Maryam ... So how Do we heal? Part 3?

One of the women that I teach at The Red Cross, Maryam, called me 10 days ago, almost in tears. She couldn't come to yoga, because of her back. She was in pain and desperate. She had gotten medicine and now was waiting for it to work. I promised to call her back the next day.
Next day ... she picks up the phone sounding like and old woman, Maryam is 55, sobbing she says, that the medicine isn't working, she got some different medicine now and is taking double dose. Ugh, I think, but say nothing.

I say I'll visit her and the next day cycle down to her place in the south part of town called Söder, very appropiately.

Maryam is from Iraq and was tortured by the police for two weeks every day. Then they held her in isolation for several months, before they dumped her in the streets again without an explanation as to why they took her in the first place.
She told me, that they said to her they would kill her and throw her in the garbage as a dead pig, so she might as well tell them everything. "Oh, and I would have loved to, but I knew nothing. I was scared. You can't imagine." No, I can't. I really can't imagine, but my whole body fills with fear at the thought. There is not many things that fill me with fear, but the thought of the inhumanity of torture does.

This was the second time the police had taken her in, and this time when they finally released her, she fled.
Her crime was, that she was Kurd and part of a peaceful organisation working for the rights of Kurds in her country.

The part of town where she lives is a colourful and sometimes more rough neighbourhood than the sheltered part of town where I live. The other day cycling back from teaching at the Red Cross I witnessed a dramatic car-chase, that ended in the rather sad apprehension of two young guys. People watching the scene, judging. Not seeing, that this is us. This is our apprehension. Our imprisonment. Just imagining that those two kids with their hard faces and good looks and collapsed bodies being handled by policemen in bulgy uniforms making them look bigger and stronger ... just imagining that they are my kids. Not evil. Not bad. Just misguided. Anyway ... back to Maryam.

I park my bike and call her. I have to have the key for the frontdoor and she has a system where she lowers the key in a long piece of string from the second floor, I untie the string and take the key. I see her smiling face up there on the balcony.

Maryam is one of those people, that feel like sunshine breaking through the clouds when she comes in the room. She has been my translator at the Red Cross, because she speaks some Swedish, Kurd, Persian and Arabic. She is a gem. She is diligent, when we practice and, like all the women, very enthusiastic and grateful. One of the other women, Iqbal, who speaks very little other than Arabic, after the first yogaclass, she took my hand led it to her breastbone, her face and eyes soft, and said: "I am happy in my heart to have met you." maybe just language, but what language! They don't know what joy they give me.

I come in to her home, that smells of food. Maryam is bent by the pain and walks like an old woman. Her face looks pale and haggard. Her hair sits close to her face, greasy and tired; she hasn't been able to take a bath for a few days.

Now, I have visited Maryam before, where I enjoyed and in some ways suffered from her hospitality. Culture wills that she makes food as though a whole army of hungry men were visiting and it is just me with my birdlike appetite. I had counted on her being too troubled to cook for me this time, but I was wrong.

The chicken and potatoes are simmering on the stove, the littled baked spinach things are in the oven, the cookies, the chocolates and all the other sweet things are ready on the table together with the coffee and the tea. She moans as she makes the journey from the kitchen to the livingroom and back again.

We sit in her sofa, all the food lined up on her glasstable on a red velvet cloth, television is on with an Arabic talkshow. A heavily made up woman with big breasts talking to men, who politely look at her face, not her cleavage. We talk over the background sound of seemingly angry Arabic, rythmically tapping in to our conversation. We eat. I feel I eat too much, Maryam says I eat too little. "There is so much food, and you have scarcely touched it," she says. We laugh at all the food. I hold her hand. She cries. She has noone in Sweden. A friend who lives in the neighbourhood, a brother in Denmark. He's a doctor. Maryan used to work for some kind of ministry, now ... she takes care of her plants and the wounds after the torture. She is full of hatred when ever we talk about muslim culture. All muslim in her eyes is bad. All things muslim. All people muslim.

Anyway ... after having eaten, I clear the table for her, while she protests and follows me around like a worried Jewish grandmother ...

... and then I offer to massage her a little bit, give her a bit of shiatsu to maybe relieve her pain. I promise her nothing.
She lies in her big soft double bed, night gown on, face contracted around the pain. First I ask her to just stay with the breath and to tell me, if my pressure is too painful. Her face begins to relax, and I start connecting to her body. Just touching. Not trying to fix. Just giving it attention. Listening to her pain. I apply pressure to points that I think will help her and then when I get to a point on the leg known as Stomach 36, something happens. There is a look of amazement in her face, and then she breathes deeply, a sigh.

She is lying there on the bed saying: " I can feel it in my back. You are touching my leg, but I feel it in the back. The pain is less." She grows quiet and her face looks peaceful. Something has shifted.

Afterwards she insists on coming with me to the door. And as she gets out of  bed, she is like a child; joyous, silly, giggling. "Look at me," she says, "I can stand upright. The pain is so much less. it's a miracle!" She hugs me and kisses me and I receive all her love. And promise to come back the next day and repeat the "treatment".
"All those doctors, all that medicine couldn't help me. You could. You are a great doctor!", she smiles at me half serious, half joking.

So what happened? I would love to take credit for the transformation, but the important thing is to remember, that healing take place in the body. I don't make her heal. I just encourage her to be present.
So again the whole thing has to do with the opposites of fear and love. If we are afraid, the body tenses, and a whole series of things happen in the brain, in the nervous systems, in the breath, in the whole body, that work against healing. When we start relaxing in to the experience we aid it in not solidifying in the reaction to the pain and thus we help the body heal.
It is naturally for us to heal. The body like all natural systems seek harmony.
But that harmony comes at a cost, we have to listen. We have to meet what goes on wholeheartedly and be willing to connect to the underlying patterns of the pain.

I was as astounded at the very radical and sudden healing of Maryam, and of course it wouldn't always work that miraculously to just touch. But human touch, relationship, love is a healing power, that science has begun to look in to over the past 20-30 years. Maryam trusted me enough to completely relax with my touch and her body responded.

Relationship is many things, but we suffer from a lack of real relationship, of the feeling of being connected, in our society, in our culture. Touching, sharing honestly our depths, having rituals that promote presence and healing, giving of ourselves to others.
We are connected. We can pretend and get wrapped up in the idea of a seperate self, but it is an illusion. Nothing in this universe is separate. Nothing.

I have several mantras these days to help keep me awake:

Pay attention
Practice is giving
It is not about me

I love something Jon Kabatt Zin wrote: "Next time you're in the shower, just check if you're really there."
Are we?

For now, end of story.
Untill next time ... stay in touch