The Hawk That Taught Me to See

My eye socket was throbbing and my vision was starting to go blurry when I sat down to practice with Angie.

No no no, not now, I told the migraine. I have work to do. I can’t let myself feel this now. You have to go away. I have to focus.

The migraine responded by sending a searing pain through my skull, so blinding I had to close my eyes.

“Would it be okay if I was the practice client first?” I asked Angie. “And can we lay down in this corner? And is it okay if I keep my eyes closed and don’t look at you?”

This was a lot to ask of a new therapeutic practitioner. We were at an educational healing retreat for Organic Intelligence, a wellness modality that focuses on the inner workings of the nervous system. Angie and I were supposed to have easy, free-association conversations to watch each other’s bodily responses as we talked together.

We were supposed to trade off being practitioner and client for each other, and my guess was that right about now Angie was feeling she’d drawn the short straw in picking me as a partner. I was incapacitated. Luckily, Angie had a mentor sitting with us to help guide the session.

 With my eyes closed, I heard the mentor talking in low tones to Angie. “When a client is experiencing a lot of pain, it can be a struggle to stay oriented in the present or to stay in conversation with you. But often the imagination can be a useful tool to work with in situations like this.”

 “Okay,” Angie said slowly. “Let’s start there. Keep your eyes closed if that feels better, and just notice: are there any images coming to mind?”

 I shook my head a little, trying to clear away the silver swords stabbing through my eyes and ears. Angie already had quite enough to be getting on with; she didn’t need me throwing bleak pictures into the mix.

 Get under it, I thought, and I took a deeper breath. I tried to feel my butt and thighs on the floor, or my feet—as far away from my head as I could get.

 And then suddenly in my mind there was an open field. I was fifty feet above it, looking out to the tree line, scanning the rows of alfalfa. I could see a mouse twitch a hundred yards away, its sliver of a tail snaking under a leaf.

 “I’m a hawk,” I told Angie. My breaths weren’t deep anymore; they were just a shade deeper than shallow, and rhythmic. It seemed important to keep my breath exactly the same so I wouldn’t lose the view. “I have this image of watching a mouse really far away. I can see its tiny pink toes. They’re perfectly clear.”

Eyes still closed, I slowly turned my head. It just felt like the right thing to do. “Or I guess I’m next to the hawk,” I said. “I can see its feathers. It’s perched on a bare telephone pole.”

I could see every filament of the down in its chest. Its wings rippled iron-red and gold and silver, and all the colors of shine on metal, green and ice blue and lavender. “It’s beautiful,” I breathed.

 The mentor leaned in close to Angie and whispered something. “Okay,” Angie said, “see if you can play with looking out in the distance, and then looking back at the wings. Out at the distance, then back at the wings.”

 I nodded slowly and shifted my gaze in my mind from the field and the mouse, to the shimmering hawk next to me. The mouse nibbled at broken seeds in the dirt. The hawk twitched its shoulders. The mouse ventured another few inches further. The hawk shifted its weight from one foot to the other. I could feel the tension of its legs in my own neck. The mouse scurried down a hole. The hawk watched it go, and instantly relaxed.

There was no more searing pain in my head. I kept my eyes closed and my breath steady. I didn’t want to move, didn’t want to change anything that might make the pain come back.

“If it feels good, you might try bringing a bit of your attention back to the room around us,” Angie said quietly. “You can just listen to the sounds in the room if you don’t want to open your eyes.”

I nodded, ever so slowly, but it didn’t make the hawk go away and it didn’t make the pain come back. I listened to the other groups around us in the room, and shifted my weight back into my hips. I opened my eyes just a crack. It was bright in the room, but not too bright.

“The pain is gone,” I said, and I looked all the way up to Angie’s face. She was watching me, wide-eyed. Our mentor was next to her, smiling.

I have no fully logical explanation for why my migraine disappeared so easily that day. Nor do I have enough hubris to assume I could create the same effect again on command. I’ve since learned more about the nervous system, and how our bodies compensate for overwhelming states, and how capable they are of righting themselves when given the right, supportive conditions. Even so, the relief I felt that day was a powerful bit of magic.

That day taught me incredible lessons I still carry:

I can trust my body to lead me where I need to go.

My migraines are an invitation to bring attention and compassion in. They are to be cared for, not overcome.

My daydreams can be medicine.

Nature teaches me how to mend.

I am healthiest when I take time to look and listen inside.

An empathic witness is a powerful healer.

Later, I built a little altar on top of a bookshelf in my house. The first object I put on it was a hawk feather. Now when I sit to meditate, I thank the hawk for teaching me to trust what I don’t fully understand.