Gestating in the Bardo

I was driving home with the words “genetic” “off the charts” “high risk” “treatment” “scans” “tests” streaming through my mind. The doctor’s voice playing on repeat, “We have to treat you as if you’ve had a myocardial infarction, but we won’t really know until we take a look at the images.” But somehow my mind also felt very clear, and these are the first five thoughts I had:

1. Wow, my heart broke so badly that a part of it actually died 😅 (It’s good to still be able to laugh in these moments).

2. These past few months, my soul work has been to stay in my soft, sweet heart. Even when it hurts so bad you can’t breathe, even when it’s scary, even when you’re angry…can you stay in your soft, sweet heart? And this felt like another query from the Universe asking, “Even this? Can you, will you, stay in it? Can you love this too?” The answer was, and is, yes.

3. I’m not afraid of dying; I’m afraid of not living.
Dying is sooooo out of my control that it seems like a very silly thing to worry about. Even with my son – if he’s meant to grow up without a mom, that’s not up to me. I can’t save him from that. All I can do is love him, right now. I’m not afraid of dying; I’m afraid of not living. And this thought broke my heart all over again – this is when I felt the gravity and delicacy of everything, and I cried with…

4. Gratitude. I was so grateful for this information. It gave me insight, options, and choices. When my doctor explained a typical trajectory, I felt so grateful to know this now and not find out flat on a gurney someday.

5. (And let me be honest, this was not my fifth thought, but it’s important) Heart dis-ease is the NUMBER ONE killer of WOMEN WORLDWIDE. If you have symptoms, genetic predisposition, intuition, whatever – don’t ignore it. Get the tests, advocate for yourself, do what you need to do. Life is so beautiful and short 🫀

The good news is after some urgent, expensive, and potentially scary tests (including a CT photon cardio scan, which wow, medical tech is wild. Being inside that machine felt like being inside a particle accelerator — the scanner spinning around me rapidly while numerous dyes were being injected into my veins, making my pelvis and neck prickle and burn, and the ridiculously handsome doctor spraying nitroglycerin into my mouth making me dizzy and feel like I was starting to hallucinate, lying there naked on the first day of my period, holding tubes over my head, while the machine talked to me, telling me how to breathe and sliding me back and forth…The whole thing could have been a very kinky fever dream from a Kubrick film)…my heart is okay ❤️‍🩹

But there’s another part to all of this, something no scan was going to pick up on. The energetics of it all. Because see, a part of my heart did die last year. Months and months of dying…ending…allowing…accepting, and now stillness, gestating in the bardo. Before my doctor told me the test results, I knew one thing very, very clearly: no matter what, I can heal my heart. I think that’s what I’ve been doing in the in-between all this time. Healing decades, maybe lifetimes of wounds. It’s been intense. There’s soooo much unfolding, so many lessons, so much becoming clear, so much wonder, receiving, even more allowing, more opening, more love…but sharing too much too soon would be like giving birth prematurely. So patiently swelling and synthesizing until its time…