Tales of The Urban Goddess: Barb

Barb Thomas, RHN- Holistic Nutritionist, Mother, Author, Goddess

My Story


Growing up, I was always the one that played it safe, followed the rules and took care of everyone else. I am still called the “Ultimate Hostess” by those who know me well. My towels are fluffy, my sheets are crisp and my wine is chilled, just so. I guess I get some sort of twisted sense of fulfillment when someone tells me that the dinner I cooked was spectacular or that they always feel like they are at a hotel when they come to stay at my house.
Micheline Star standards are great and all, but they come at a cost. And so this is my story about how much I paid for them, and how i got a refund.
The day I turned thirty, I began to fall apart. My second baby was now done nursing and my boobs let gravity get the better of them. But that wasn’t all. My whole body began to hurt. Even walking made me feel awful and I was teaching yoga at the time. My menstrual cramps came back in full force too, once I stopped nursing. My digestion was off, I had no sex drive, my back was sore (due to my larger than life chest) and my eyesight began to get worse, as if over night. I was fatigued all the time, got all kinds of colds and flus, and my hormones were all over the map. From top to bottom, I could pick something in every area of my body, and chances are, it was causing me some sort of discomfort or pain.
Everything seemed fine on the outside- lovely home, two beautiful kids, great husband, yoga as a job...what could have been better? But inside, things hurt. Here I was, teaching others how to achieve balance and bliss though yoga, and I didn’t seem to be able to live up to my own advice. I was getting sick of the pain. I was getting sick of complaining. And mostly, I was sick of being sick.
Things were beginning to get confusing. I had spent all of my twenties, pretty much, living a very holistic lifestyle- on the coast, hiking, doing yoga, vegetarianism, organic foods, regular chiropractic care, ample time to indulge in things like spas. I never smoked, have never done drugs, rarely drank, didn’t take in caffeine, took all sorts of supplements, and have no family history of any sort of weird illnesses. So what the heck was going on?
Naturopaths, chiropractors, doctors- everyone had a theory about individual issues. But the big picture? Seems like no one could see the forest through all those mighty trees. And things were about to get even more complicated.
September, 2004. After a summer of finally cutting loose a little more than I had ever done in my twenties (brought on, methinks by the idea of just being tired of paying such close attention to how every little thing affected my body) I was at a wedding in Whistler. It was a great night- majestic mountains all around us, twinkling lights, wonderful food and all of my deeply good friends around me, dancing, laughing, having fun. It was great to be there. My husband and I had moved to Calgary four years before and our trips back to the coast were few and far between since we were blessed with our two young girls. This was our first weekend away just the two of us in years.
I owned the dance floor that night. It felt so good to just move to the music and feel free and sexy. Moms of little kids don’t get too much time to dance to anything other than Raffi.
So there I was, grooving my heart out, like I was eighteen on a speaker at a nightclub, when POP. Something happened. I felt a searing pain in my right hip. I stopped dancing and tried to walk off the dance floor. I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything, in fact. I made my way, with some help, outside for some air and limped over to a bench.

“You are not eighteen!” screamed my body. I wanted to be, though, for those few minutes, moving to the music. I wanted to have no kids and no husband and no mortgage and just be that girl, shaking it on the dance floor, that all the boys wished they could have. Just for a minute. But the Universe said no. And that’s when everything changed.
The hip thing took about a week to get over. Or so I thought. My chiropractor figured I had strained the ligaments in the hip joint. Nothing seemed to be dislocated, so I rested it for a week and continued to teach yoga and lift kids, despite a pronounced limp. Life kept moving, so I did too- never resting, never taking time for myself to regenerate, to gain back some energy, to heal.
One day shortly after thanksgiving when I was teaching a yoga class, I was instructing my students in a simple resting pose, and when it was time to come out of it, I didn’t. I couldn’t. My body just stopped. It had had enough. Enough of what? Of me not listening, I guess. It was screaming again. My bladder stopped working and later that night my husband Chris found me on the floor of my bedroom, unable to walk.
This time I got the message. I had to stop DO-ing. At least for the time being.
Incidentally, when you lose internal organ function, the hospitals bump you to the front of the line. Back surgery happened the next day for me and the neurosurgeon repaired a severely herniated disc in my lumbar spine.
A very wise woman said to me once that pain is a reminder. Just when the ego begins to interfere enough with our real purpose, the Universe comes in and knocks us down a notch or two. Because we need it. Because you can’t ignore pain. It immobilizes. It deflates our egoic sense of self. It beats us down and makes us really appreciate what we have left. Pain can be all consuming.
It’s usually shortly after someone recovers from a particularly painful experience that they begin to look at their lives and say things like, “You only live once”, or “count your blessings”. And that’s exactly what happened to me. After the surgery, I got sick of lying there, waiting for the pain to leave. So I eliminated the word from my vocabulary and got up from my bed. I took time, years in fact, and I worked on expanding my knowledge base in nutrition, on taking good supplements, eating good food, going to counseling with my husband to heal the massive rift we had created in our marriage. I spent time with my kids. I learned to say no. I rested, slept, and exercised. And I got not only better, I got best.
Much to the delight of my house-guests and my family, I have gone back to being the Hostess With the Mostest. But I play by different rules. First me. Then the rest of them. The towels are fluffy again in my guest bathroom, but so are the ones that sit beside the tub I use. MY tub- the one with the bath salts that bring balance to my body, the good book I read to nourish my mind, and the candles I light for my soul. The drive to do everything for everyone else will always be there, because that’s me. But the drive to value who I am as a woman is stronger than anything, now. The greatest lessons are the ones from battles hard fought and hard learned. It was only when I got quiet and listened to the whispers of the universe did I even realize I was being taught. 

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