Why Meditation?

Writing With Intuitive Clarity

It Really Helps Me if you Click The Heart ❤️ Before Reading…thank you.

Before Parkinson’s came into our lives 22 years ago, one of the most fun parts of our marriage was exploring new experiences and learning together.

Our approach to living well with Parkinson’s mirrored our life before Parkinson’s. We accepted every symptom as an opportunity to delve into the emerging situation and learn something, but that pure fun of doing things we loved has been deeply compromised by this disease. Parkinson’s has left many of our shared activities strewn in the wasteland of times before. The losses Andy and I have faced together are staggering and impossible to survive without regularly reframing those experiences.

In 2022, I was gifted a profound incident that resulted in me becoming better at reframing and I use my lessons from that time regularly now that mild dementia has entered our lives.

I had trained to be strong enough to walk the Camino De Santiago pilgrimage trail with a few friends. One in our group was carrying her husband’s ashes, another was walking in celebration of the impending birth of her first grandchild. I was walking as a break from all my responsibilities as Andy’s caregiver. Andy was able to stay at my mom’s home in Chicago while I was away. Her full time caregivers could help him out with his needs. I had two weeks.

On my first day in Spain, after an overnight flight and a long day waiting for all of our group of five to arrive in Madrid and then a late night bus ride to Bilbao where our trek was to begin, I fell backwards over a curb while removing suitcases from the luggage hold. I broke my femur.

This turn of events was both abrupt and shocking. The next morning, I wished my walking group well, from my hospital bed and they left on their Camino walk. I had to reframe my Camino walk into an entirely different scenario.

The hospital was built in 1908 and the archaic structure was both beautiful and frightening to me. After 24 hours in intensive care listening to people moaning all night, I was wheeled in the bed through archways, dark corridors, through a medical uniform wing that was unlit and swinging shirts brushed me with ghostly touches when my bed pushed through them. It was getting dark and no one seemed to be around. I was put into a room by myself where I remained for 10 days before being evacuated. Nobody spoke English and I am not a Spanish speaker. My bed was next to a large window with wooden shutters opening to the inside and I looked out at a walkway and a laundry.

That night I slept fitfully and had pain to deal with. I realized that if there was a fire that night I would likely die. I felt marooned on a rudderless boat. I was in a colossal building with no way out. This was not the Camino I’d signed up for but it was the Camino I got. When I was able to embrace my experience as a different sort of pilgrimage that could take me where I needed to go, I came to a peace with myself.

The next morning I got a roommate.

“Hola,” She called out to me in her sparkling voice and I no longer faced this ordeal entirely alone. Later, my super duper travel insurance paid for my sons, Sky, who brought me flowers that had to stay outside according to rules, and Brendan, to fly in and help with speaking Spanish and every other thing. They evacuated me and Brendan, in a business class flight, after 10 days.

My Camino turned out to be about discovering that I am not alone in facing the trials of my life. Instead of taking thousands of steps, I was forced to be still for thousands of meditative hours, and learn to receive help.

When reframing the losses that Andy regularly has, my Camino is enormously helpful.

When he could no longer work on the torch making jewelry, he became the expert in polishing.

When he couldn’t run, we learned to row.

When his voice became suppressed into a whisper, we learned energetic communication from our dog, Shine.

So, it was natural, when Andy was diagnosed with Parkinson’s dementia, that I would learn that Vedic, or Transcendental Meditation nourished the part of his brain that was affected, and we made the leap together and signed up for a class.

As we once again face another change that places us together into an unknown outcome, instead of dread, we feel the excitement of having a new experience and are learning together.