Winding Down

It is Friday afternoon and I had my last treatment this morning. I leave Sunday afternoon and arrive back in the States early Monday morning. That means I now have a couple of days to relax and get ready for the trip home. It is amazing how quickly the time has gone…..from my perspective anyway. Ask Susan and you might get a completely different answer!  The good news is that with the help of a cushion I am able to sit with little pain so my travels should be fairly comfortable.  I am on a waiting list for an upgrade to business class which would make things even better.

It has been an interesting week. My focus has had to shift so that I was concentrating on both physical and spiritual healing. The wound from the surgery is still fresh so that meant a sittz bath and redressing multiple times a day. Also, given the surgery my treatments were modified to keep oil away from that area. For the most part I have been able to keep a good attitude about the whole ordeal and I realize how fortunate I was to have the four or five weeks beforehand to get myself grounded.

I had five days of eye treatments this week and you know what, my eyesight has improved. I am not sure if it has gotten progressively better over the time I have been here or if the eye treatments have given things a boost. On Tuesday I have an appointment with my ophthalmologist and I will get a better idea of how my retinas are healing at that point. But from looking, I am not seeing the blurry spots that I saw prior to coming here. I am definitely thankful for that!

During the eye treatment they make a well around each eye with the dough that I have been talking about. Then they fill the well with warm herb-infused ghee (clarified butter) and ask you to start blinking. Initially it creates a bit of stinging and quite a bit of eye watering but after a while things settle down. The first time they gave it to me, I felt like I was lying in a puddle looking up. It’s funny but my first instinct was to shorten my breath because my brain thought it was under water! Amazing how the sensory input makes the body react without even consciously thinking about it. For me, one of the goals of my meditation practice is to reduce the number of times each day that I have those “knee-jerk” reactions based on some stimuli. I feel like I am making some progress but the next few months, while living in the ‘real world’, will be the true test.

Susan, Jacob, and Sarah are leaving today for a spring-break ski vacation in Utah. I will pick them up from the airport on Wednesday. So when I arrive it will just be me, the dog, and the fish for the first couple of days. Overall it is probably a good thing as this will give me a few days to transition back to life in Chicago, but I miss my family and look forward to seeing them on Wednesday.