Mama has Mono

Last week the Kind Naturopath asked me to come in to the office to discuss some recent test results.  I was a little nervous but mostly hopeful - maybe she was going to tell me that there's something really physically wrong and we could work together to heal it.  Maybe there's a reason I'm feeling so low.  And, voila!, I have Mono.

I felt such relief and something like happiness.  I felt lighter and brighter.  I'm sick!  I'm not crazy or despairing of life, or in a depression so deep and inaccessible my very bones feel like lead and my joints ache from moving them. It's the Mono rendering me stiff and tired, foggy-brained and craving my bed.  

I felt an iron veil of judgment and blame lift off of me.  There isn't something wrong with me or permanently damaged in my essential Jenni-ness.  I'm not dead inside.  It's a virus in my body, which can be remedied.

It was only in noticing the weight of the judgment falling away that I recognized that it had been there in the first place.  I've been layering it onto myself, and thus slowing myself down with poisoned thoughts leached from the guilt and blame.   

My body needs tenderness, right now.  So does my mind, my heart.  The damage is in how I've been treating myself.  The diagnosis of Mono is an invitation to treat myself with gentleness, great care, loving kindness - in what I put into my body, in deep rest, in how I speak to myself, in my beliefs about my ability to continue and to heal, in cultivating daydreams and curiosity for what I want to do when I'm feeling better.  Because I will feel better.