HOW I GOT A HANDLE ON MY GRIEF & ANXIETY

Story By: Chris Ann Cravens

One of my earliest memories is when I was about three or four years old. Dad would religiously perform his daily duties, including the forty-hour workweek. My mother tended to take naps and cry a lot when he was at work, and my older sister was at school. I would go into her bedroom when I was done with my nap to find her in bed. She would tell me to play quietly in the living room and that she just needed to rest a bit more.

I had no idea she was depressed. I was too young to understand any of it. I spent a lot of time by myself due to her depression. As a result, I developed my imagination to entertain myself but didn’t have much physical guidance with my body. By default, I began to disconnect my mind and body, which left me uncoordinated and clumsy. As the years passed by, my mother’s health never really improved. She would have times when she felt better but then spiral down again. It started with ulcerative colitis with an ileostomy. Then chronic fatigue, chronic pain, a discectomy, then Crohn’s disease.

Finally, one day, the medical profession developed a term called fibromyalgia. It encompassed many of her symptoms, and they smacked the label on her. It was a relief in her mind. Before that, doctors didn’t believe her or didn’t know how to diagnose her. For her, it was essential to have a diagnosis and not be seen as a hypochondriac.

Later, I would discover the BodyTalkTM system and learn how symptoms and diagnosis can be misleading and not the illness’s root. When I was twenty-eight years old, Mom and Dad drove from the Seattle area to my home in Oregon on Memorial Day weekend. I planned on getting married the next day at home – something small and simple in the backyard. We spent the evening together preparing for the event. Mom stood in the kitchen at bedtime and began taking her medications from the large weekly pillbox she had with her. In the process, she dropped the container and spilled some pills. She picked them back up and continued taking them, then a few minutes later, she said she was heading to bed. I met her in the laundry room and hugged her good night. We said our “I love you’s,” and I told her I was happy she was there. She went to bed.

Later that evening, I was cleaning up the house so I could get some rest too. So I snuck into the guest room and stepped on the end of the foam mattress that she was sleeping on to grab the bath towels and throw them in the washing machine. I remember pausing for a moment, feeling a strange feeling in my gut, and feeling as though things would make more sense in the morning.

I continued my evening duties and went up to the guest room’s attic space to dig around in some boxes for some table cloths and decorations to use the next day. Strangely, I stopped everything I
was doing and sat down on a box. I opened my mouth, and out came the words, “Tomorrow isn’t going to go as you planned, and you are just going to have to accept that.” That was it. I remember thinking it was odd and wondered why I said that. Then, I stood up, continued my process, and went to bed.

The next morning I jumped out of bed early to mow the lawn, and Dad went across the street to play ball with my future step-son. I was just putting the lawnmower into the shed when I heard Dad calling me, “Chrissy!” He shouted in a shaky voice – he hadn’t called me that since childhood. “Chrissy!” My heart dropped into my stomach. I ran into the house, saying, “No! No! No!” Deep down, I knew the pain in my father’s voice. My heart was screaming already. I entered the house, and I could see him in the bedroom over her. He told me to call 911, so I did. When a dispatcher answered the phone, I told her my mother was dead. Said to have Dad do CPR – I told her she was stiff and blue, and it was too late. They said to have him do it anyway. It was horrible! The CPR was causing vomit to come up. I kept telling them, “She’s already dead! It’s too late!” Finally, they agreed he could stop.

Shortly after hanging up the phone, the paramedics arrived. I had called my sister and was still on the phone with her. She was in bed, sick with the flu. To get the news that Mom had died on top of the discomfort she was already feeling must have been horrible.

Before they took Mom out, I asked for a moment with her. I just had to see her and witness that she had left her body. I had to know that she was no longer there and no longer in pain. I saw her eye-sockets caved in and her face flattened on one side from sleeping on it. It confirmed that there was no life circulating in her anymore. At that moment, I knew for sure she was gone—a moment of closure. I’ve never cried as hard as I did that day and all through the night. You hear stories of wails of grief. Now I know why some describe it that way. It feels as if your heart’s been torn from your chest, and it will never heal.

Later we found out that her heart had stopped shortly after going to bed, an accidental prescription drug overdose. She must have double-dosed when she dropped her pill organizer that evening. Either way, she was too young, only forty-nine years old. At the time of her death, she was ingesting ten different medications doctors had prescribed. Knowing what the world of pharmaceuticals had done to my mother, I was determined to find a healthy life without prescription drugs! I was eager to learn more about how to heal naturally. I wanted to know about ancient traditions to cutting-edge science and how they pertained to a healthy life. I knew there had to be a better way, and I was correct.

I stopped taking pills altogether, even ibuprofen and Tylenol. I would just deal with headaches and pains, even if it meant sleeping. I would later discover that simply hydrating my cells by drinking enough water alleviated many symptoms. The loss of Mom marked a significant point in my new life direction. The relationship with my partner didn’t work out. I was now a changed person. My dreams and priorities needed to rearrange to adapt and heal. So I dropped everything and moved to California by myself. I like to think of it as I needed to go “walkabout” to unravel and decipher the confusion and pain.

So I did.

My quest continued, and so did my grieving. I was still working in food service for the flexibility and started voice and guitar lessons with occasional commercial acting or modeling gigs. It was about diving into creativity to design my new life. Many years went by, and I finally ended up on the table for my first BodyTalk session on a Wednesday in my search for healing. But, unbeknownst to me, this ended up being May twenty-eighth – the seventh anniversary of my mom’s death. A fact I didn’t recognize until later. I was on the practitioner’s table and having a panic attack, nervous, sweating, and anxious. I knew the session I was awaiting was a type of energy work that I understood from Reiki, though I wasn’t sure what to expect.

My practitioner, Myriam, sat down next to me and began using my arm for muscle testing, a bio-feedback form, as she went through the BodyTalk protocol. I don’t remember everything in complete detail, though I do remember this. At one point, she began to say that my lungs were holding grief but that it wasn’t mine. I had been born into an environment of my mother’s intense pain. I took it on as an empath.

Then Myriam began to speak of how our family’s dynamic was when I was a child and that I was holding onto the patterns and belief systems from it. In her Brazilian accent, she searched for English words to describe the feeling she was picking up from my childhood and the family dynamic that she was referencing. That’s when I spoke up and said, “I perfectly understand what you are saying. You don’t need to explain. I can see it and feel it.” It seemed a little cloud or hologram image/feeling hovering over my chest above my heart chakra region, like a projection from the past shown on a movie screen in front of my vision. I felt the feelings of anxiety, panic, and chaos from childhood. The cloud of confusion from my past was strangely clear to me now.

The session also addressed my chronic state of fight or flight – what I call scared rabbit mode. I had spent my entire life feeling like this. My history of fear and anxiety caused my energy circuitry to be overloaded and hardwired into position. It was part of my everyday existence to
be in panic mode.

Having been proactive on my self-help path in addressing my hangups, they seemed to keep resurfacing until that day. After that session, my awareness had expanded in a way that deepened my understanding and allowed me to let go. She applied some techniques to address the grief and pain, which had triggered the chronic fight or flight. Finally, all I had been holding, I could now release. Some gentle tears released from my eyes, and I cried a soft cry, a soothing cry, not a violent cry like I had experienced so much before. By the time the session was complete, I had realized what the date was.

It blew my mind. I ended up on the table on Mom’s death anniversary to address the root issue I held in direct relation to her suffering. It was like my mother had proclaimed. The dysfunction was to stop with her. I had a deep feeling that she was there and guided me to release the things that had caused the dysfunction in my body and life. My sessions with Myriam continued, eventually leading me to start training to become a certified BodyTalk practitioner myself.

My emotional triggers seemed to lighten from then on, and I became more emotionally stable and grounded. When a friend would come to me for emotional support, I was now able to let them cry it out and tell me the story without me getting sucked into it and crying with them. There was now an energetic shield or boundary that helped me determine what energy was mine and theirs. I would later learn about this protective energy layer called Wei Qi in my studies.

Ways to connect with Chris

Author: Chris Ann Cravens
www.MyAntidote.life
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