipated wealth leaves a palimpsest upon the family canvas; I felt homeless hung on any wall, torn from a frame I could never reclaim. The lack of pretense to wealth in my immediate household only served to exacerbate my sense of its absence, and my conviction that my world was predicated on inadequacy, not even amounting to failure. I was furious with my parents for their frugality and my perceived lack of adequate social standing. We were comfortable, certainly, but we weren’t rich, and it made me mad, because I knew who the Joneses were, and we were not keeping up.
I wasn’t athletic or beautiful; I didn’t have the hair, the clothes, the figure. I was smart but not brilliant, motivated but not fanatical, charismatic but not mesmerizing.
So, normal.
And that never felt good enough.
Because when you are the “smart kid,” you spend your life getting feedback that makes you think there is something special about you that will be recognized and rewarded out there in the big old world. And then you get out in that world and find out that most of us are right in the middle of that curve, a face in the cocktail party crowd of people scanning for who is worth talking to, and who can safely be ignored. I imagine the same is true when you’re the anything kid, really.
Unless you are the exceptional one.
And how I wanted to be exceptional! I worked my way into finance, determined to play the game right, medicating away the disappointment at discovering that the work wasn’t compelling or intriguing or, even, value-creating. The people around me seemed like shadows or shells or sharks, and still I soldiered on.
Until the towers came down and I just couldn’t anymore.
The summer after I left that job was a sun-drenched wonder of severance pay and simplicity; the first time that I ever felt I knew what it meant to be in complete alignment with my rhythms.
Last week I braced for a deadlift and felt something howl in my back ; I dropped the bar and spent three days on the couch trying to figure it out. I’m a homeopath; I can’t help it. What is the growth, what is the healing, what is it that wants to be seen? I never had back issues before, I’m fitter than I have ever been, my business is growing, my health is terrific, my kids are amazing, my marriage is wonderful, there are even people out there who want to read my writing! So how can my back, which is the analog for the structure of my life, be in protest?
It is because somewhere along the line, I forgot to forget about the Joneses.
Of course, it looks different now. I’m not begging my mom to buy me Bennetton sweaters and Tretorn sneakers. I’m at the gym, trying to lift more and more weight, trying to go faster, go harder, get leaner, get stronger. I’m on calls, and in coaching, and at masterminds.
Because if you weren’t born with it, and it isn’t given to you, you have to work for it, and the message I’ve been telling myself for over four decades is, whatever you are doing, it isn’t enough.
I thought I’d left that story behind when it almost killed me fourteen years ago.
Today I realized: you don’t leave a story like that behind just once. You have to keep leaving it behind, over and over again, until God, The Universe, and Everything, is good and sure you’ve gotten the point. Here I am, becoming the embodiment of the very pattern I so often see in those I encourage to seek homeopathic care, trying to push through the clear message from my body just for a little while longer, thinking I can make it up to myself later.
I can’t. You can’t. Peace can’t wait.
And that means there are times when you have to drop the bar.
Don’t break your back on the life you weren’t meant to be living.
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BONUS:
I’m rolling out a new bonus for my premium subscribers. Some of you have signed up for the Deep Dive Healing Club and taken advantage of your 10% discount off the Founder’s Club price. But for those of you still on the fence, I am now including part of that offer for ALL premium members. Each month, premium subscribers will now have access to key sections of the practitioner-level remedy studies that club members receive every month, enabling you to make better home-prescribing decisions for yourself and your family.
Check out this month’s offering, a classic for ear infections, common colds, and even for the Bug That Shall Not Be Named.
Pulsatilla.
This month ONLY, I will be including the COMPLETE remedy profile, to give you an example of the depth we go to in learning how to use these amazing remedies.
Enjoy!
“My first thought was to give Pulsatilla, and then I had second thoughts.”
As we drift along through the most common of the acute remedies, having studied Arnica and Aconite, we must not forget Pulsatilla.