I called this blog “Work from the Other Side” because I feel like I’ve spun off from the career path presented to me in school.  Instead I’m making up the rules, and I’m seeking guidance from above.  Everyone’s career path is full of unexpected twists, and each of us tells her own story at various stops along the way:  This is mine.

Moving to the other side, where money became a tertiary consideration in my work life, really started with my father’s death.  Dad was diagnosed with cancer at 51, and he died six years later.  Seeing him go through chemotherapy and radiation treatments, lose work he loved, then his beloved dog, finally more and more function until he ended up confined at home in a chair with a morphine pump, started me wondering what is important.  When he died I became acutely aware of my mortality, and I felt a strange new sense of myself, a self I had often tended to define in my father’s terms.  I realized I was responsible for setting my own course.

It also made me wonder why cancer treatment had to be as bad as the illness, and it made me wonder how the medical system (or some other system), might provide nurturing treatment along with the harsh treatment.

I mean, herbs may at times cause irritation, but generally they soothe and heal.  They work synergistically with our bodies, drawing forth our own immune responses.  And yoga?  (Don’t get me started on that—I’ll try to be brief.) As my yoga for cancer teacher, Nischala Devi, says, “cancer helps us remember who we are.”  I didn’t need to ask her what she meant by those words; I immediately began to think of our divinity, of our spiritual natures, of our connection with mother earth and father sky.  We may get sick and we may die, but why do we assume that’s bad and avoid thinking of it?  The other side of that question is this:  What is the nature of healing and wellness?  What is illness telling us, and what might we gain from it?

Add my own discomfort in the work environment to staggering fact of Dad’s departure, and I’m ready to walk off the grid.  This discomfort is a response to the rigidity of the work environment as well as a result of shyness.  It is a restlessness spawned by a desire to investigate.  By a need to move, physically, to feel sunshine on my face rather than commute and work the entire span of daylight.  By a need to join the forces pressing for a new paradigm when it comes to healthcare.

I have had the joy of working at a hospital holistic center as education coordinator.  The gig lasted one short and quick year, but I embraced it wholly, thrilled to provide education and services to the community.  Since then I have had part-time wellness, retirement, or independent living center jobs.   And I write, and teach yoga.  Life is good.

When I lost my ideal job, I prayed, and I meditated.  I cannot analyze and put forth a resume campaign:  I am too far gone, too far out on the other side.  Sometimes I get scared on this less certain path, but more often I know deep down that I’m okay.  I always find work, always have just enough income.

This week I went to Lifespa, John Douillard’s ayurvedic center in Gunbarrel, Colorado, for a consultation and oil massage/lymph stimulation session.  Douillard, a chiropractor and sports medicine fellow turned ayurvedic doctor, is squarely, firmly, and abundantly on the Other Side.  He’s providing much needed guidance and treatment to our tired, stressed, toxic, emotionally constipated world.  Meeting him and his staff, I feel that the other side is a good place to be.  I realize that I am not alone, I realize there is a need, and I see one can also have the material support to sustain oneself.   It is possible to thrive out here, off the map.  May God sustain us, and may we learn, work together, and serve.