The Maladies
Learning to insource rather than outsource for health, for hope
The Sixes, Pair 3, Bonus Part 3
What did I mean to say about The Weight before I got sidetracked hanging out the laundry (which probably only made sense if you read the transcription I stuck behind the paywall)?
Here’s a snippet of that March 2006 entry both for retroactive context and the rest of this post:
The separation between my body and my spirit is like the separation of church and state! I don’t “live” in my body anymore than I “live” in my wood and glass house… I don’t even know if it’s so much that I hate my body as I have a thoroughly distant relationship with it.
My whole life used to be an out-of-body experience. I was either in my head (or on the page) trying to make sense of everything, or out of it altogether, busy with mindless activities, like housework. Doomscrolling works, too.
Over the last year my body and I got to know each other much better thanks to what I call The Maladies, a series of breadcrumb symptoms that led me down paths to nowhere, medically speaking.
(Except for a fussy gallbladder, chronic left-sided sinus inflammation, an allergy to dogs, and the nebulous catch-all of menopause.)
Nevertheless, I got somewhere.
First, The Maladies brought me to The Sixes. No, it’s not just next-level navalgazing.
What I am looking for in my old journals are the unique patterns of my health over time. Also, mentions of my mother’s and grandmothers’ health because, you see, I arrived at my menopausal transition without a single living direct female blood relative with whom to compare notes.
Second, and more importantly, The Maladies reliably twitched me back to my center, a place deep beneath the branches of my entangled nervous system, far below my meaning-making mind, where I snuggled into something that is both my Self and so much more than a single Self can contain.
Multitudes, as Walt Whitman said.
What I was starting to say before the laundry pulled me away was how I got from the total body disconnect of a 25- and 35-year-old woman to a mostly integrated middle-aged one.
I had some help.
Until last year, I outsourced the care and comfort of my body, especially if it involved any brand of alternative medicine. I never met a cold plunge-herbal-homeopathic-massage-yoga-breathwork-reiki-cleanse I wasn’t willing to try (maybe Ayahuasca, but only because I hate mushrooms).
But The Maladies kept tossing symptoms at me that defied float tanks, CT scans, psychic readings, votive candle pleas, and prescription drugs.
That’s how I ended up in the care of Dr. Jacey Goddard and Dr. Daniel Gibbons, at RiverTree Osteopathic Health. Inconceivably, I’d never experienced osteopathy in my lifelong quest for optimal health. I thought “D.O.” was just another way to say “M.D.”
I needed help with my crossed-wire nervous system, constant low-level anxiety, and tsunami-like panic attacks. A friend and RiverTree patient said she knew just the people.
You can learn more about osteopathy from an internet search, but suffice to say the focus is the whole person and not compartmentalized systems of a person.
By the way, don’t go to classical osteopathic doctors if you want to find out what’s wrong with you. They look for HEALTH in your body not a disease.
Dr. Goddard teaches an online course called The Art and Science of Healing from Within, and hosts biweekly online meetings for those who sign up.
Between the self-paced modules and the experiences of others in Dr. Goddard’s group, I learned I have resources within me that promote and support my own health. No CBD drops needed.
“Self-healing is our birthright,” Dr. Goddard says.
Really?
It’s still kind of hard to believe. The “fix” I searched for all my life was never out there. It was always right here in my very own body.
I call the experience insourcing, a felt sense inside me of my own okayness. And more. When I get down in there good and deep, there is so much love underneath the tangled cables of grief (that never had any outlets to begin with).
It wasn’t easy. I’ve cried some of the ugliest tears of my life since February 2025. Learning to live in my body and feel things instead of dissociating is one of the hardest lessons I ever willingly signed up for, and kept coming back to again and again.
Do I still have The Maladies? Yes. Probably. Sometimes. Not always.
But that’s not the point.
“Down periscope,” Dr. Goddard says, “You just gotta keep feeling into that center, dropping down into yourself, and staying inside.”
Especially when so much pulls you out.
Maybe you have your own physical, mental, emotional, and/or spiritual maladies.
Even if you don't, just look around.
We are living through an ongoing compounded collective trauma that future generations will wonder about as surely as we try to understand what it was like to be alive during the Great Depression.
Insourcing may not change our historic circumstances (but imagine if more and more people learned how to truly center themselves). And it’s not a cure-all - or a substitute for medical care.
But The Art and Science of Healing from Within is a good place to start on the path to better health.
Maybe even a better world.
The Sixes: My Reading from the Journal of Yesterday project for 2026 is a series of paired posts drawn from the diary entries of 1986, 1996, 2006, and 2016. Part 1 - for paid subscribers - shares transcription from one (or more) of these old journals. The intention here is to show my stripped down, straight from the heart, awkward and messy humanness with no claim to good writing. Part 2 - for everyone - reflects on it with the full power of my narrative might and the hope that with craft comes connection to readers in the here and now.
Thank you for sharing your journey toward health and healing. What a gift to know that we are all on this journey together!