I don't consider myself religious, but I like the idea of reincarnation. I get the sense that I've been here before. And my slightly woo-woo explanation for how I went from living in a body that I didn't think had many years left to finding my way back to health and life is that once I started living my truth, my body responded.
I think that my body was fast-tracking death so that I would be born again.
There's this idea that the conditions you are born into are the ones that your soul chose for its next evolution on the path to enlightenment. Until you learn your lesson, you keep getting born into versions of the same story. I wasn't overcoming the challenges, I was succumbing to them – and my soul gave up. Let's get this one over with so we can try again next time with different variables.
And then, by some last ditch miracle, I completely jumped timelines. I left to travel the world mostly as a way to go out with a bang, but then my body started to heal. A significant part of the healing was brought about by coming into contact with my truth. Sitting with the truth, honoring the truth, and having the difficult conversations that the truth brought about.
I remember in one of those conversations, the person across from me mused about what their life would be like in a parallel universe. Immediately I had this knowing that if I had a sense of what my life would be like in a parallel universe, then I wanted to live it in this one. Almost two years after that conversation, I remembered the parallel universe vision for my life that I've actually always carried with me. And it dawned on me that now was the time to live it.
My soul was right that I needed to experience death in order to live the reason that I incarnated for. Many pieces of me have died in the last ten years. I'm thirty five levels into the video game and I've found the secret passageway that will transport me to the room of reckoning – with just enough of me left to complete the mission.
My tooth needs to be extracted.
Clara Ritger
Read the backstory: Last year I shared about the rollercoaster of trying to identify the source of my tooth pain. Turns out, it was multiple teeth.
Three years ago, I had a chipped filling replaced on a lower left molar – and it's been painful to chew on that side of my mouth ever since. While I'd like to blame the dentist who did the procedure for cracking my teeth (yes, two) – underlying trauma to the teeth put them at risk of cracking in the first place. The evidence is visible on the lower right molars: deep fissure lines that run down the center.
I've been clenching my way through life, and my teeth have the receipts.
I've seen many dentists over the past few years – a by-product of nomadic living, but also because each one struggled to resolve the pain – and last year, one of them told me it is only a matter of time before the right molars crack too.
I've now had two crowns done on the lower left molars, and while my pain has improved, it isn't gone, and we're pretty sure we know which tooth needs to go.
After my second crown procedure at the end of April, I had a three-week period where I existed without pain. I could eat without thinking about it. I felt this spaciousness in my mind as the worries and constant awareness of how my teeth felt dissipated. I realized just how much this had been weighing on the back of my mind over the past few years, now that the weight was gone.
And then the pain came back.
Everything I ate, every time I chewed on the left side, this instant shock of pain. It wasn't as bad as it was before last July, when I had the first crown done. But it was enough to make eating not enjoyable. Slightly stressful, even. I couldn't stomach the pinging that told me all was still not well with my teeth.
This turn of events was not a surprise. Actually, the surprise was that I had three, pain-free weeks at all. Before the second crown, a bite test revealed that the pain was likely still coming from the tooth that had the crown last July, but we did the crown on the tooth next to it anyway, because there was mild pain and gum sensitivity from the filling replacement and subsequent shaving down of the tooth while dentists mistakenly thought it was the problem.
"Your nerve is correctly telling you there's something wrong," the prosthodontist said. He suspects there's a crack that extends to the root that he couldn't see when he did the crown.
But he doesn't think I should do anything about it yet. It's an expensive, troublesome, and lengthy procedure to extract a tooth and replace it with an implant, and it does contain some risk for other health problems and complications.
His recommendation is to continue monitoring the tooth until it shows more signs that it is ready to go.
I agree with this assessment, and yet...
I spent most of my life ignoring the pain that my body carried. I minimized my own pain to the point where my appendix had to burst before I sought medical care for it. I've worked hard to come back into my body, to understand the way that it speaks to me, to make space to hear its wisdom, and to take action to prove to it that I will keep it safe. This is how I transformed my nervous system, healed from long-term gastrointestinal pain, and began to believe that I was not imminently dying.
To wait and see is asking my body to trust me that everything will be okay, and this is asking my body to extend more trust than I've earned.
I can feel my body's hesitation in the way that it braces, ruminates, and breathes every time that I eat. Part of me wants to do something about the tooth now, and just get it over with. Part of me isn't ready to let go of a squeaky little nerve that I've come to love, because even though feeling it brings me pain, it also reminds me that I'm listening, and I'm alive. Part of me wants those three pain-free weeks back. Part of me wonders if I'll remove the tooth only to discover a new pain in my body; if a prolonged pain-free existence is a reality I'll ever know again at all.
A guided meditation I created to ease the process of letting go. Subscribe on YouTube!
Behind the paywall, what a seven-year-old taught me about wanting to go back to what we used to have — and the lesson I learned from my pain, and how to transform it.
