Wounds and Healing in Northfield Intro: Playful Souls I'm bawling my eyes out on the curb of a strip mall, just off a long, flat highway in Northfield, MN. My face and throat are tingling intensely, my eyes are pressed shut, and in place of the deep darkness I saw a warm green. I had just gotten off the phone with a woman who was 15 minutes late to our interview—a Reiki Master, intuitive, and medium named Becky Costello who was stuck in traffic on Interstate 35. The previous week I had slept through a meeting with her, setting my alarm to PM instead of AM. We laughed at our misfortune, and she wondered if there was some bigger reason we weren’t supposed to meet, in person, yet. Then she asked me if I had lost any friends recently—and indeed I have. Two months ago, three fellow students at Carleton College died in a car accident. The roads were icy as they were driving to a frisbee tournament; their car jackknifed and an oncoming eighteen wheeler hit it between the wheels. It was devastating. I knew and had been somewhat close to two of them, but the weight of the collective loss was what crushed me. Still, in being crushed, I felt broken open. In a reflection I wrote later that week, I said, “If there’s an upside to all of this, it’s the way we’re wordlessly confronted with the value beneath the daily fluctuations. In place of anxieties and excuses, we get our tenderness and the warmth of compassion.” Becky told me that a couple “playful souls” had been hanging around her the last couple days—being a medium, she is ostensibly open to the spirit world. She said they wanted to contact me—that “They are so happy you are doing this. You are opening so many doors to wholeness for others. It’s sad that sometimes it takes a tragedy to create
healing, but look around and see all the light that has come from it.” Through my weird mix of being stunned and elated, I wrapped up the conversation, and then hurriedly put in my earbuds and put on a song that had been my go-to crying soundtrack. “Think of me... and remember to slow down,” it told me as my emotional plumbing let loose the waterworks. Ten minutes later, I realized that I could still make it back to campus for the end of my frisbee team’s “feelings circle,” discussing the accident with the alumni who were around that weekend. I told them what had just happened, talked about feeling broken open, and then gave them all long hugs, crying some more.
Setting: Glistening Wounds This piece of writing started out with two curiosities: First, I wanted to meet alternative healthcare practitioners in Northfield, and to get a sense of the journeys that led them to doing what they do. My hunch was that they are “Wounded Healers” (a term created by the psychologist Carl Jung)—in other words, that they had a wound that catalyzed their journey out into the marginal, magical land that is alternative medicine. Second, I was interested in exploring my own woundedness. This part of my life (concretely, at least,) revolves around a physical injury—a torn sartorious muscle that threw my life into a stumbling, tumbling confusion for two years.1 It’s been nearly 9 months since the complications from that injury have felt resolved, but the quality of the suffering seems even more distant. Some words in the novel How To Live Safely In a Science Fiction Universe, spoken by the protagonist Charles (a time-machine 1 The sartorious is very thin, but still the longest muscle in the body, wrapping from the back of your hip, around and down your leg, connecting to your inner knee.
mechanic), resonated: “If you’re not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge.” At this point in the story, in time, the car accident was a sad but mostly processed memory—I had no intention to revisit it in this project. My injury took place late in the summer after my freshman year at Carleton. My brother and I were backpacking through Europe, and had just finished a pickup frisbee tournament—the only intense exercise I got that summer (unless you count throwing up from drinking too much, which I did at least twice). The tournament was exhilarating— my team came from behind to win in the finals—but that night, with the endorphins from the games (and subsequent waffles, fries, and beers) wearing off, I realized that I had done something to something around the front of my left hip. And that something freaking hurt—all of a sudden I could barely lift my leg to walk. The next day, miserably rolling through Wikipedia pages in my hostel while my brother explored the city, I pondered cutting short my trip by a week and flying home early. Eventually, I summoned the grit to walk outside in search of food. A few eon-long city blocks later, I was sitting on a park bench with a gyro, watching the sunset and wondering what the fuck I did to myself. The fall of my sophomore year, my hip slowly got worse. I remember describing the week before school started as the best week of my life, but I remember the fall as one of my worst seasons. In November I went to physical therapy, which provided some help—if not so much physically, at least in the way it made me feel like I was doing something, that I wasn’t a helpless victim to my mysterious and cruel injury. I went into the winter feeling strong, playing a bit of frisbee again and taking three challenging,
science-and-math type classes in an attempt to see if I could stomach the harder path towards those more monetarily bountiful lands of opportunity after college. But I fell into the depths of the winter, the stability of my hip crumbling, feeling more deeply entrenched in depression, and eventually contracting three successive cases of pink eye. In late March, I fell prey to mono and left Carleton. It felt like I was sick, not just physically, but entirely, completely.
The Supporting Cast: Butterflies Almost unanimously, the pathways of the individuals I interviewed followed a similar dynamic: some big crisis or wound came along, and the life they were leading came under a sort of radical questioning. Things started falling apart—in careers, in relationships, and in their ideas about health and the body. They began to explore alternative medicine and the accompanying ideas about spirituality, and things began falling apart some more. Jessica Miller, who works with guided meditations and essential oils, provides a concise example. Sitting in two antique chairs in her art studio, she told me that she had dealt with chronic knee pain since she was 17, during which Allopathic (or Western, so-called “Traditional2”) medicine hadn’t been much help. In 2010, in her late 20s, she suddenly developed carpal tunnel-like symptoms, and her doctors wanted to perform surgery. After doing some research of her own, she decided to see a chiropractor. In 6 weeks, the pain was gone, but it took some scary, cholesterol-heavy blood tests to really wake her up. Jessica’s doctor asked her, “Do you plan on being one of those women that 2 Many laugh at this characterization, as the principles upon which many forms of ‘alternative’ medicine are so old their roots cannot be discerned.
drops dead at 40 from a silent heart attack?” A chiropractor couldn’t fix Jessica's blood tests—that would take a more substantial shift in her life. She ended up leaving her career in corporate management and entirely changing the way she took care of herself—building a set of what she called “self-care” practices—the habits of mental and emotional health that enable physical health. Jessica suggested that a lot of people her age (in the their mid-30s) are dealing with physical issues that shouldn’t be arising for another 20 years. The common dynamic, according to Jessica, is a gross excess of stress and dearth of self-care practices. Others I interviewed used more intense language to describe their shifts. Lindsey Stafford, another Reiki Master, said that exploring her energy practice “literally changed my life… I went through a divorce. The more you open up to things… the world changes.” She had numerous epiphanies; her life made sense on a deeper level. Shari Setchel, a movement and bodywork therapist, said that in order to go through the Global Somatics program she is certified in, “it’s required that you transform.” Like wiping bugs off a windshield, she had to clear the dross from her life. Joy Feilen, who practices different forms of healing massage, went through job loss, bankruptcy, foreclosure, and divorce in the span of three years. In “taking inventory” on who she was in relation to the world, she settled on a self that was radically different from the previous Marketing and PR specialist. But she experienced it like a return home, to her connection to nature and to her body. “The way we equate and define who we are is a distraction from who we really are,” Joy said. Medical anthropologist Anamaria Iosif Ross sees this restructured relationship to self and world as a key element of the appeal of alternative healthcare. She says, “The
modern health-seeker’s path through the realm of healing alternatives resembles the anthropologists’ journey through distance landscapes and customs, a journey driven by the hope of achieving a new coherence, a more meaningful narrative of suffering and the human condition, and an enabling transformation of our vulnerable (and often marginal) identity in a much larger context.”
Development: (Some) Healing Western medicine treats illness and injury as essentially physical, mechanical phenomena, but in doing so it inadequately manages suffering, which cannot be likened to the malfunctioning of a machine. Another medical anthropologist, Arthur Kleinman observes, “Clinical and behavioral science research... possess no category to describe suffering, no routine way of recording this most thickly human dimension of patients’ and families’ stories of experiencing illness. Symptom scales and survey questionnaires and behavioral checklists quantify functional impairment and disability, rendering quality of life fungible. Yet about suffering they are silent.” We forget that health, like beauty, is not a hard fact of life but a personal judgment and subjective experience. It is an ever-changing narrative, and as the writer and social critic Anatole Broyard says, “Doctors discourage our stories.” When I went to my 2nd and 3rd physical therapists, they were only interested in the physical facts of what had happened to me: what I was doing, what hurt where, and what I had done to try to make it better. But internally, my injury had swirled into the rest of my life, bleeding into sleepless nights, memories pounding through my head of hurting friends while lashing out in my own pain. The issue of the injury was now existential.
A year and a half after my original injury, I finally took the leap into alternative medicine and went to talk to a Reiki Master named Sonia, in my home city of San Antonio. Most Reiki sessions involve the master reading your energy field and channeling subtle energy, often called qi (pronounced, ‘chi’) or prana, into ‘stuck’ areas. In my case, my first session simply involved me explaining my story to her—not just the physical facts, but also the deeper stuff. She explained that our physical problems—especially chronic conditions—are often manifestations of mental, emotional, or spiritual issues. The hips often had to do with the second chakra (one of the seven centers where subtle energy pools in the body), which deals with pleasure and sexuality—definitely somewhat twisted areas of my life at that point in time. Specifically, Sonia asked me if I might have some homosexual feelings I wasn’t accepting—an issue she saw regularly and had gone through herself. Six months later I was comfortable identifying as bisexual—at least internally—and my hip problems largely receded. But the erotic aspect was but a single part of the larger healing, restructuring I’ve experienced. Sharing my story with Becky (the Reiki Master who had been in contact with my friends), I got a perspective that now makes more sense; she suggested that hip problems in my location are “about beliefs that have created an unstable foundation.” My desperation for physical and existential relief helped crack through a heavy shell of skepticism and cynicism grown over the years. Underneath, I’ve found a greater sense of wholeness, wonder, and purpose.3 3 Still, thinking about subtle energy made me focus too heavily on the mental or spiritual aspect of my being. For a while, I was convinced that whatever physical problems I experienced were manifestations of my own making. And while this is definitely a big
Still, I feel far from healed. Rather, I feel like I’ve stepped into a healing process. Accepting and relating to the spiritual dimension of my being, I have become increasingly strong, clear, and fulfilled within myself. Likewise, many I interviewed said it was only after they had gotten into their disciplines that they really felt transformed. Becky told me, “I battled severe depression for most of my life. It wasn’t until I embraced my intuitive skills that I began to heal.” Shari, Jessica, and Lindsey all experienced the same dynamic.
Interlude: Do You Believe in Magic? In 2011, what is arguably the most prestigious medical organization in the world released the 2nd edition of The Mayo Clinic Book of Alternative Medicine, demonstrating the increasing acceptance of Alternative medicine within some parts of Western medicine. Many doctors see a spiritual side to illness, and others are open to letting their patients explore a variety of routes towards healing. Others are more than skeptical—they actively discourage their patients from receiving alternative treatments. This fall, my mom forwarded me an email from our family doctor, a book review explaining, “Even though some popular therapies are remarkably helpful due to the placebo response, many of them are ineffective, expensive, and even deadly… part of the picture, it made me ignore the strictly physical aspect of my body. I forgot that things can go wrong, not because of any esoteric cause, but because of simple structural imbalance. Even though my hip issues were gone, I was still repeatedly experiencing knee and feet problems. After a few sessions with a chiropractor (who also used some acupuncture) and learning the structural dynamics of my body, I feel like I’ve escaped the worst of the swirling, moving cycle of my injuries.
megavitamins increase the risk of cancer and heart disease… acupuncture needles have pierced hearts, lungs, and livers… chiropractic manipulations have torn arteries.” Considering traditional medicine’s track record in misdiagnosis, malpractice, and spreading infections, this argument doesn’t make much sense to me. There seems to be some inherent danger in seeking out any sort of medical treatment. The crux of public debate over alternative medicine, rather, seems to be the difficulty of scientifically testing and studying the field’s claims. Stephen T. Asthma, in an op-ed in the New York Times, emphasizing the need for a verifiable, causal explanation, wonders, “Can qi theory4 be scientific in this more rigorous sense? Skepticism seems reasonable here because no one has seen qi directly.” I disagree. The last few months, I’ve been enthusiastically showing people subtle energy, with an exercise that works for probably two thirds of the people I show it to. You can do the exercise right now, actually; Stick your hands out in front of you, and flip one hand over. Press your middle fingers into the middle of your palm, 10 times, rather hard. Flip both your hands over, and press again. Then face them together, holding them about 8 inches apart, and slowly expand and contract the distance. You should feel a slightly magnetic force pushing out when your hands contract and pulling in when your hands expand. By no means will this exercise end the debate. However tangible the stories and experiences surrounding Alternative medicine, skeptics will doubt the universality of them, or otherwise be content explaining them away as manufactured by the powers of our minds. In this regard, I think there’s something fundamentally wrong with the 4 Asthma suggests that Alternative medicine is essentially based on the theory that all illness starts with imbalances in qi.
assumptions and process of the scientific method. Author Charles Eisenstein used to run a salient experiment in some classes he taught at Penn State. He would ask his students to bring in a story that “doesn’t fit into scientific reality”—a UFO sighting, an experience with a fortune teller or ouija board, something with Alternative medicine, etc. When they began sharing their stories, he would attempt to debunk their stories as best as he possibly could, but eventually his efforts would begin to seem increasingly contrived and decreasingly persuasive. Eisenstein explains: “The charges of selective memory, confabulation, attention-seeking, fraud, hallucination, coincidence and so forth—along with a little character assassination when necessary—appear perfectly reasonable at first, but soon it becomes clear that the debunker himself is blindly committed to his own dogmatic worldview that is impervious to any evidence." On a basic level, the outcomes of “scientific" experiments can’t be separated from the sterile contexts and belief systems they take place in. In doing so, they screen out their openness to the energies, and misinterpret the actual, holistic treatment plan that is a part of most systems of alternative medicine. We shouldn’t expect acupuncture, Reiki, or any other modality to be a repeatedly verified wonder drug. I surely haven’t experienced any alternative healthcare treatment as a supernatural fix-all’s. Rather, I understand them to be effective insofar as they jab cracks in the ways of being that were making us sick in the first place, we can expect results. Then, looking at the process as a whole and keeping in mind the words of William James—that “Truth is what works”—we might accept the “qi theory” to be true.
Deeper into Wounds In the cases of the individuals I interviewed, wounds became gifts of sorts. Wounds opened them up to the world, spurred them into new careers, and gave them a sense of a personal gift, a gift for aiding in healing. Sitting on the front porch of her house, with a blanket across her lap and steaming cup of tea in her hands, Julia Uleberg Swanson (who practices Healing Touch, which is similar to Reiki) invoked the image of a labyrinth to describe this process. One must go deeply into their own suffering in order to help others. One “goes inward in order to be able to go outward.” In the biomedical model, the quality of the treatment might be equated to the knowledge or insightfulness of the doctor. In other models, speaking to wildly varied situations, this journey woundedness is essential for outer effectiveness. In The Wounded Healer, Henri Nouwen relates this to ministry saying, “Whether he tries to enter into a dislocated world, relate to a convulsive generation, or speak to a dying man, his service will not be perceived as authentic unless it comes from a heart wounded by the suffering which he speaks.” I.M. Lewis, the scholar of religion, suggests that overwhelming illnesses or experiences of suffering initiate the archetypal shaman into his or her state of mastery. Lewis says, “The powers involved are often, either directly or indirectly, both the causes of misfortune and the means of its cure… It is precisely by demonstrating his own successful mastery of the grounds of affliction that the shaman establishes the validity of his power to heal.” In this regard, the specific experience of the wounded leads to the broader issue she is enabled to heal. Jung suggested that only what the analyst "can put right in himself can he hope to put right in the patient.” And I found this in the people I interviewed—
especially with Becky. After losing her boyfriend when she was 14, her best friend when she was 16, and then falling for a guy who had cancer, she feels people who have experienced traumatic loss are attracted to her. Becky said, "Many people here in Northfield found me after losing their spouse, their child or what have you... The pain they felt was crippling... and because I could understand that, I prayed that I may be able to provide some relief for people. Ironically, it was what opened me up to healing my own grief." But even before these sorts of mystical examples, wounds are gifts in more basic ways. Arthur W. Frank thinks the idea of the “Wounded Storyteller” can help “shift the dominant cultural conception of illness away from passivity—the ill person as ‘victim of’ disease and then recipient of care—toward activity. The ill person who turns illness into story transforms fate into experience; the disease that sets the body apart from others becomes, in the story, the common bond of suffering that joins bodies in their shared vulnerability.” This is that state of being broken open that I experienced after the accident, a very real wound. Here, we might best conceptualize woundedness as a continuum. Individual wounds, such as my injury, ignite a perpetually unfolding process where new and deeper aspects to our woundedness come into the picture. The accident thrust me into the dark, illuminating the wounded parts of myself. My pain was not equated to my grief for the guys that were lost, or even to the secondhand grief I was getting for my friends that were even closer to the dead. I was grieving at my entire relationship to people—especially how large of a divide existed between this openness, empathy, and connectedness and the normal state of
relating in the hectic, anxious rapids of daily life. Feeling into that frustrated pain, I traced back this pain to my sense of self to begin with. In the reflection quoted earlier, I said, “This is another shithole: the guilt and regret of confronting yourself.” In the last year or so, my sense of self has largely had to do with my sense of spirituality—of performing a self that takes as real synchronicitous and supernatural phenomena. After spending two and a half years getting existential when things got bad, I flew up to those skies immediately, wondering at the cosmic meaning of the deaths—a habit I felt guilty about. Commenting on how quickly religious language gets thrown into everyday life after death, I said, “For me, and maybe for you, the religious stuff all too often has the unintended effect of distancing us further from the felt reality here on the ground.” My spiritual self felt unripe, out of place in the also broken world.
Conclusion: In the hours after talking to Becky, I felt broken open again. But even in the wake of that shattering moment, I watched how quickly my tenderness, my cracked-openness faded. The shell fell back into place, a weight I didn’t know how to take off, a shield I didn’t want on. Writing this, I think, has helped me understand that shell and what’s underneath. Piecing back together all of the last two years, climaxing in the curbside waterworks, I feel as if I’m on a healing journey, and not one that is isolated and solitary, but rather is intimately connected to and unfolding with a larger process that we’re all going through in different ways—the journey of exploring our woundedness, and becoming wounded healers in our own unique ways.
What made me cry on the side of that highway was not so much the memory of my friends (which I’ve done several times the last few weeks), but the vividness of the encounter with the personally meaningful beyond. I felt loved, individually and incredibly, and that this love was gracefully guiding me in a direction I’m often too scared to leap into. At the end of her email to me, Becky wrote: “So now… your friends that have passed on...They are proud to see you moving ahead with your career path and that you will make huge impacts in the lives of others. Also, don't dismiss those coins you find on the ground... or the birds that seem to sing extra loudly.." I have no clue what all this is leading to. It feels ridiculous, scary, and exciting, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.