Read an Excerpt
Fierce Medicine
Breakthrough Practices to Heal the Body and Ignite the Spirit
By Ana T. Forrest
HarperOne
Copyright © 2011 Ana T. Forrest
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-186424-7
Chapter One
THEY TELL ME I was born crippled, a funny-looking kid, my feet and
the left side of my body all twisted. Family lore is that the doctor had
told my mother that they would have to break all the bones in the left
side of my body and then put me in a full-body cast. Luckily, we had a
relative who was a chiropractor, which back in the fifties, was like
having a witch doctor in the family. He told my mother, “Her bones are soft;
you can straighten them out.”
My earliest memory is of Mother’s hands coming through the bars of
my crib, and the terror and pain as she twisted my feet and legs this way
and that, again and again. Whatever she was doing to me in the crib was
probably her attempt to follow my relative’s instructions. It must have
worked; the next time Mother took me to the pediatrician, there was no
more talk of breaking bones and setting body casts. The doctor, without
even glancing at any notes or file, just waved her away: “See, I told you
she’d be fine.”
Fine, perhaps, but certainly not fixed. I crawled as much as possible as
a babe, since it was so hard to walk and I looked so weird doing it. When
I was five or six, my mother forced me to wear heavy orthopedic shoes
fitted with steel braces inside that made walking even more difficult.
Every day I was supposed to shuffle along a chart she laid down on the
floor. The chart was dotted with footprints where I was supposed to
step—a kind of evil Twister game. The steel braces raised blisters and
welts on my feet, and the daily therapy made them bleed. God, I hated
those shoes. Once I tried burning them in the fireplace—the damn steel
braces wouldn’t burn. That earned me a smack from my mother.
Nothing new about that. Our home was a terrifying place where I
never felt safe. From the outside, our lives must have looked pretty nor-
mal. We lived in a California tract house, fairly new, with four bedrooms
and two baths for five people: my mother, my dad, my older brother and
sister, and me. Inside, though, things had gone to hell. My father had
long since moved into a separate bedroom. The house was always filthy
and foul-smelling, with crusted dishes piled up in the sink, ants every-
where, dried cat scat in the corners and under the couches. My
morbidly obese brother hoarded food, especially after a padlock appeared
on the refrigerator door, so odd smells came from his room too.
My mother, who was also obese, was always hitting me for some
reason or another. She could switch in a moment—from a helpless, whining
hypochondriac to a violent, out-of-control tyrant. The smallest infraction
—or sometimes nothing at all—would start her on a rant, which
often escalated into slapping and coming after me. “Demon seed,” she’d
say, or “bad seed,” or “goddamn kid”—she would scream at me.
She’d go off on my brother too—I don’t remember if my sister was
ever in her sights—but I was her favorite target. I don’t know why.
Maybe trying to fix my funky feet and legs wore her out and made her
sick of me. Maybe she was just exhausted and frustrated trying to be a
mother to three young children. Maybe she was just nuts. All I knew
was that whenever I was home, I was afraid of her. She was a
hammer-smith’s daughter and had a hell of a swing.
In the beginning, I’d beg her to stop, but after a few years, I stopped
protesting, even stopped crying—I refused to give her that much, to
show her I was broken. I also discovered a method of protecting
myself from her rages. Whenever my mother went on a rampage, I’d run
to my bedroom closet, pull myself up onto a high shelf, and tuck myself
behind the clothes and boxes, trembling. There in the dark, I’d close my
eyes and just disappear. I’d hear her tearing around my room, tossing
aside clothes and shoes, looking behind furniture. I was mere feet away,
but she’d never find my hiding place. I’d somehow figured out how to
extinguish my life force so she couldn’t track me. It worked every time.
School was safe enough—inside the classroom. But getting there and
back was a nightmare. An undersized, pale, sickly kid with bruised eyes
and funny-looking clunky shoes, I had an obvious target on my back.
The kids would circle me, calling me strange names, like “Jew bitch with
nigger socks.” (I had no idea where they got this or what it meant.) The
worst bully was my neighbor. It wasn’t like I could avoid her; we lived on
a dead-end street, and I had to walk by her house to get to school. One
day she dragged me into her backyard, picked up a board studded with
nails and waved it at my head, laughing as her growling German
shepherd menaced me, jaws snapping.
My waking hours were ruled by fear, yet sleep was no relief. That’s
when the sharks and other shadowy monsters stalked me. People tell me
you can’t die in your dreams, but I died a thousand deaths—torn limb
from limb by sharks and demons, crushed slowly by stones, drowned,
sucked into tsunamis. Whenever I finally succumbed to sleep, I lay
pinned to my bed, paralyzed by these horrific apparitions. The next
morning I’d wake up sore, covered with bruises, sometimes with ripping
pain in my intestines and butt. The pain came on with such suddenness,
such violence, that I’d gasp. Sometimes I’d force myself to stay awake for
days rather than surrender to such dreadful dreams.
But I was a creative kid, and when I was about four, I figured out one
way to numb myself to the constant fear: raid the liquor cabinet. I
remember walking on my pathetic legs to get there. I snuck out to the
kitchen and squatted near the cabinet. I unscrewed the caps and stole
sips from the caramel brown bottles full of something that was sickly
sweet, the pretty emerald green liquor, the clear bottles with the stuff
that burned on the way down, the squarish bottle with the red waxy seal
and sweet amber fluid. It wasn’t that I liked the taste so much; I liked the
strange fiery sensation on my tongue, the feeling of floating away from
my body. I liked that it altered my filthy reality very quickly. The fear
was still there, but it wasn’t as sharp.
Then, about two years later, I finally found a safe haven, an escape
hatch away from the horrors of home and the torment of the
neighborhood bullies: a horse stable. For as long as I can remember, I’ve shared
a sacred bond with horses. I’ve been told that someone had taken me
to a parade when I was a year old, and there I’d seen my first horse. I’d
pointed and said, “I want.” I was about six when my mother started
taking me to a rent stable a few miles from home. I’m not even sure why she
took me; probably just to get me out of her hair.
Pretty soon that broken-down rent stable, Azusa Canyon Stables,
became my real home. It wasn’t a fancy place, just a bunch of horses
for hire, some boarding. The owner, a rasty, amazing Greek Jew named
Nick Angelakos, was a real wild man, though. When he was younger, he
used to jump his horses through rings of fire at the circus, or over a
jalopy with a bunch of smiling passengers. He had framed photos of his
circus escapades all over his office, and I couldn’t stop staring at them.
Nick was pretty fearless, and he didn’t condone fear in animals or
children. I was at least a foot shorter and five or six years younger than
anyone else working there, but he must have seen something in me that I
didn’t yet see in myself. Pretty soon we had a deal: I’d help out at the
stables, and he’d teach me to ride. For the next six years, I did whatever I
could to be around those horses: mucking stalls, leading groups of
riders, and eventually training horses.
I learned a lot about facing my fears by working with those horses.
Far from being gentle souls, horses will bully each other, and they’ll
bully humans. I was always getting stepped on and pushed over and
kicked. Since I was such a runt, I really had to learn how to make those
huge animals pay attention, let them know, “I may be short, but you
better know I’m here.” When they’d rear up or try to kick or bite me, I
refused to be spooked. Instead, I faced them down, drawing my tiny body
up as tall as I could, keeping my voice low and determined. “Oh, no you
don’t. You’re coming with me right now.” I got kicked to pieces a million
times, but I stopped being afraid of getting stomped. Size has nothing to
do with standing up to someone. I began to grow my power.
I remember the moment I knew for sure that I’d changed my relation-
ship with fear. My mother and I were carrying a heavy piece of wooden
furniture down the hallway when I accidentally dropped my end.
”Demon seed!” she screamed at me. “Evil!” She brought back her arm to do
her usual routine. But by this time I was close to twelve, much stronger
from working at the stable. I’d been dealing with fifteen hundred pounds
of equine temper often enough that I found myself thinking, This is just
a two-legged one, and a fat one at that. On that day, I reached out and
caught her hammersmith’s fist mid-swing. There were no words, just the
two of us staring straight into each other’s eyes and a realization: this
ends it. Fear left me and infected her. I think she was as astonished as
I was. She struggled for a moment and then let her arm fall. She pretty
much quit going after me after that.
That was a turning point for me. I learned to do a switch—instead of
running from the fear, I turned around and went after it, making it my
ally. On the playground, I challenged the toughest bully to take her best
shot. “Go ahead, hit me!” I kept backing her down, right in front of her
posse. I don’t know whether she was scared or just confused, but she
kept her distance from then on.
I was done living in fear. I took a pledge to stop being prey, to turn
around, face my fear, and stalk it. I’ve lived that way ever since.
FEAR TRAINING
I started deliberately doing things that terrified me; I called it fear training.
As a teenager, I was afraid of being out in the desert—it was so dry,
so exposed to the elements. So I ran off to Hesperia in the Mojave Desert
in Southern California to take my first job training horses on my
own. When I first arrived, I felt like I’d been plunked down on the life-
less surface of the moon: blazing heat, no water. Gradually I learned to
walk through the heat the way you’d ford a river—loose-limbed, going
with the flow. I discovered an incredible amount of beauty and life in the
desert; it was just subtler than I was used to. You have to look closer, but
then you see hares, mice, rattlesnakes, buzzards, hawks, and all the folks
that live in the desert. I began to sense the desert’s rhythms, the way the
flowers can carpet the land after a cloudburst and then three days later
leave just seeds rolling across the dry earth. The very briefness of those
flowers’ lives added to the poignancy of it. I began to love what I had feared.
A few years later, when I lived up in the Santa Barbara Forest in my
early twenties, I decided to stalk my fear of heights. I’d perch on this
tiny ledge high above a river filled with rocks. I’d stand there, at least
twenty or twenty-five feet above the water, petrified, waiting for the fear
to leave. But it never did—so I would jump anyway. I’d keep climbing up
that ledge and jumping off five or six times, even though my heart
hammered harshly in my chest. I realized the fear wasn’t going to go away,
but my paralysis within the fear would.
Sometimes I’d hesitate. I had this paradigm in my head: If I just stand
here long enough, the fear will go away and I’ll jump and I’ll be fearless.
That didn’t happen. I discovered instead how not to be stopped by my
fear. I tried stilling my fear by sitting down and breathing deeply, but
that really wasn’t all that helpful. After a while, I’d clamber all the way
up and just jump right away so the fear wouldn’t have time to build, the
paralysis wouldn’t deepen, and all the subterranean scary stories in my
head couldn’t bubble up. I didn’t wait to feed the fear. I just took a deep
breath, exhaled, and jumped. The fear was there, but it wasn’t unmanageable.
I’d believed that in order to do what I was afraid of, I had to get
rid of the fear first, but that turned out to be only an idea, not the truth.
You have to do something two hundred times before the fear will disperse.
Are you still afraid of something? Just do it again. Do it again. Do
it again.
Maybe I couldn’t banish all my fears, but I made the choice to stop al-
lowing them to rule my life.
It takes a lot of courage to explore your fear. Courage isn’t the numbed-
out, flinty, Clint Eastwood–esque stoicism we’re accustomed to, but
instead it’s daring to experience our feelings—even if this requires painful
awakening—with discernment and intelligence. Choose the Brave-
Hearted Path: have the courage to truly feel what’s going on inside you
when you’re afraid, and respond appropriately. This requires patience.
Walk the Brave-Hearted Path now by deciding you will no longer be
afraid of being afraid. Reframe your fear; be willing to get sick and tired
of being sick and tired. I also got sick of being everyone’s lunch. Now I
refuse: You don’t get even a snack from me!
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Fierce Medicine by Ana T. Forrest Copyright © 2011 by Ana T. Forrest. Excerpted by permission of HarperOne. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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