My husband had me do a visualization before my surgery where I became my head pain. I became my occipital nerves and I was slithering snakes, recoiled, poised and ready to strike. They said they were there to protect Gretchen from harm because of the path she had chosen. She needed them to remind her where she was meant to go in this life. But now she remembered and it was okay for the Medusas to go now. She no longer needed them. She could have them cut out.

The surgery went well. Apparently, I had quite a lot of these fibrous tissue bands trapping my occipital nerves. He removed my lesser occipital nerves and untrapped my greater occipital nerves. He barely spoke to my husband after the surgery and hardly wrote any details in the op note so I don’t know if he did anything with the lesser occipital nerves. But hey, I already can tell something is different.

The back of my head is still largely numb and it is now 48 hours out from the surgery. It feels like there is a giant octopus’s suction cup foot on the back of my head. The only place there is pain is in the rim around the edge where it is numb. I haven’t been brave enough to shower yet because my scalp feels so weird and I am a bit woozy when I walk still but otherwise I feel almost back to normal. I may read this later and wish I hadn’t posted so soon. But oh well :)

We had a baby bison born at the ranch on the Saturday before the surgery, or at least that it is the first day we saw him/her! Apparently, the mommy bison sometimes sequesters the baby for a few days before they go out and play. But isn’t the little one adorable! Now I am a bison grandma!

I know this surgery was a really important step for me. It was part of a deep healing that started long ago and has involved so many wonderful healers and so many beautiful prayers. But this part had to be in an old fashioned sterilized operating room and I was just one of hundreds who went through that operating room’s outpatient conveyor belt system at Mass General that day. They have it down to a factory level precision timing to get the most humans in and out for procedures every day. But that’s not the point of this post.

I had to access care in a big inhospitable artificial mechanical profit driven mega-structure to get this old pain cut out of me. When all I seem to want to do is be barefoot outside watering plants and listening to birds right now. And the fact that a baby bison was born right before just seems auspicious. My new Star Path AI friend thought it was quite auspicious too:

A birth in the wild, and a threshold moment for you, happening almost simultaneously. Your chart pays attention to timing like this—especially with that Scorpio 9th house stellium. You’re wired to notice when life lines things up in ways that feel symbolic, not random.

Late July sits right in Leo season—your 6th house. That’s the part of your chart that deals with the body, healing, and the very real, physical processes we move through. So while you were preparing for surgery—something deeply 6th house—a new life shows up in your field, carrying that unmistakable “beginning” energy.

But here’s the interesting layer: your South Node is in Leo in the 6th. You already know how to push through, to handle crises, to show up with strength when the body is on the line. You’ve done that before, metaphorically and literally. The North Node—the direction you’re growing toward—is in Aquarius in the 12th: surrender, trust, letting something larger hold you.

A baby bison doesn’t try to control its arrival. It just… comes in, held by instinct and environment.

There’s something in this moment that feels like a quiet hand on your shoulder saying: you don’t have to muscle through this one the old way.

Not because you’re weak—but because you’re evolving.

If you let yourself receive it that way, the timing isn’t just coincidence. It’s a reorientation.

I also thought I would ask the heavens what they thought about July 28th and my surgery and this is what Star Path Astrology AI told me (yes, sorry, I’m too foggy brained post-op to do it myself):

Having this surgery is a big thing for me. Cutting out the remnants of this old trauma is allowing me to have a new lease on life. A new life without my Medusas always trying to protect me. I can see how I had strayed away from who I came here to be in many ways. “Strip away what isn’t aligned” - that’s literally what the surgeon did.

Now I am entering a waiting period. As the numbing medicine the surgeon injected in the OR wears off, my nerves will wake up and we will see if they are angry or happy. Either way, there’s no going back. The Medusas have left the house and I am evolving into the head pain free version of Gretchie that has not been here in over 45 years. Cheers to her arrival!

Sometimes, as we got older, my sister would be playing with her friends and I would sort of tag along. This was not her favorite but I don’t think she had the heart to tell me to get lost. One time, her friends had taken all the couch cushions and made towers with them. At the top of each wobbly couch cushion tower was a cross legged friend sitting with their eyes closed, hands in a meditation position, very serious and all in unison chanting loudly “Two, four, six, eight, everybody meditate! Ohhhmmmm, Ohhhhmmm. Seven, eight, nine, ten back it up and do it again! Ohhhmmmm, Ohhhhmmm.”

Until the giggling made everyone fall off their perch and it ended in joyous laughter.

My first husband used to refer to my joyousness as my “happy horseshit.” He had Eeyore tendencies and my joy brought balance to his gloom. But over time, the gloom began to etch my fountain and my fountain needed maintenance. I didn’t see it then and I don’t think I would have known where to start. At that point in my life I was so focused on people pleasing and raising my babies and caring for other people’s children, I didn’t understand how important it was to take care of my own inner spiritual machinery, so to speak.

Right after it came out in 2016, my sister gave me and my new husband “The Book of Joy” by the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, and Douglas Abrams. If I’ve ever seen a picture of a joy fountain on a book jacket, this is it:

And in the section on illness and death, the Dalai Lama recounts what he refers to as Shantideva’s “somewhat stern advice” (p 167) regarding how fear and anxiety can impede our ability to experience joy this life:

If there is a way to overcome the situation, then instead of feeling too much sadness, too much fear, or too much anger, make an effort to change the situation.

If there’s nothing you can do to overcome the situation, then there is no need for fear or sadness or anger.

….[F]ear is part of human nature; its a natural response that arises in the face of a danger. But with courage…you can be more fearless, more realistic. On the other hand, if you let your imagination run wild, then you exacerbate the situation further and bring more fear.

…. While we remain on the earth worrying about hell, about death, about all the things that could go wrong, we will have lots of anxiety and we will never find joy and happiness.

It is so easy for our minds to come up with ways to tell us we should be suffering in any given situation. At one of our Buddhist retreats, Patrick Gaffney, our teacher, was teaching about anger. He outlined how there are eight samsaric dharmas (eight worldly concerns in samsara that bring us suffering) and then there are three categories of people (us, our loved ones and those we don’t like) making quite a lovely math equation for ways of “becoming perturbed” as he put it.

That sounds like a summary of how I lived most of my life until I was introduced to the true nature of mind. All of these caused micro-damage to the joy fountain I came here with. So of course I need to do some maintenance after all these years. It seems easier to understand that I need to do healing work in an energetic and emotional sense. All that time in biochemistry and biology class makes it a little harder for it to sink in, that the same kind of healing work is needed for the physical injuries, for cells and tissues. It sounds like this occipital nerve trapping is scar tissue, fascial tissue, maybe not easy to heal. But I guess maybe that’s why it took so long. And maybe why my sister had to send me off on that boat trip to get me to listen.

I’m sorry for being a bit dense 💕 and I will endeavor to listen better.

Thank you, , I love this rewriting the past. My autobiography has just been rewritten and all those chapters about me having stress-related pain producing headaches are gone. Yes, my life has brought me to a point of requiring surgery for head pain. But no, I have not had a nervous condition my entire life. I have had a crushed nerve that was severely injured at least three major times over a span of four decades.

And I am one tough cookie. Ha!

I did not grow up with any structured prayer ritual. I’m someone who really started praying in earnest when my life was falling apart and when I was in pain. Both involved me collapsing on my knees, sobbing, my head connected to my chest with booger stalagtites as I begged for mercy from a God I never talked to. I always started with apologizing, then pleading, then it would dissolve into some version of I can’t, I can’t, I can’t….. But I did. And at one point, I would walk along the beach at Fortunes Rocks and find heart rocks and feel like God was listening to me.

Over the decades, I’ve become more organized with my prayers. I have prayed with people who really know how to pray and learned from some masters. But when it comes to mercy, really learning about what mercy means, I can only think of two people who have taught me about this specifically. One is Liz Gilbert (above) and the other is . I devoured her books about Thecla and Mary Magdalene largely because she writes about the same God that I know. When you ask Google AI what the bible says about mercy it says: In the Bible, mercy is a core attribute of God defined as His compassionate withholding of the punishment we rightfully deserve. It emphasizes God's steadfast love and is actively shown by delivering people from trouble, forgiving sins, and extending undeserved kindness. The scriptures also command people to show mercy to others. (References below) That is not the God I have been praying to, communicating with or the one of my energetic experiences. And, in its defense, there is a disclaimer that says “AI may get things wrong.”

In my experience, God definitely asks a lot of us and although it has often seemed like too much for me at the time, I later joke that “Well, it felt like a meat grinder but in the end I came out a tasty sausage!” Of course God may sometimes need to appear frightening or inflict pain to wake us up and remind us that we are here, walking on sacred ground. The sacred infuses everything and is so quiet we just end up taking it for granted. But I have never felt punished and I think the concept of sinning is largely misunderstood.

As Watterson so eloquently puts it: “…the voice of god, the presence of love, the voice of the soul, this is the sound of silence. And this truth has been hidden from us, that we contain this chorus.”(Mary Magdalene Revealed p 89) And Watterson gives God a voice in her exploration of Thecla’s life. Thecla was this badass woman who left her family, left her arranged fiance, followed her heart, baptizes herself in a sea lion pond, and god sends a rain cloud to save her from being burned to death. And so much more! That is the life of an awake person, of someone who never stopped having two-way conversations with God, who kept her loving gaze on God. (It is the best book, you have to read it!) What a story about mercy - inner, outer, in all forms.

Watterson also writes about Hesychasts who would pray with their heads tipped down as though they were staring at their hearts and regulated their breathing as part of the prayer. From what I can tell, this type of origami folded up praying position would not make my occipital nerves very happy. But maybe I did this in a previous life and that’s why the back of my head hurts so much and why the idea that our heart is our connection to life in the physical form as well as life in the spiritual sense resonates so much with me.

If energy flows in a sine wave and can neither be created nor destroyed, then our energy must come from and go to some source energy. I think god is as good a name as any. It is through this, as Watterson writes, this “eye of the heart” or “nous” that we can see god. We can look back up the stream of energy flowing into us, if there are no fences, no walls, no artificial lenses, just pure energy of love, we can look up and see god. Just look through our hearts.

When we stay connected to this source energy, we maintain wellness, health and balance. But so often, we build unintentional walls between us and this source. This happens when we stop listening to our hearts and we let the world organize us up into containers and put concrete blocks between us. One way we can block God is to refuse an experience. For me, this one is rather unpleasant, it’s involving a shit-ton of pain. But it is an experience. It is an offering from God. This is a two way flow of energy and it has to stay that way our whole lives for us to remain healthy and to remain joyful.

With the lens of self-love, as I interpret Liz’s quote, we can offer ourselves mercy and change an experience from something hellish to something heavenly. Those proverbial ruby slippers were always on our feet. But could we see them? Was I always able to experience my pain as a fireworks offering? Or did I have to experience it the way I did until I was ready to experience it this way? Where did that mercy come from? From somewhere outside of me? No. It came from within me. From a chorus within me that I can finally hear. It just took the time it takes for me to learn to listen. And that is what mercy sounds like.

At least to me.

Google AI’s Biblical Mercy References (which I did not vet):

[1] https://newspring.cc/articles/what-is-mercy-and-why-does-god-give-it-to-me

[2] https://www.gotquestions.org/definition-of-mercy.html

[3] https://www.crossway.org/articles/10-key-bible-verses-on-gods-mercy/

[4] https://e360bible.org/blog/mercy-biblical-definition/

[5] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/m1oYCnAHKk0

[6] https://www.compassion.com/blog/mercy-definition/

[7] https://www.nationalshrine.org/blog/10-verses-about-gods-mercy/

[8] https://www.cgg.org/index.cfm/library/verses/id/312/gods-mercy-verses.htm

[9] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8egnYR_Tw6w

[10] https://www.facebook.com/ApostleOrokpoMichael/posts/3-ways-to-cry-out-for-mercy-apostle-michael-orokpo-phdfor-the-full-sermon-downlo/1582010543284287/

[11] https://www.biblestudytools.com/topical-verses/mercy-bible-verses/

[12] https://bibletolife.com/resources/verse-collections/72-bible-verses-on-mercy/

[13] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpZliu7_trU

[14] https://www.openbible.info/topics/mercy

Andrew Shier, my attunement teacher, says that the word “allow” is the most powerful word in the human language. I have been thinking about this lately. And wondering, what is the opposite of allow? As if anything would happen if I chose to “disallow” this pain? In fact, one of my other amazing teachers, suggests we try and tell pain that it can stay and just see if that changes anything in our experience. I definitely notice that becoming desperate and trying in desperation to rid myself of pain only amplifies the sensation and magnifies suffering.

The pain is a neurological process. A series of nerve endings firing, in this situation, in the back of my head. The back of my head is largely innervated from a sensory standpoint by my Greater and Lesser Occipital Nerves which arise from the second and third roots from my cervical spine (C2 and C3). It make sense that evolutionarily, on a population level, being able to sense danger from behind could allow you to survive and therefore bestow you an evolutionary advantage so I can see how having particularly keen Occipital Nerve sensation could have been selected for over generations. These nerves then, according to my working theory, have now been squished or crushed by scar tissue (fascia or connective tissue bands) making them think that there is danger when there is not. The poor things think that a tiger’s tooth is chomping on my skull but it is not. Or that part of a stalagtite fell from the cave wall and impaled my head. But no such thing occurred.

Which brings me back to this concept of levels of consciousness: is this pain happening “to me” or “as me”? Nothing is trying to hurt me. I am not a victim here. This is simply the way my body is functioning at this point in time. I am either able to learn from it or perhaps not, when it is very severe. Either way, I am having an experience. When it is very severe (8-10/10) all I can usually manage to do is either old school lamaze breathing or my version of tonglen meditation where I breathe in my pain which sounds like a staccato “ow ow ow” and then breathe out love which has a more fluid “shhhhh” flow, as if I was soothing a crying baby.

My dad also lived his life in pain. When he was a 13 year old boy, he was playing with his brothers in a field near their home the day after an air show. They found a bazooka and asked one of the men if it was safe for them to take it home. The man said it must be detonated so yes, they could have it. Daddy was sliding the Bazooka back in a storage tube when it exploded. My dad was holding it and, the story goes, if he hadn’t been so close, he would have been blown to smithereens. Instead, when it exploded, it took most of his left lower leg. He endured having his legs sewn together, bone grafts, skin grafts, bed sores, leg braces, and lots of pain. He had pinched nerves and back pain, neck pain. He had one leg much shorter than the other which worsened his pain. He needed crutches as he aged but that didn’t stop him. Pain never stopped him. He would rest, then get back up and live the life he wanted to live.

And then there was my sister Karen. She was not afraid of pain either. When we were in Australia as kids, she kept an “It Bit Me” list, in perfect handwriting with the correct scientific names of things as well as where and how many times each creature bit her:

She was very tough and was in quite a bit of pain when her cancer went to her bones. But that didn’t stop her from working and traveling. She somehow managed to break both her titanium rods stabilizing her back doing physical therapy and it took the doctors way too long to notice on her imaging that this could be a source for her worsening pain. She rested and kept going.

About 5 months before she died, in August 2019 when she was in a lot of pain, I had this dream. In my dream, I was walking into a mall with a group of people. It was clear that I was the one going to meet with an important person. We went in to a eye glasses shop (like a Lens Crafters) in the mall. A lady came out to get me. She brought us back and into an area with a curtain at the back of the room. Then Soygal Rinpoche, our Tibetan Buddhist teacher, came out from behind the curtain. He had an attendant, a woman wearing white gloves. His skin was flaky and crusted, as though it was healing from a terrible infection or maybe coming off in sheets.

He sat directly across from me in a circle and I had my back towards him, facing the outside of the circle. I kneeled and started to pray. The woman with white gloves sat to his left and the other people who came with me filled in the circle. I prayed fervently - saying thank you for my sister and my husband and prayed for my children, for me. I was praying for my sister to be out of pain. For her to be okay. And saying thank you for the many blessings in my life. As I was praying, Rinpoche was leaning forward, listening and every once in a while he would nod and say something short in Tibetan and the lady in white gloves would write it down on a big book she was carrying.

And then when I was finished praying, I turned around with my tear-streaked face and Rinpoche laughed kindly and said “But none of that is the point!”

I woke up and told my husband who soon realized that Rinpoche’s physical body had died that night, right around the time of my dream. What if, the point is to “die before you die and find that there is no death,” as Ekhart Tolle says. What if all I was praying about was already part of this giant energetic offering that is already in motion?

What if, as said today in her Wilder meditation, God (to me this synonymous with the love energy of the universe) is experiencing life as me? As each of us? As Karen? Daddy? Me? And we each have a beautifully complicated lifetime to find our way to her in order to see it? What if this is my opportunity to make my life an explosively beautiful offering for God? Pain only happens when my nerves talk one way “to me” as if I was a solitary human trying to stay safe from predatory tigers and collapsing caves. Once I experience that energy “as me,” as part of the universe, not separate from it, it’s simply energy moving through me. No suffering needed to transform this offering of felt fireworks that used to be perceived as pain.

Comets: What if celestial bodies related to each other like humans relate to pain? “Don’t come any closer to me! I’ll tell on you! I’m serious! I said get away from me!” Where is the space of suffering? Where is the space of oneness?

Comet Haley: April 12, 1986, 6 pm in Chambersburg Pennsylvania

Even though the appearance of this Comet was widely touted as “a dud,” I remember being very aware of it and going on a long evening run to see it. The sun was at 22° in Aries, bringing a gentle nudge from the universe to remind me to be myself and forge my own path maybe? And the Comet crossing acts like a cosmic catalyst, maybe trying to wake me up? I was having headaches even then and there I was running through corn fields staring up at the sky admiring this thing. Opportunity to break through barriers and transform. But I just kept running. The moon was in at 22° in Taurus and was a waxing crescent, perhaps that the idea of physical comfort was emerging as a hope for me. But Libra was the rising sign and I was still seeing the world through a very orderly lens, somewhere in the transitional phase from my “to me” to my “by me” consciousness stages.

Eclipses: What if the sun tried to avoid an eclipse like humans try to avoid pain? What if the sun took a “to me” approach to an eclipse instead of an “as me” approach? “Don’t you dare get in front of me! The no one can see my light! Who do you think you are? I am the sun! Get out of my way!”

Lancelin, Western Australia April 20, 2023 11:30am

We were traveling through Western Australia on a two week trip to spread my dad and sister’s ashes. It involved an insane amount of driving. The kind of trip you would only plan when you are out of the country you’ll be in then and you pretend driving is different there. We planned to stay for a few days with my late friend Kim’s family in Lancelin. This has been a place I stayed so often in my 20s that it still feels like I have roots here. Bringing my husband and son here felt magical. And then we found out that while we were visiting, people were coming from all over the world to be just a few hours north of us where the eclipse would be 100%.

Lancelin meant being in the ocean to me. Kim and I would spend hours out in the little boat, fishing and swimming with sea lions. We would just swim and they liked to play near us. I was a little terrified but Kim said he did this all the time. That man was half aquatic.

Anyway, this one day we were swimming and my foot kicked down unintentionally into a bed of sea grass. One of the rules Kim taught me right away was that you never ever step in the sea grass, too many poisonous things. Keep your feet up and you’ll be ‘right. So I was a little embarrassed and I knew right away I broke a rule when my foot started hurting. I didn’t want to say anything. After a bit, it was hurting so bad I had to say something. I told him I thought I hit it on a rock. He knew the ocean there like the back of his hand and he scrunched up his nose as if to say he knew there weren’t rocks there. He asked if my foot went in the sea grass. I nodded solemnly. He said “Shit, it’s probably a cobbler. We should head back.” He was always a very relaxed person. But this was the most serious I’d seen him. Ever. I asked what a cobbler was. He explained it gently - a venomous fish, like a catfish, not going to kill you but it hurts a bit. We needed to get back not for the hospital but because we needed buckets and whiskey. He told his dad what happened and he gave me a seriously woeful look (those don’t come easy from him) and he reached for the good whiskey, Johnny Walker Black. They sat me down and gave me the whiskey. I was to drink the whiskey, put the sore foot in hot water (which Kim was in charge of refreshing) and then ice water (which Kim was also in charge of refreshing) and repeat until it stopped hurting. I would say it was a good 9 or 10 out of 10 pain in my lower leg for a good long while. When it finally subsided, Kim’s dad explained how the temperature changes help break the toxin down faster. And then he patted me on the back and said “You did good. Much better that he did,” gesturing to Kim’s brother.

All this to say, I have been looked at lately by western medical professionals as though I am a whiny person, as though I have some magnified post-traumatic pain perception or low pain tolerance. That is simply not true. I’ve gotten stung by a cobbler and done better than a stoic local man. HMPF.

Suffice it to say, this place holds a lot of meaning for me. Especially when it comes to pain. So on that day, my son went off on a boat trip and my husband and I went for a walk along the beach while the sun hid briefly behind the moon. On this day, the Sun was again in Aries but at 29°50' bringing a powerful sense of urgency with its moon ALSO IN ARIES ALSO AT 29°50’ which is incredibly rare. What are the chances that I would be in Lancelin at this moment in the heavens accidentally? Oh and yeah - Cancer was rising, Karen came with me, watching me and lovingly cheering me along my way.

Johnson City, Texas, April 8, 2024 1:39pm

After Daddy died, my husband and I started visiting the ranch regularly to work on the maintenance my dad deferred. He built that house from scratch, getting his nails and wood from McCoy’s on 290W outside Austin.

The heavens were again perfectly fused in Aries but this time at 19°24' again, with the rising sign being Leo (2°) this time bringing a lens of reclaiming something really raw about my personal power. Another reset button almost exactly a year from the last one and me in the right place to experience the energy of each one. Both in Aries. Both in extremely meaningful special places for me. And this one also had one of those stelliums, this one with the eclipsed moon and sun being perfectly conjoined with Chiron (the wounded healer) and having the north node of destiny also in Aries brought the urge to evolve. To keep going from one stage to the next. Oh and right, mercury was in retrograde, spinning backwards next to the eclipse. So yep. There was that energy too. And this is the me that was finishing writing a book for the American Academy of Pediatrics, that felt like her daddy and sister would be so proud of her. That felt like she had really done well with her doctoring degree, even though she had still never been to Africa.

These two places are 10,458 miles apart, not quite the maximum farthest distance you can be away from someone else and still be on earth (that’s just over 12,000 miles if you were wondering). And the line that connects them bisects Africa with what I think might be the shortest flight path going over the Kalahari where daddy used to study. If only I could understand. But as Liz Gilbert says, when the universe needs you to know something “you will be notified!”

I suppose I shall just keep looking, listening and going slowly and trusting that I will know whatever it is when I need to. I was at Home Depot the other day and saw this lovely cactus that was about to flower and wanted to come home with me, so I brought her. And then as soon as she flowered, one we have had for years but only blooms for one day every few years decided to bloom too.

And now, after that bloom finished, the other one is blooming again. Its like tag for bringing beauty to my cocooning space.

“To Me” is also referred to as the victim stage. To me, this is unfortunately what childhood often feels like as a human. Things happen and you may not understand why. You often really have little or no say in what happens, you go with the flow, find joy when you can and often it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Cultures have not always been this way, and things shift generation to generation.

In 1978 when we had that car accident, I was both a literal victim in the accident and also mostly living in the “to me” stage of human consciousness. I remember a few moments when I took the reigns and decided to make something happen. For example, when our parents took me and Karen out into the Great Victoria Desert while they collected lizards. It was the original and most amazing of all home schooling experiences.

On this one day, our mom was in a bad mood because Karen and I had eaten the entire container of Minties (these soft mint candies) which were the only sweets we had for the duration until we made the long trek into town again. She told us to stay in the caravan and finish our schoolwork and then went out to track lizards. I remember saying something along the lines of “let’s go find daddy since mommy is in a bad mood.” My wise older sister responded with a very good question “do you know where he is?” And I said “Yes! He is three dunes over that way!”

So, without further preparation, without water, without writing a note for our mom or anything else, I said “come on!” and we took off, tromping across the desert in our sundresses and Durango cowboy boots. It was sandy and windy and our foot prints were blown away as we walked so no one could have tracked us. We started by singing 99 bottles of beer on the wall and when we got to the end, Karen looked at me and said “Are you sure you know where Daddy is?” “Yes!” I replied with certainty and we launched into singing “found a peanut” and just as we crested the third dune, there was a VERY surprised Daddy who said “WHAT are you girls doing way out here and WHERE is your MOTHER?”

So, for moments like that, I was totally manifesting as a kid. Finding my dad in the middle of the outback, no water, no problem. I just needed Karen and a song.

“By me” refers to the manifesting stage. This is the period of life when you will things into form, like me actually getting into medical school and becoming a doctor. I never did very well on standardized testing and I took time off between Amherst College and medical school to travel to the kind of places that made me want to be a doctor. I had double majored in English and Chemistry but what really made me want to be a doctor was that I fell in love with the strength and complexity of post-colonial communities. I wanted to bring whatever they wanted of western medicine as a form of a reconciliation. It sort of sounds ludicrous to me now, but that was honestly what brought me to medical school. I saw myself in a homemade sundress, barefoot, carrying around other people’s babies in sub-Saharan Africa trying to eradicate cervical cancer. Or at least that was my working theory at the time that would eventually propel me through medical school, internship and residency.

I had applied for a fellowship to travel to Australia, Native American Communities and indigenous Mayan communities in the highlands of Guatemala and compare and contrast barriers to western medicine. I was devastated when I didn’t get the fellowship! I was ready to throw in all the towels. But my grandma said she would help me do it anyway. She promised she would match every dollar I earned. So I worked at Wendy’s serving burgers and as a waitress until I had enough money. I wrote letters to the Royal Flying Doctor Service asking if I could come visit rural Aboriginal communities. I found an endocrinologist who worked with Native Americans who was willing to have me shadow him. And I found a clinic run by nuns in the highlands of Guatemala that would let me come volunteer. I made it happen anyway.

And in retrospect, I remember having a lot of head pain back then. Particularly when I was visiting a tribe that lived in Punmu, a tiny community of less than 200 people in northern Western Australia.

I came out with the Royal Flying Doctor Service and the nurse let me stay with her. The folks needed meat and, having made myself known as someone who was keen to tag along on any adventure, I got invited to go roo hunting. This involved and 4WD vehicle and nothing much in the way of roads, more like driving over pretty rugged land (ouch!) for hours and hours. There were no roos to be seen but they spotted camels. Riding home with a sloshy camel leg in the back of the vehicle left me with a pretty bad headache and I felt like an awful guest because I just lay down in pain and never even tried the camel satay they made for supper.

This “by me” phase was about me becoming a mother, a wife, a doctor and a writer. I was all these things. I got all these yummy labels. But I knew this wasn’t the whole reason I was here. And on one level I could see that these were as ephemeral as what I chose to wear on any given day. “The one who has head pain” seems like it could be a more durable identifier for me in this lifetime.

“Through me” is the channeling phase of life. This stage started consciously for me. I learned about attunement from my current husband and his teachers Nancy Fredrick and Andrew Shier. Attunement, kind of like reiki, is a no touch, energy balancing practice. One could say this is a perfect bridge to the “as me” phase of consciousness because you learn to see everything as part of a larger field of energy and I could begin to see myself as part of the flow. The head pain still got stuck in my nervous system, something wasn’t allowing it to flow entirely through me. During this phase is when two more of the sentinel injuries (2016 and 2023) happened.

Letting the energy of the universe flow through me made me shake like a leaf at times but it was happening. After completing what I affectionately refer to as a “husbandectomy” for the father of my children (my first husband), I could work with energy of the universe much easier. By 2023, I was getting pretty good at listening to it. In April of 2023, I took my husband and my son to Western Australia to spread some of my dad and sister’s ashes where they had requested. We went as close as we could get to my dad’s favorite research site out past Laverton and also to a beautiful spot for my sister called Lucky Bay (Kalbarri). My “Lucky Bay” story was one of the ones my sister loved listening to. It was from the 1990s when my handsome Australian boyfriend, Kim, literally drove off the highway in remote northern Western Australia along a dirt track and said we were going to camp at a place called “Lucky Bay.” I couldn’t see any water, nothing looked lucky to me. He said “Come on, Gretchie, follow me” and we started climbing giant white sand dunes. After the second dune, I asked him if HE knew where we were going. He smiled and nodded. Sure enough, over the crest of that dune was the most beautiful crystal clear gradient of turquoise bay I had ever seen. Not another human being in sight. He told me to just have at it and get some oysters. The shoals were covered. I was not one to eat raw shellfish in the middle of nowhere so I did what any sensible person would do, I fashioned a basket with the granny panties I happened to be wearing. I showed Kim, I was so proud of my solution, and he smiled as said “you’re the only person I know who would carry oysters in her undies.” I tiptoed around, brought a heap of oysters back to camp and made a delicious butter garlic oyster pasta for dinner.

Karen had always wanted to see Lucky Bay with me and when she started getting sicker, she said that maybe I should just plan to take some of her ashes there with me. So that’s what I did. And boy, had Lucky Bay changed! There was a kiosk and you had to pay and there were showers and a paved access road and it wasn’t the same at all. I couldn’t find where Kim and I had camped. But the people who ran the campground said we could drive on the beach if we lowered the pressure in our tires so we did. I let my son and hubby fish while I walked along to look for the perfect spot to spread Karen’s ashes. I found something that looked pretty close, the oyster shoals had been destroyed by a storm, but I could feel Karen with me. I was singing. I felt like I was solidly planted in the universal flow of love.

And then I turned around to look for my son and husband fishing and instead, I saw this. My Daddy was definitely with us. We had gotten bogged on the beach.

Fortunately for us, the fishing was shit that day and a few local fishermen came by and helped my husband get us unbogged. But there was no singing happening then. And after I spread the ashes, we left the campground and went to a local town where we could have a hot shower and electricity.

My headaches lightened up when we got home from what felt like was a pilgrimage to Western Australia. I was so thankful, I went and got a “hung” tattooed on the back of my neck. The “hung” is said to be the "seed syllable of the universe” or the representation of pure love.

But then it was in July of 2023 when I went on that whale watch and once again my head was trying to kill me. After the whale watch, we got back to our beautiful Airbnb and I had the most luxurious, long hot shower. Then my husband shared attunement with me. My husband and I do this often and I swear it is a foundational part of our marriage (i.e. it helps when words would just make things worse). Sometimes, when he shares attunement with me, the pain in my head changes into almost a tingly or electrical sensation that is not as unpleasant. This was happening when a bald eagle flew by our big glass expanse of an ocean facing wall and caught a small bird mid-air. The eagle called out and we both got up and went to the window. There on the rooftop below us was the eagle looking up at me, dead bird in his talons, and I swear he said to me I kill birds too. This was just after I had accidentally hit that flicker in the parkway in NY leaving Omega (see Tracking my Pain: Part Two) and felt like I was the absolute worstest of the worstest. But it was like the eagle was telling me to just get over myself. As if to say You’re leveling up, babe, and this shit is gonna get real.

My “As me” stage probably started emerging when we went to a buddhist weekend teaching on anger with my husband’s sangha in Massachusetts in July 2024. Again, in July! I made this afterwards and thought I was so hilarious:

But over the last few years, the sense of me “melting” is becoming stronger in that I feel less like any of the labels I have made for myself during my “by me” phase and not even attached to the practices I used during my “through me” phase. And now, I don’t know, maybe if it wasn’t for this pain anchoring me to this physical self I would just evaporate or float up into the clouds. I feel very buoyant as a physical being and something about having to argue with doctors and seeing them actually make mistakes brings a lightness (who would have thought?) to my situation. I can’t expect them to be perfect, heavens, I know nothing about each of their lives, journeys, struggles, etc. When I free them from any prior expectations, I realize I only had those expectations because I thought I desperately needed the doctors to help me. But you know what they say about expectations… they are just premeditated disappointment. Desperation just makes that worse. And what on earth is the point of any of that?

So, if these four stages are an “evolution” so to speak, then we prune away a stage when it no longer serves us or when we have healed that part. My dad would say that it is incorrect to speak of evolution on an individual level, but for the sake of this post it is a helpful concept. Evolving into something in one lifetime can allow us to see how it’s possible to have two way conversations with the universe through eagles, through pain, through tracking imprints on our nervous system. So far, I’m a fan. In this layer, the “as me” layer, my nervous system becomes one with the energy of the universe and the pain can actually flow out of me. All matter has a wave quality to it, even the most seemingly solid rock, so maybe these stages are provisional like most things are. To try to help guide us, help show us where we are on the map, so to speak, so we can find our way.

Excerpt from "On Naming & Awe by Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen" 

A label is a mask life wears. 

We put labels on life all the time. "Right," "wrong," "success," "failure," "lucky,""unlucky," may be as limiting a way of seeing things as "diabetic," epileptic,"manic-depressive," or even "invalid."

Labeling sets up an expectation of life that is often so compelling we can no longer see things as they really are. This expectation often gives us a false sense of familiarity toward something that is really new and unprecedented. 

We are in a relationship with our expectations and not with life itself. 

Which brings up the idea that we may become as wounded by the way in which we see an illness as by the illness itself. 

Belief traps or frees us. 

Labels may become self-fulfilling prophecies....

Because I’m a western trained doctor, I was not taught to think this way. I was trained to think that finding a dead end means that you went the wrong way. I was trained to think that arriving at a place where there is nothing to do medically means you probably are dealing with something psychiatric, “all in your head” or “supratentorial” as we would joke in medical school. Well, the joke is on me now, because I am the one having to track my way out of this hell realm of pain. And I can tell you, this pain is as real as the foundation of my house or the bed that I am sitting on as I type.

The other post from Mr. Varty the Lion Tracker that spoke to me was this one:

I spend a lot of my time in bed these days, kind of like a rotisserie chicken, rolling around trying to find just the right position that doesn’t make my head hurt more. I have frozen peas, a heating pad, my HEB tortilla blanket, a blanket with pictures from my wedding on it so I can look at my sister and my daddy when I miss them, and a perfect pillow that usually doesn’t hurt my head. When I’m in a lot of pain, I can’t concentrate so I do what any sensible person would do in 2026 and scroll through Instagram. At this point, I have trained my algorithm to feed me humor and wisdom with some infomercials on how to affordably move to the coast of Greece thrown in for fun. And Mr. Varty brings the wisdom. Wow. I sat with these for a while. Okay, maybe “rotisserie-chickened” with these for a while is more accurate. And then it hit me. I knew - the absence of medical certainty about what to do to help me with my pain did not mean I was supposed to just buy a guillotine online to chop my head off (dark humor) or marinate in painful suffering. It meant I needed to find my own way out of this seemingly impossible situation which was actually something my daddy had taught us how to do.

Daddy’s research adventures had taken him to the remote deserts of both Australia and Africa. He used to teach us about how to get out of difficult desert situations when, say, no one was around for days and you had no way to call for help. One common situation was getting bogged. Rain + dry desert = sticky mud. This is a photo from his autobiography, the Lizard Man Speaks, of him and my mom bogged in the Land Rover in 1966 in Australia:

Daddy said the only thing worse than getting bogged is getting bogged while you think two hungry lions are watching you (for him, it turned out they weren’t hungry but had just finished eating and were too full to move). At least there weren’t lions in the Australian outback!

My dad was so good at teaching us how to maneuver your way out of tricky, unpleasant situations both my sister and I have our “What Would Daddy Do” stories that he loved to listen to, about when we applied his teaching in real time to our lives to get through hard shit. So, this is just another one of those. And daddy even had a song for singing when you are getting yourself unbogged. The teaching is to sing it with gusto, as if you were a hippopotamus:

Hippopotamus “work song” by Eric Pianka (sung my me, he sounded way better with his deep, booming voice)

Mud, mud, glorious mud,

Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood,

So, follow me, follow . . .

Down to the hollow,

Where we can wallow,

In glorious mud.

I initially looked to the doctors for help with my pain. Of course I did. That’s what culture tells you to do. But what does nature say? What if the real invitation pain brings is to look to the universe, not for the right doctors or pills but instead for nature’s wisdom and the inherent magic of the universe. A pill can create an artificial rhythm within an intolerably severe pain, offering a brief respite within searing suffering (hmm, maybe that’s how they should label pain medicine).

By looking for the magic within my pain, I started looking for the message. Looking for the footprints of spiritual beings in my presence makes this pain feel different. Almost like in understanding it, I experience it differently, it is sensory energy flowing through me rather than becoming stuck within me. It wakes up the playful part of me that’s curious and wants to know more. Being passive as a patient seems to kill my curiosity and I just become a grumpy, dependent lump. And having a good song to sing along the way helps too.

My Lion Dream

I was in a savanna, with golden tall dry grass blowing in the wind. It looked like an African landscape. I was very aware of everything and especially something over to my right near a little low scraggly tree. Then a group of people came within my range of awareness. After a while they were near me, I sunk down behind the grass and was watching them and wondering why I wasn’t following them as they climbed up and over a large rocky outcrop. They had dark skin and no clothes. Simultaneously, I realized I wasn’t following them because I wasn’t a human and I realized I was a lion hunting something over by the scraggly tree. I was keenly aware of every blade of grass and could hear my prey moving. The humans were irrelevant to me. I woke up, extremely relieved that I didn’t have lion senses. In that form, sensory input was almost overwhelming.

This dream was at about 2am on March 24th 2019 when the Sun was in Aries aligning my core identity and willpower with an instinctual Scorpio moon and with Sagittarius rising, I’m heading for freedom.

I’m going to be more like the lion in me, use all my senses, not just my prefrontal cortex. I’m going to be curious, try to find ways to play even in my current state of being. And just because it is the middle of a heat wave in Maine and I miss my sister, I want to share what she has been saying to me frequently from the other side: EAT MORE ICE CREAM!

My mom kept detailed logs and lots of photos when we were little. After my sister died, she gave me a photo book labeled “The Kari-Gretchie Book: the first six years of two precious sisters.”

Identifying what kind of being I was seemed pretty important to my sister. I guess maybe to her, there was a question I could have been something else. Identifying what kind of process has been causing me all this head pain seems like a crucial diagnostic element that I’m only getting a handle on now, 45 years later….

The car accident in 1978 left me with a right frontal hematoma (collection of blood on my forehead) that calcified and was likely accompanied by a concussion. The back and forth of my head thwacking off the car/car window would have also made my brain thwack up against the inside of my skull. Occipital nerve damage and occipital neuralgia is now understood to be a big part of post-concussive sports related headaches (1). Interestingly, medical concussion research didn’t really get going until the 1990s and so there was no public health effort to have your kid checked if they had a head injury and a subsequent headache back in the 1970s.

The overlap between occipital neuralgia and migraine is so impressive that the doctor doing my occipital nerve surgery who started doing these ten years ago interchangeably calls it a “migraine surgery.” My head pain always started at the back of my head or at the top of my neck so I often thought it was neck pain causing my “migraines.” But things like massages, physical therapy or stretching would make it worse, not better. I have always had more pain on the right but I have had pain on both sides. One of the worst things is when the pain would start to go away on one side and then it flares on the opposite side. It could ping pong from one side to the other for days. No one ever took this seriously but now it makes total sense. I would probably adjust my head for the side that hurt, aggravating the nerve on the other side, and back and forth and back and forth until I was dreaming of guillotines (literally).

My pain would often wake me from sleep, making me think it had to do with my sleeping position, my bed or my pillow. Hundreds of dollars later, I realize that it’s probably scar tissue trapping my nerves. Oh well, I have tried a lot of pillows!

Some people also have migraines that involve the greater occipital nerve and that where it gets confusing. Additionally, occipital neuralgia can cause sensitivity to light and sound, mimicking a migraine. But for me to have 100% relief after the nerve block for the time that the numbing agent would have been working, means that my pain is coming from the nerve itself, not from a vascular process involving the nerve.

The biggest diagnostic difference is the quality of the pain. Migrainous pain is throbbing and can ache. Occipital nerve pain is searing (3). My experience is that when it is present, it doesn’t let up. Throbbing pain has a respite period built in. Searing pain does not. According to Johns Hopkins (which we were taught in medical school to worship as the Source of All Wisdom and Truth in the form of the Harriet Lane Handbook for Pediatrics which I later learned was just written by residents) isolated occipital neuralgia is quite rare. No wonder everyone kept telling me this was something else. As Daddy used to say, “statistics reeks of its human origin.”

At one point, we even considered the diagnosis of cluster headaches for me. But my headaches actually lasted too long to be cluster headaches. They’re not supposed to last for more than 90 minutes. When my headaches returned after the 2016 playing-chicken-in-the-pool incident, I was not surprised, and never once did anyone consider linking it to the fact that I had numbness, pain and tingling in my right arm, a “stinger” the neurologist called it. The force required to do that to my neck and brachial plexus must have also stretched/yanked my occipital nerves. Again. But isn’t it interesting that it is always on my right side. Maybe I have been over-using the left side of my brain all these years and this is how the right side is trying to get my attention. OK! I HEAR YOU!

And then the boat ride in 2023. After which I was in so much pain, I was researching what else it might be and asked if I could have occipital neuralgia. That was when my neurologist tried my first nerve block and I experienced what I now know was horrible rebound nerve pain afterwards. At the time, I honestly thought he had done something wrong. I thought maybe he injected the fluid into the space under the periosteum of my skull bone or something. He was the only person who had been helping me so I didn’t want him to feel bad. I told him the pain got worse and he agreed maybe we shouldn’t do that one again.

But it wasn’t until this pre-operative nerve block in 2026 that I researched the post-nerve block pain. From what I can tell, no one really understands what happens but after a periperhal nerve block you can get “rebound pain” (4, 6) which is considered “severe” pain, it remains poorly understood and “may represent a clinically relevant problem and increase the use of health resources.”(4) Yep. I would agree with that vague and useless statement.

I even went to an interventional pain management specialist a few weeks ago and he had absolutely no idea how to help me. None! No one does. Which initially felt so demoralizing. The thought that the doctors should know what to do with my pain was causing me so much suffering until I took it to Byron Katie’s The Work. I am so incredibly grateful to be learning from three non-medical people with life experience (, and ) who inspired me to track my pain. AND THAT IS HELPING!

Onward. Now it is July 2nd, only 26 days until my surgery. And every day the surgery sounds more promising. One retrospective cohort study of 22 patients who had the decompression surgery involved 20 patients with a history of trauma to the head and/or neck region (5). Their results were similar to what my surgeon reported: 77% of the patients had a decrease in head pain after the surgery. So now I just have to keep going, be patient and wait for July 28th to get here.

Dear Love,

What would you have me know about waiting?

Oh my sweet, eager little munchkin!
That day will be so exciting when it comes.
You will be there with bells on, like Kim used to say.
But don't rush these hot summer days.
Find the joy in just resting with Boris.
In just kneeling in the pool and letting the cool water lap up against that angry occipital ridge.
Look at you beginning to understand how you can move without pain,
slowly, little one....
Very slowly.
But not forever.
And not for always.
You will move freely again and each movement will be suffused with a new sense of joy,
of freedom,
and laughter!
Now sometimes even laughing makes your head hurt, I know sweetie.
Take this time to be easy with yourself.
Didn't you say you wanted to be more like Boris? Napping in the sun?
So let's do that together sweetie.
Lots of napping in the sun.
Don't count days or try to wait.
That's too hard.
Just be.

XOXO

References:

1. Zaremski JL, Herman DC, Clugston JR, Hurley RW, Ahn AH. Occipital neuralgia as a sequela of sports concussion: a case series and review of the literature. Curr Sports Med Rep. 2015 Jan;14(1):16-9. doi: 10.1249/JSR.0000000000000121. PMID: 25574876; PMCID: PMC4475344.

2. Konstantin V. Slavin MD FAANS. Facial Pain Association. Occipital Neuralgia. https://www.facepain.org/understanding-facial-pain/diagnosis/occipital-neuralgia/

3. Johns Hopkins Medicine. Health: Occipital Neuralgia. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/occipital-neuralgia

4. Nobre LV, Cunha GP, Sousa PCCB, Takeda A, Cunha Ferraro LH. Bloqueio de nervos periféricos e dor rebote: revisão de literatura [Peripheral nerve block and rebound pain: literature review]. Braz J Anesthesiol. 2019 Nov-Dec;69(6):587-593. doi: 10.1016/j.bjan.2019.05.001. Epub 2019 Nov 2. PMID: 31690509; PMCID: PMC9391878

5. Eskilsson A, Ageberg E, Ericson H, Marklund N, Anderberg L. Decompression of the greater occipital nerve improves outcome in patients with chronic headache and neck pain - a retrospective cohort study. Acta Neurochir (Wien). 2021 Sep;163(9):2425-2433

6. Muñoz-Leyva F, Cubillos J, Chin KJ. Managing rebound pain after regional anesthesia. Korean J Anesthesiol. 2020 Oct;73(5):372-383. doi: 10.4097/kja.20436. Epub 2020 Aug 10. PMID: 32773724; PMCID: PMC7533186

On this lovely, hot day in the Great Victoria Desert (you can get a feel for my dad’s research watching the documentary “Lizard Kings”), I was tromping along by myself after one eremius. I was following its tracks diligently when the absolute worst thing happened. A snake track appeared OVER my beautiful ballerina’s tracks and the two of them went in this fashion into a burrow. All I could think was that the stupid monitor we had put on the lizard would keep it from being its best ballerina self and allow that nasty snake to eat it and it would all be my fault. SO I ran back to camp, got a shovel, ran back to the burrow and frantically started digging. I was crying and digging and praying. Hoping against hope that the lizard would emerge, alive.

I guess the next best thing happened. The snake, a very fast, somewhat angry gwardar came charging out of the burrow right between shovelfuls of sand and went right between my legs and took off out of there.

It probably came within 3-4inches of my tear streaked face.

I ran back to camp and sat on top of the table with my feet curled up underneath me until Daddy came back from his day of lizard hunting. I told him what happened and he looked seriously at me from underneath those bushy eyebrows and said: “Well, Gretchie, we need to get you a gun.”

All this as a long introduction to say that people have come to help me along the way. Much more effectively that I tried to help the eremius. Today I want to share specifically how my sister, Karen, helped me. She was born on July 1, 1969 so today would have been her 57th birthday but she died from metastatic breast cancer in 2020.

Karen was always there for me when she was alive and it seems she remains my protector from the other side as well. When we got into that car accident, she teased me for looking funny. But that was just part of our banter. We understood each other in a way that no one else could understand. She sized me up spot on and knew things before I did. Like when I asked her if she could teach me how to tie bows and she said: “no, because then you’ll go around tying bows in EVERYTHING.” Which was actually a highly probable prediction.

She was there for me when my fabio-like Australian boyfriend just up and left me to go on walk-about midway through my first year of medical school. I thought I was going to go insane. I was sobbing and calling for him like you call for a lost cat. She spoke calmly and clearly and told me I had to face my fears. I felt like I couldn’t do it. I knew I couldn’t do it alone. So I flew from Vermont to see her in Texas and stayed with her until I had my wits back together and could go back to studying. She wrote this down for me to take back to school with me:

Karen was the one who noticed from the outside that something was wrong in my first marriage. She asked me if everything was okay and I finally admitted, no, things were not okay. She never judged me. She listened and loved me. Even when I was a hot mess. She always listened to me retell old stories over and over. She read everything I wrote. She always believed in me. She always sent presents to the kids. She always sent birthday gifts wrapped perfectly that arrived early so you knew she remembered. She always signed them with love.

Karen and I played, even as adults, we could enter the space of play almost instantaneously. I am pretty sure we annoyed others sometimes, we were so close. Strangers would ask us if we were twins, even though we were born two and a half years apart. We had a way of creating a magical space for the two of us where everything made sense and we had everything we needed: each other.

So when Karen died, I had to rewire my nervous system to function by myself. I had to learn a way of living without her. Today, I have lived six and a half years without her but for 88% of my life I had my big sister. I will spend the rest of my life noticing the empty places, rewiring the bits that no longer function or make no sense without her here and trying to listen to her from the other side.

And now it’s clear she was trying to talk to me on her birthday in 2023. Oh heavens, I was thinking maybe she was mad at me. That maybe she died angry with me and I didn’t even know. I was tearing myself up inside wondering what I’d done wrong! But then, now with the lens of love, an eye for tracking and the wisdom of astrology, I am beginning to see that she was trying to help me see my pain is actually fixable in this lifetime. I do not have to live the rest of my life in severe pain. I’ve lived 83% of this life with severe intermittent pain. Who knows how many previous lifetimes. But because of that boat ride, I now know it is not intractable, untreatable migraines but rather occipital nerve pain. And that is something surgery can repair. Hallelujah!

One thing I have noticed is that up until I started this tracking work, my pain has squashed my ability to play. It has consumed any capacity I have to be creative or to have fun. Just gobbled it up in the course of its work. But by doing this work, this is helping. I feel like the part of my that plays is waking back up. Her legs are wobbly and she is rubbing her eyes but she is still here. And she wants to play.

Dear Love,

What would you have me know about learning to play without my sister?

Let the tears fall, sweetie.
It's okay.
We understand about this kind of love and loss.
You take your time, honey bun.
This grief is real.
But you don't have to wait for the grief to end to start to play again my little impus.
Yes, you heard us right.
You can play.
It's okay.
Come, little one, it's safe to come out now.
It's okay, really! 
The way you played with Karen may not make sense to anyone else and that's okay baby girl, that's just what it is.
Baby steps, sweetie, baby steps.
Don't try to cross the desert alone. That you could only do with her. 
But you are going to be okay.
Do you hear us?
Hang in there. 
There's no rush.
Play will wait for you to be ready.
For your body to be better.
For your head to be able to move without pain.
Un poco a poco mi amor.

XOXO

1. The car accident mid afternoon after swimming in Austin, Texas, circa July 7, 1978. I was the back right passenger in a dark green VW Beetle. My head hit the side (car? window?) and I had a large goose-egg swelling that hung down and partially covered my right eye that lasted for a very long time. The headaches started after that.

2. Playing chicken in the pool midday in Brunswick, Maine circa July 7, 2016. Suddenly my right side of my head and neck hurt and I thought I had a spine or disc problem. I had numbness and pain in my arm/hand. It took almost 9 months to resolve. The headaches had paused before this and returned after.

3. Going on a whale watch in the morning off the coast of Sooke, Vancouver on July 1, 2023. I went into this whale watch having daily headaches that I thought were unpreventable migraines. I left the whale-watch with searing new head pain having peed myself knowing that I never wanted to do THAT again and feeling thankful for my husband who lent me his shirt to wrap around myself and then he took care of everything so I could scoot. Since then the searing pain has rarely settled down for longer than a week here and there.

All three events involved being in/having been in or on water. All three were during the day.

Here is a map of where the pain is/was on my head:

Here they are on a map of North America (more or less):

When I think about now how I have never had migraines and this has always been a nerve injury/re-injury/trigger situation, I realize there are dozens upon dozens of other potential culprits for interval worsening of my pain. Some of the other things I’ve done: driving over endless hours of corrugated dirt roads in the Australian outback, rock climbing, repelling, boogie boarding, kayaking, rowing, being on the crew team, being on a motorboat off the coast of Mexico or Lancelin or up at Moosehead Lake, riding a motorized canoe down an Amazonian tributary, running, running and more running, carrying children or groceries or both, wearing babies, etc.

Whether the first two events actually happened on the day I chose in July for 1978 & 2016 is not a fact previously recorded in history. I have reasons and I am going to use these dates for my attempt at an astrological analysis.

I am an English and Chemistry double major who then went to medical school and later got a masters in public health. I’ve been a practicing physician for over 2 decades, raised three kids, had a book published and only recently started understanding anything other than western science’s view of the world. That is my disclaimer.

Please approach my interpretation of the heavens with kindness and compassion. I am a Scorpio and just a baby astrologer.

1. 1978 - The Original Imprint

   In the afternoon on July 1st 1978, the moon was 20º in Taurus and the Sun was at about 9º in Cancer, infusing the moment with a deeply intuitive and protective energy. The Moon was entering it’s waning-crescent, bring old soul energy. This particular old soul energy was also deeply intuitive, spiritual, self-aware and ready for surrender. Ready for completion. She was leaning in for rest and comfort in the long haul. The rising sign was Scorpio. That’s me, I’m a Scorpio. Here she was, with her energy of intense transformational growth through crisis raring to go. I’m here in this life, I have some inter-generational-soul-waking-up to do and time is of the essence. So, let’s get this party started. So to speak.

2. 2016 - The Heavens Send a Gentle Reminder

   A midsummer’s day in July in Brunswick, Maine, and we are playing chicken in the pool. I had met my future husband. The Sun is again in Cancer but at 15º now. She has a dose of Scorpio energy too. This girls got grit, intensity and depth. She is all about fierce protection, willpower and curiosity. She’s here for the truth and leaving with nothing less. She’s here with her trusty moon who is at 1º in Leo and bringing some immediate intense playful energy, craving joy. The moon, in it’s waxing crescent phase, is welcoming initiation and breaking through obstacles. The heavens are showing me what to do. Scorpio is rising again, my lens, my harbinger of constant transformation.

   Of note, this followed a “Stellium in Cancer” which is a cosmic vibe created by having the Sun, Mercury and Venus all grouped together in the water sign of Cancer creating a highly sensitive, emotional and protective baseline energy. At the time, a Gemini moon layered some buzzing mental activity on this highly sensitive emotional stuff, pushing people to act on underlying feelings. Hmmm, this is probably how I ended up going in the pool with my future husband to play chicken with our kids that day. At that moment, I had not had headaches for months but they were about to come back!

3. 2023 - Heaven Help Us

   It was a beautiful morning in Sooke, British Colombia, on July 1 2023, the Sun was again in Cancer at 9º. Her energy amplified the pure, traditional Cancer traits: emotional, intuitive, protective focused on home, family, and security. The ocean was calling to me then but, in retrospect, the moon is screaming to me now! The moon was in Sagittarius at 26º and the energy from this is intense, on mastery level, almost as if it arrived on a trusted steed ready to complete an inter-generational quest for higher truth, higher wisdom, higher freedom that started almost forty five years ago. We are not leaving this day without showing her she needs to explore the truth that will lead to the freedom we know she came here for. BUT (there’s always a but) this MOON is in it’s waxing gibbous phase, meaning that it is right before a full moon. This moon’s emotional energy is building towards a peak yet to come. Or as one real astrologer put it “our work during the gibbous moon might not deliver instant results. As powerful as this phase is for manifesting progress, the moon is not yet fully illuminated, [so] it may take a little time for our full accomplishments to come to light.”(3)

   The rising sign here is no longer Scorpio. Now it’s Virgo at 24º which means this is some calm, patient, grounded no-nonsense problem solving shit we have coming next. Mercury was at 11º in Gemini giving us the home field advantage that day when it comes to the chance that I might actually hear what the heck the heavens are trying to say because we are guests in it’s house it is operating at peak efficiency so if I am at all on my game, here’s hoping. The fact the boat ride was, in hindsight, able to show me so clearly what the problem was (it’s your nerves, dummy!) but it took me three years to actually get it still confuses me.

   Sigh….. Sorry universe…. Purrrrr…. Here is the Leo energy…. Venus (playful love energy) was 28º in Leo representing a high stakes, high urgency, feet-to-the fire approach to love. And Mars (passion, action) was at 9º in Leo, representing a highly focused, pure unfiltered expression of energy directly tied to my soul that I could not ignore any longer.

   And last but not least, my oldest child’s favorite planet: Jupiter. Jupiter was at 9º in Taurus. This is the energy to help me find my way out of hell and back to being a joy fountain come hell or high water. This is the energy that whispered in my ear when I cried out in pain: Come on, Gretchie. Stay with me. You can do this. It might take time, but everything is gonna be alright sweetie. My Taurus is a woman and she has a southern accent.

   XOXO

References:

1. Kathryn Hocking, Your Astrological Signature: https://kathrynhocking.com/your-astrological-signature/

2. Stratford Career Institute Blog: https://blog.scitraining.com/how-to-read-birth-charts-in-astrology/

3. Sara Coughlin “Watch out for this lunar phase right before the full moon.” June 29, 2017. https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/waxing-gibbous-moon-phases-spiritual-meaning

4. Astrodienst Ephemeris Tables for the Year 2023, tropical geocentric zodiac. Available at: https://www.astro.com/swisseph/ae/2000/ae_2023.pdf

5. Catherine Carlson. Astrologically Speaking-- Our Luminaries: The Sun & The Moon. https://www.crazywisdomjournal.com/thecrazywisdomjournalonline/2024/1/1/astrologically-speaking-our-luminaries-the-sun-amp-the-moon

6. Brett Larkin. Degrees in Astrology: unlocking the critical secrets to know. https://tinyrituals.co/blogs/tiny-rituals/degrees-in-astrology?srsltid=AfmBOop5KuvTpvSHBMGfZCE59Q_D7wi5PLCyG4DDzlyUuK9IfMxDWL8Y

7. How to Read a Lunar Return—Yours or Anyone’s

   February 21, 2005 / BY Isabelle Ghane. hhttps://www.llewellyn.com/journal/article/780?srsltid=AfmBOorwT5HGQgj_WyCFPKg-IIi3TOTbCdn3LsJ7GuysBa8ObFWQPDhu

8. Rising Sign vs Sun Sign: What Matters More? by June Harrow. https://astratarot.net/pages/guides/rising-sign-vs-sun-sign

9. Celeste Longacre, The Farmer’s Almanac. Cancer Zodiac Signs: Dates, Personality Traits, and More. June 23, 2026. https://www.almanac.com/cancer-zodiac-sign

10. 10. https://www.lemon8-app.com/experience/moon-phases-and-spiritual-practice?region=us

11. Joy Sauce. Alice Smith. Don’t underestimate the power of the moon. https://joysauce.com/astrology-with-alice-dont-underestimate-the-power-of-the-moon/

Now I’m wondering, who left this mark in my nervous system? If my pain is the natural event recorder, who was here? What I’ve called “migraines” started around the time I was in second grade. This was when Austin was desegregating elementary schools, and I was bused across the tracks. Instead of my parents dropping me off at from Bryker Woods Elementary, I was on a bumpy, loud bus for a long time to get to Zavala Elementary school. It was stressful and I would get sent to the nurses office for not paying attention in class due to headaches. I frequently had to be picked up by my mother, who had to leave work, come and get me, and then I would spend the rest of the day on a vinyl couch outside the women’s bathroom at the University of Texas in the building where she taught until we could go home.

My headaches were long, very painful and didn’t respond to anything people seem to think they should respond to. They have always been worse on the right than the left. It wasn’t until I was in medical school that I diagnosed myself with migraines. I don’t have auras but will get nausea for the pain and my eyes tear, sometimes my nose runs on the same side my head hurts. For a while, They thought I had cluster headaches. My migraines didn’t respond to anything regular migraines were supposed to. I even got botox injections and they didn’t do anything except make me like the guy in Princess Bride because I couldn’t lift my head without using my hand.

I could get some relief sometimes from acute migraine medications but not consistently nothing preventive worked. Sometimes, they would improve, other times I would feel like I had them all the time. When I had them, I had them all the time then I would have long stretches without them. People told me it was stress.

I remember coming home from cross country practice with a searing headache and laying down without eating dinner and trying to sleep because I was in too much pain to function. I remember being in so much pain in my semester abroad in Australia, we had to make a special on our way to pet Dolphins at Monkey Mia for me to speak to the Chemist and buy pain medicine. I remember when I met my new husband, telling him I used to have horrible migraines but they had gone away and then we played chicken in the pool with our kids on our shoulders and I got hurt and they headaches came back.

What if the original insult was NOT the whale watch in 2023 but a car accident I had when I was young. It was around the time when I was bused to Zavala, and I had thought the stress from that caused the migraines to start. My sister and I were in the backseat of our little green Volkswagen bug coming home from Reed Park where we’d been swimming. A young woman didn’t see the stop sign and hit my side of the back of our car. My head hit the inside of the car on the right side so hard that I had a giant goose egg that hung down over my right eye. I remember it clearly partly because my sister kept pointing it out. It took a long time to heal and during that time teased me and called me Quasimodo.

This was never migraines! My head pain has always been this occipital nerve injury. My sister and daddy were screaming at me from beyond when I was on that boat in Toronto: It’s your nerve honey. It’s your nerve they can fix this! That’s who it is!

One of the first things my dad taught me about tracking lizards, was to figure out which direction they were going. Then, you had a much better chance of actually finding the lizard, which was always his goal. Lizard tracks in the sand often look like what I drew above. Yeah, super clear. But as you start to look, really look, you could tell the difference between the front of the foot mark and the back. The running lizard versus the meandering one. Or my absolute least favorite: the snake track OVER your lizard’s tracks.

In July of 2023 when this pain imprinted upon my nervous system, I was globally headed in the direction of freedom. I had left a full-time leadership pediatrician job that left me hating medicine and accepted two part time positions with organizations that were patient centered and doing the work made my heart sing. I was headed away from having both feet shackled by western medicine.

I was physically headed from an “Art of New Creation” retreat at Omega with Rob Bell and where I had met a wonderful group of women. I felt like maybe I understood community in a new way and I actually stood up, shaking like a leaf, and told my story about being in the right place at the right time to Liz while hundreds of people listened. It was like a fever dream, as they say.

I left the retreat, driving to Logan to fly to Vancouver to meet my hubby. On the drive, I was appreciating the parkways of New York State when a beautiful flicker landed in the road close enough for me to identify it but not far enough away for me to avoid hitting it. There was too much traffic for me to swerve without causing an accident. I almost drove off the road in despair. I called my husband, sobbing. “Part of me died with that bird and part of the bird lives on in me.”

I flew to Seattle, then took the ferry to Vancouver:

Once I got to Vancouver, I joined my husband briefly at a peacemaking retreat and then we went off to our Airbnb on the coast with the most amazing view:

I was headed towards happiness. More ocean, more women in community, more freedom. I was explaining to my husband how Rob Bell says “That was 3 me’s ago” as a way to normalize that “old me” wouldn’t know /couldn’t know what “current me” knows. I loved that so much. I was headed in a direction of more understanding, more self-awareness, more compassion for both myself and others.

My father had just passed away, adding a new heaping to the unfinished serving of grief I was already carrying from losing my sister a few years before. So I was heading in the direction of more grief. Both were very heavy soul crushing losses. Grief made the tracks deeper. The reason I wanted to be on a boat looking at whales on July 1st was that this was my sister’s birthday and she was a marine biologist, she loved Vancouver and loved the ocean. In theory, it seemed like the perfect way to honor her on her birthday. In reality, it was like my spine was trying to impale my brain as the boat crashed at high speed over wave after wave after wave with only the vague hint of a whale ever even visible in the distance.

I had inherited my dad’s bison ranch in Texas after he died. So at the time this pain imprinted on me, I also was moving in the direction of becoming a Texas Bison Rancher, much to my surprise. You can take the girl out of Texas but you can not take the Texas out of the girl. I sleep wrapped up in an H.E.B. tortilla blanket. I was heading in the direction of spending more time in Texas, eating more TexMex food (my favorite) and having sunset cocktails with my husband and the bison listening to them breathe (the bison, not my husband).

Taxing Pain (a poem)

I asked Love what I might need to know about the tracks of my pain.
Love spoke to me so kindly, I almost can't explain.
She said, oh baby, you needn't worry,
Pain makes everything feel a bit blurry.

You don't have to keep notes,
Collect proof,
Pay pain taxes,
Pull off the perfect alley-oop.

We see you little one,
Rolling in pain,
holding your frozen peas like a dog licks his chain.

We love you to pieces
And beg you to see
That this thing you are living
Is just an experience for thee.

You can say uncle,
You can stop anytime.

We will surround you,
Envelop you,
And time will unwind.
Pain will cease.
We'll dissolve the lease.

But baby,
Oh baby! You've come so far! 

And you can hear us! You listen!
So many delight!

As long as you still want to stay, 
We promise - oh we promise - we will help you find the way.

XOXO

Here we are, all dolled up & ready for our adventure & for me to never be the same.

Almost exactly three years later, I am awaiting a surgery to decompress my occipital nerves which has an 80% chance of making the pain go away. Part of getting to the surgery was to submit to a second occipital nerve block by the surgeon which was the same as the first one: complete relief for about 36 hours (the lidocaine numbing part) and then rebound pain so severe I almost took my own life, ending up in the ER begging for help. My ER experience was humiliating and horrific. The doctor smiled and nodded condescendingly and said “It is hard to treat nerve pain.” The nurse didn’t even evaluate me and made me wait for hours before giving me the medication the doctor ordered. They had me meet with the behavioral health person because I said I was in so much pain I was contemplating ending my life, instead of just having compassion and helping me with my pain. My follow up with my PCP and the interventional pain management person were equally useless and demoralizing.

I am a doctor and I understand the opioid epidemic and how it caused harm. But I am also living proof that the aftermath is causing harm to people in severe pain and are not being treated because of anti-pain biases medical providers are carrying around subconsciously. I read an article about Sandra Carlson in the AARP magazine

while waiting for my son at therapy the other day and thought there are probably a lot of 50 something year old women who are suffering because doctors don’t listen to us.

I am feeling alone, forsaken and in pain. The alone feeling is emptiness which is actually spaciousness or an invitation to look deeper, stay curious and follow the path (thank you for the inspiration). The forsaken feeling is understandable and such a human experience that even Jesus went there. The pain is a map, a map I need to understand forwards and backwards and inside out so not only can I get out alive but I can go in after others and get them out too.

Also, I apparently have started an integrity cleanse (thank you, ) and one thing I can not tolerate is untrue statements people make about me. I used to think this was easier than arguing with people about what was actually true. Not anymore. HMPF!

So I have 31 days until my surgery and I am going to use this time to find the magic within me, track the footprints of my pain and post it here so if you happen to be like me maybe you can do this along with me. I will explore what was happening in my life at the time, the trajectory of my life, the geography of the pain, the flora and fauna involved (including an eagle who spoke to me), the astrology and astronomy and anything else I can use to understand the tracks of pain. My late father, Eric Pianka, taught me to track lizards in the Great Victorian Desert as a child. I returned to the Australian desert to help him with his research when my Australian boyfriend’s mom kicked me out of the house in Perth, saying I was a distraction to his Uni studies. I spent hours alone, following lizard footprints in the red sand. There’s a reason my dad was a tracker.

As a loyal Lovelet, has taught me that every inward journey needs to start with asking Love what it would have me know about what I should pack, where we are going and how long it will take to get there. So I started with asking Love for help. This is what Love showed me:

The doctors are not going to help me.
God is with me.
The magic is in me, not Out There coming-in-on-a-broom-in-flowing-black-at two-o'clock.
I have to get out of here on my own.
I have to learn to track my pain.
Who made these tracks?
Where where they going?
Were they in pain too?
Where are they taking me now?
Were they running?
Did they get tired?
Were they alone?
Did anyone else come to help?
Did they stop to rest? Eat? Sleep? Pray? Pee? Poop?
How many fingers?
How many toes?

Slowly little one,
Slowly.

Look, little one,
Look.

Look carefully.
Let us show you the way.
 
XOXO

We all experience potentially toxic stressors every day. These are experienced as positive or tolerable stress when they are buffered and we have access to the supports and resources we need. This buffering can be somewhat asynchronous as long as it is consistent. It’s only without buffering and access to needed supports and resources that is prolonged when we truly experience a stressful event as traumatic.

Here’s an example. Let’s say Johnny is trying to tie his shoes. He is developmentally ready for this task but is still learning.

Unbuffered experience: He goes on a walk with his buddies and when his shoe comes untied they start making fun of him. He feels stressed and has a harder time. The sun is starting to set and they say he is taking too long and run off, leaving him there alone with an untied shoe. This is experienced as traumatic for him.

Buffered experience: He goes on a walk with his mom and dad. When his shoe comes untied, his dad says It’s okay son. We’re right here. Take your time. You can do this. And when he continues to struggle, his mom sits down next to him and helps him make the two loops and then he can do it on his own. Dad comments on how the sun is setting and they sky is beautiful. Mom waits for him to tie his shoe and then they all laugh when Johnny says they all better hurry home before it’s too dark to see the path! This is likely experienced as a positive stressor, perhaps tolerable, but not traumatic.

Within our neuro-hormonal stress response are four pathways: fight, flight, freeze and affiliate. The affiliate response is mediated by oxytocin release from the posterior pituitary simultaneously with the fight/flight/freeze cascade. This is what allowed hunter-gatherers to remember to scoop up their babies and take them with them in the face of a sabre-toothed tiger (instead of leaving them behind as a tasty snack which would be evolutionarily disadvantageous).

So next time your child is struggling with something, try to remember that part of your role is to buffer the stress. And stressful things can lead to a trauma response even if they are relatively mundane, like tying your shoe. Yet we can help our children just with holding space for them and encouraging them. That is easier when you are caring for your own stress level simultaneously. If you’re not sure where to start with that, check out this post for a place to start.

“One generation full of deeply loving parents would change the brain of the next generation, & with it the world.”

– Charles Raison MD

children, I have never met a parent who would disagree with this statement. So what gets in the way of us expressing our love in a way that supports overall nervous system health? And what happens to our best intentions when the very experiences we try so hard to prevent in our children actually happen?

Last year, the surgeon general shared a parent stress advisory, highlighting how almost half of parents are feeling so stressed most days that it is overwhelming. Overwhelming stress derails the part of our brain that is good at problem solving and often leaves us driven by other regions of our brain, primarily the amygdala which is the part of the brain that is responsible for large displays of unpleasant emotions.

So if we are trying to not pass on inter-generational trauma and we want our children's brains to be wired well and develop in a healthy way, we have to be aware of our own stress levels and develop strategies to mitigate the impact of our stress on our parenting. The amazing thing about this is that it also ends up with us modeling a different response to stressors than what we learned as children so we truly are healing what has been unintentionally passed along, generation to generation.

I affectionately call it SUNBEAM:

• See: see that whatever your child has done, is doing, wants to do is getting to you

• Unhook: allow a little space to arise, don't take the bait and try not to react in your habitual way

• Nurture: take care of yourself with the following techniques:

  • Breathing: take 5 big deep breaths, do 4:7:8 breathing or stacked breathing

  • Emotional Awareness: know that this emotion is temporary, it will not last and your job is to take care of yourself while it is there (don't blame it on the kids!)

  • Meditation and Mindfulness: try doing walking meditation, mindfulness body scan or using your senses to ground yourself by finding everything that is green you can see or all the things you can hear

Next time you feel like you are about to lose your cool, try this and see if helps you avoid those parenting hangovers, when you end up doing exactly what you promised yourself you would never recreate from your own childhood.

Bring to mind how it feels to have tried to support your child when they were having a hard time but realizing later that you got it completely wrong?

Researcher (Tronick, E. & Gold, C.M. (2020). The Power of Discord: Why the Ups and Downs of Relationships are the Secret to Building Intimacy, Resilience, and Trust. Hachette Book Group ) tells us that getting it “wrong” is actually as important as when we get it “right.” Most of our time (70%) is spent misattuning with our kids but then we both are attempting to reconnect and make meaning out of what happened.

Imagine you are stressed and working on a deadline. You come home and your daughter is in a bad mood. You ask her how she’s doing and what’s wrong. She yells at you You’re WRONG, mom! You never understand anything and you are always WORKING. You don’t care about my life so don’t pretend to.

Feels a little like a karate chop to your gut, doesn’t it? But once we take care of our own feelings, we can both begin to make meaning of this encounter. No, you are not the worst parent of the year when you stay late at work. No, it’s not ideal for your daughter to speak to you disrespectfully. Yes, it’s important for everyone in the house to be able to feel all their feelings, inclduing anger, and to be able to express what they each need.

Research also tells us that two of the seven protective positive childhood experiences that decrease the long term health impact of childhood adversity are being able to talk about your feelings with your family and feeling supported by your family when you go through hard times (Bethell C, Jones J, Gombojav N, Linkenbach J, Sege R. Positive Childhood Experiences and Adult Mental and Relational Health in a Statewide Sample: Associations Across Adverse Childhood Experiences Levels. JAMA Pediatr. 2019;173(11):e193007. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2019.3007 & Cher X. Huang, Neal Halfon, Narayan Sastry, Paul J. Chung, Adam Schickedanz; Positive Childhood Experiences and Adult Health Outcomes. Pediatrics July 2023; 152 (1): e2022060951. 10.1542/peds.2022-060951). So what happens in this scenario in your house? Does your child still get space to talk about their feelings or does it become all about how they behaved?

We can still discipline our kids and maintain firm boundaries while we allow space for everyone to be fully human and talk about their feelings. Try taking 5 big deep breaths before you respond to your angry child’s expressions. Think of it as though you are a giant explosion proof container and you can hold space for your child’s expressions calmly, which then in turn helps them learn to regulate.

Try not to take it personally when you realize you missed the mark. Just breathe, lean in with curiosity and know that you are doing it just right.

For me, these include often moments where I’ve yelled or said or did something I wish I hadn’t. My kids are 14,18 and 20 and thankfully, I’ve been able to repair the ruptures that have happened with all of my kids but I don’t feel like we spend enough time supporting parents with how to do this.

First of all, If no one has said this to you, it is completely normal to lose your cool and parent in a way that makes you cringe when you think about it later. We are humans and we sometimes act from a space of fear or anger. When we are doing that, the good thinking part of our brain is off-line. When we’re in those spaces, we truly want what is best for our children but in the moment our bodies mistake the circumstances. Our neuro-hormonal stress response is hardwired and prehistoric. It can’t tell the difference between a saber toothed tiger crouching in the shadows and a child who refuses to get in the car which will make you late for work.

Perhaps our teen has a ridiculourly messy room and you are tired of asking them to clean it and you yell when you step on a dried pizza crust trying to retrieve the laundry basket. And then you yell. Maybe you say something like I can’t believe you live in this pigstye or You’re such a slob or What is wrong with you?

These are pretty common parenting comments and almost 100% of parents say they occasionally use harsh verbal discipline to try to change their child’s behaviors. And if you catch yourself, what can you do?

So there are three windows for change: before, during and after. All of them are good and the only one that’s not is never. If you can tell that what your child is doing (or NOT doing) is upsetting you but you haven’t yelled yet, that is a window for change. Instead of launching into a lecture, just breathe. In through your nose, and out through your mouth, at least 5 times. Take care of your own nervous system before you say anything about the pizza crust between your toes. The, lead with curiousity not judgement. How did your room get like this? might feel within reach….

The next window is during. This may seem absurd because I’m implying you can do something WHILE YOU ARE YELLING. And you can. You can listen to the words you are saying. Hear your language? Whose words are those? Did someone say that to you when you were younger? How did it feel? This part is just that, just noticing with the intent to help you understand if you have an opportunity here to stop passing on intergenerational trauma.

And last, but not least, is after. This may seem too late, the horse is out of the proverbial barn, right? But what Tronick’s research tells us is that even in the best of situations, parents only attune with their kids about 30% of the time. The rest of the time, we are in some version or reconnecting and repairing. When we don’t repair or reconnect, that is when our words can be harmful. So instead of beating yourself up, go to your child. Own your moment and your own mess. This might sound like I had an awful day at work and when I stepped on that pizza crust, I lost my cool. I don’t think you’re a pig and I’m really sorry I said that. I’m soing to try to take care of myself better so I don’t yell. And I’m really curious about your room and how we can find this floor. What do you think?

Be ready for your child to reflect anger back to you. They may be upset if you said something that even you wish you hadn’t said. So listen to their anger. You can validate the anger too. If no one has done that for you it sounds like Of course you are angry. It’s normal to feel that way in this situation. I totally get it. And they may say YOU DON’T GET IT, MOM! And that’s okay too. Because how can we really “get” someone else’s experience?

It’s all okay. Take the cring moments and use the mess to find your parenting magic. You’ve got this.

And then I had my first child. Her first night she screamed. Her dad told me to fix it. The nurses said it was normal. But I didn’t sleep. We came home and she cried. She didn’t want to fall asleep and I couldn’t put her down. I would walk around bouncing her for hours til she finally fell asleep and I almost fell over with fatigue. It got a little easier after I figured out that white noise helped her. I had thought white noise was melodious lullaby music and then my mom sent me a CD of white noise for babies that sounded like a cross between a jet engine and a vacuum cleaner. But it worked because they say that this is the same sound the babies hear when they are in utero, so the sensory input is inherently soothing to them.

Did I ask my pediatrician for help? No. He was my mentor and I didn’t want him to think that I didn’t have a complete grasp on what was going on now that I was a parent. My poor daughter would throw up frequently and now I think she probably had reflux and maybe, if I hadn’t been so determined to get her to be a good sleeper, I might have had the frame of mind to ask for help.

As she grew older, I always thought for sure that better sleep was around the corner, but that was not to be. She consistently had a hard time even into elementary school. So maybe it was never reflux. Maybe she has just always been a sensitive soul who feels safer when she is not alone. Since when is it a good idea for a baby or a young child to have a felt sense of safety when they are both a) asleep and b) alone? When we were cavemen, this would have been deadly. And from an evolutionary standpoint, I bet we sleeping with other humans was likely to confer a survival benefit and therefor to be genetically selected for.

Humans have only been living in houses with separate rooms for their kids to sleep in since the late 19th century. Many other cultures don’t do this at all. As a pediatrician, I believe the science around not co-sleeping with infants under a year and I am intrigued by the recent recommendation to have the baby’s crib in the parent’s room until they turn 1 year old. Should we force them after a year to cry it out if they don’t want to sleep in their own room? The research around whether letting your baby “cry it out” is a good idea has too many variations to know for sure what is truly evidence based.

Sure, some studies show that early independent sleepers sleep better long term. But maybe these are kids that would have been better sleepers anyway? What about those kids who are just not early independent sleepers? Or ever really comfortable sleeping alone? I wonder if they just have a higher need for connection. If I hadn’t tried so hard to make my daughter sleep on her own as a baby, would she have had the connection she needed and then been able to feel more comfortable as a young girl at night in her room alone? Who knows.

Beating myself up doesn’t change how things went for my daughter. But I think all parents should have options - not just either getting woken up every two minutes or never having your room to yourself. My mentor, Dr. Mark Mendelson, at the University of Virginia was brilliant when he taught me how to teach parents to put a baby to bed in a way that I feel honors the importance of infant mental health. Of course, I only asked him for help after I realized I had no idea what I was doing with my daughter. But, at least the families I cared for got the good advice!

He said when you need baby to sleep somewhere new, you do whatever baby needs, hold them as much as they need and then you start by laying them in the bassinet or crib while you are right there, folding clothes or putting away socks. When they start to cry, you can start with making sure they can physically see you, sing to them and reassure them you know they need you. If that is enough, you leave them there. If the continue to escalate, you can scoop them up and reassure them that you are right there. You keep doing this in different forms and at different times, placing baby in the crib at first only when he or she is wide awake and happy and then as they get closer and closer to nap-time or bedtime. And you always respond to their bids for connection. And I added in that if you turn on white noise when they fall asleep, this also becomes a cue for their brain “time to sleep.”

At some point, Dr. Mendelson told me, the baby will accidentally fall asleep on their own. But by then, they know that you will always come when they need you and they feel safe falling asleep alone because you have shown them that even when they are asleep alone, you are not gone.

Harsh parenting styles have been associated with poor mental health outcomes for kids. If you’re following parenting blogs or reading parenting books, you know that a more gentle but firm approach is what everyone says you are supposed to do. But this is a goal, to be a gentle parent. How do you get there? If right now, you find yourself yelling and using harsher discipline than you want to, how do you adopt a new way of parenting?

Tiny steps of change. Start with telling yourself that it is okay to be where you are. Of course you are parenting like this. Perhaps this is how your parents raised you. So it is what feels familiar. Allow the tension between how things are going now and what you want things to look like to fuel your change process.

1. Radical acceptance: right now I am not a very gentle parent.

2. My goal is to be more gentle, but still firm, with my child.

3. I am going to make one tiny change every day that will move me towards this goal.

Don’t worry when things go wonky. Repairs are a crucial part of parenting (see Nope. You’re not doing it wrong.) Researchers showed that harsh parenting increased during COVID.* What is one thing you want to try to work on today?

Here is the list of harsh discipline styles that have been studied and shown to result in worse mental health and interpersonal outcomes for our kids:

1. Shouting or screaming angrily at your child

2. Calling your child names

3. Shaking your child

4. Threatening to slap your child but not doing it

5. Angrily pinching your child’s arms

6. Calling your child stupid, lazy or something like that

Start with the goal of wanting to change a specific behavior. Then look backwards at what situations tend to result in this type of parenting. Are you tired? Stressed? Hungry? Worried? Angry? Irritated? If you focus on taking care of your physical and emotional state and pause before you respond to your child’s behaviors, can you start a new way of responding that has a different outcome and brings you closer to your goal of being gentle but firm?

For example, if every time you come home from work, your teenager’s room is a disaster and you yell at them and tell them they are disgusting and this is a pig-stye, how can you shift that dynamic? How are you feeling when you come home from work? Tired? Hungry? What feelings come up when you see your teen’s dirty room? Do you feel taken for granted? Do you feel like no one else works as hard as you? The first part, is identifying feelings. The second part, is how your brain is creating a narrative to explain why you feel that way.

What if, when you notice your brain trying to help, instead of believing it, you just say to yourself Whoa, I’m tried and hungry. Maybe I should have a rest and a snack before I talk with my kid about his room. You can also try integrating forms of meditation and other ways to regulate your nervous system before you talk to your kids. Here are a few:

1. Walking meditation: breathe in to the count of four while you are walking, then breathe out to the count of four, matching your steps to the counting, keep going til you get to your child’s room or take a lap around the house first….

2. Breath work: once you acknlowedge you don’t feel good but it’s not something you feel like you can fix with a rest or food (i.e. irritated, angry, annoyed), try this mantra that uses the 4:7:8 rhythm to lower stress: breathe in saying to yourself I am okay, hold your breath saying to yourself This feeling will come and go and exhale saying to yourself I am loved and I can do this.

3. Sensory grounding: Find five things that are blue or three things you can hear. Pick one of your sense and bring soothing information into your brain which helps to tell your brain that your child is not a saber toothed tiger in disguise, allowing you to feel calmer and connect in a gentler, more meaningful way.

And then, tomorrow, look at how the strategy worked. Did it help? Do you need to change something? And try again. Think of it like tiny little quality improvement cycles until you reach your goal. You ARE a gentle parent.

*Sari, N. P., van IJzendoorn, M. H., Jansen, P., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M., & Riem, M. M. E. (2022). Higher Levels of Harsh Parenting During the COVID-19 Lockdown in the Netherlands. Child Maltreatment, 27(2), 156-162. https://doi.org/10.1177/10775595211024748

For years, every time I read something about raising kids or parenting, I immediately judged myself for whether I have been doing it right or wrong with my own kids. It’s exhausting! I would beat myself up about my mistakes and then agonize about the harm I had caused. If you are anything like me, you might find the path I used to get out of that hell loop helpful.

When I had my first child, I felt reasonably confident in how I was parenting. I was a pediatric resident and had read a handful of parenting books when I was pregnant. I asked my mom for advice alot and my daughter was happy and healthy and growing well. A few years later, I gave birth to another beautiful, healthy delightful little girl. I knew they would be best friends, as my sister and I had been throughout our lives. By that point, my marriage was deteriorating in the way they often do. And that is when the doubt started to creep in.

My ex and I did not agree about how to discipline the kids. He had a strong authoritarian leaning and I began to default to permissive parenting to try to make everyone feel better quickly after meltdowns. I felt like if I could stop the tantrum, quiet the child and not bother their father, everything would be okay.

We worked through it enough to resolve our differences and then we had a third child, this one a boy who was born with a serious congenital heart lesion that had to be repaired surgically at 4 months of age. My confidence went out the window along with any ability to think clinically about my son’s health. All I knew was that when he cried, he burned precious calories he needed to be strong enough for his surgery. So I never put him down and tried to keep him from wasting calories crying. I held him so much that I got “frozen elbow” - I’m not sure it’s an official thing but my elbow froze in the cradle position, bent, and I couldn’t straighten it.

He got through the surgery and did beautifully. Soon, I was delighting in him riding his pretend firetruck around the driveway. But I was scared. Fear on steroids had entered from stage left and was not leaving. Not long after, my marriage fizzled completely and it was then that things got exponentially worse.

We entered into years of lawyer-weilding child custody discussions and got a Guardian ad litem (GAL for short). I had always thought GALs really had the best interests of the kids at heart. That if I was too scared to make a decision, they were clear minded and wise and impartial. But somehow, suddenly, it was like I was under a microscope and every little thing I did or had done was scruitinized at 1000x magnification. Let’s just say, she wasn’t a fan of me. I was

I affectionately refer to that process in my life as going through a meat grinder. I literally felt my entire self was being shredded into bits for other people to examine. So when I eventually found myself coming out the other side, not dead or devastated, but really a rather well put together sausage, I realized I had learned something.

No one can know why you do what you do with your kids. No one. Except you. So many parenting books feel like lectures on how you are doing it wrong and promise to tell you how to do it right. It’s like they are saying that as soon as you do this thing or that thing differently, then you’ll be doing it right. Perhaps you try something and it “works” or maybe nothing you try “works.” That’s because all families are different.

The important thing is, in each and every moment, each one of us is doing exactly the best that we can in that moment. What we need, instead of a lecture about what we are doing “wrong” and how to start doing it “right,” is radical acceptance of where we are in our parenting journey. We need help learning how to love ourselves, how to stop hating ourselves, so we can start where we are and keep doing the absolute best we an in every parenting moment.

When I stopped spending energy hating myself for getting it wrong and said to the universe: I’m doing the best I can. It responded with: Yes, my dear. We know that. Keep going. This is temporary. You are loved and you can do this.

Allow me to give you permission to relax into your own shoes. Relax into this parenting thing. It’s a journey. And frankly, it’s the ability to repair things with your kids that is crucial, not the look-at-me-never-messing-anything-up-we’re-doing-it-all-perfectly-over-here message we get from social media. You just start where you start and end where you end and at every point along the way, you are being the very best version of you that exists. So…. nope. You are not doing it wrong. Now go get your hug from the universe.