To Stay or Go

My mom was recently going through old photos and she came across this one. It stopped me in my tracks. I had seen the photo before but it had been some time – years if not decades. For some reason I could not stop looking at the photo  – a lot of emotions came up looking at this. Almost like I wanted to dive into that photo and hold my 2 month old self and tell me she was going to go through a lot of hard things but you’d make it. 

A while ago when I was going through my divorce I had seen this woman who is, according to her website, “An inner child energetic wound healer”. This was so not up my alley at the time.  I was going through such a challenging place in my life that I was willing to be open to anything that would ease the heavy emotional pain I was dealing with.

I remember our first session with my eyes closed but internally rolling them. I way laying on the table thinking to myself, “This is such bullshit.”

She stopped the session and very directly said, “if this is going to work, you need to take this seriously.”

“Fuck.” I immediately tucked away my skepticism and focused on the session. 

After a few minutes, she had asked me about my birth story. She had gone on to say that birth in general was traumatic, but she could see mine had been more traumatic than most.

I told her the story of my birth – where when I was born  was born with a mild case of Saethre-Chotzen syndrome – a byproduct  is having the sutures on my skull fused and not allowing my skull to expand to allow my brain to grow. Boston Children’s didn’t know enough about it so we were referred to New York Children’s Hospital where I had surgery at 6 weeks old.

Shortly after telling this woman this story, she informed me that while I was on the operating table, my soul had to make the decision whether to go or stay and ultimately I made the decision to stay in this life.

I interrupted the woman and said, “It wasn’t a life threatening surgery…”

She stopped me and very directly said again, “Your soul had to make the decision whether to go or stay – and your soul stayed.”

I burst into tears. I’m not even sure why to be honest. If I wanted to think about it on a deeper level, perhaps it was the first time I acknowledged something on a soul level that my physical being had never been conscious of. In retrospect, I feel like this was a very powerful moment for me. It made me look at things in life (this life?) completely differently which is exactly what I needed at that moment in time. To be reminded that I could get through hard things. 

Which could be why this picture struck such a heavy chord with me when I was reintroduced to it – that I went through hard things and I decided to stay.