Why I Think My Healing Farm Vision Doesn't Exist

Admittedly, there are places I’ve found online that are healing places. There’s even one that’s in the works called “The Healing Farm” (which as far as I can see is not yet happening). But I’ll be darned if they aren’t all hippie dippy, new age, or spiritual retreats. So I said in my initial post that the closest thing I can think of to my fantasy is a spa. But who can afford to go to a spa for a month or two? Also, although I’m a firm believer in massage and sitting in hot tubs, I think a chronic injury needs some collaboration and other practices to really get in there to find where the problem stems and to try to work it out. Honestly, a hospital bed would be good too.

This is my fantasy. This is my vision. I go to a place for a month, six weeks, two months. Where I might have my own little tent or cottage or room with bathroom. There’s a hospital bed with a REALLY good mattress. One of those latex mattresses. There’s a team of practitioners I meet with at the beginning of my stay who will all interview me about my pain, feel around and confer about what treatments might be best. There will be a massage therapist. There will be an acupuncturist. A physical therapist. An Osteopath. A Chiropractor. A feldenkrais practitioner, a yoga instructor and a pilates instructor. Maybe even a nutritionist. All of these people would be happy to collaborate treatment and ideas tailored to my personal healing attempt. I think one of the biggest frustrations I’ve come across is to have conflicting, even competing opinions from different healing disciplines. I don’t want to hear someone slamming another process. I want to hear why they think what they are doing is best for me and how it might work in tandem with other practices to heal me.

I might have my own little kitchenette so that I can do a little cooking or have the option to buy a reasonably priced meal at the common space. There might even be a garden I can walk in that would grow organic veggies and fruits for the guests/patients to eat. There would definitely be walking trails and yoga/pilates classes. And a hot tub. Maybe a pool too for gentle exercise without stress on the body.

Expensive to run (translate: expensive for guests)? Yes. There’s the glitch. I would want it to be affordable for those like me. Those who can’t afford to heal their backs. Maybe someday I will be able to create this place and somehow figure out how to make it affordable. In the meantime it’s a “staycation” (in the words of my friend Laurel) for me. My mini-healing project.

Not a Farm?

OK. This is not a farm. I know. But it stems (no pun intended) from an idea I’ve had, a fantasy really of my Shangri-la. My healing shangri-la. I’ve done a lot of traveling in my life. I love it, I dream about it, but I’m going on year-three of chronic back pain and my current fantasies revolve around going to a place where I can heal. Naturally. I really don’t have anything against healing back pain with western medical practices and maybe if I could afford it, I would go for major back surgery, but I can’t afford it. I also have read loads about unsuccessful back surgery. Not too appealing to get something that invasive done and to not have it work. Ouch. I do believe, I want to believe, in natural healing and I REALLY believe now in preventative. It’s too late for me to go the preventative route, but I want to reach out also to those who don’t yet have back pain or some other chronic pain in their body about the importance of preventative care.

So since my Shangri-la doesn’t exist (at least as I visualize it) and I can’t afford the nearest thing, which would be a spa, I’m creating a test. This is my virtual Shangri-la. This is my personal healing project that I hope will be a sharing place for people in chronic pain who want to heal naturally or who might have crappy health insurance like I do. A place where we can share ideas, successes, failures and hopes of being pain-free.

I’m a photographer. I don’t have a shoot for another month and I want to do an at-home healing test. This is my mini-at-home healing sabbatical. I hope to bring ideas, inspiration and hope to other people who are in pain. And maybe have a little fun in the process. This is,  after all, supposed to be my Healing Farm Shangri-la.