Fall 2021 - Team Happy Feet and Taking Steps Towards Healing
Welcome to the first post of my new blog. Yay! My intent is to bring you a new insight each season (there are four of them, after all), each relating to one of the four Classical elements: Earth, Wind, Fire and Water.
Today, for my fall post, I want to talk about mental health and how it connects with a recent, life-changing personal journey of forgiveness. This is an Earth story, about being grounded to it, and how it can heal deep wounds. By sharing my story, I hope to inspire all of you to think more about mental health, its wide-ranging impacts and how it affects all of us.
Mental health is also one of the four basic life elements that underlie my fitness and health philosophy. Here are some surprising statistics that illustrate why it’s so important:
● Each year, one in five Canadians will experience a mental illness or addiction problem.
● By the time Canadians reach 40 years of age, one in two have—or have had—a mental illness.
● People with mental illness and addictions are more likely to die prematurely than the general population. It can cut 10 to 20 years from a person’s life expectancy.
As some of you know, childhood trauma led to an eating disorder that cut my soccer career short and affected me for years. Much of this trauma was related to my mother’s mental illness. And true to the above statistic, it cut her life short. Because of her isolation and other dysfunction, she ignored signs of cancer and chose not to treat it.
When I visited Mom in palliative care, it was the first time we’d spoken in over eight years. I’d had to distance myself to protect my own mental health. Establishing this boundary was one of the hardest decisions I’d ever made.
At her bedside, we laughed together for the first time in perhaps 20 years. I told her how much I loved her. Then, with another laugh, she reminded me of her long-standing wish, upon her death, to have her ashes and a thousand origami cranes dropped on the North Shore Lions. Mom had her playful, whimsical side.
Sadly, she passed shortly after that visit. Losing a parent is never easy. For me, Mom’s death was tangled up in those early dark years. I had scars and trauma, for sure, yet I cherished her and felt a deep loss. I also needed to forgive myself for the distance I’d put between us.
I wanted to honour her wishes about the cranes and Lions. But as you can imagine, it was a highly impractical request.
Discussions with my husband Jon led to an alternative that I knew Mom would like. She’d always loved rocks. They grounded her, in a way. She collected them and gave them as gifts. So we decided to take a selection of rocks, hike to the Lions, and arrange them there as a memoriam.
I mentioned the idea to some friends, and one thing led to another. Soon we had established “Team Happy Feet,” which included Jon, Debbie and Marie, two of my long-time 4 Elements friends, and Devon, an experienced trail guide.
Devon warned us about the difficulty of our trek. So Team Happy Feet met and trained for months leading up to the big day. Just this social interaction, working towards a common goal, provided healing and grounding for me. I took comfort in knowing I would not make the journey alone, and I realized it was the first team I'd been part of since playing soccer. I felt grateful to my mom for leading me to this group.
On the rainy Sunday of September 5, we departed the Cypress Bowl parking lot and headed up the Howe Sound Crest Trail. Our route would take us over three peaks, to the base of the Lions, then down to sea level at Lions Bay.
Sounds easy enough, right? Trust me, it wasn’t. In fact, it may have been the most physically challenging thing I’ve ever done. We covered 25 kilometers in over 12 hours, gaining more than 4,000 feet in elevation. However, we consciously made the hike mindful and purposeful rather than an endurance contest.
As we hiked, I felt Mom’s spirit moving with us. The word “grateful” kept coming to me. Grateful for the friends who hiked with me and never complained, despite their own fatigue and pains. Grateful for my husband’s loving support. Grateful for Devon’s guidance and patience. Grateful for the chance to honor Mom in such a conscious and spiritual way. Grateful for the gorgeous, natural setting where I knew she would feel at home and, I hoped, at peace.
At the base of the West Lion, Team Happy Feet gave me a moment alone. I placed the rocks I’d brought, including a heart-shaped rock with the word “Mom” painted on it, in a snug little spot with a view of the East Lion. And then I cried. I felt a catharsis. I was at peace about her, perhaps for the first time in my life. I felt forgiveness and softness. I felt her presence. She was there, and she was happy.
Then we began the long, difficult traverse down to Lion’s Bay on a ridiculously steep trail strewn with roots and boulders. My knees were talking to me….they hurt in ways I had never felt before which reminded me that the emotional load of this journey was still in my body. There was no choice but to keep descending, so I meditated to manage the knee pain and direct it away. On this day, it saved me. As we continued our descent, the pain diminished, and I felt a corresponding emotional release.
At the same time, I was inspired and light. I realized I had turned a corner in my relationship with my mother. I saw the hike as a metaphorical and spiritual journey, as well as a physical journey. I knew that a beautiful healing process was underway. I felt a flood of forgiveness, both for her and the life she lived, the pain she had caused in my life, and for me, for the pain I had caused her when I so reluctantly had to exercise strong boundaries to protect my own life. I don’t know if she ever understood why I had to do this, but I had to in order to honor my own health and other relationships in my life.
Since that day, I’ve reflected about how to use this journey to help others deal with their own trauma and personal challenges. So much of what I do at 4 Elements concerns mental as well as physical health.
I’ve realized that, while Mom was the source of so much childhood pain, she was also the catalyst that gave me tools to navigate life challenges. She gave me resilience. She helped me think creatively to meet the demands of my career. In essence, the thing that could have destroyed me ended up saving me.
I know that many of you have faced similar challenges in your lives. If you’ve not done so, I urge you to open up about them. Bring them into the light, whether through counseling, sharing with a friend or loved one, or writing about them in a journal. Embark on your own personal journey, your own healing process. Forgive yourself. Forgive others.
We are all in this together.
Miranda
