Episode 39: Discovering The Beauty Within Healing

Beauty is a profound teacher. Inspiration is an equally profound teacher. Without beauty and inspiration and the joy and light those two bring into your healing journey, you risk traversing a very raw path that spurs no incentive to keep going. In today’s show, I’ll delve into the importance of giving yourself plenty of grace, joy and laughter as you continue on your healing path. I’ll also share three inspiring true stories that shine a big light on how allowing beauty into your life can change everything when you are struggling and need to be inspired. 

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Transcript

Welcome to Episode 39: Today’s topic is: “Discovering The Beauty Within Healing”

Today’s show is about the unexpected beauty and inspiration that often erupts within one’s healing journey. We get so mired in the heaviness of whatever we’re going through and it often prevents us from being able to see the magnificence and brilliance within the human spirit that’s always been there but either has never had a chance to flourish or one was simply so engrossed in the dark parts of what their healing required, that they simply didn’t see it. Or perhaps, beauty was never considered to be important, even prior to becoming ill. 

Beauty is a profound teacher. Inspiration is an equally profound teacher. Without beauty and inspiration and the joy and light those two bring into your journey, you risk traversing a very raw path that spurs no incentive to keep going. And I’m well aware of how the lack of beauty and inspiration create what I would describe as a stern, somber and often bleak experience. 

I grew up around a lot of people in the alternative health field who, while having a lot of knowledge about health and how to live to a ripe old age, were not what I would describe as happy or joyful. They were very rigid, very regimented in their lifestyle, their diet, and so on. And their home life was also very spare and lacking in aesthetic beauty. Everything they purchased was practical and useful and utilitarian. They didn’t smile a lot and I’m not sure I ever heard any of them laugh. Yes, they knew how to work with you on a diet that would heal your body. But they forgot that the mind and the emotions played an equal role in maintaining one’s physical body. Leaving joy and beauty and lightness out of the equation, from what I observed, created a very miserable person. These individuals never came from their heart. Only their heads. And believe me, it showed. It wasn’t so much about ego as it was about fervent righteousness regarding their strict protocols. Like the vibe of 15th Century religious righteousness. And a dose of persecution if you didn’t follow what they instructed you to do to the letter. 

These were not comforting healers and alternative doctors. These were people who treated everyone like something to be diagnosed and treated and along the way, given ridiculously restrictive diets, exercise regimens and more that felt like a boot camp instead of a healing experience. This was the world I grew up around so I can absolutely speak to it and tell everyone how brutal many of these healers and doctors were. 

When I got into my twenties, I began to slightly reject this harsh belief system that had been foisted upon myself and many other, even though I had to deal with these types of healers and doctors on a somewhat regular basis, as they were in the gravitational pull of my extended family. I never resonated with them. I disliked their coldness and always abrupt replies when you made the mistake of telling them how you felt. Feelings, like beauty, were inconsequential to them. However, I know I absorbed some of their dogmatic behavior and often while designing my own nutritional programs and lifestyles for clients as I used to do, I unfortunately generated that same “mission centered” attitude that didn’t leave a whole lot of space for appreciating or taking time to see the beauty that was always around but never soaked in because we had a task to accomplish. 

It wasn’t until I learned about the effects of trauma and began to heal my own trauma, did I start to understand that the healers I grew up around who followed this strict, rigid, utilitarian mindset were actually terribly traumatized individuals. Some of them were well educated but so what? Having a whole lot of degrees doesn’t mean you don’t have a whole lot of unhealed trauma. And as I thought more about it and thought back to the often stern and unforgiving nature these people carried, they were in fact, projecting their unhealed trauma onto their patients through their never-ending dictates and warnings and fear-mongering that often created a lot of unnecessary emotional upheaval in the people they were treating, including myself. 

And I didn’t really get to have a strong, opposing point of view to this cold hearted healing method until I got to meet a reasonable, measured, moderate alternative physician who wasn’t judging my every move. This guy was laid back and it was odd to me at first but he was also very knowledgeable. He wasn’t telling me that if I didn’t do exactly as he instructed, that I was going to die…or worse. In fact, this doctor wrote a prescription for me on his pad one day that said, “Go for a walk, play, have fun, gaze at the sunset.” I thought he was being sarcastic, and I handed the script back to him and he pushed it back to me. And he said, “Do you want to know what I eat for lunch every day?” And he told me he ate a healthy salad with a little protein in it and lemon and olive oil dressing. But before he ate his meal, he always ordered and ate a piece of carrot cake. “Why?” I asked him. And he said, “Because you never know if you’re going to live to see the end of the meal. And I don’t want to die without eating a piece of carrot cake.” I loved that. How refreshing. I’d never met anyone like that in my life. Someone who appreciated health and wellbeing but didn’t take it to extremes and forget that without joy or fulfillment, in whatever that means to you individually, what was the point of this life that was often suspended in a lot of difficulty. 

And as I continued to wake up and totally rebuff this rigid mindset I’d grown up around, two things happened. I began to have a perspective that countered what I had been told to believe. I saw that a lot of what these strident healers demanded of all of their patients, was actually not a good choice for “everyone” as they always put it. Not everyone needed to follow these strict dictates the way they demanded. Not everyone was unable to digest dairy. Not everyone had a problem with wheat. Not everyone should be a vegetarian. Not everyone should avoid coffee. Sometimes, in critical moments, an antibiotic was necessary followed by probiotics to rebuild the gut flora. You were going to be okay. Nobody was going to die from eating ‘the wrong food’ once in a while. And yes, you could actually drink a root beer and not “destroy your progress”. The message of “everything is critical and if you don’t follow this, something absolutely catastrophic is going to happen to you” was beginning to be seen by me as a faulty belief system that I had bought into. 

The second thing I noticed that was more important than anything else, was that none of these people as they got older – because I observed them for over twenty years after I left California – none of them were happy. None of them had a minutia of contentment in their soul. As they all aged, they became increasingly harsh, unwilling to hear any ideas that countered their extreme healing and health viewpoints many of which could now be easily proven incorrect if they would have agreed to climb down off their very high horse and read the updated studies. But they would claim the studies were faulty without even reading them. Even hundreds of studies done within the alternative healing movement. Such as coffee is an antioxidant and when used in moderation, is a good thing. They would not ever allow themselves to be flexible within their mind, their heart, their body and so on. And thus, without that flexible mindset, they became rigid in their body and in their mind and that godawful stern, unforgiving mentality, destroyed them as they grew older. And by the time they were in their sixties and seventies, and older and had reached this point in their life that they had all touted as their ultimate goal. Live to be in your nineties, following a lifestyle that was nothing short of joy-sucking. You’re 95 and your miserable. Congratulations! They were always scrawny and angry and depressing to be around. And everyone who had to deal with them or work for them, was also miserable. But in their mind, they had achieved something. Because in their mind, I learned as I would talk to them when I was an adult, that the concept of happiness, joy, contentment and beauty were not values that they ever subscribed to. Ever. When I realized that and that reality sunk in for me, that was a moment in my life when everything started to shift. And I began to pull away from this insane strict mindset and allow myself some grace. 

So on today’s show, I want to reflect on three separate stories that I feel are indicative of how beauty and certainly inspiration play a huge role in giving someone the will to continue or generate a new perspective that is carried forward and impacts their healing journey forever.

I’ll start with the first story which I’ll call “Dahlias”. 

            It was the Fall of 2019 and I was doing somewhat better in my healing journey but I still had a long way to go. For over three years at that point, I’d been hyper focused on my physical and mental wellbeing and the idea of beauty in any sort of way was not on my to do list. Now I always loved to garden and grow lots of different things. But I was also one of those very practical people who only grew what I felt we needed for food or herbs. For whatever reason back then, I didn’t want to take the time to plant anything that wasn’t useable. So one day when a bulb catalog somehow ended up in our mailbox, I added it to the pile of junk mail to toss. But my husband saw it and started to check out the offerings inside. After showing me multiple colorful photos of dahlias, a flower I had absolutely no experience with nor any interest to grow, he said, “We should set aside part of the raised beds and plant dahlia bulbs.” I regarded his comment in a confused gaze. “Why would I waste space on flowers when we could grow more squash or tomatoes in that area?” He opened the catalog to the centerfold which was a very bright red dahlia and said, “Because they are beautiful.” I just shook my head and walked away. 

             About a week later, I was sitting in my functional medicine doctor’s office, pouring over my blood test results and feeling somewhat relieved that the numbers were better but still not anywhere close to where I needed to be. I felt deflated and I knew she could tell. “Where’s the beauty in your life?” she said out of nowhere. I had no idea how to answer that question. She then said, “I think you need to inject some beauty in your life.” I asked her if she had been talking to my husband and I told her about his strange idea to order a bunch of dahlia bulbs for the following spring’s planting. And I remember saying, “Can you imagine wasting money on dahlia bulbs. He wants to dedicate part of a raised bed to flowers.”  She smiled and said, “I think that sounds great! Why don’t you want to do it?” “Because you can’t eat them. You just look at them.” “Oh,” she said, “well, they are gorgeous, especially as they bloom. Give it a shot. I’d do it,” she said.

            My entire drive home, all I thought about was dahlias. And then my mind went where it always went back then. How can I take something minor and turn it into a stunning showpiece? By the time I got home, I’d designed an intricate tapestry of dahlias that I would create, with my husband’s help, of course. Red dahlias on the outside, graduated into an orange and then yellow motif and in the center…ah, in the center, vibrant purple. Yes, yes, yes, this was going to be a complex layout and it was going to stress me out, but back then, complicating my life unnecessarily was one of my many talents. And as far as I was concerned at that time, creating beauty had a price and that price was rigid authoritarian plans that had to be done exactly as I felt they should be done. 

            I grabbed that catalog out of the junk mail pile and poured over it for days. And during that time, I absolutely made sure to purchase twice the amount we could fit into the raised bed and sacrifice a few feet of squash. Because when I go all in, I go all in. 

            That entire winter I re-designed that garden bed at least eight times. I loved the uniformity of the colors and how everything would be in its exact spot as I designated it to be. Because the way I believed back then, beauty needed to be managed and calculated and stressed over. And I knew when those bulbs showed up in mid-May because that’s when it was warm enough to plant them, I would be able to see my vision realized. 

            But in early April, a large box was delivered and it was my dahlia bulbs. No, no, no. I thought. It’s too early to put them in ground. There was still plenty of snow. My husband assured me to keep the box closed and we’d store it in the garage in a safe, temperature-controlled spot where they wouldn’t sprout and we’d be fine. I agreed. What choice did I have? Meanwhile, I added more complexity to my raised bed design. 

            Finally, seven long weeks later, it was time to plant. Seven weeks that I’d put even more thought into my design. But when I went into the garage to bring the box out to the garden, my heart dropped. In the corner of the box, was a hole and outside of that hole was the scattered remnants of the bags that held my precious bulbs. I brought the large box outside and cut it open and as I pulled up one bag after another, the bulbs fell out willy-nilly, and there was no way to identify them any longer because the family of mice had eaten all the tags on the bags so I had no clue what was what. And about one-third of the bulbs were completely destroyed by the mice. I sat there in the driveway utterly heartbroken. There was no way I could now create my intricate, complex, tapestry of beauty I had been designing and redesigning for six long months. What was the point? My husband assured me that this was not the end of the world even though I was not in agreement. He said, well, we can still plant what the mice didn’t eat and see what shows up. See what shows up, I thought. What’s the point? My vision of strategic, rigid, inflexible beauty had been taken from me. So, we shoved a bunch of bulbs in the soil willy-nilly and I exhaled miserably after each one went in the ground. My husband insisted plugging a few of the half-eaten ones in the ground just to see what would happen. I just shook my head in defeat. Sure, throw the mutants in, I said cursing the mice. Let’s make sure we have some deformed dahlias in the mix. There’s some “beauty” for you. 

            So I watered them and waited for something to show up. Three weeks past and they finally sprouted. But I’d lost interest by that point. I couldn’t get past the idea that MY vision of beauty had been stolen from me. MY vision and control of the design and form had been ripped from me because a bunch of mice needed to build a nest. Yes, it was a dramatic response, but I tended to lean in that direction back then. 

            By this time, it was the first week of June and I didn’t realize it was going to take another two months because of our high-altitude zone to see the first flower. But I keep watering and praised the squash and the tomatoes and the other practical plants in my garden for making up for my perceived loss.

            And then one day, early August, I spotted a single dahlia beginning to bloom. I called out to my husband and told him to come over. I think it’s one of the red ones, I stated. No, he said. I think it’s purple. It’s red, I insisted. So we placed a bet of twenty-five cents on it. And now that there was money riding on it, I had a horse in this race. And every day I’d walk out there to see the progress on this very slow blooming dahlia. But then it showed itself. And it was pink. I didn’t order any pink ones! But I kept looking at it and as it continued to bloom, it was….extraordinary. It was pink on the outside petals and bright yellow in the center. And because it was the only dahlia that was blooming, I had plenty of time to study it and watch it unfold as it came into its own. And I became completely entranced by this single breathtaking flower. And when it reached its zenith, I cut it and put into a little vase and set it on my bedside table. And every morning when I woke up, it was the first thing I saw. And I’d lie there and just stare at it, truly captivated by the shades of color that traced across it. 

            One by one, more of them bloomed. And each time, we’d place our twenty-five bets on what color it would turn into. And as August became September that year, I eagerly waited for each flower to unfold. And every single time, it was like magic to me. The beauty in each one was unique and I became one of those women who cut bunches of flowers and arranged them in vases and placed them all over the house. I’d never done that in my life. And I started taking photos of dahlias every day. Dahlias in the garden. Dahlias in vases. Dahlias against a bluebird sky backdrop. I was obsessed. And that’s when I fell in love with the beauty of dahlias. Not some intricate, tapestry I wanted to force them into. Not some regimented design that I needed to control. Just the singular, captivating unique beauty of each one. Even the mutants were unique. What they lacked in height, they made up for in a spray of vibrant color that basically said, “I’m still going to bloom regardless of what is expected of me.” And from that year on, every fall I look forward to that catalog and I buy my favorites and always some I’ve never grown. And I always make sure to buy a couple mystery bags of dahlia bulbs because it reminds me that being surprised in the outcome is sometimes the best part. And to be honest, it’s those mystery bulbs that I have the most fun with every summer. No order in the garden. No design. Just a blaze of color and beauty that provided me with another great lesson in healing that I never expected. So thank you to those mice. Because if it weren’t for them, I would never have had that lesson and that experience that truly began to change the way I moved forward in my life after that. 

            The next story I’m calling Tunnels Of Light. 

            This occurred 18 months after my Dahlia experience. And I will admit that that experience allowed me to really reduce my need to control outcomes which in turn, helped me to be much more calm in the way I dealt with life and others. By this time, I’d given up my nutritional practice but I still kept in touch several times a year with a few former clients because we’d created a friendship bond beyond me working with them. One day, I got a call from a former client I’ll call “Arthur”, and he said he really needed to talk to me. It was clear that he was seriously struggling. He was 62 years old, the owner of a very successful accounting firm that had been started by his grandfather and he had been told six months prior he had Stage 3 cancer. He had done the chemo and radiation, and it wasn’t working. The cancer had spread and there was nothing that could be done, he said. His wife wanted him to try more invasive conventional therapies, but he wasn’t interested. “I’m a numbers guy,” he said softly, “and I know the odds aren’t in my favor so I’m done.” There was a reluctant sadness in his voice I noted. He was turning his accounting practice over to his eldest son, who “loved numbers”, he said. “Well, he must get it from you,” I said to him. “Not sure about that,” he said quietly. I didn’t understand what he meant so I asked him what he meant. He let out a very long exhausted breath and mumbled, “It’s not important….I just wanted you to know what was going on. And I’m okay with death,” he added. “I can’t wait,” he said, “to see the bright light at the end of the tunnel when I die.” Well, I wasn’t going to hang up at that point. So I did what I could to draw him out more but his voice was so low and really hard to understand at times, I struggled to hear him. Finally, after about five minutes, he paused and then said, “You want to know the truth?” I said, “Sure.” And he proceeded to tell me how much he always hated….truly hated….despised what he did for a living. How, yes, he was good at numbers and yes, he was good at what he did and that yes, it had allowed him to support his family and he was a good provider. But every single day he went into that office, he struggled and felt like a heavy weight was around his neck he couldn’t get away from. He said he felt he had no choice as he was his father’s only son and expected to carry on the family business. Nobody ever asked him if he wanted to do it. Nobody asked him if he had other aspirations. It was just understood, he told me, from the time he was about thirteen that he would one day inherit the accounting business and that was that. “Why didn’t you tell your Dad you didn’t want to do it?” I asked him. He said he had no choice and he did not want to disappoint his father. 

I felt for Arthur. He was a gentle soul and even though we’d only known each other for a few years, I’d always sensed a sadness within him during those times. And I could now feel how that sadness had devoured him whole and how the tentacles of the cancer had strangled his voice and life energy. He'd acquiesced himself to his death in the same way he’d agreed to a life unlived. I didn’t want to end the conversation on a depressing note so I asked him, “If you could have done anything in your life instead of accounting, what would you have done?” He hemmed and hawed for a couple minutes until he finally said, “If I told you, you’d laugh at me.” I said I would absolutely not laugh at him and I wanted to know what it was. He mumbled something but all I could make out was the word “colors.” I asked him to repeat it and he was so embarrassed to utter it again. But he very quietly repeated it. “I’d always wanted to paint watercolors,” he said. He told me he’d even taken an art class in college to fulfill a credit and learned a little about watercolors, but his father always mocked his paintings. “You need to paint watercolors, Arthur,” I stated. Of course, he resisted but I sent him several links to watercolor sets he could buy online and he thanked me and we said goodbye. 

About two weeks past and I got a frantic voicemail from Arthur’s wife. She was certain his cancer had gone to his brain and she sounded completely terrified. I called her back immediately and asked why she thought his brain was being affected. “Well, for starters, he bought himself a very large assortments of…I don’t know how to tell you…watercolors. And so much art paper.” My goodness, I thought. She went on to tell me in hyper dramatic fashion that he’d locked himself in his office and that an easel had just been delivered that day. I smiled to myself but remained the understanding friend. “Why do you think this is a sign of brain cancer?” I asked. “Because,” she said, choked with emotion, “he just keeps painting the same thing over and over. They are everywhere in his office. The same thing. Different colors, but the same theme.” I asked her what the theme was and she couldn’t describe it. Just a lot of color. She asked me to talk to him and, as she put it, try to find out what was “going wrong with him”. 

Oh, I called him for sure. But not to ask what was going ‘wrong’. And he answered and I honestly had never heard him speak so loud before and with such clarity and excitement in his voice. He said he had just finished his fifteenth painting, and he told me about how he couldn’t wait to wake up every morning, lock himself in his office, surrounded by his accounting books and paint all day long. I congratulated him on finally diving into his true passion and we talked for about another ten minutes when he said he wanted to finish that day’s painting before dinner. But before he hung up I asked him what he was painting and he paused for a moment and then said, “Home. I’m painting home.” He said he would have his wife take a photo of him with his artwork and send it to me. 

About two days later, I got an email from his wife with several photos attached. There was Arthur, standing up, skin and bones and smiling like I’d never seen him smile, surrounded by his artwork. And his wife was right. They were identical paintings, except for a few color changes here and there. And they were all, in my opinion, absolutely beautiful. In the body of the email, she said he titled them, “Tunnels of Light.” He was painting ‘home,’ a place he would soon inhabit. He wasn’t crazy. The cancer hadn’t gone to his brain. He had ignited a passion and discovered the beauty that had been longing to be felt and seen through his eyes. 

I talked to him one last time before he died and walked through that tunnel of light and while he couldn’t speak very well, one of the last things he said to me was, “Sometimes life can be so beautiful. You just have to find the light.”

The third and final story today I call “Aunt Dotty.”

When I was thirteen, my parents briefly split up and my mother told me she wanted to divorce my father. She took me out of school one week before summer break and we drove to Northern California where we stayed with a friend of hers while she explored her various options. My life had just gotten somewhat stabilized with another new school and the thought of having to start over, yet again, as I’d already done multiple times was a real gut punch to me. I didn’t have a lot of soft places to fall when I was growing up. Thankfully, I could count on an older family friend and my godmother, Anne, who I got my middle name from. My godmother lived about twenty miles from where my mother and I were staying and after about three weeks of unending turmoil with my mother, I asked if I could go stay with my godmother and she agreed. 

My godmother never had children. She’d been a very successful businesswoman in Los Angeles and retired to Carmel Valley to enjoy the rest of her life. She was always a pragmatic woman, and I appreciated that about her. She had a sturdy quality and I could always count on her to be honest with me. The week I spent with her at that time I will always cherish because I was obviously very emotional given the circumstances of my parents’ marriage and terrified of how my parents divorcing would affect my life. We sat at the kitchen table and over a cup of tea, she said, “I want to tell you something. I know your parents better than anyone. And I know they will never divorce. They can’t live with each other, but they also can’t live withouteach other.” She was right. She was always right. She had a keen way of sitting back and observing people and accurately predicting the truth of a situation and where it would inevitably lead to. So I trusted her words and they gave me solace. But she could see I was still very much torn up inside and consumed with other people’s problems and trying to fix everybody. “You can’t do that,” she warned me. “You have to get up one day and carry on with your life because you only get one life as Laurel and you have to make something out of it. And if you let yourself stew too long, you’ll never be able to do that.” I thought about what she said as we sat there but I still felt a helplessness creep around me. 

And then out of the blue, she said, “Did I ever tell you about Aunt Dotty?” I shook my head. “Aunt Dotty,” she said, was a lady who lived in the neighborhood where she and her family moved to when she was ten years old. She didn’t know anything about Aunt Dotty or her history, except for the story she’d heard that she was about fifty years old and quite unwell. Aunt Dotty sat all day long on her front porch, wearing a drab housecoat, her hair a mess, always with a blanket over her lap, no matter the season. She looked frail, she told me, and tired and always sad. Like the weight of the world was on her shoulders. Whatever illness she had was, as she put it, dragging her under. But my godmother at ten years old felt a kinship with Aunt Dotty for whatever reason and on her walk back and forth to school every day, she always stopped in front of Aunt Dotty’s house and waved at her, said hello, and Aunt Dotty always waved back and nodded to her with a smile. That was the extent of their friendship for the first six months my godmother lived in that neighborhood. 

And then one day, when she arrived in front of her house, Aunt Dotty was not sitting on the porch. When she returned from school, she still wasn’t there. This continued for almost one week until, as my godmother told me, she couldn’t stand it any longer. So she screwed up her courage, walked up Aunt Dotty’s driveway and to the front door and knocked. The door opened and my godmother said she took a step back in a state of shock. Because there was Aunt Dotty and she was standing up. She’d never seen her standing upright and she said she was tall and quite beautiful. She said she looked ten or more years younger. Her hair was freshly styled, and she was wearing makeup. She wore a lovely dress and pretty shoes. My godmother stared at Aunt Dotty and didn’t know what to say. Until finally, she said, “Aunt Dotty. You’re not sitting on the porch anymore. And you look beautiful. What happened?” And Aunt Dotty looked at her and said, “It was time to get up.” 

That’s all for this week. Thank you for choosing to listen to this show. Check out the notes for this episode where you’ll see the links to find me on Instagram and X @laureldewey or thealchemyofnaturalhealing. On all the show notes, I’ve included the companies I support and have helped me in my healing process, so check that out and look for the discount codes. Looking forward to you joining me in two weeks where I’ll talk about the mind/body connections that will shine a new perspective on your healing path and most likely will surprise and maybe even shock some of you. Until then, remember that “Awareness is a demanding mistress. Once she wakes you up, she won’t let you go back to sleep.”