“Just because we are afraid doesn’t mean anything is wrong.
Doesn’t mean a mistake is being made.
Doesn’t even mean, necessarily, we’re in danger.”

~ Adyashanti, “Letting Go of Fear”
from In the Face of the Infinite

It is 6:21 am and I am sitting with an ice pack on my left hip writing this post.

My relationship with this left hip has been long standing, pun intended.

My left hip was dislocated at the pelvis August 12, 1962, in an auto accident.

An auto accident which resulted in my having an out-of-body experience.

There, I have said it.

I distinctly recall floating above my physical body watching the scrambled flesh on my forehead being sutured.

I was watching from a “space” of no pain, no fear, no sense of myself as a separate being.

The summer of 2021 has been a time of revisiting this experience. I have connected with dozens of others who had similar altered states of being. Many shared much more extreme experiences, including those who were clinically dead for some time, but everyone identified ways that experience shaped the rest of their lives.

Possibly EVERYONE knows someone who has had some type of experience.

Profound gratitude for each person who has spoken out loud. (The International Association for Near-Death Studies is a non-profit organization based in Durham, North Carolina in the United States, associated with the academic field of near-death studies.)

It is likely not an accident that I was immersed with this community, nor a co-incidence my hip would flare up as I process that experience I had when I was twelve years old.

I will give a talk at St. Johns UCC in New Buffalo, Michigan titled, “Time Change.” Notes from that draft:

Now is not a moment moving through time. Now has no duration. There is no time through which we move.

Time is imagined to be real only when we have forgotten our true nature of ever-present awareness.

We imagined ourselves instead to be limited, located entities. Time and space are born with that thought, but there is no present moment.

This ever-present now is eternity.

Time is thought superimposed upon eternity, and eternity is just another name for our true nature of awareness.

~ Rupert Spira, “Time and Death”

Louise Hay, in You Can Heal Your Life, shares a probable mental cause related to hip problems: Carries the body in perfect balance. Major thrust in moving forward. Fear of going forward in major decisions. Nothing to move forward to.

Oh, my….

While the night is still dark, before I have welcomed relief from discomfort, even as you seem to be there and I seem to be here and we seem to not yet know what we moving forward to, truth embraces and erases each of these distortions.

In 1988 I was told I needed to have a hip replacement. I was only 38 years old, considered to be too young. They only got about ten years from an artificial hip at that time. The same hip could only be replaced twice due to the formation of scar tissue. The doctor said, “Replacing this hip now would leave you with no options. You just have to face it, you will never have quality of life.”

I tell the entire story in Freedom from Pain.

Yesterday morning I cried when I saw my doctor, Dr. Leanne Mancini, DO, at Family Physicians of Sanit Joseph. “Does this mean I have to give up on this hip?”

“No,” she gently reassured me, “it simply means we have to treat it.”

Thus the ice, and the ibruprofen, and the rest.

And, of course, the affirmations by Louise Hay:

Hip. Hip. Hooray — there is joy in every day.

I am balanced and free.

I am in perfect balance.

I move forward in life with ease and with joy at every age.