Published on

Yesterday's Tomorrow

9:57 p.m. 3/3/2023

This time last night, I was writing a letter with no intention of sending it—a sad one, a final remark for no one in particular and everyone all at once. So we don't send those letters; they end up tear-soaked if we do.

I devised a rhyme in bed tonight as I lay beside my little boy until he drifted asleep.

Moments before, he said, "Momma, will you ever leave me?"

"Never could. Never would. Never will."

And the rhyme goes:

Never could I leave you

Not even if I tried

God made me just for you

Forever by your side

He fell asleep in less than ten minutes. When I grabbed my phone from the nightstand, I noticed a text message I had received from my dad. A YouTube video of a Ted X Talk by Mary Morrissey titled The Hidden Code For Transforming Dreams Into Reality.

Dad sends me clips like this once a week, at least. I watch about forty percent of what he sends, and I know I will regret that one day. He will die someday, and I will long for those reminders of his love for me and my well-being. I watched this one, though, and I'm glad I did.

During the keynote, Mary tells a story I most certainly needed to hear tonight, and perhaps you do too.

At around the ten-minute mark, Mary talks about a hospitalization for kidney failure which she endured as a young woman in 1967, shortly after giving birth to a son while still in high school. The doctors gave her six months to live, contingent on eliminating toxins in her body.

She says:

"I felt like this was happening to me—like I was being punished for being a bad girl. Well, the night before the surgery, a woman walked into my room at about ten at night and identified herself as a chaplain offering prayer for people scheduled for surgery the next day. And did I want prayer? And I'm thinking the God of my upbringing probably needed to have some anger management classes! But, I told her, Maybe. She pulled her chair up next to my bed and didn't do anything that looked like prayer. Instead, she talked to me and asked me what was going on in my life. I went over the last year or two, and when I finished, she said, Mary, everything is created twice. I asked her, What do you mean? And, she said, You know this. In fact, everybody knows it. But almost nobody knows the power of knowing this. The bed you're lying on, the nightgown you're wearing, the sheet covering you, the walls, and all the machinery you're hooked up to first had to be a thought before it could be a thing. You know this. And I hear how much you love your little boy, but I also hear how much you've been hating yourself. You feel like you shamed yourself, you shamed your school, you shamed your family. And now that you're thinking about how everything is created twice, could you consider that there could be a correlation? Because, consider this, Mary. If you think embarrassing thoughts, your cheeks get red. If you think scary enough thoughts, your heart beats faster. It doesn't mean anything scary is going on. It doesn't even mean that anything embarrassing is going on. It means you think those thoughts, and your body responds. Could it be that if you think enough toxic thoughts about yourself, there could be correlative toxicity? What goes on in your body actually could threaten your life.

This was so beyond anything that I had any framework for at that point. Then, she said, Could you believe it's possible that we could do a prayer, say words, and this could be completely eliminated from you? In fact, when they come and get you for surgery in the morning, they instead say to get up and go home—you're fine. Could you believe that? And I told her the truth. I didn't believe that was gonna happen for me. There was not one part of me that believed that. I had way more belief in my pain at that point. And she said, Now remember, there is an infinite number of possibilities! There has to be one where we do this prayer, we pull all the genesis of this dis-ease that's going on in you and put it in the kidney that's gonna get removed, and when it's removed, instead of getting worse, you actually get better. Could you believe that's possible?

I didn't know if it was possible, but I could tell she believed it was possible. And this was the first time I ever chose to believe on the frequency of someone else's belief who was operating in a higher domain than me. So I said, Maybe it's possible. She said, Let's work with that; one idea, one part of you open to the idea. Then, she said some words. She gave me a prescriptive for how to use my thinking and my emotion, and then she left. And they did the surgery. About a week or two later, my numbers were stable. Enough so that they said, You might have a little more time. We're gonna let you go home. I went home to my parent's house in an ambulance, where my son and my husband were staying. And I could hardly get my head off the pillow. And subtly, over time, my numbers not only stabilized but improved. Four or five months later, I am sitting in a doctor's office with the surgeon, specialist, and my regular GP. They're scratching their heads, saying, We have no science for why your one kidney is not only getting better, it's functioning as a perfect, whole, fine kidney, and we just don't have any science for this. We're gonna put medical anomaly on your chart. Whatever you've been doing, keep doing it.

And that's when I began to do the things that I told you about. I got into undergraduate school. I got into graduate school. And over time, as I reflected on what happened, I studied people who transformed their results—people who not just wish for a better result but actually transform their results. There are three things they do—every one of them—whether they do it consciously or unconsciously. And when I transformed my health result, I was totally an unconscious component. I just did what she told me to do. She said, Here's what's gonna happen when you have that surgery; your mind is very much like a rubber band. You've thought those thoughts so much your mind is gonna want to keep thinking those toxic thoughts. They will remove that one kidney. Then, every time you start to notice yourself thinking a toxic thought, say No, that left with the kidney, and then immediately imagine yourself walking into your room and getting into your own bed. And for me because my two big dreams were to be a teacher and raise my son.

Imagine you're walking into a school; you've got a little five-year-old's hand in yours—feel the warmth of his hand in yours. He goes into his kindergarten class, and you hear the click click click of your heels, and you go around the corner, and there is your classroom! Fast forward, and imagine yourself sitting in a big auditorium—there are caps and gowns down there. Your son is eighteen and graduating from high school, and you're there! Your career is advancing. And then fast forward and imagine you're sitting in the front row of a wedding, and you're the mother of a groom who is marrying the love of his life. Your career is flourishing. Keep repeating that."

I don't know about you, but I've long found it difficult to envision my dreams, much less name and claim them.

It's hard to keep a mental photograph of a place I've never visited. How will I know which colors go on the palette for a masterpiece I have not painted before? It seems silly to think this way and call yourself creative.

It's silly to entertain the mind games of a thirty-five-year-old man whose behavior resembles your seven-year-old son's. Yet, I do it. And I believe it's because I haven't made amends with the version of myself I was before I fell in love with him—and before I became the mother of our child shortly after. Do I resent the man? Yes. Do I resent the boy? Perhaps.

Will this resentment kill me? Most definitely—if I allow it.

Whatever the future landscape looks like, I know it doesn't involve self-destruction via toxic thoughts—it mustn't. No, that left with the kidney.