Mariah’s Reemergence

What follows is the text of a guided meditation written for Mariah by Nicole Kierein. Nicole is Diana’s eldest daughter. She, her husband Zach, and their 2-year-old girl, Eva, have been my generous and gracious hosts during my stays in DC. Click on the player control near the title below to hear an audio version of the meditation. Please excuse the living room production quality. We’re all learning as we go.

– Mark

Mariah’s Meditation

(Click here to listen)

By Nicole Kierein
July 20, 2008

Mariah, Mariah Papaya, Bunny, Squeege, Punker, my beautiful baby girl ….  You are precious, elegant, graceful, brilliant, and your presence commands great respect.  Your life is changing…you are transforming…you are reemerging.

I love you… your mom loves you… Clay loves you…  Grandma loves you… Diana loves you… Sarah loves you… Molly loves you… Coli, Zach & Eva love you… Aunt Judy, Amy & Holly love you… Uncle Carl loves you… Chai loves you… your entire family loves you… your friends love you… you love yourself.

This love is very powerful…your spirit is very powerful…your mind is powerful…your body is powerful…your brain is very powerful.

Your brain is privileged.  It has achieved amazing feats.  Few brains have accomplished what yours already has.  It has never been faced with a challenge like this one.  It has grown and flourished and reached new territories and new heights many times in your life, but it has never had to rebuild part of itself.  But your great brain, of all brains, is more than capable of confronting and overcoming this trial.

Your brain is mending itself.  It knows what it needs and what it needs to do, and triumphantly oversees its own progress.  Each day as you provide it with input, challenge it, and exercise it, it is consuming all of this experience with ferocity.  When its cup is full, it calms and retreats into itself for awhile.  While you fuel it with sleep, it carefully, delicately, deliberately, directively, acutely, intensely works.  Its work is beautiful, like a spider crafting a new web.

Deep, nestled in the center of your brain stem, the crafting is unfolding.  There, your neurons’ axons are reaching out to the synapses where they used to find dendrites welcoming their signals.  And your neurons’ dendrites are open and eager, waiting for the signals they used to receive.  This longing and this urging are great forces and they are pulling the web into new patterns.  New branches are forming to bridge the gaps.  Each day, you are showing them where the gaps are and helping them to discover where the repair work needs to happen.  And each day you spur them into action by demanding their old familiar results.  This information is invaluable to them and they use it to work while you sleep.  They carefully explore the gaps that you reveal to them and meticulously create tendrils that form the basis for new full-strength connections.  At times, they encounter barriers, walls or chasms that were not there before.  Ever determined, they creep relentlessly like vines around, over, under, and through to restore their pathways and meet their goals.

As you sleep, you can almost feel this happening.  You can sense the deep labors that your cells are undertaking and you are proud of what they are already achieving.  They repay you for the care you are taking of them by showing you glimpses of what they are working on.  Their successes are evident in the vocal outbursts and amazing movements you have made so far, like an outlet being plugged in while the light switch is turned on, and the bulb flickers as the plug is secured into its place.  Your brain is forming the plugs and the outlets so that the connections fit and the electrical pulses can surge through their courses to their destinations.

All of this is occurring in hundreds of cells, in synchronization, in a symphony.  The music is staggeringly powerful, and it is flowing throughout your brain and body.  Your extraordinary and heroic spirit has the good fortune to be housed in a phenomenally perfect physical body.  And it is this same spirit that is compelling this same mighty body to heal itself and to triumph.