DURING MY “TIME OUT” I DECIDED to focus on healing. One of the first things I did was to join a health club. It felt good to regain some of the strength I’d lost after the hijacking. I could feel the muscles in my arms and legs growing stronger. I always feel better when I exercise.
I went to yoga classes at the club and signed up for relaxation classes at a local hospital. Both helped me learn to slow down and relax more.
To help deal with the social isolation I was feeling, I decided to volunteer to help others. My ears perked up when I heard someone talk about the Courage Center, a place that helps people with head and spinal cord injuries. It sounded like just the place for me. I called and offered to volunteer. I wanted to do volunteer work because I thought I had something to give, but when I got there, I realized I needed help just as much as the people I had come to serve.
Some of the people had more serious physical limitations than I had and were, for example, in wheelchairs. But some could talk better and understand things better than I could.
As I listened to some of the head-injured people talk about their experiences, my own feelings and frustrations made more sense. I could relate to so much of what they were going through. I learned that my mood swings—from giddy highs to fits of rage and depression—were normal. I also saw that I was better off than lots of head-injured people. I felt less sorry for myself.
Aside from the Courage Center, I learned more about the problems associated with head injuries by becoming a volunteer at the Minnesota Head Injury Association. I was mad that no one had referred me to a place like the Courage Center, or taught me about the process of recovering from a head injury.
One of the counselors at the Courage Center took me under her wing. I told her about my problems with reading and, one day, she brought me into a special room, the Courage Center’s reading lab. She sat me down at a computer that had special software designed to help boost people’s reading skills. She let me sit at the computer for hours, practicing with various programs.
A paragraph would flash on the screen, and I’d put my finger to the monitor and slowly read one word at a time. It didn’t go fast; it let me go at my own speed. By the time I read the second or third sentence, I had to go back up to the top. I didn’t remember what the beginning said.
After reading a small paragraph, questions appeared on the screen. I had to punch in the answers. It would say, “Yes! You’re Right” or “Try Again!” I got a lot of “Try Agains.” At the end of the test, the program totaled how many questions I’d answered correctly and incorrectly.
After spending a few hours on the computer, the Courage Center counselor offered a suggestion that might help me read better. “Some people with head injuries see better with certain colors on the screen,” she said. The computer allowed you to adjust the colors of the letters and backgrounds.
The color of the screen made a big difference. I needed bright colors to see the words properly. A black-and-white screen was not good enough for me. I needed bright reds and oranges.
A few months earlier, Scott had planned an evening out with some of his friends. They gathered at our apartment and, before leaving, spent some time talking in the kitchen. I sat in a corner of the living room reading the magazine article about Barbara Mandrell.
One of Scott’s friends came over to me and, gently, asked how I was doing. I’d never told anyone besides Scott and my family about the numbness I felt in my left side anytime I moved my head forward, but I had a feeling that I could tell this man. I also told him that my jaw sometimes locked.
Mark Lyso introduced himself and said he was a holistic chiropractor, someone who understood the healing connections between mind, body, and spirit. He started feeling my neck. He thought he might be able to help me and suggested that I make an appointment to see him at his office.
The next day, I followed up. I told Scott what I was planning to do. He was a little skeptical about the idea, but supported my decision.
I didn’t know exactly what to expect. This would be the first time I was going to see a doctor who focused on healing—not just treating disease.
On my first visit to Mark’s office, Mark explained more about the theory behind chiropractic medicine. Mostly, however, he and I spent a lot of time just talking about what happened in the hijacking and what my specific ailments were. These included the numbness in my neck, headaches, and some low back pain. He asked a series of questions to better understand how they might fit together physically, emotionally, nutritionally, and spiritually.
Mark did a series of x-rays and an orthopedic exam to determine if it was something that he could treat and, if so, how. Sprained ligaments in my neck, together with some misaligned vertebrae, were apparently causing the numbness when I bent my head forward. Based on my personal history and the x ray results, Mark and I developed a treatment plan designed to help heal my mind, body, and spirit. Part of this involved muscle tissue work and chiropractic manipulation to help gain movement into the vertebrae and relieve some pressure on the nerve root that was causing the numbness.
Another part of the treatment process involved relaxing on a table in Mark’s office and using visualizations as he worked on the areas of my back and neck that were injured. As he treated these areas, I would visualize blue-white lights coming from his hands and fingertips and flowing into my neck and body.
In the next few weeks, I could tell the treatments were making a difference. Someone was finally helping me! My neck was getting better. My jaw was starting to loosen up.
Mark was my chiropractor, but he did much more than just help me with the physical problems with my neck. He was a very interesting and spiritual man. He shared many helpful thoughts and insights about healing and spirituality. I enjoyed asking him questions. I’d finally met someone who understood the journey I was on! As I trusted him more, I shared some of the dreams, fears, and frustrations that I was having.
“Imagine taking a little eyedropper and transferring five or six drops of water from the ocean to a glass jar,” he told me one time. “The jar would contain elements of the ocean—but is not the ocean itself. In a similar way, each of us has the elements of God within us. We are not God, but contain little droplets of God inside us.”
After five weeks of working with Mark, the numbness was completely gone. He helped me change my diet, and I started taking vitamins and drinking lots of water with lemon. In a short time, my jaw no longer locked.
Seeing Mark was really a rite of passage for me. It opened me up to a whole new world of alternative medicine that I had never known about or experienced before. In the process, I gave myself permission to be vulnerable with my feelings. I felt safer to seek out answers to the many questions I was having. I was beginning to see a connection between mental, physical, and emotional healing.
Though Mark played such an important part in my healing process, I was learning to take more and more responsibility for my own healing and to reach out in new directions. I was slowly moving away from the limits that other people set for me—about how much I could heal or what I could do after the hijacking. I was starting to discover that there were people on my path who could help me get better.
Mark was also involved with a group called “Executive Futures” [the name has since been changed to “Unlimited Futures”]. This organization offered motivational training and personal growth seminars. Mark told me that Executive Futures specialized in helping people erase limits and discover their greatness.
I decided to check out the group for myself. I was drawn to Mark’s philosophy and felt the group could help me learn and understand more about what had happened to me and why. I wanted to grow as a person and process all the spiritual insights I’d been having after the hijacking—the sense that there was something much more to life and that I had a purpose to fulfill.
Executive Futures gave me an opportunity to associate myself with people of like mind and energy. Here I found a group of people who were on a journey similar to mine and who supported me without judgment. The program also provided a helpful structure for me. It linked the physical, mental and spiritual aspects of healing that I was learning about with techniques for setting goals and overcoming limitations.
When I first started trying to figure out what I wanted in my life, I tried to quiet my mind. It was not easy. I was so used to going, going, going that all these thoughts were buzzing through my head…. Thoughts about my responsibilities…. Thoughts about conversations I had with people that day…. My thoughts drifted back to my life when I was a special education teacher in Baytown, Texas.
I had worked with several kids who were diagnosed as LD—yet were extremely gifted intellectually. I remember one fifth-grader, in particular, whose name was Bill. He scored in the superior range on IQ tests but was reading at the fourth-grade level. Usually, students don’t qualify as LD if they are reading just one grade level lower. But when you had someone with superior intelligence—who should be reading at a much higher level than fifth-grade—it was a big deal.
Bill was a very different student. He had a very hard time focusing and paying attention. I could tell he was really frustrated. He was almost in another world. Bill came to me for help with learning difficulties. He was having a hard time weeding things out and focusing on what people were saying to him, and he would get upset for no apparent reason.
I thought Bill needed some help in learning to relax and slow down, so he and I listened to a relaxation tape together. We’d move the chairs out of the way and lay on the floor side by side as I turned the tape on. There was some soothing music on the tape, as the speaker guided listeners through a series of breathing and relaxation exercises.
“Relax your arms…. Relax your legs…. Relax your toes.”
The tape seemed to work. Bill never fell asleep as he listened.
I saw a real difference in Bill when he left the classroom. I thought he would benefit by listening to the tape on a daily basis, but his regular teacher wouldn’t let him come every day because it wasn’t reading or math. Bill still came in to listen to the tape after lunch, sometimes just for five minutes at a time.
I remembered how well relaxation had worked for Bill. Could it work for me? Many of the books I was reading and people I was meeting spoke of the healing effects of meditation and relaxation. I decided to give it a try.
I found a safe, quiet room in my apartment, shut the door, closed the blinds, and sat down in a comfortable chair. Slowly, I felt myself letting go of my anxieties and worries. I felt my body relaxing and my breathing becoming deeper, slower, more even and regular.
A few more minutes went by, and I felt my muscles relax. I felt peaceful and quiet inside.
I asked myself a question: What do I need in my life today?
The first thing that came to me was Joy.
I relaxed and thought more about joy. I saw what joy would look like and how I would feel if I had joy in my life.
After a few more minutes, I opened my eyes. I wrote some thoughts down on a pad of paper.
Boy, did I ever need joy in my life!
Though I had trouble reading, I turned to books for support and encouragement during those dark days. One of my favorites was a book called Affirmations, by Stuart Wilde. It was simple and easy to understand. I underlined the sections that struck me as being true.
In the book, Wilde says,
It is important that an affirmation have emotional force behind it and that it means something to you. Emotions harness the energy. It puts you in flow…. The words do not really matter: it is your feelings that count.
I underlined other sections of Wilde’s book that gave me strength and comfort, such as
Each time the individual faces adversity he brings to that adversity his ability to transcend. His ability to be creative and to adapt is dominated by his experience of life so far, whatever that might be. And these confrontations, or trials in consciousness, more or less set down the quality of events the individual will experience for the rest of his life.
And, every morning before starting my day, I’d repeat the following affirmations:
May the freshness of this new day vitalize and heal
my body. May there be balance and power in this day.
In this day, I express love to each person I meet,
for I know that I am truly lovable.
The universe is abundant, therefore I feel abundant.
All my needs are met.
I found passages that meant a lot to me in other meditation books too. I underlined and put stars by them in the books so I could return to them again and again. I wrote down a list of affirmations and started saying them to myself every day. Some of them were
I am loving and lovable.
Today is a beautiful, loving, and fun day.
I am honest to whoever comes across my path.
I relax and am patient.
Good things happen to me today.
I didn’t rush through my affirmations, but put my heart into each one. As I said each meditation, I visualized what it looked like. I used the affirmations along with the visualizations to set goals and achieve them.
Shakti Gawain was another author whose books helped me walk through my depression. One of the passages in her book Living in the Light, a book about personal growth and transformation, really hit home for me. Gawain writes about our need to develop healthier relationships with ourselves, others, and the earth itself, because the old ways don’t work anymore.
It’s as if we’ve been in school our entire lives, receiving an education that teaches the exact opposite of the way the universe actually functions. We try to make things work as we’ve been taught, and we may even enjoy some degree of success, but for most of us things never seem to work out as well as we had hoped….
Thus, our first task in building the new world is to admit that our “life education” has not necessarily taught us a satisfying way to live. We must return to kindergarten and start to learn a way of life that is completely opposite of the way we approached things before [emphasis added]. This may not be easy for us, and it will take time, commitment, and courage. Therefore, it’s very important to be compassionate with ourselves, to continually remind ourselves how tremendous this task is that we are undertaking.
Wow! I thought, this woman is great. She was speaking to me. I was learning to love the new Jackie—and I was learning to heal some of the old Jackie’s emotional wounds too.
I started thinking more about what the epilepsy center counselor had told me about my limitations. It didn’t sound right to me. I recalled a similar episode from earlier in my life that put her predictions in perspective.
In my senior year of high school, I started thinking about my plans after graduation. I thought about working for a while but decided that what I really wanted to do was go to college. No one in my parents’ families had ever been to college, but education was a top priority in our home.
I made an appointment to talk about my plans with the high school guidance counselor, as all graduating seniors were required to do. Mr. Jenkins was a tall, imposing figure of a man.
“I’m thinking about college, but I need a scholarship to pay part of it,” I told him.
Mr. Jenkins stared across his desk at me with a sad, sympathetic look on his face. It was hard to break the bad news, his eyes seemed to say, but someone had to do it. “I really don’t think you’re college material, Jackie,” he said. “Just look at your grades (I had mostly B’s and C’s). I think you’d be a lot better off doing something else. Have you thought about a vocational-technical school?”
He urged me to learn a trade. I left his office feeling disturbed and confused. Somehow, it didn’t feel right.
There has to be a better way, I thought to myself.
I went ahead and applied to college anyway—and tried for one scholarship. Three months later, I got two letters in the mail. I was accepted at a junior college and awarded a scholarship by the Deer Park Cafeteria Workers Scholarship Fund! It wasn’t a lot of money—$120 for one year—but it was something.
At the beginning of my junior year at Sam Houston State, I declared myself a sociology major. Taking an education class was one of the requirements. I wasn’t thrilled about it, but I signed up.
Was I in for a surprise! A whole new world opened up to me. I was finally in a class where I was getting it. I decided to switch my major from sociology to education. I amazed myself by making all A’s. My self-esteem shot up and I finally felt that I belonged in school. My grade point average went from a C to an A. After that, I made the dean’s list every semester.
I started thinking about becoming a teacher. Then the doubts crept in. I’d have to study and work harder to graduate on time. Who did I think I was? Me, a teacher? I saw teachers as being leaders, role models, the “good” students. In my mind, I didn’t fit the bill.
I went to my academic advisor and asked, “Do you think I could be a teacher?” And he said, “Yeah, I think you could.”