Josh Scherer from the Mythical Kitchen on Youtube hosts a show all about death, centered around his guest’s last meals. And before you ask, in several courses, my last meal would be carbs and cheese.
- Course 1: The cheese star – Loaded nachos and a cheese tray
- Course 2: The things in bread – breakfast burrito, a Spicy Southwest Chicken Sandwich from McAllisters with extra pickle spears OR a Vespa sandwich from a restaurant in Albuquerque called Il Vicino, and to end with a Michelin star bread course (if you know, you know), and some mussels with a white wine sauce, dipping the leftover bread in the sauce.
- Course 3: The un-bread and cheese – East coast Oysters from several places, and udon noodles with a garlicky bok choy side.
- Course 4: The carbs and dairy dessert course – Banana Pudding with Nila wafers.
At the end of every show, Josh asks the guest a final question, “Are you happy?” Guests have had a range of responses from extremely yes, to I do not know if happiness is the right goal, to nah but that’s OK. Every time I finish an episode I think about my response.
I think I fall into the camp of happiness is not a consistent feeling, just like sadness or anger. But as an overall average of emotions, I strive for that average to be more happiness than anything else. As a girl that has struggled with anxiety for as long as I can remember, happiness has been more difficult. My average emotion is generally worry. It’s been a work in progress to relax enough to feel lots of happiness. This post is my comments on that work towards happiness. It is a celebration of how far I have come and is in no way a recipe for happiness in anyone else!
There were two facets to focus the work; my body and my brain.
BRAIN WORK
Now I cannot go much farther without a shout out to therapy. It has given me so many brain tools, a few of which I will highlight here. I will not talk about the usual ones like meditation, watching your thoughts float away, or naming things to see, hear and smell in the present moment. But know I also use those tools from time to time. Anxiety and stress have been at the helm of many of my years as a human. It is hard to be happy when there is a persistent fear of fucking it all up!
Connecting to positive memories, like really getting all 5 senses back to those moments does some really positive things to me in connecting with myself. I personally excel at ditching myself at any sight of someone cooler or my annoying emotions bubbling up. While abandoning uncool or uncomfy me helps in the immediate, it leaves me feeling the same feelings as the ones that occur when an actual person leaves; alone and bummed. Here are some positive memories that always bring me back to liking myself.
- Imagine me and a group of my friends racing down a hill to our favorite outdoor hangout spot in a canyon between neighborhoods in Albuquerque. In that moment wearing my Chuck Taylors, slamming my feet on the ground, guaranteed giving myself shin splints the next day, I felt invincible. I wish I could bottle up the feeling of being invincible at 16 years old! It literally felt like I was flying down that hill.
- The second memory starts showing some themes. It was when I was home for some holiday and I was riding my mountain bike with my mom. She was stopping and explaining the trail between moments of speeding down the mountain. Whilst trying to keep up with my mom, I had the biggest, goofiest smile on my face. There was no fear, just pure joy with the wind blowing through my helmet.
- My final memory is quite the opposite of the first two. I was sitting completely still under the stars, alone in the Moab desert. I had messed up my vacation rental booking and didn’t have a place to stay one night. But I was able to find the most incredible little BLM land campground and I had everything that I needed to sleep in my car. It was the moment that I realized I could trust myself to deal with the worst case.
Yoga is something I started doing somewhat regularly in high school with my best friend at a studio called Cloud 9. My focus at the time often was on doing the poses as deep or as hard as I possibly could. On top of that, MANY of the teachers made it their personal mission to make sure that everyone was pushing to their edge in every class. I liked feeling “the edges”, which kept me coming back. My mom got her yoga teacher certification and in support of her, I went to her classes religiously when I got home from college. Her classes were focused on building the poses that in most classes seem to be autopilot for people, like downward dog, warrior 2, and half moon pose. She took the time to open up the body for the poses and describe what every part of the body should feel like in those poses. I learned SOOOOO much. Several other teachers Keisha, Deanna, Kari, to name a few, kept/keep my practice alive by offering classes where I get to deepen my knowledge of yoga and the way I move my body. My practice went from a way to workout, to a way to move and stretch intentionally. For example, when I had Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever I was invited to my first restorative yoga class that opened my eyes to the healing nature of intentionally slowing down and breathing into the poses. We had nowhere else to be but that pose, just like my body had no other job than to heal. But the most recent evolution of my practice has been my favorite! Early 2024, I needed a place to move through some very big emotions. Deaths in the family and a break up will do that to you. Intuitively, my yoga mat felt like as good of a place as any to get off my couch, to stop feeling sorry for myself, and to move my body. Little did I know, the therapy and inner world building that I will talk about next, would show up in almost every shavasana. In the moments of active practice, I got out of my head and into my body just enough to let my emotions come up.
My inner world is an imaginary place I go to check-in with me. For the first 30 years of my life, I could “check-in” with myself. But it is uncomfy to realize I am uncomfy. So I got into a bad habit of not really listening to me if I did check-in or not even bothering. This allowed for many feelings, time periods, and versions of me to get buried and to go unseen for YEARS. My inner world is set up like a campground loosely located in the Jemez mountains. It has a field, trees, kittens, an A-frame cabin, a unlimited fire and s’mores, cozy camp chairs, big cozy blankets, a stream running through, jackets, beanies, mittens, and a path up to the top of the rocks, a place with the best view. I found this inner world with the help of my therapist, but this inner world became real to me after doing 75 minutes of at home yoga for 14 days straight. Many days in shavasana, I found myself walking through the fields, stopping to warm up, then up to the top of the rock to meet my emotions. I started learning how to know what I needed. It was way more maternal and cozy than I would ever like to admit. Sometimes it was needing a hug, sometimes it was needing a lap to lay on and a person to play with my hair and sometimes it was someone to eat a popsicle with. I imagined myself as that someone.
Tarot cards are another way I learned to trust my brain. I have always been scared to be overly dramatic. I am an empath. I feel feelings, my own and others, big! That is not comfortable and often times cringeeey! In those 14 days of yoga, the instructor pulled a tarot card to start or end the class. Many times those cards set my brain in motion towards what I was thinking or feeling inside. On a whim, I bought my own tarot cards and with no research or understanding at all, I started doing my own tarot card practice. One really notable pull was my very first one. I pulled “The Queen” from The Wild Unknown deck by Kim Krans. Like I noted in the previous paragraph, I have had to lean into being more maternal with myself and pulling The Queen card felt like a nod. Like I was doing something right. Ultimately, these cards are the meaning we make of them. This practice allowed me to open my heart up to those gut interpretations as they were my truth in those moments.
BODY WORK
For me and many other people, a lot of my emotions are neatly and tightly stored in my body. Stomach aches from basically birth brought on by anxiety, migraines becoming regular in 2020. A hip injury from 2015 or earlier, hamstring injury from 2021, irregular lower back pain that I could not tell you the start date and a diagnosis of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever in 2022. It felt like 1 step forward, then 12 steps back. Anytime I figured out one aspect that was causing me pain or discomfort, something else would pop up. Let me tell you, it is very hard to be in pain and happy. In tandem with the brain work that addressed the psychosomatic symptoms, I found two things that addressed the very real physical symptoms.
Finding a chiropractor saved my sanity! In January of 2020, I got a migraine at work, and every month after that for about 3 years I got at least one migraine a month. The type that creates auras in your vision, stabs in one very specific place above your eye, makes words harder to find and overall just makes you feel yucky for several days. On a bad month I would have 1/3 of the month be taken over by migraine. On a good month it would only be 3 days! But whether it was a good or bad month, my anxiety was always ready for the worst. Never very far from ibuprofen or my sunglasses, contingency plans for my classes if I could not teach, excessive liquid IV consumption to guarantee I was not dehydrated, and a healthy Reddit search history to know how others did it. The headache clinic prescribed me fast acting medicine, a food log and an option between antidepressants, beta blockers and anti-seizure meds; all seen to have positive impacts on migraine havers. Before I went down the medical side effect rabbit hole, I wanted to make sure I did my due diligence to figure out why I was having the migraines. Everyone wanted the pattern to be foods. For a while I took away alcohol, dairy, chocolate, foods high in histamines, and non-natural sugars. When that didn’t work, I got very nervous I would have to give up road and mountain biking because my pain and auras seemed to often get in the way of engaging in those sports. Now that I have painted that depressing picture, you can see I was at a low in mid-2022. I was at the White Water Center at some event walking by tents that were mostly to buy gear. A chiropractic office tent doing body scans caught my eye. On top of my head hurting, my hip and back just felt tight. I decided to test their body scan. It came back with tightness and misfiring something or others in the exact places I was feeling discomfort. I booked my first appointment right then and there. A few x-rays later, I was given the, “I do not know if Chiro is the ultimate fix, but we have had success in cases like yours”. That day I got my first adjustment. I wish I could say I have never had migraine pain since. But pretty quickly I went from 1/3 of the month migraine to only once a month, to nothing for a whole month, then 2! I was gaining hope! Migraines slipped in here and there, but they were overall so much less potent! When I moved to Asheville I stopped going, 6 months later I found myself back at that hopeless stage. I found a functional neurologist and chiropractor. While doing some neurology eye tests, I got a migraine and I knew I was in the right place and that they were digging in the right causes. Y’all I am back to only getting migraines if I am particularly stressed and my muscles are particularly tight! You have no idea how happy the whole thing makes me! I did it! I found a treatment that attacks the cause of the pain and not just masks the symptoms. I also know that if something like this happens again, the Reddit posts and Instagram stories are of the people that are not me. Their 12 year struggle with no answers is not my 5 year struggle with hypothesis, peaks and valleys, and several answers.
Rolfing is a massage technique that focuses on the facia. When I was desperately trying to find things for the tightness in my neck and back someone recommended that I look into Rolfing. It takes a whole body approach with massages occurring over 10 sessions to get all your connective tissues working together and talking to one another. The pain in one area could be due to actual issues in a totally different part of the body! I had read reviews where people shared that one particular session changed their world. I took a leap of faith and found a somewhat inexpensive Rolfer and I am happy to share it just took two sessions for my world to be forever changed! In session 2, it is all about creating a base to work up from. The massage worked into the connective tissue of my feet and ankles. In this hourish session, I had a lightbulb moment realizing I carry way more of my weight in my back than my feet. After this session I became slightly obsessed with thinking about my feet. So much so that it became my resolution for 2024 to continue to find grounding through my feet. There is not a way to describe the energetic shift I felt in putting trust in my feet and ankles to hold me. Another session had me also realize that while sitting at my desk, sit bones and feet are where so much of my weight should be, NOT my upper back! Less carrying of weight in my back, meant less stress in several areas and way less tightness AKA less pain! I only did 6 of the 10 sessions as I did not feel much positive impact from the last few sessions. But I would really recommend this to people that have tried it all and still feel the need for a reset on their body!
That is not all folks! I am not sure what category community falls into but my Asheville communities including, the friend group I have found myself in, the West Asheville Yoga community, the Dirt Skrts, the Women Who Hike, the Asheville Beer Choir and the cool people at Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., play an integral part in the joy I experience on a weekly basis! Each of these groups took me being willing to show up somewhat regularly in addition to them being some of the most accepting and happy to be here kind of people. After living in several places, I will never take this community for granted!
Are you happy?
At this moment in life I can truly say above many other moments in my life, I am indeed on average HAPPY!
Please do not judge the typos and weird punctuation. ESPECIALLY the misplaced or missing commas. Thanks
Unravelling with a Smile 
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