Healing can happen quickly

Back in 2009, I had a cyst or lump on the top of my left foot. It got so huge over the course of a couple of weeks, that I couldn’t get a shoe on that foot. I sat around the office I worked in, with one shoe on and my left foot bare. My coworkers kept telling me to see a doctor, as I couldn’t go around wearing one shoe, and it seemed like surgery was inevitable.

I was in the midst of completing an online degree in English, planning a move to the country of Panama, and going through a divorce. I had a lot on my plate, and I didn’t need foot surgery slowing me down. But family, friends and coworkers all agreed something had to be done about my foot.

Admittedly, I’m not big on doctors and often they haven’t done well by me. I’d finished reading a book by Brandon Bays called The Journey and thought I’d give her healing process a try. She’d managed to completely shrink a huge tumor in her uterus in less than seven weeks, so in my usual idealistic way I figured if she could do it I could do it.

Her method involved sending your consciousness into the area you needed healed, and noticing what memories were stored there. At least, that’s how I remember it. Once you notice the people involved in this memory, there was a ritual where you imagined everyone around a campfire and forgave them. It’s been a while since I’ve read that book, so I can’t guarantee that’s her exact method, but it’s close.

I went to bed that night and focused my mind on the lump on top of my foot. Pretty quickly a memory surfaced – not a forgotten memory, but something I clearly remembered happening. I was maybe three or four years old, and my mother had me signed up for a summer program at the local park. Teenagers had volunteered to run this program and it lasted for an hour or two each afternoon.

At the end of that day’s program, all the moms came to retrieve their child. My mother didn’t come. One teen girl hung around for a bit, but I assured her my mom would be there shortly and she could leave. She seemed relieved. I sat on the swings, waiting all alone for my mother while no one else was around.

I waited. And I waited some more. I had to pee, and still my mother never came for me. I sat on the swing and peed my pants because there was no bathroom at the park and I couldn’t hold it anymore. Another girl, older than me, showed up to swing. She asked if I’d wet myself and I lied and said no, because I knew I was too big to pee my pants and I felt such shame about it. She left a little while later and still my mother never came. I was way too little to know my way home, or even understand the fact that I only lived a couple of blocks from the park.

Finally, I knew my mother had forgotten me and it was up to me to get home. I wasn’t allowed to cross the street alone, but I felt I had no choice. I watched my left foot poised to step off the curb and into the street. At that moment, I heard my mom’s voice say, “That’s the wrong way.” I turned around, and there was my mom standing with her hands on the stroller containing my baby sister.

Up until now, I’d done my best to be a big girl and not cry, but at the sight of my mother I ran to her while hysterically sobbing. I was relieved beyond words. I choked out, “You forgot me!” She insisted she hadn’t forgotten me, and to calm down because she was there now, and we could go home. But she had forgotten me, and it seemed so wrong that she would say she hadn’t, when we both knew this wasn’t true. Had she come a couple of minutes later, I would have already been wandering the neighborhood in the opposite direction of my house, and who knows when she would have found me?

Now, as I lie in bed, remembering this episode, I could understand it better as an adult. My mother was a good, patient mother, and she worked full time in the evenings while taking care of me and my younger sister during the day. She never got enough sleep, and she still managed to make our family three meals a day. She was tired all the time and had arranged an evening work schedule so that when my father came home from his day job, she could immediately leave for her night job. This way, we weren’t left with babysitters.

As an adult, lying in bed that evening, I reasoned she had maybe fallen asleep, or had been so caught up with the baby that the time slipped her mind. Either way, I felt compassion for my young mother and sent forgiveness to her and to my own young self. I drifted off to a sound sleep.

In the morning, I got up to prepare for work. As I slid my feet from under the sheets and put them on the floor, I thought, “Oh, I should look at the lump on my foot and see if it shrunk.” I sleepily glanced at my foot and…it hadn’t shrunk. It had completely disappeared! The huge lump on my foot was amazingly just gone, as if it had never existed. I reeled from shock. I thought, oh maybe I’m looking at the wrong foot, but with my feet side by side to each other, they were both perfect, with no lumps, no cysts, nothing wrong at all. I remember laughing out loud and being amazed that the technique actually worked.

All my coworkers that day were amazed. They’d seen the giant lump yesterday, and now today it was gone. When they asked what happened, I explained what I’d done but none of them believed me. My ex-husband marveled at the miracle of it, and my parents were flabbergasted. My children were also shocked. My mother remembered that day so long ago when I’d been left at the park and said she hadn’t forgotten me, she’d been trapped on the phone with someone and didn’t know how to get off. She said she was horrified to finally get to the park and find me ready to walk off in the opposite direction of our home. I’m sure her forced calm demeanor that day was because she herself was somewhat panicked by what could have happened to me.

You might wonder why a traumatic memory from early childhood would suddenly manifest itself forty-five years later. Well, just as my three-year-old self was trying to be brave and step into the forbidden street to find my way home, I was now going to have to learn how to live on my own without a husband to support me, and I was moving off to a foreign country where I was truly bad at speaking the language. A lot of change was happening and I needed to just put my foot forward and take that risk. But I needed to be brave. No one was going to help me through this.

Our bodies and our cells don’t forget emotions, and if we suppress them they’ll manifest later to get our attention. Years have passed since that giant lump formed on my foot, and it’s never returned. I healed it overnight, with forgiveness and grace.