Firewalk: Embracing Different Abilities presents a new perspective and action plan for anyone who lives with adversity. Author Kathy O'Connell draws from her own experiences of living with cerebral palsy and working with others as a counselor in this powerful-and empowering-book about living life to the fullest with a disability. Readers are offered an approach to moving through feelings of fear and victimization, which lead to embracing and appreciating their different abilities. As a result, people experience greater love, happiness, and fulfillment. Kathy uses the metaphor of a firewalk to represent the fear we feel when faced with difficulty, circumstances that could further hurt us, and the doubt within about our own ability to be successful. The author's epiphany during an actual firewalk served as a catalyst for developing this powerful and unique approach she now teaches to clients, audiences, and workshop participants. Firewalk: Embracing Different Abilities shows how to: View your difference as a valuable gift, teacher, and opportunity for growth Move beyond hardship and "why me" victimization Face fear, anger, and frustration head-on so you can access your authentic self Stop letting others' attitudes and perceptions define, limit, and hurt you Get in touch with your sexuality and power to attract Find your purpose and go after it with new abilities, strength, and focus Firewalk: Embracing Different Abilities offers invaluable tools for parents and teachers of children with disabilities, as well as new ideas for therapists and other healthcare workers who work with clients andpatients who have different abilities. When we learn to see our disability or difference as a gift, we can use it as a transformative tool. Instead of struggling against what is difficult, or trying to "manage" or "fix" our difference, we can embrace the very thing we resist-and allow it to strengthen us. Drawing from her own expe
Firewalk
Embracing Different AbilitiesBy Kathy O'ConnellBalboa Press
Copyright © 2012 Kathy O'Connell
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4525-6119-6Chapter One
The Significance of Embracing
Whatever you're given can wake you up or put you to sleep. That's the challenge for now: What are you going to do with what you have already—Your body, your speech, your mind?
—Pema Chodron The Wisdom of No Escape
I live life embracing cerebral palsy.
When we embrace, we surrender. It is not a surrender of weakness but one of strength. Embracing means holding something dear to our hearts, just as we hold close to our hearts those whom we physically embrace. In the act of embracing, we are saying we are strong enough to accept something or someone willingly into our lives. It is weakness that causes us to fight or resist, because we believe we do not have the power to hold or endure what we are pushing away. Embracing signifies strength and a belief in our sense of power and spirit being so great that we can incorporate whatever it is into our lives. When we welcome something into our lives—whether it is good or bad, easy or challenging, likable or loathsome—we are embracing it and no longer struggling against it. We may continue to struggle with its effects, but we are no longer using the majority of our energy to deny its existence and influence in our lives.
I was born with cerebral palsy (CP), a permanent disability frequently caused by congenital abnormalities in the brain or the oxygen supply being cut off to the baby for several minutes during delivery. It is not known what caused my CP. My mother had phlebitis during her pregnancy with me. Additionally, I came out of my mother's womb silently, not breathing. In those days, the doctor would spank a newborn on the bottom to get her to breathe. Quite a way to enter the world. Luckily, I had loving parents waiting for me. I quickly learned the world could be a welcoming place.
I was placed in an incubator due to breathing problems, despite being a full-term baby weighing nearly ten pounds. Two days after my birth, I had my first and only seizure. The doctors were not sure what caused it. They sent my mother home from the hospital without me. Days went by, and they still could not figure out whether there was something wrong. I was eating just fine (never had a problem with that). I was sleeping and carrying out all the other typical baby functions. The doctors shrugged their shoulders and sent me home.
It wasn't until nearly a year and a half later that my parents, concerned enough by my continued difficulty to sit up on my own or grab toys, took me to see a specialist, Dr. Schwartz. This is when my parents received their introduction to cerebral palsy. They were told that it was a neurological condition affecting basic brain functioning such as movement, balance, coordination, learning, hearing, and seeing. My parents were told this by a doctor who was wise enough to know he could not determine my fate based on my condition. My parents remember the doctor telling them that the effects of CP vary a great deal and that my development would eventually show to what degree I was affected.
Dr. Schwartz clearly conveyed to my parents that there were many possibilities for me in life. As an example, he cited someone he knew with CP who became a pianist. He went on to challenge my parents by telling them that the level of success children with disabilities experience is usually based on the care and nurturing they receive at home. My parents walked away from the visit believing they had the power to foster abilities within me. I am profoundly grateful to Dr. Schwartz for laying the foundation of hope and potential in my life.
The love and affirmation I received as a child has resulted in a life full of blessings and successes. By successes, I don't necessarily mean material wealth or accomplishments, although there's been some of that along the way. Success, to me, is happiness. I am a happy person with a happy life. And yes, I share in some of the typical American successes: marriage, family, graduate degrees, my own business, a nice home, and many good friends. Being given the opportunity to show my abilities in these areas is directly related to my happiness.
The fact that I had CP led to my career as a rehabilitation counselor, a counselor who specializes in the emotional, vocational, and social issues of people with disabilities. I run my own counseling practice, specializing in helping people with some of the internal struggles experienced as a result of having a disability. I also provide a host of trainings and presentations to people with disabilities as well as to professionals in the field. I love what I do, despite it being very challenging at times. I have tried to adopt a Ben and Jerry's philosophy toward work: "If it's not fun, why do it?"
This happy life, though, began with my embracing the difficult and acknowledging my struggle.
Many people may have difficulty embracing what is not acceptable (or perhaps is even hated). How can we embrace something in our lives that we do not like, we do not want, and which may even cause us pain? When a difficult event is happening in our lives, our natural tendency is to begin to shut down and cut off our feelings. For many people this urge can lead to addictions of all kinds—food, drugs, alcohol, sex, shopping. However, if we remain aware and take an honest look at what is going on in our lives, profound changes can begin to happen. By looking at the struggle and why it is so difficult, we honor the struggle and the impact it has on our daily lives. When we do this, we are not submitting to it but rather allowing ourselves to incorporate what we are meant to learn from this experience into ourselves so that we may become more fully the people we are intended to be.
All of us have experienced, at different times in our lives, resistance to events and circumstances unfolding around us. Many times it is very justifiable to push back from what is happening to alleviate the pain we feel. We deny what hurts and even try to force our pain away so that, in our minds, it does not really exist. Although this can be a coping mechanism for survival, when we do this we are investing all our energy (which could be used for more positive results) into the belief that something has power over us. We then struggle arduously with this perceived power to keep it out of our lives. In doing so, we risk losing our faith that all things, no matter how painfully intense they may be, happen in order to allow us to grow, learn, and access or further our abilities. Once we begin to acknowledge, rather than deny, the struggle taking place, profound things happen within us and in our lives.
In the midst of adversity—whether it is in a relationship, at work, or in how my body functions at the moment—I find that life lessons can be difficult to accept, let alone embrace, even today. In my own life, the process of embracing my disability—or difference, as I like to call it—has included many twists and turns, which I expect will continue throughout my life. I have no doubt that my adjustment to living with cerebral palsy came easier because I grew up in a loving family. My parents always focused on the positive. When, as a child, I became discouraged by how difficult tasks were for me, my parents would be quick to point out how much I could do for myself. While this approach, at times, may not have allowed me to deal with the depths of my grief about living with a significant difference in ability, it did instill a glass-is-half-full mentality in me. This was the impetus for me to begin embracing my life and experiencing many successes. The grief of the hardship of my life, however, was something I kept inside and did not fully deal with until I was in my mid-twenties.
Feeling the Pain on the Path toward Embracing
When I allowed myself to feel the grief of living with a disability and the complicated emotions associated with it, I began taking the steps toward truly embracing CP as a valuable component of who I am. I mourned the fact that I would never experience the ease of motor coordination or speak without the accent of a brain injury. I grew very sad about always dealing with people reacting to my difference; I would have to always be on guard for a range of teachable moments, even when I did not feel like educating anyone. I felt the sadness from the lack of ease from daily tasks, like always needing a railing to go down stairs or having to take baby steps when I carried a glass of water so as not to spill it. I acknowledged the deep discouragement of having something within me that could not be changed. How could I continue to embrace this as my life if I felt this way? What was the meaning of it all? Somehow I knew that the answers were more than grief and discouragement.
I love the Rolling Stones song that claims, "You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need." This is so painfully and annoyingly true. Even as a young child, I sensed that living life with a disability was what I actually needed to do on this earthly plane. Although there were moments upon moments when I hated the struggle of living with a difference, my innate wisdom knew that it was exactly the way I needed to experience life. I began to allow myself to struggle and to endure the pain that went along with it, trusting that it would lead me to where I needed to go.
This began with looking at myself and allowing those feelings to come. A significant motivator for doing this stemmed from the fact that I was training to become a counselor for people with disabilities. One of the core tenets for anyone wanting to be a good counselor is that you cannot take people to a place where you are unwilling to go yourself. I entered into professional training programs where a key requirement was to go through clinical experiences to work on myself first. These trainings, over the course of years, consisted of several intensive workshops lasting three to five days at a time. While I was involved in a few different trainings, the same instructors led each. This created a safe environment for trust to develop.
For the first time in my life, I really allowed myself to feel the pain and sorrow of living with a disability. I did so without the usual judgments of my pain—"My disability isn't that severe; what do I have to complain about?" I finally learned that honoring the pain I feel about living with a disability is key to honoring who I am as a person. It helps me to be more real, someone others can relate easily to. If you think about it, we more readily connect with people when we see their multiple dimensions, not just looking at them as "all good" or "all bad." We tend to want to see all that someone can bring to the table.
In these years of self-exploration, the most profound lesson I learned was that I had the capability to endure the struggle. Furthermore, I learned that allowing myself to acknowledge and feel the pain in fact made me not only stronger but also more compassionate and loving. I was not just becoming a better counselor; I was becoming a better person—more grounded in love and acceptance for myself and, therefore, other people as well.
As I learned to embrace the struggle, I also learned that in doing so I was not forfeiting the gifts cerebral palsy had provided me with but was integrating the wisdom of these gifts into the person I am. These gifts will be revealed as we go through this book, but a few of them include a profound sense of joy, from really understanding what is important in life; empathy and compassion for others; and a depth of fortitude to see the possibilities. I began to feel in my gut the yin and yang aspect of living with a difference, and I knew that in the end my essence could handle and embrace both the struggles and the joys my disability presented me with.
One of the core lessons in the art of embracing is believing that all things happen for a very specific reason. Once we are able to accept that there is a direct meaning underlying all the events and circumstances in our lives, then the process of embracing the difficult will surely be a profound one, which will only strengthen us. This is because we will finally understand that circumstances and situations are brought into our lives with the intent to transform us and provide us with opportunities to draw upon our own personal tools to deal with them. We learn to incorporate the lessons of these circumstances into our lives in order to improve them. When we resist embracing something, then God and the Universe, or whatever your belief system is, will continue to provide us with certain life situations; these will encourage us to embrace what we are resisting.
When we are confronted with challenges in our lives, it can be difficult to even think about embracing them, let alone living life from this perspective. Nonetheless, when we are given the opportunity to do so, even when there is no other choice, as was my case, we are allowing ourselves to embrace the challenge. In doing so, we stretch our abilities even further. Think about the act of physically embracing someone—we extend our arms around the person. In embracing a challenge, we are taking all of our abilities and broadening them to encompass the demands of the situation. Our essence surrounds the challenge, rather than our essence being dominated by the challenge. Embracing a challenge or a difficulty means we are really acknowledging the abilities—which have always been within us—to meet it. Many of us do not realize that when we come into this world we already have all the abilities we need to reach our highest potential. Very specific situations and relationships are called into our lives through the years to give us magnificent opportunities to help unveil the gifts we have possessed all along but which we may have had no idea were within us.
Throughout my life, people have often referred to me as courageous. For years, instead of receiving this as a compliment, I felt annoyed when I heard this. To me, there was nothing that courageous about living the life you want, and I thought that it was condescending to place such a characteristic on me because of my disability. It was not until I was in one of my trainings that I began to hear this from a different perspective. One of the teachers, someone I deeply trusted and respected, told me I was courageous. When I tried to resist, he looked me straight in the eye and said, "No, you're really courageous." It was at that moment that I began to understand what he meant. He had witnessed the pain I felt over always being different, about having things I would never be able to do, and about being so quickly judged by people before they had even met me. He had also learned how much I loved life and wanted to experience all of it, despite the pain I sometimes encountered. I began to realize that true courage comes from wanting life and wanting to fully live it, even with all the heartbreak it brings.
Courage comes from within, from a deep place within our hearts, spirits, and souls. We all have it within us, and it is always our choice to either use it or let it lie dormant. Courage, combined with love for ourselves, gives us the power to live our dreams. When faced with days when we would rather stay in bed, it is courage that gives us the jump-start we need. When we are told we are unable to do something or that it is impossible, courage expedites our journey to the possible. Courage is the transformative agent within us that allows us to see the possibilities of our abilities. Courage also provides us with the extraordinary opportunity to explore the deeper meaning of life and our unique purpose in it.
It does not matter whether you have a paralysis from the neck down or have the athletic abilities of Derek Jeter; we all have to call upon courage on a daily basis. Courage allows us to choose between fully embracing ourselves and being just another lost soul walking around in a shell of a body. Courage is what whispers to us that our dreams are to be met and that we are infinitely more powerful than we were ever taught to be. With courage, I have been able to enjoy all the external successes and accomplishments of my life, which have made my life quite pleasant. More importantly, though, courage and a sense of self-love have empowered me to enjoy the internal prosperity that has made my life rich with love, joy, and spirit. Because of this, I am now on the lifelong process of embracing all of my different abilities. This journey has allowed me to begin to embrace the essence of my life's purpose: to live in light and love and encourage others to do the same. I welcome you on the journey.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Firewalkby Kathy O'Connell Copyright © 2012 by Kathy O'Connell. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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