The understanding of Balance

It probably sounds simple to most people. The idea of standing upright without leaning or swaying. Just standing there with your weight evenly dispersed, strong and without waiver.

All of this describes the balance of our body and is something we learn at a very young age without being taught; well we have a little help from gravity. We start to become mobile at as early as 6 months. As soon as we do our first "pull up" we begin to develop our balance and we don't really stop learning after that. The older we get the better our balance becomes and pretty soon we are all running around like little mad beings with a passion for life and happiness!

I find it somewhat strange now when I think back to first riding a bicycle. I had training wheels on this old BMX that my grandpa picked out the trash and fixed up for me. He had welded some homemade training wheels on it and he had patched the tubes in about 100 places so the tires would hold air. The depression era people were kinda frugal. There was a lot to be learned from them.

So I have come along ways since my first bicycle ride. Through out childhood and my early adult life I really felt like I had pretty good balance. I graduated from the BMX to dirt bikes which eventually led to street bikes. I was active in several outdoor sports but preferred snow skiing over all else. My point is that I thought my balance was pretty good.

Learning all over again...

So one fateful day which seems like an eternity ago, (Dec. 31st 2004) I died. Yep that's right, dead. No it wasn't a motorcycle, it was just a plain old automobile that went bouncing down a back country road. Luckily no one was injured, except for me of course. So as short as I can make it, I had a car wreck that ejected me and smashed my pelvic/lower back region leaving me unable to walk.

So this is really where I started to understand balance. My physical balance had always been quite good and now it was quite bad again. To make matters worse, I now had time on my hands which I had never had. What was I going to do with all of this time... Well as it turns out, you do what ever the hell you can to stay out of your own mind.

What do I mean? Well I had never really stopped to look at how I lived my life and what I did in this world. I had just worked labor jobs and when I would get done with one I would go home to another. That is what you do when you are farmer but now it didn't make a damn bit of difference what I did, I couldn't get out of my mind. I had enough drugs in me that I should have been out of my mind. Here is what I was on 6 months after my wreck...

Morphine sulfate (Roxanol)
Morphine sulfate extended-release (MS-Contin)
Oxycodone and Acetaminophen (Percocet)
Gabapentin (Neurontin)
Tramadol (Ultram)
Diazepam (Valium)
Cyclobenzaprine Hcl (Flexeril)
There were various other anti-depressants and things mixed in along the way. I stayed on all these drugs (minus the Roxanol, which is a highly concentrated oral used for extreme breakthrough pain) for the next 9 years...

So back to me trying to get out of my mind. There was a lot of reasons I wanted to stay out of there. I had done a lot of immoral things in my day. I was a pretty avid hunter of wildlife and I had put way to many animals down. We always justify these things to ourselves when we are unaware of the true consequences of our actions. I did what I did when I was younger because I had not known any different. I was a perfectly programmed little sheep just doing what I was told. When most kids my age were getting video game systems, we were getting hog confinements. I was eager and excited to work there because it was one of the first steady paying decent wage that we had seen.

To think back now, I started working there for a salary wage of $13,000 per year. I started my employment in that hell in 1994 and I thought I was making big money. Enough to convince me that I would never have a future where I would go to college. I was going to be a hog farmer, get married, eat pork tenderloins and ice cream and have a whole litter of my own little pigs. This is what happens when you eat to many pork tenderloins and take to many drugs...

For crying out loud Sage, where are you going with this??

Balance... it's not just what keeps us upright. Balance pertains to all aspects of the universe. As it turns out my subtle idea of balance being something that just kept us standing, was a bit short sided. The conscious mind is constantly trying to make sense out of the world around us. To bring into balance what we receive from the subconscious and what we perceive from our surroundings.

So going back to not being able to walk. I had been unaware of a need for balance in my thoughts. I had been slaving away physically which kept the mind occupied but now that physical work was unavailable. Inside my mind began the stories I told to myself of all the reasons that this came to be. Often times a person looks for someone or something to blame for all the things that go wrong in our lives. I discovered that this was true for me as well, at least at this point in the story. I was angry, scared, confused, the list goes on and on.

So I now had to learn the physical balance again with only one leg working and the other more like a giant piece of swinging meat attached to the bottom of my body. It was strange. I had some motor response in my left leg but had sustained so much nerve damage that I had no feeling in 90% of my left leg. On top of that I would tell it to do things and it just wouldn't work. So angry I became. The more frustrated I became the more dependent upon the drugs I became as well. Anything to escape reality.

What actually started to become so difficult was not the physical but the emotional. This is where long drawn out addiction to the drugs became ever so pressing. Every time I would start to get anxiety and start trying to connect with my inner self I would increase the pill count. After a couple grueling years of learning to get around on crutches and learning to find meaning in life, I decided to get a formal education. It was obvious to me at this point that I was not going to go back to labor work so I needed to do something.

I thought that I had come along ways at this point. I was once again upright and was down to one crutch. I had what seemed like a good support base and I was doing more all the time. I had regained more use of my left leg and could actually control it with conscious thought, although I was still unable to stand on it without support. So I began my college life. Learning from a book seemed so foreign to me but was really not that difficult. After all the things I had been through, this education thing seemed pretty straight forward.

I was also starting to branch out a little bit in my physical treatment as well. I knew early on that I should try to wean off of the pharmaceuticals but that just didn't happen. I did start with some acupuncture and chiropractic care. This I believe finally led to me being able to walk without assistance devices. I have a friend who happens to be a chiropractor. He worked on me 4 days a week for many months. Slowly he worked my spine back to a relatively straight line. He would use his thumbs to crush small bone spurs and disfigured areas in pelvis that was still pushing against nerves. Even with the amount of drugs I was taking it was still almost unbearable but it paid off in the end.

So the physical pain sucked but the mental balance at this point was way out there. I was living in a foggy fantasy world. Even at that I managed to make it through nursing school and eventually decided that I would continue on to a graduate degree. At this point my wife and I decided that we were going to make the move to Hawaii. I can not say for sure what prompted the move. I believe we had an ice storm and I had fallen and re injured my back. My left leg immediately went numb and I thought here I go again. It turns out the injury was not bad but that incident led us to believe that maybe we should just live where they didn't have ice storms. Or at least no ice at sea level...

Hawaii here we come!

So after a little discussion and a massive amount of preparations we left for Hawaii. We really had no idea what to expect as we had never even visited the Islands before. This may sound kinda crazy but that's how we roll. At this point in my life I was once again starting to feel like I had pretty good balance. We jumped right in after arriving in Hawaii and within 6 weeks of being there we had started a fresh salsa business that was being sold at the local farmer's market and was well on our way to producing vegetables to be sold and used to make the salsa. I enrolled at the University of Hawaii in there psychology grad dept. It seemed like everything was coming along nicely.

I still had one major problem though. The drugs were becoming harder and harder to live without. I would start withdrawing after about 2 hours without one of my cocktails. I knew this was a problem but I was trying to go to school, work, and do everything I could to help my wife with the salsa business. I was stretched too thin and I was about to lose my balance. Eventually I did and this time it was the hardest one yet.

My back was failing me, my mind had failed me, and on top of that I got the key to a full mental breakdown in the form of a cancer diagnoses. FUCK!!!!! I was a little bit ready to die at this point.

What I had failed to realize this whole entire time was that I had never taken the time to heal. Yes my body had gotten better from the time of the wreck but it had not healed before I began pushing it again. I had refused to ever seek any type of help and now I was at a point where I needed it. I really should have sought help but I chose to go it alone with just my wife, step son, our dog and me.

So began my quest to accept what I had been dealt and try to figure out how to live with it... and now is when balance is more important than ever. The first major step I took was in getting off of the drugs. I had already been trying to taper down over the last 6 months with the help of my pain management doctor (aka drug dealer). I had gotten off Oxycontin at this point and gabapentin. The valium and percocet were next to go and that really only left one major culprit. Tramadol actually turned out to be the worst of them all and it used to be consider a non habit forming replacement for opioids when I started taking it. Here is a link to it. Link So tramadol actually caused me to start having seizures every time I would go over about 18-20 hours without it. At the time I actually thought I was having very lucid nightmares about the car wreck because the seizures always happened at night. It was not until later we realized that when you head is pinned to your back that your body is seizing.

So begins the journey with cannabis.

I had used cannabis here and there for many years but it was never really my thing. I was a drinker when I was young and then after the pill addiction there was nothing that compared. I always felt cannabis actually took away from the high on the pills so I didn't use it that much. Now as I seemed unable to withdrawal from that last pharmaceutical cannabis made sense. Seizing had led to 2 discs bulging in my upper back on top of all else. So I began to use an edible form of cannabis at night before bed and after just 2 more weeks I was finally able to stop my last tram. Then after a few more weeks I ceased using cannabis as well. I was finally free of all drugs for the first time really in my life. I had taken heart meds since I was a kid. I was now off of everything!!!

Sounds great but it really wasn't. I had been about 13 months becoming drug free and now I had a chemically depressed brain that needed my help. I dropped out of college and took up meditation and Tai Chi. I began to read about Reiki and Qigong. There were wealth's of information out there to be had. I just needed to be open and accepting of all that there was, good or bad didn't really matter. They were one in the same. I began to understand that we all stem from the same source and that there were ways of guiding one's own path if you were just willing to accept your small and humble existence. I finally began to understand that when the mind finally comes into balance, it can do amazing things! And when the mind and the body are finally both in balance then we have found what it is to be human. This helped me to finally overcome the imbalance in my emotional and physical connection and allowed me to feel on a level I had never known.

I still live with physical pain every single moment of my existence and yet I have found a way to live in unison with it. I did start using cannabis again as a crutch for the pain. I understand why I use it and what its for and I am OK with that. I feel that it is a wonderful addition to anyone's life if they have diagnosed with cancer. As with everything, I understand that it all has a place and that every one must find what works for them.

I have many many more stories and this one has drawn on long enough... I hope this was worth reading and if you enjoyed please upvote, resteem and all that other good stuff.

Peace,
The Last Sage