A Sacred Space

I used to argue with my instructors when they would talk to us about “protecting our energy.”

I used to say, “What the patients take is what they will take. I will just make more. I eat right, I sleep right, and I exercise.”

I think that mindset got me pretty far in my early days as a physical therapist.

But like all the people out there who are lucky enough to say they are lucky enough to have gotten to whatever age they are, I find myself doing what I need to do in order to protect myself while caring for and guiding my patients to a better quality of life.

I think therapists call it boundary setting, or something like that . . . I like to read a lot about the world of clinical psychology, because I believe there is a lot of crossover into physical therapy. After all, one cannot separate their head from their body. There’s a superhighway running between the two: brain to body and back again. 

Here’s a simple example: when a person stubs their toe really badly, why do they get mad? Superhighway. Nerves in the big toe perceive a painful stimulus, and run it straight up the spinal cord to the brain where it will ignite the somatoemotional sensory region just above the right ear. And then BAM! You’re mad. Happens every time. You really cannot separate the brain from the body.

It works the other way too. If someone is so depressed that they cannot get out of bed for a week, by the time they finally do, their whole body hurts. Every cell is echoing one truth: the brain is hurting.  

Enter the physical therapist, the person trained to guide patients with a physical problem through the problem to the other side of it. Sometimes that “other side” looks much like life before the injury or problem: same function, same quality of life, no lingering deficits.

At other times, however, the outcome is profoundly different. The kind of different where life will never look the same again.

Those are the tough ones. But if you do your job right – really right – even if they are not the same, they are grateful. For what could be done.

And so, I put my hands together and I look up to the sky.

Is it centeredness?

Is it spiritual?

Is it prayer?

Am I giving, or am I receiving?

Am I shining my light? Sharing it? Or protecting it?

It’s my choice in the end, I think.

Sometimes I don’t even know. But I do know this: I am incredibly grateful to be in that space my patients allow me into. I mean, I don’t let just anyone into my space. So why should it be different for them?

And so, here is my message of gratitude to all my past patients, my current patients, and my future patients:

Thank you for trusting me with your bodies and your brains.

Thank you for sharing your stories.

Thank you for letting me learn through you.

Most of all, thank you for letting me into your space.

Your sacred space.