Maui Fever: Day 2, Throat Chakra
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Day 1 is here:
Day 2 was a blur. Three hours earlier than normal means going to sleep earlier, and waking up at the crack of dawn confused and alarmed.
Where am I? I look up and the fan is whirling around. It’s slightly wiggly, indicating it’s probably been on for years to circulate this thick air. I hear tropical bird noises. For some reason, I feel comfortable for the first time in 31 years.
I am in the neighborhood of Kihei. Tourist central, but isn’t everywhere in Hawaii? I am surprised there isn’t a puka shell kiosk inside my living room.
According to Google maps, my Airbnb is less than a half a mile from the nearest grocery store. I pull on my exercise pants and t-shirt, strap on my Tevas (aka the worlds best walking sandal, hello, get on my level), and step outside, ready to take the world by storm. I take a deep breath of the tropical air.
OH DEAR GOD
HUMIDITY
I CAN’T BREATHE
WHO AM I
I made it approximately 900 feet and couldn’t do it anymore. Sweat poured out in buckets. No wonder everyone is so slow-moving here. You physically can’t move more than a lackadaisical pace. May as well wear flip flops because you’re getting nowhere fast.
In the evening, as a Hawaii present to myself, I decided to go get a massage/reiki healing. As much of a skeptic as I am, I firmly am on the side of believing that energy really does impact the physical world we live in. And frankly, my energy has been really (x1,000) tremendously bad-news-bears. Depressed, anxious and perpetually rejected, I have been under the impression that I will never get out of the hole I have somehow dug for myself. I wanted to pay someone else to do it for me — if only for some temporary relief.
From outside the small apartment, faint island music was playing through her open windows. I knocked on the door.
Her name was Heidi. A middle aged, short white haired woman, she looked like a Heidi. We sat down to talk about what ailed me, and I immediately started listing inner personal struggles like it was a therapy session.
“I’m a writer but I don’t know how to be one.”
“I feel pressure to get a 9–5 job because that is normal and safe but I also I don’t know how to get one of those either.”
I start breathing heavy.
“I don’t know what I’m doing???”
I start sweating for different reasons. More uncomfortable, deeply frustrating reasons that all-knowing Heidi has hopefully seen before from her little apartment by the sea.
I’m sure she was asking if my shoulder hurt but I gave her my daily smorgasbord of inner pain and anguish instead.
Right in the middle of the living room was the massage table. I took off my clothes and settled in. She scanned my body and did her massage routine, and it felt glorious. The only thing she stopped at repeatedly was my throat / shoulders area. Over and over again she would rub near my collar bone.
“Your throat chakra is closed.” She finally said,
“The rest of you is open, even your head chakra straight to the heavens, but your throat chakra…your voice is almost completely closed. You can’t express yourself the way you need to.”
Well, no shit Heidi.
That’s why I’m on a vacation I can’t afford, in a place of forced spiritual growth, among all of the rolling waves and prehistoric sea turtles, trying to find my voice again.
