Not pregnant yet? You bet!

– I’m sorry I did this to you… I thought if I go to doctors and they do some procedures, this would mean I was doing the right thing, nothing else was required. I didn’t take a moment to think what it was what you needed…

– You can ask it what it needs.

– It doesn’t need anything at this point, she is used to the pain, so it doesn’t feel anything.

– That is what you decided for it. Exchange roles with it.

Lida exchanges places with the uterus and stands in the wrung sculpture, yikes and laughs:

– Yeah, now I get it!

Other parts of the sculpture who have been standing in uncomfortable poses for several minutes now are tired of waiting for Lida to understand that she needs to untie the knot.

– Tell us, what is it that you get?

– I need to un-wring.

– Let your stand-in who plays you ask for forgiveness and you listen to it in the role of the uterus.

The member of the group who plays Lida addresses the uterus and repeats Lida’s words about being guilty and asks to forgive her. Lida listens to these words in the role of her uterus and says:

– I’m so tired, it’s OK, it’s water under the bridge, I’m glad you understand me now.

– Now, go out and untie.

Lida unties the “jumble” and puts the participants in an orderly structure like five Olympic rings: ovaries and uterus are in the front and tubes on the back, all of them are still holding hands.

– This is how it goes.

– Now be the baby and try to get into the uterus.

Lida in the role of the baby crawls as an egg: going between the legs of the women who comprise the sculpture and finds herself in the uterus.

– Here I am, all attached.

– Now exchange roles and be yourself again.

Lida becomes herself, now she walks to the sculpture to metaphorically place the organs and the baby within herself, everybody sits down.

– What do you feel?

– I feel good… my back hurts, I need someone to stand behind me… My husband!

– Choose your husband, let him stand behind you.

– I need him to hug me. Now it’s warm.

– How does your baby feel?

The woman who plays the baby:

– I feel so good here!

– Shall we finish? Take the roles off.

“Jumble”: commentary

We are invited to take a different view of our symptoms. Our first, natural desire is to suppress them, but we must learn to read them as cues to the wounded wishes of our soul, or as the autonomous protest of our soul over our mismanagement.

    James Hollis

This session with Lida happened seven years ago. Now I would have done it differently, I would have put more emphasis on the feelings of the client. However, what was done was enough to see the psychological reasons for her infertility. The climax of the session happened when Lida realized what she did to her reproductive system and expressed it as: “I thought if I go to doctors and they do some procedures, this would mean I was doing the right thing, nothing else was required. I didn’t take a moment to think what it was what you needed…”

Now Lida understood for the first time in her life, that, firstly, her health was her responsibility, not the doctors’; secondly, that it was necessary to know the needs of one’s body and to listen to oneself and to one’s body, and not to undergo standard recommendations and supposedly necessary and useful procedures. To do so, it is necessary to redirect one’s energy from the outside to the inside, develop one’s intuition, learn how to read the language of one’s body, get to know one’s own feelings. This is not something our culture offers to us, and living this way is unusual for many people.

What is it that our bodies want? It’s been comparatively a short time since Bert Hellinger’s Love’s Hidden Symmetry[29 - Bert Hellinger, Love’s Hidden Symmetry: What Makes Love Work In Relationship.] was published. Its main idea is that every person within the family system has a place he has an inherent right for. If he is deprived of that place for some reason, it ends badly for the whole system. The same works for entrails. Each one of them has a place, a territory, boundaries that are as sacred as the borders of a country. Any intervention is possible only upon obtaining the “permission” of the organ; just as well as when going to another country one should obtain a visa.

Violating boundaries

Say, what good two kidneys are?

Better a kidney and a car.

    Internet meme

Unfortunately, medical interventions are violation of the boundaries without the “permission” from the body. I know this both from my experience of psychotherapy sessions and my own. For example, there was a time when I had a blood sample taken to check out my hormones and prescribe the treatment. When a nurse took out the needle from my vein, she accidentally dropped some blood on my arm. She took a wet piece of cloth from the sink (usually they clean the sink with such cloths) and wiped the blood from my skin. I was told return to have my blood sample taken one more time in a week. For this whole week I could not shake the disgusted memory of the wet cloth. Besides, I couldn’t forgive myself for being so tactful as to keep silent, instead of telling about my resentment. The day before the blood test the skin on the inside of my elbow was covered in red itching spots. When I understood that this was the way my body reacted to the procedure and to upcoming hormonal treatment, I didn’t go to the hospital any more, a started looking for other ways of treatment and I did find them.

Personally, I’m not lucky with medical procedures, lots of bad things happen to me. When I had my eczema treated with quartz lamp, I made it worse by getting my leg burnt. The thing was that the lamp was loose on its pole and was coming down bit by bit, but I didn’t notice as I was wearing safety goggles. After curing the burn I’ve got another prescription for injections that should have been done according to a special pattern: the dose of the drug should have been increased from one to ten units. The nurse who supposedly was very familiar with this drug didn’t read the prescription and started with the maximum dosage of the drug. As a result, my whole body was covered in eczema…

If I studied psychology when I was young, maybe it would have been different. However, I doubt it. It is due to the negative experience that I was able to hear my body and had some insights as a result of difficult and hard inner work.

“Jumble”: post scriptum

But despite the fact that the doctors treated him, bled him, and gave him medicines to drink, he recovered.

    Leo Tolstoy

I guess, Lida also needed to get there. I didn’t hear from her for a long time, and then I got an email from her:

“It’s been three years since I moved. Several days ago I heard that you were planning on visiting our city. I was reviewing the program for the conference and found your theme. I would be glad to see you if you have time”.

I used this opportunity to ask about the children. Lida said that her husband and she got divorced as he left her “for a twenty-four year old”; that she does not have children, she was “married to her work”. Sometimes she was perfectly happy, sometimes she missed Siberia, her friends. She bought an apartment, she took a mortgage. She joked about this: “In Russia we exchanged death penalty for mortgage”.

In a couple of years I received one more message from Lida:

“You may congratulate me on a new husband!”

“Yes, I got that already, congratulations! And on the new second name as well!”