It’s been a while since I have talked very much to you. Over the past few years I went quieter in the world, stopped teaching (mostly). Slowed my practice down, refused new patients. I traded a larger degree of public service for more private ones. My mother was declining and then, last year, she died. Other family members struggled with health conditions and surgeries. Helping with that is the sort of thing I shaped myself to be good for.
I have spent over 25 years managing disease and injury in my patients and my family, but my mother had very little I could fix or heal or manage. My mother, very simply, had been aging and was getting tired physically and emotionally with a declining body and a life that had grown too small. She had lost her husband and her friends to death. Her heart just wasn’t in it anymore.
I remember the moment she decided. We had spent many weeks on and off together in her last year. Far more time together than we had in decades. We told stories, talked about loves, loss, grief, adventures and romance. Told each other secrets we had never shared. We settled practical matters. We did not talk much of our battles and our disappointments with each other – that past was forgiven on both sides years ago. We made a lot of food and debated at great length the particulars of a meal – she loved food and was a gourmet cook yet always ate very little, and only after everyone else was finished and the kitchen clean. She was of the era where you could never be too thin. But her last year, she was definitely too thin to my mind. We sat on her bed a lot and talked of random things. I did the things for her she had once done for me when I was little. That full circle sort of thing.
That is where we were, The Moment She Decided. We were on her bed together, going through her bills and I was helping her write checks and do the paperwork for selling her house and moving to Arizona to live with me… and she made a mistake on a check. Not a big one. But my mother was not the sort of person who made mistakes like that, even little ones. We laughed about it, and I helped her correct it, but I saw the consideration in her eyes.
She considered that check book for some long minutes. She got very still and very silent and very serious. I saw and felt the moment she decided.
There was a caregiver there, coming in and out of the room, helping out -- and the poor woman got very confused when I spent the next 10 minutes somewhat loudly cajoling and begging and teasing and respectfully demanding that she “stop that right now” and “mom, don’t you dare” and “no really, we are going to have a great time in Arizona, I will make it fun” and other such declarations. I talked non-stop to a silent woman sitting up very straight in her bed, just blinking at me with big brown falsely innocent eyes and a slight Mona Lisa smile on her face. I know the look of my mother when she is resolved. The Universe would not deny her, and her daughter would be no match for the two of them.
That night, I watched her sleep. She glowed. I was supposed to leave for a few days to go back to my practice and then return, we had a doctor’s appointment to take her to when I got back. She died while I was gone in those few days, in her bed. But she left the poem, Invictus, written in her own perfect handwriting on her nightstand. A poem I always meant to memorize and never got around to. A poem I did not know she knew and more than knew, but loved so well as that. A poem, I learned the day she died -- was a secret friend to us both.
What followed was all the things one deals with in the administration of death. There were challenges and drama and the theater of family things, and it was expensive and exhausting and all the rest. But also, I got to spend many long nights walking in North Carolina woods and sitting on a bridge over a lake with a male swan who had lost its mate years ago (and would take no other despite human attempts) and would swim over to float near me in the dark water. He gave good advice, like “be present” and “after loss and solitude there is still beauty”. I got to think about living and dying and the things that make a life. I got to be alone. I had had very little solitude for a very long time.
It was a good year to take a moment in the long hours of quiet nights to think about what to stop doing and what to keep doing and what to finally do that I have been putting off.
I have deferred a lot of things. As one does in a life. Time got away from me. Death reminds you of time.
I had the usual reasons. I was needed by others to be what they had come to expect me to be. Or, at least, that was what I told myself.
My mother had asked me a question that year, one I had not answered. I sat with it on the bridge with the swan when warm faint rain of the Carolina weather drifted over me.
Are you happy? she asked. Not like I should be, or even that it was important, or that she wanted me to be. She asked because she was curious, and happiness seemed a word that had a meaning neither one of us fully understood. This from a woman who had never asked about my feelings directly, this is the question you ask? In my proper New England upbringing there was very little discussion of feelings. Expectations, yes. Feelings? Not so much. Feelings were to be inferred.
I never really set out to be happy, I don’t think. I set out to accomplish things. Happiness was an ephemeral experience that wandered in and out of my life of its own accord it seemed. I had known many beautiful things, things I loved and was grateful for. But there has been a lot of hard. Life is like that.
I designed myself and my life to show up for others that needed help with hard things. It seemed like a good way to spend a life. A life I could get to the end of and not regret.
To my surprise I found I had regrets. Not very many. But there, and real.
My body was tired and so was my spirit. I felt like I was carrying more weight than I wanted to (and I don’t just mean the ten extra pounds after the last round of viruses). I had shouldered many things, and I had forgotten how to put some of them down. So this year I took the clue from all the stories, myths, archetypes and stereotypes around me and asked myself the questions I often ask my patients.
Who did I think I was supposed to be versus who was I really? What was all this life for anyway -- now? When you are a woman who is no longer obviously young, and you can see old age approaching (even if it hasn’t yet arrived at your doorstep) it is a strange middle ground. Add some hormone craziness and the accumulated micro damages of time and I find the social narratives in my western American model had very little appeal. What was a crone anyway, I mean, really? Did I want to be one? Do I have a choice? I may not be her yet, but is she heading toward me on this road? No longer the mother of a young child, not yet a grandmother, still care-taking my immediate world, wearing many hats.
So I asked my body and my heart and tried to get my mind to shut up long enough to FEEL it all differently. What feels alive to me now?
What sort of animal is happiness and where is its natural habitat? Do I hunt it or stay still under a tree and let it sniff me and decide if I am worthy enough to pet it? Can I lure it better with food and what does my happiness eat? Can it be domesticated or left a wild thing, coming and going as it chooses? The answer is what I have been working on this past year. I have built a new framework for the things I have always done all my life. I still love medicine, I love teaching, I love helping people to unlock their bodies and their minds, but I re-shaped what I have made important in the work.
There are problems that keep tripping us all up in life and in medicine.
We keep forgetting to address the basics PRACTICALLY. If it does not actually work, then all the theories, research papers, supplements, influencers, podcasts and experts have only entertained you at best…delayed you at worst.
Many of us now talk about identity and the conscious and subconscious beliefs that shape our choices and identities and create the bodies, relationships and lives we live in. We talk in medicine about how important exercise is, we talk in exercise about how important stretching and alignment and posture is. We don’t put it in actual practice very well.
The standard office visit, 15 minutes, is not enough to know a body, a mind, or a person, and certainly not enough to know how to help change the root causes of disease or create longevity.
Even when I studied natural medicine and acupuncture, there was very little emphasis on the hands-on manual therapies, the exercises and movements that could redesign a body to restore energy, reduce pain, improve the brain, calm the nervous system, enhance the immune system, improve the digestive and cardiovascular system. Doctors of all kinds mostly gave all the most direct and foundational interventional changes to other practitioners to caretake: certified personal trainers, yoga instructors, massage therapists, nutritionists, etc.
Functional Longevity Practice is about restoring all the elements of lifestyle, movement, mind and identity belief patterns, and physical natural therapies back into the center of medicine and not on the periphery. The Barefoot Sage Center focuses on meditation and movement classes that center around fascia health, alignment, posture and the nervous system. It also strongly incorporates hands on bodywork, hot and cold alternating therapies, photobiomodulation, moor mud, and other somatic treatments…and for those who need the doctoring. We doctor.
Some of it may need the medical thinking. As we age, we accumulate damage to our DNA, mitochondria, fascia, microcirculation, feet, spine, head and neck in ways that can be reversed. This reversal is often the missing element. These micro and macro damages hugely affect how we age, decline, and succumb to diseases.
But repeatedly what I find, especially in women although definitely not exclusively, is that we get stuck in the places where our meaning lives. We lose the thread of our deepest longing and our most authentic selves. We may want our bodies, our lives, our health, and our relationships to be different and we may be given the tools…but the will and the wisdom and the skill to use them may all be missing.
The Why has more power at times than the what, the who, the how.
Health Coaches and People in the Transformational space talk about the Hero’s Journey. I did too. The mythic archetypes of both the process and the characters and the stages of a life are reflected in many of our stories from ancient times to Hollywood. I shaped myself around these myths like more than a few of us…but, as a woman, it became clear that this lens, these tools of meaning left me only half a life. The Heroine’s Journey is not just this, even if it is partly this, the Hero’s story serves the masculine aspect of me very well…and left the female aspect staring at him like many of the women who come to see me stare at their mates – you are not paying the right sort of attention to me, she seemed to be saying. Life’s meaning, the stories we tell ourselves are a braid of stories, The Hero’s Journey of the Call, Refusal, Challenge, Obstacles, Mentors, Allies, Dark Nights, Transformation, and Return. Yes. But there is also the Divine Romance, the seduction of existence and of the dance of life that culminates after its own quests and transformations and hard-won wisdoms into a Union we surrender to but do not collapse into. Union that awakens. Union that alters what gets birthed into the world. There are some parts of the journey that are our own private struggle of evolution and choice, some things we must face alone. And yet, there is also the siren call of The Other. The things that can only be known and learned and discovered in relationship.
The braiding of embodied practices, medicine and mythic adventure stories and divine romance into one program is where some of my work now lives. We need, I think, to tell ourselves and each other better stories again.
— Dr. Sara Hazel