Zen Bender

by Stephanie Krikorian

  All small and insignificant things, save for the surgery, but put them all together and I was getting wiped off the emotional map. I was ill-equipped to handle one of these things on its own, let alone all of them together, and a result, I was choking on the anxiety. I was near catatonic from the stress. Frozen and feeling broken.

  And Erin picked up on this. I would argue that she saved me from a breakdown. By the time I met Erin, I felt, not like I was trudging through mud, but like it had dried up and I was frozen there with it. I was stressed out, having not had acupuncture for months, I couldn’t focus on work, and the mishaps that had plagued me, well, that left everything else clogged up, too. I couldn’t sleep, not well anyway, and I couldn’t shake the ever-deepening rut I felt I was in.

  Reiki is weird. Initially, it feels like nothing has happened. Then you get in your bed that night and you slip into a coma. It’s unexplainable magic. After one in-person session, I contracted Erin to do remote Reiki, which was, apparently, a thing.

  For thirty glorious days, Erin performed daily Reiki on me from afar. She would call every couple of days to share insights and things she had seen, and we would talk through some of the things that I was experiencing.

  Even if you don’t believe this could be real, that I could feel relief from energy shifting in another state, believe this: There’s something affirming and positive about taking a moment to think about how to be calm. It’s comforting and inspiring to have an insightful, empathetic human remind you that stress is bad, and that you are strong, creative, and smart, and can get through the challenges. There’s something nice about having that kind of wellness support.

  That is real.

  And my time with Erin was measured very clearly in hours slept and coherent words written. Undisputable, objective measures of her work.

  And something else crazy happened, too.

  By the time I met Erin, I had turned down the anti-seizure medicine. I had also been gripped by the worst nasal congestion and inability to breathe normally that I had ever experienced.

  Eventually, I asked my general practitioner what she would do if I had a sinus infection or Lyme disease, because maybe the smoke smelling was caused by one of those things coupled with the agonizing congestion. My gut told me my brain was less involved than I had been told.

  My doctor’s answer was three weeks of antibiotics, which I took, and I still smelled smoke. Even more troubling, the congestion got worse. I would go to the beach each day and I grew so congested there that I had to leave. It went on for a full month or more, and I was beginning to think I was looking at my breathing for the rest of my life—that this was the way it was going to be moving forward.

  One random day during my month-of-Erin, she called.

  “What’s going on with your sinuses?” she asked. Come. On. I hadn’t told her anything about my sinus issues or my smoke issue. Yes, I said, they’re making me crazy. She said she’d cleared them during Reiki.

  I thought very little of that conversation that day, because the situation didn’t change. They didn’t clear.

  A few days later, I was sitting on my couch and I was in agony. I thought, Okay, I’m going to have post-nasal drip and green thick snot pouring out of my nose forever. It was dreadful.

  Then Erin called again.

  “Your sinuses are causing you all kinds of problems, aren’t they?”

  “Yes!” I said. It was the understatement of the century.

  She told me she knew this. That she could see it. And that she knew it wasn’t just sinuses, there were other things happening as a result of that congestion. Erin told me she had cleared my sinuses, once again, and that I would get some relief soon.

  I didn’t think much of the latter part of her statement until a few hours later.

  I hung up and, while I felt calm thanks to my month of remote Reiki, I was still resigned to never breathing normally again. About an hour later, I was suddenly and amazingly able to blow my nose fully for the first time in a long, long time. Usually, it just kept coming and wouldn’t clear. Brace yourself or turn down the volume, because this next part is super gross: I gave one last big heavy blow, and from somewhere deep inside my head everything in there came out into that Kleenex, including a large black piece of something that looked to me like brain matter. (Gross, I’m sorry.)

  I was certain I’d blown a piece of my brain out of my nostril.

  But Jesus, Mary, and Joseph: I could suddenly breathe, for the first time in what had felt like forever.

  And I have never smelled smoke again. Ever.

  After my thirty days with Erin, we were doing our closing call when she explained to me that, in that last vision, she saw me under water blowing bubbles, happily, not stressed, and moving through the water with ease. I reminded her of our initial discussion: that she’d seen me jumping off a cliff into water, holding my breath, surviving for as long as I could, as it was the only option I could see. She had forgotten that was how we had started. I was wowed by how poignant it was to bookend my time with her in that way.

  Chapter 13

  When Your Healer Jumps the Shark

  peace

  For years, I swore by the Rainbow Healer, Skype sessions and all. And maybe that was the problem—there was no take-it-with-a-grain-of-salt mentality. I blindly believed. Strange, of course, for someone who had spent a career asking questions.

  I would send struggling friends her way, certain they would leave feeling better. And they did. My friend Gianpaolo went to see her and described his experience: “My body cried.” That was an incredibly accurate way to explain it. The common threads among those who saw her were a rush of inexplicable tears and deep sleep the night that followed a session.

  These were worthwhile benefits in my opinion, and they kept me coming back.

  Then, toward my final couple of visits with her, I noticed a shift in how we worked together. Energy movement was always the reason I visited her. And she did reorganize mine when I saw her, and I always felt a little clearer and calmer when I left.

  But she had also started branching out, almost as though she wanted to expand her business somehow beyond energy work. Suddenly, our sessions felt more like life coaching. And not in a good way.

  In fairness, Amazon used to only sell books. Then the company began to basically rule the world. Companies need to expand and innovate. I get that.

  So, apparently, do healers.

  For me, in my business, the opposite is what drove my increased revenue. At first, when I started writing, I threw spaghetti at a lot of walls to see what stuck, trying various formats and all types of projects. I took on many different kinds of clients. But, ultimately, that left me scattered and stretched thin. When I made the decision to micro-focus on one particular type of writing, with a specific type of client, and to stay in my lane, I started to find my stride. And to thrive.

  It wasn’t just the Rainbow Healer who was trying on new hats, I noticed. Several of my go-to healers were tackling new territory. One started explaining the publishing industry to me; she started coaching me on writing. Um, that’s what people pay me for.

  The Dove was expanding, too. Right around the time of my last visit to the Rainbow Healer, the Dove had invited me to, coincidentally enough, a vision-board-making session at the glorious Soho House in Malibu. I hadn’t made a vision board in a long time, nearly a decade. Harder fixes had eclipsed my vision-boarding.

  The Dove, at this particular vision-board-day event, was set up in an open-air room on the ocean. It was a spectacularly sunny day. I could see how the vision board connected to her intuitive work. Her readings were encouraging, and mostly about the future. The vision board was about making that future materialize, so working on both wasn’t off the mark. She hadn’t suddenly started performing root canals, or anything random like that; she was still on the same road, even if she was in a new lane.

/>   More interesting for me was my reaction to the vision-board process ten years after making my first one. Other than the size of the vision board (this one was about two by three feet), the principles were the same. See it and you can be it. That day, I cut and pasted and visioned as best I could, filling all my space with hundreds of pictures of things I wanted to bring into my life. But my reaction to this particular vision board was startlingly different from my first two early attempts. All the things I had pasted were similar—fancy décor, skinniness, success in some form, home, and a man—but this time, it just felt greedy.

  Sitting there taking in the ocean air, watching the waves hit the sand, the sun on this open deck hot on my face, that alone felt like enough. I was, in many ways, already living my vision board.

  One sunny afternoon that same week, I arrived at the Rainbow Healer’s new location for what would be my final session with her. As she shuffled the Tarot cards, she asked me what I wanted to work on. As usual (almost as if I were sticking to a script), I said, “I’d like to reduce anxiety. I’d like to lose weight. And, of course, my love life.” My personal and oft-inquired-about trifecta. It had become boring, even to me.

  The Rainbow Healer explained that the weight and my love life were intricately linked, but that they shouldn’t have been. It was weird. It didn’t feel like what I was paying her to tell me. And on some level, when she next offered up, in great detail, personal examples of her own struggles with weight and men, I thought maybe we’d gotten too comfortable with each other. And that made her feel comfortable sharing her own woes.

  All while I watched the clock tick away on my time.

  Or, maybe she had just had it with me and could no longer fix me up using her traditional methodology.

  As I sat there, I wanted only to participate in her wacky breathing technique that made me hyperventilate into a daze and have my energy shuffled around because it was supposed to be good for me. I wanted to sleep that night.

  Instead, still focused on dating and weight (as if I wasn’t even sitting there), she said, “Look around, ugly people have boyfriends. So do fat people.” Translation: I had a mental block about dating because in my head I didn’t look the part of a dateable girl (not that I’d once referred to myself as “ugly”).

  The pep talk she gave on the connection between my lack of relationship and my weight was weird. It felt out of bounds, considering that her core competency, as they might say in the corporate world, was moving energy. At the time, I felt irked. Looking back, perhaps she hadn’t changed, but I had. I felt the dating advice was better left to the dating coaches. And in the projecting department, she’d shared the chaos that was her dating and eating life, and let’s just say it didn’t make the cover of Living My Best Life magazine either.

  I wondered if she was dumping her own shit on me. It certainly seemed so. This time, I made a mental note to filter rather than soak up her words. That was a first for me.

  Since that excruciatingly un-healer-like nugget alone wasn’t going to convince me I was worthy of a man even though my pants didn’t always zip up, she prescribed a self-help book that she insisted would clarify it all. Skeptical and annoyed, but still a loyal member of her congregation, I ordered it on Amazon right then and there.

  She went on to say that I probably didn’t do anything special for myself and that was holding me back. “You have to be nice to yourself sometimes. Buy yourself something special.”

  “Well,” I said, “I just bought myself a three-hundred-dollar custom kimono at Open the Kimono on Abbot Kinney. Does that count?”

  She said it sort of did, but that I needed to do things to make myself happy—really take care of myself. (I felt certain that kimono would make me very happy.) Based on nothing, she theorized that I probably wasn’t getting enough joy in my life.

  “Treat yourself once in a while. Have fun.”

  I’d encountered this before: the you-must-be-depriving-yourself-and-that’s-easy-to-fix-by-getting-microdermabrasion-at-Red-Door theory.

  “Here’s the thing,” I said. “My entire life is a treat. It’s nothing but joy. Joy is, basically, abundant. I’m not exactly suffering.”

  I actually surprised myself with those words.

  She didn’t believe me.

  But I did.

  Still, I climbed up on the table and had my energy reorganized, just to be safe.

  That’s Fear Leaving You

  As I was up there on the table, in black this time because I had nothing colorful to wear, I realized I was freezing cold. Shivering, in fact. I told her so and she told me I wasn’t actually cold, that it was fear leaving my body.

  “Fear of what?” I asked.

  “Everything,” she said.

  “Being loved. Finding success. Everything.”

  By this point in my Zen Bender, nearly a decade in, I was starting to be aware of my success and feeling a little more confident in what I was doing. I knew I would never fully embrace that word, success, but I at least felt I was inching toward something. Plus, I could afford to pay this healer two hundred dollars per hour. I was out of the woods in terms of always panicking about surviving on my own (I’d shifted to only part-time panic), and I’d accomplished a lot over the years of running my own business.

  But hey, I’d let her knock the fear out of my body and hope her translation of my vibes was accurate and that I’d wake up fearless the next day.

  Instead, I woke up that night around midnight so violently sick and shivering that my only fear was death.

  I suffered through my discomfort for twenty-four hours, and by the second night was so sick and/or afraid that I worried I was going to have to go to the emergency room. I made it to eight the next morning and went to urgent care instead. There, the doctor prescribed Cipro—an antidote to fear, perhaps? Or, more likely, to the infection he thought I had gotten.

  Days later, recovered and out walking again on a gloriously sunny day, I got to thinking of my most recent session and what I had said to her when she’d told me to treat myself: My entire life has been a treat. I had always tried to be aware that even my bad days were the equivalent of other people’s good days.

  My struggles were real to me but, in the scheme of things, surmountable. The more I let that sink in, the more I realized that I actually did believe to my core that my life was a treat. The simple fact: I didn’t suffer from a fun shortage. I hit speed bumps like everyone else, but I got through. I worked hard, but I enjoyed my work and my off-work time. And the bills always got paid. I got my hair blown out at the Drybar sometimes. Okay, a lot of times. Okay, too many times in a month. Okay, okay, I am a member. I ate at nice restaurants when I felt like it. I had more great friends than I had time for.

  Most important, I drew the longest straw with family.

  And, I didn’t have a brain tumor!

  I drank rosé on the beach almost every day in July and August, watching the most-velvety Hamptons sky and breathing in the salty air while the waves crashed into the sand. I laughed a lot at all of life’s absurdities, and I tried not to let other people get me down. Like anybody and everybody, I suspected I had a crazy streak in me, but frankly, I was the one many of my friends called for advice and help and grounding when they were having a crisis or needed guidance or suggestions. Single deep into my forties? Yes. A desire to be thinner? Of course. But, generally, life was not so shabby.

  A big revelation was forming in my head.

  My walk that day was extra-long, and I eventually made my way out onto the Venice Pier. The sky was perfect, blue and clear. I was listening to the previously prescribed self-help book (I had paid for it, so why not), instead of the Pacific Ocean waves and seagulls circling, learning about eating and why everything to do with weight and body went back to how terrible one’s mother had been to them.

  I stopped in my tracks. Literally. Stopped dead.


  And I said to the author (who probably didn’t hear me): “Fuck you. My mom is awesome.”

  In that instant, all the intense effort I had been putting into fixing myself for the past ten years seemed…dumb.

  And there it was, with the flip of a switch, a thought: Maybe I’m good enough already. Maybe I have been all along.

  I turned the book off, pulled my earbuds out, and instead soaked up the view and my thoughts. I stopped for a while and watched the surfers riding the waves and took in the brightly colored houses that peppered the boardwalk in the distance. I let the beauty seep into me. Permeate my core.

  The air was fresh and my mood was suddenly as bright as the sky. Oddly, I felt peace in that very moment and absolute clarity.

  Had a single nugget from each coach and guru and book given me something to cling to? Had it brought me to that turning point on the pier? Sure. Yes—the project nature of it all, the talking things out, the ideas that made me think, yes. But, I realized, treating self-help as gospel had perhaps been misguided.

  Despite all the promises and pursuits, being better wasn’t what I craved; it was something else altogether. Peace. That was what I really needed. Peace with myself. Peace with my work. Peace with my life. Peace. A cease-fire between me and my urge to fix me. I’d done so much to try to fix what ultimately was probably never truly broken. I had been so consumed by finding the broken parts of my life and the explanations for them that I lost sight of the good parts. I realized, finally, that just like Dorothy with her red shoes, I had perhaps had the answers all along.