How I keep learning! I’d like to tell you about some of the personal healing discoveries I made.

Before I tell you these amazing revelations, I’ll quickly recap the saga of my carelessness on the treadmill and the fracture of my shoulder in four places.   You may remember I had to wear an immobilizer that kept my right arm bent at the elbow and glued to my chest. I had to wear it for six weeks.

To move my right arm even a hair’s breadth was torture.  My whole body was affected. I couldn’t bend to pick up something. I could hardly walk. I was on pain medication, which I never want to take, and still I was in pain and fearful of pain and fearful of bumping into something and hurting my arm again.

Gradually the pain became less.

At three weeks, the doctor gave me exercises to do three or four times a day. The purpose of the exercises was to get my shoulder moving.

I did do the exercises conscientiously for a few days, but my arm would throb so badly afterward that I could not sleep. I was also afraid that I might be injuring my shoulder again. I stopped doing the exercises.

In response to an earlier blog entry, Pete Koerner was untiringly supportive of letting nature and God heal broken bones. Pete is such a strong advocate. He has absolute certainty that pain is nature’s signal telling us: Don’t move.

Berit, who had the cast removed from her broken ankle around that same time, was also a strong booster for self-healing. She elected not to do the painful exercises her doctor had given her. She was brave enough to rely on God and her own body’s natural healing.  To encourage me, Berit sent me Heaven #2942, God Carries Us, in which God says “You cannot make one move without Me. I AM you.”

In Berit’s own personal Godwriting, she asked God about my shoulder, and God responded: “Don’t you think I can take care of it?”

I was pretty bolstered up. I practically was swaggering with my ability to be self-reliant and have trust in God.

That was before my six-week visit to the doctor.

At the six-week visit, the doctor showed me the new x-rays. X-rays carry an authority. So does my doctor. In addition to his confidence, my doctor is a wonderful caring person. He is also tall.

The doctor had me move my arm in certain ways. He saw that, instead of rotating my shoulder, I was using my whole body, leaning and such rather than actually moving my shoulder. To get my shoulder cuff rotating, he was quite sure that I needed to go for physical therapy which would be painful. That was the reason he wanted me to go because a physical therapist would submit me to more pain than I would ever submit myself to.  He  advised me to take considerable doses of pain medication four or five times a day and before bed so I could sleep at night.

The doctor also put the fear into me that unless I did all this soon, it would be too late for my shoulder to regain its range of motion.

At this point, all my confidence was gone. After all, the doctor should know.

I didn’t want to go for physical therapy, and I didn’t want to give up my own integrity. I was afraid to go for therapy, and I was also afraid not to go. I wanted to heal myself, and yet I seemed to be devoid of the courage to do so.

Do not think that I cannot take advice. I am grateful for the doctor’s advice to apply heat to my arm and shoulder to ease the pain. This works wonderfully. When Heaven Admin gave me a healing soothing breathing exercise to do, I gratefully did  it right away.

Furthermore, a friend suggested that I let my body tell me what exercises it wanted me to do. She was telling me to get out of my logical informative left brain which, of course, echoes that the doctor knows best and I don’t. My friend was telling me to go into my right brain which doesn’t care about logic.

I know right brain. Right brain is where Godwriting™  comes from. In Godwriting, I don’t know ahead of time what is going to come. It’s all new.  It isn’t following a program but rather being surprised.  Innocent. Not all-knowing but rather unknowing and finding out.

Before I even got to ask my shoulder what it wanted me to do to gain greater range of motion, I had an impulse to swing my arms to the front and back. I swung both arms  together, and my right arm kept up with the left arm. I could swing quite far. In sync with my left arm, my right arm could go farther and farther without effort.

Then my arms wanted to start flapping like wings. My arms went out horizontally and went up and down and got quite high. The same thing as before, my right arm amazingly could do just as well as the left. And I loved flapping my wings!

Even after doing the swinging and flapping and whatever else, I found that my right arm by itself was not able to go so high.  Also when I would move my right arm by itself, I found my balance off. I would lean to the left instead of being straight.

This reinforced that moving both arms together is powerful. Two arms working in tandem made my right arm stronger and more limber. It was like my left arm became my right arm’s buddy. This was a great discovery for me. I had found a secret to increasing the range of motion of my injured arm. Two arms together work better than one.

I also became strongly aware of the value of swinging. Incidentally, way back at three weeks when I took the immobilizer off to do the doctor’s exercises, my arm already was telling me it wanted to swing. At the time I let it swing a little, and it felt so good, but I stopped myself. I was afraid that my arm in motion might be too heavy for my shoulder.

In addition to my insights of two arms working together and the joy of swinging, I had a third great insight (great for me), and that was the value of momentum. The momentum from the swinging and flapping made moving the injured arm effortless.  It was like an unseen force moved my arms.  Once started, it took no effort at all, and my arms loved it and wanted more and more.

Other spontaneous impulses arose, like marching while swinging my arms. If someone  would have seen me marching around my living room and swinging and flapping my arms, hmm, I can imagine what they would have thought.

There were other additions to my repertoire — shaking my right arm vigorously, sort of twirling my hand with my arm in different positions. I just had fun and let myself do whatever movement something in me wanted to do.

As a result of all this, my right arm can do things today that yesterday it absolutely could not. For example, two days ago, it was impossible for me to put my right hand behind my back.  Absolutely impossible. My arm just couldn’t move that way.

Then, the next day, I found myself clasping my two hands together in front of me, fingers entwined, and I could lift my hands over my head and down to the back of my neck. Again, with my right arm alone, I couldn’t do what my two arms could.  I also found I could clasp my two hands behind my lower back when the day before that would have been an impossibility.

Now I wait for my nine-week doctor visit for the doctor to corroborate what I already know.

Meanwhile, there is a song in my heart, something to do with two arms swinging together and the  energy of momentum that swings them.