Memoir As Medicine: The Healing Power Of Writing Your Messy, Imperfect, Unruly (But Gorgeously Yours) Life Story

Recently, Synchrodestiny grabbed me. Just as I was getting off the phone with Esalen Institute to plan my first post-pandemic five-day Sacred Medicine workshop at Esalen in April and a month-long Burnout Rehabilitation For Health Care Workers & Therapists (in the fall), my phone rang. Nancy Slonim Aronie was my first Esalen teacher. She is the one I wrote about in The Anatomy of a Calling. I also owe her the Writing From The Heart workshop, which I believe helped me become a writer in 2007 after I had just recovered from the horrors of my Perfect Storm.

Nancy wanted to share a story with me about how she got a book contract for Memoir As Medicine. She said that I was responsible because a client of mine, who had heard about Nancy through me, introduced her to the publisher, who then gave her a deal. She thanked me by inviting me to her Martha’s Vineyard retreat center. I replied, “How’s next Tuesday span>

I just so happened to be flying to Boston to celebrate a friend’s birthday two days later. We could both visit Martha’s Vineyard together. She was thrilled. A little over a week later, Nancy was there with me, reading the galley copy her new book Memoir As Medicine. It launched yesterday!

One of the prompts in the book was helpful to me while I was there. I’d like to share it with all of you, and encourage you to use the prompt as well to have some fun with your own creative muse! Here’s mine. What’s yours?

WRITING QUESTION: Give a vivid description so that we can experience — with as many senses — what you are talking about.

Our hosts had invited us to bring Jeff’s favorite treats to Martha’s Vineyard from their local Jewish deli. We had already taken the ferry there the day before. While our hosts prepared breakfast in their artistically decorated cottage, which was lit by stained glass windows and decorated using the MacGyver inventions Joel and the quirky creations friends made, they talked about the whole smoked whitefish that was in the deli booty.

“We should remove the bones from the whitefish so that it is easy to eat.”

“No, they should keep it on the bone in one piece so that they can see the beauty of the plate.”

“Oh. My. God. It is so large it could as easily be Moby Dick! This is the smallest fish they ever had. How will we ever eat all this ?”?

I went in for a cup of coffee, then wandered out to the guesthouse.

The decision was made by the time breakfast was served. The whole whitefish was cut in half, but the scales and gills were still as sharp as a pen and ink drawing. It was so beautiful that I wanted to take a picture of it. However, it was too shy to do so after listening to their conversation. We were staying in a guest house, sharing a cottage, but not a bed. I had already told Jeff that he was folding the blankets on his sofa to comment on how beautiful it looked all together.

We sat around the coffee table, our bagels stuffed with lox, fresh tomato and sliced red onions, with steaming coffee in our hands. Because I am allergic and cats love it if you work hard to get, I was forced to sit in a circle around the coffee table. The cats then jumped into every chair I could place before I got down so I finally got up on the floor.

We took turns being the creative center of our own creativity, inspired by Shiloh Sophia’s “Cafe Time”, bohemian ritual. Shiloh says Cafe Time has very strict “DO’s and “DON’T’s.” Do choose something that will delight, inspire, stimulate, incite self inquiry, provoke, overload, or overwhelm someone with pleasure. This is a throwback from a French salon filled with music, art or poetry or scholarly discussion. Talk about politics, money and work with your therapist. Do seduce your audience but don’t actively instigate sex (although that’s fine if it’s an aftereffect of all the creative stimulation). DO plan ahead. Perhaps even the night before. Teasing your audience with Cafe Time treats, and searching throughout the day for the best Cafe Time desserts, is a good idea. Don’t give it away too soon. It should be allowed to marinate like flirting or foreplay. This will elicit anticipation for the future.

Nancy read her heartbreaking memoir about her nine-year-old son, who was diagnosed at nine months with juvenile diabetes and multiple sclerosis. We were so completely transported into the underground jungle of the Connecticut shaman that Dan, her wheelchair-bound son, couldn’t climb the stairs. Jeff’s forehead was awash with tropical sweat beads. Knowing Dan’s death, I knew that this story would not have a traditional happy ending. It was not complete with a shamanic miracle. It wasn’t until Nancy read her story that I realized Nancy had also experienced a miracle. Although Dan was unable to walk due to the smoke, the shaman blew smoke on his legs. But Nancy, with her croaky voice, and tears that looked like ice melting around her heart, explained that Nancy had learned to run that day. She had been freed from the burden of her mother’s need to save her son.

Nancy was reading while I watched Joel, her husband for many decades, caress the second cat and watches Nancy with the most gentle gaze. I felt a pang in my stomach and wished that a man would look at me like that. Joel knew the story, but listened attentively as if it were all new to him. The conversation grew into a discussion about women and their tears and how men respond to them. Nancy suggested that Joel wasn’t able to comfort her when she was crying.

span style=”font weight: 400 ;”>” But they come so often!” He exclaimed, and all of us laughed.

His eyes were clear and he was not giving Nancy the hug she might want. He found a way to attend to her many tears by inventing and mass-producing a gyroscopic, round tissue box that rocked and never tipped over. This was something that only an inventor who had a wife who cried a lot would think of. Joel’s Cafe Time shared had occurred the night before – with the toroidal smoking gun that blew perfect round rings of nontoxic, white smoke much like an opium-smoking caterpillar holding an Alice in Wonderland hookah. We had much fun oohing and ahhinging over the beautiful poofs that floated in the air like a ceremonial pipe.

I felt an unwarranted surge of pride as Jeff read from his book. I felt like I was claiming credit for his intelligence, discipline, sensitivity and hard work. I had already read his book many times so I was less focused on the contents of his story than the strange energy between us. The magnetic pull that pulled me closer to his body, and the stronger invisible forcefield that repelled and pushed me away, were the things I was paying attention to. I wanted to grab his hand, but he refused. I felt a surge of gratitude for the fact that we were all in the same room, with the scent of last night’s wood smoke still lingering. It was as if Joel’s smoke signal gun and the shaman smoke were tying us together with invisible threads I hoped would stay. After my divorce and the loss of my parents, I miss being part of a loving family. It was almost as if we were one.

It was my turn to show my appreciation for the teacher who had largely given me my writing voice on an unabashed love platter. I thought back to Esalen 15 years ago, when I was her lost, insecure, heartbroken and grieving student. Writing a book that would be published was a long-term goal of mine back then. This was well after all the rejection letters, many of which were tequila-soaked and I would burn and toss into the ocean. Nancy was a great supporter of my writing voice. Over the years, Nancy was always there to remind me of when I wrote a sentence. I realized that I didn’t include the reader in the emotion I felt too ashamed to share. I remember how Nancy called me just a week before to tell me about the story of how her roots and wings at Esalen had brought me back to her book deal for Memoir As Medicine.

Nancy’s gift to me many years ago was medicine indeed. It wasn’t Nancy. Joel reached out to me, a part of me that was still searching for a father after my father’s death a year before I arrived at Esalen. After believing that medicine was my calling all my life, I quit my job as an obstetrician to become a mother. It was as if the part in me that made me a doctor to finally get attention from my father had also died. It took me only nine months to do it (nine months for OB/GYN). It took me nine months to realize that you can leave your job, but not your calling. I hadn’t made a mistake in becoming a doctor. I had not found the right medicine. The real medicine was found in the circle of backjacks that consisted 16 people who validated, believed, attuned to, empathized with, and shared their heart-melting trauma stories. Nancy and Joel had given it back to me, and I will never forget how profoundly changed I felt that week at Esalen.

It was not important what story I chose to share at Cafe Time. More striking was the fact that Nancy gave me the confidence to believe my story matters, that I mattered to others, and that people will one day pay attention to what I have to say and how it is said, so maybe I can make a living writing. The same conclusion Jeff and Nancy reached in their books, and mine was mine, was that stories about ourselves, our true selves, are the basis of what makes us miracle-prone.

We continued to enjoy Cafe Time, wondering why innocent people must suffer terrible tragedies. We laughed at Stephen Colbert’s mocking of President Biden’s State of the Union speech and felt the uncertainty in our stomachs as we wondered if we were going into World War III. My mother, who had come to this exact place to write retreat, Dan, who had railed against the furies but finally let go, Jeff’s father, who just passed away a month before, and left behind the memories of the club with which he had beat Jeff and his brother. I also felt the ghosts Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., and Frederick Douglass, Civil Rights activists, whom Jeff was studying as he tried to understand the morality of nonviolent activism against violent bullies, right as Russia invaded Ukraine. They created a tapestry that incorporated the conflict-avoidant sides of us all, who wanted peace and unity. Then they polarized the parts that wanted Putin to be crushed and punished for his unprovoked violence towards innocent Ukrainians. Although I knew that the outer wars wouldn’t stop until we stopped fighting inside and neglecting our hurt inner children, I felt powerless to stop mass suffering. Jeff and I tried to find miraculous cures for our suffering, but maybe some of it is too severe to be fixed. We can only carry on the wings compassion.

My second cup of coffee was running out and I could feel my old self, the one who took my coffee into the wood-paneled workshop at Esalen. There were hummingbirds outside, circling the windows, as if jealous that they missed all the love in that space. Although there weren’t any hummingbirds in wintertime on Martha’s Vineyard the rising sun dancing through the stained glass window above Jeff looked like fairies of light. The light show was captivating, but I also felt something odd in my body.

I could feel the pulse in me that I knew, the thump in my chest that Nancy’s student had suggested I felt after Nancy suggested I visit the energy vortex in the redwoods. This sounded strangely “woo” to my science-loving, mystery-fearing brain. The moment I felt the pulse was when I was standing on the bridge and my hands were on the railing. Boom boom boom. It was steady and rhythmic, and I recorded it. Fifty beats/minute, which is about twenty beats/minute slower than my heartbeat. It was what? What was the heartbeat of redwoods? The vortex itself? The overhead power lines?

It took me many years to realize that this pulse was the coherent energy field’s pulse. If we were to be placed on a monitor, I would suspect that the four of us would have synchronized our heart rates and brain waves in the same way a choir sings together or a drummer circle does. Shiloh might have been onto something. Cafe Time was more than a way to begin the day with joy. Cafe Time may have been a form of energy healing, one that connected people who were surrounded by a vortex full of creativity, flow and love.

span style=”font weight: 400 I’ll be teaching a Memoir As Medicine class with Nancy Aronie on Zoom for those who are working on memoirs, or want to start one soon. You can still access the recordings from Healing With the Muse if you sign up now.

Order Nancy’s Memoir As Medicine here.

Join Healing with The Muse To join us for our next session, or to view all past archives including Nancy Aronie starting this week!

Order my “memoir-as-medicine” book Sacred Medicine now.