The Good Fairy

A week or so after I went to see life coach Frank Gjata, my therapist, Sandy Gartin, MA, MFT, (whom I cannot recommend highly enough) read me “The Good Fairy.” It’s by an unknown author. I found it so helpful that I’m reprinting it here; if anyone does know the source, please let me know.

The Good Fairy!

From the corners where the silence remains, there came the urgency to go to a mountaintop and scream out the whole truth. I sent out a prayer to the Universe – “It’s too painful; I can’t take it!” – and she came to me, the power of my mind, the Energy of the universe, in blue like the Good Fairy in the Wizard of Oz, waving a wand.

I sat cross-legged on the floor of my bedroom, looking up, about four years old. She said: “Sweetheart, here’s the deal. There’s too much going on here, and I don’t have the power to make it be gone, to make it be okay, or even to help you cope with it in a way that’s not going to cause you some pain. What I can do, Sweetheart, is help you get through this time now, help you forget it as it is going on. It will come back, but it will come back to you only at a later time, when you’re able to handle it.” So I said: “Okay, because I can’t take it anymore.”

She waved her wand and said: “I am going to send things that are happening into different parts of your body, and they are going to hold them for you like a treasure chest, like a dowry. Your heart, your heart is broken, and I’m going to have to let your rib cage close in around your heart, and let your heart constrict so that you don’t feel the pain of your heart breaking. And I’m going to really tighten up your neck and let it be a fortress with very thick round walls, so that what you’re feeling doesn’t get up to your mouth, and you can’t speak the words. You can’t cry out for help and can’t scream out in rage. And you can’t breathe too deeply to feel what’s going on in your body. And that fortress will keep the knowledge of what’s happening in your body from connecting with your head, so that you will not be fully conscious of what’s going on. And I will tie up your ears, so that you hear but don’t take too much in.”

“I want you to be fairly still as a child and not very athletic, so we don’t interrupt what we’re going to put very carefully in place. And it will stay this way. You will have trouble feeling and being close to people, but it will be your way of surviving. And you, my darling, will be a fairly functional human being in spite of all this pain, because you have a strong mind and you can hold this all in. And I will be helping you. You will not forget everything. You will remember just enough to always know that this happened. And I will leave a voice inside of you that will urge you to reconnect with your whole self, to find this person who you are now, who is calling out for help and whose heart is totally breaking. It may not be clear, this voice! It will manifest as an urge inside of you, but it will be me speaking as I can through your frozen muscles to come back and find yourself.”

“At the right time, maybe your second life cycle, you will begin to open up. It will be a very long process. It may take you as long to heal as you’ve been in pain and in the frozen place. Finally around 40, your muscles will no longer be able to hold all this in. They will begin to give way; you will feel an urgency to do physical work, and that will begin the process of really unwinding your body and releasing what it will have been holding all these years. There will be physical as well as emotional pain in this process. But by then you will be strong enough and old enough to bear the truth, and you will have a network of friends around you, mostly women but some men also, who will hold you, as you find yourself again. As it begins to unwind, you will struggle to relearn the language of your mind/body and come back together wholly. But you will do it, because you are a strong person full of love. I don’t know exactly how it will unfold, but the universe will move you through it. You will have to be very patient, very brave, very courageous, but it will be your training, your firewalk, your healing. And when you are through it, you will be a whole person: new but still the same.”

“Now I want you to go to bed. I will wave my wand, and you will go to sleep, and when you wake up, you will forget I was here. You will forget you asked for help, and you will forget your daily pain. This is the only way I know to get you through this. You are a beautiful child. I don’t know the reasons you have chosen this, but I love you, and the universe loves you, and, in fact, even your parents love you, although they’re incapable of showing it to you. You will have to love yourself enough to heal, so that the last half of your life will be strong and powerful and full of light: the pain will be there, but it will all be in proportion. One day you will have it all again. Until then and for always, I Love You.”

I cried as she read it. (Then again, there wasn’t much that didn’t make me cry in therapy.) I was amazed to find the same message Frank had given me – that will begin the process of really unwinding your body and releasing what it will have been holding all these years. The story resonated with me. I believed that my body had stored up my emotions from childhood, and that now, in my forties, it was time to loosen up and let them out. I paid closer attention to my tendency to tighten up. When I found myself waiting with strangers by the elevator, clutching my purse with both arms, I released my hold and let my arms swing awkwardly. When I found myself sitting with legs crossed, hands tightly clenched under my knees, I relaxed and let my elbows hang loosely at my sides. I took deep breaths more frequently and shook my neck out a little, relinquishing any tension I might be feeling – in my eyes, lower back, legs.

I need to unfreeze all of my muscles so that the old emotions can come out, leaving space for love.