00:00

Mary’s Talk

Saturday, October 25, 2025 (Group/Hinsdale, New Hampshire)


Participants: Mary (Michael), Adam (Avril), Ann (Vivette), Brad (Quinian), Christina (Melian), Cristina, Daniel (Zynn), Denise (Azura), Eric (Doren), Jean (Lyla), Jean-François (Samta), Jeff (Rogert), John (Lonn), Karen (Turell), Letty (Castille), Lynda (Ruther), Marcos (Marta), Mauricio (Kaffka), Michael, Melissa (Leah), Natasha (Nicole), and Thomas (Abel).

“You can’t make different choices if you can’t see the ones you’re making, but if you can see them, you can start making different ones and it makes all the difference in the world.”

MARY: Well, this has been a very eventful year I think, for a lot of us, and a lot of changes happening and a lot of struggles happening. So I’m going to share my struggles this year and also what I learned from them.

This year started out horrible. It was just really bad. I first injured my knee and then from injuring it, it created this cyst in the back of my knee called a Baker’s Cyst, and that was pretty painful. The doctors, every doctor that I went to decided that prednisone was the answer to whatever was wrong with me. (Laughs) For pain, it was the answer. Then I got the flu, the regular flu, which the regular flu, I don’t know, it seems to me is worse than covid because my daughter’s had covid five times and this flu was horrible. It was horrific, I was so sick. I was incapacitated and I was in the emergency room five times in a month because I couldn’t breathe. I got pneumonia after I got the flu, and so I was just out for the count. I couldn’t walk because of my knee. My leg swelled up two times the size of what it normally is. I mean, it was huge.

I felt like an invalid. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t walk around, across the room without being out of breath. I couldn’t function. Actually, it did start earlier than the beginning of the year because I was also getting sick after the last group session. Now I know what led up to all of this, because Thanksgiving was not good either last year. I couldn’t cook because I couldn’t stand long enough to do the cooking. It turned out to be a nice Thanksgiving anyway because my daughter and my granddaughter jumped in and they were great and they made it wonderful, but it was not so great for me. It kept going. There was a little bit of a reprieve around Christmastime, but then the first of January I was a wreck with my knee.

(To Melissa) Hi Melissa! Oh! And there’s one seat here.

MELISSA: Oh! Okay.

MARY: (Laughs) That must be why we have one seat. Again!

Anyway, so until February I kept thinking that this was all just temporary. I’d get over it. I’d be fine. Then when things started to keep going and getting worse and getting worse and getting worse and I was so incapacitated I couldn’t work, I couldn’t function. I had to have people come and take care of the house and take care of the dogs and take care of me because it was all just so awful.

That kept going for months, and I was on such a high dose of prednisone that I blew up like a balloon. I was… My whole self was then like twice my size. It was horrifying. It was really frightening, and that just made it even harder to function. I started to feel like, “Oh my goodness, this is going to be the rest of my life. I’m going to be this way and I’d rather be dead than to live like this. It’s just going to be horrible.” And the breathing part was really frightening, because I haven’t felt like that since I was a small child, and it brought up all kinds of really bad associations with my mother being so controlling with asthma medicine and wouldn’t give it to us. Because my sister and I both had it when we were little and she wouldn’t give us the medication until we were practically turning blue. So this round of not being able to breathe was bringing all that back up, and I hadn’t thought about that in fifty years.

It was really horrible, and I started to become very discouraged and feeling kind of hopeless, and didn’t really have much fight left in me. I just thought well, this is it. This is the way I’m going to go, and it sucks but this is it. And I was upset too because I felt like I wasn’t ready to check out, but at the same time I felt like, “It doesn’t matter whether I’m ready or not, it’s coming.”

Then in April, things changed, or they started to change. In April, Karen had a little group session with her magic group and they did it at my house because there weren’t very many people. The energy in the house was so incredible, it was palpable. I mean you could feel it in every room. It was huge and it was really strong and I could feel it in an incredible way.

(Turns on the fan) Yes, I’m going to have to turn this on (group laughter) because I’m starting to get hot.

But after they left, it was like that energy hung around for a little while and it, in a way, kind of punched you. It was like a real kick in the butt of: “Get up and do something! Change it! You’re not ready? Then change the outcome of this,” and “You just had all these people all in your house with all this magic stuff going on. Well, use it and do something!” So I did.

I got new doctors, because unlike a lot of people that don’t want to go to doctors and don’t go that route, which is great and fine for any of you that are in that direction, but I’m not one of them. I have been going to doctors since I was a baby, and so that’s what’s in my arsenal. That’s one of my tools. So I got new doctors that are from Dartmouth, which is an ivy league university and hospital.

LYNDA: Teaching university.

MARY: Yes, it is a teaching university, and they specialize in medicine and law, and so their doctors are pretty amazing. I first went to a neurosurgeon for my back, which has been bad for years but it got worse in all this time of being incapacitated because I wasn’t moving. She talked to me and gave me a plan of how to taper off of the prednisone and get off of that, which took me three months, to get off of that. Then I also got a pulmonologist who put me through all kinds of tests and discovered that I had developed asthma again, from the flu targeting my lungs and then the pneumonia after that, and it just put my lungs in a direction that they just couldn’t function.

So then we went on a journey of trying to find the right medications that I could use that would help the asthma and which I am proof right now that that is working, because I’m talking like nothing is the matter with me and I’m breathing like nothing is the matter with me. Let me tell you, that is a miracle (chuckles) because I was really scared that that was how I was going to go out, was not being able to breathe, and it sucks! (Laughs) (To Letty) I can feel for you, Letty. Oh my god. I have never experienced something like that. It’s terrifying and being not able to breathe is such a horrible feeling. I mean, it’s so debilitating, it’s scary. Anybody that has had those experiences of not being able to breathe knows it’s a terrifying experience, and so uncomfortable (chuckles) when it’s all the time. But I got this pulmonologist. She’s wonderful and she finally found the right combination of medications that I take every day, and it manages the asthma.

Then I also got an orthopedic doctor and he fixed my knee. My leg is not two times its size anymore and I’m walking, and that is great. And now my neurosurgeon is hot on the trail to do this surgery on my back, to fix that. That will be the end of the journey of this year.

What I learned from this, I think, was exceptionally valuable because through that whole time I kept trying to think about perception, and “What is my perception?” and “Why am I doing this?” and “What’s happening to me?” and “What am I creating?” I was asking all the wrong questions. I knew what started it all, but this is a key piece I think, because lots of times from talking to other people, I hear this from other people too that they might be going through something and they know what started it. Then we just have a tendency to go with that, that this thing, this experience started this downward slope of my experience. You don’t even think about it, you just go with it, that you’re just going to go. It’s as if you think – but you don’t think – that whatever it is just has to run its course until it’s done. But you don’t think that, you just do it.

I just did it, too. In that time though I was thinking, “This is such a horrific experience,” and it went on for so long. I mean, six months I was out of it. I’ve never been sick that long, and I’ve been sick since I was a baby and I’ve never been sick for that long at any given stretch of time. It was frightening, and so it was kind of influencing me to think about perception and what is my perception that’s making this happen. Well then, how can I say this? A part of what started the whole ball rolling came back and I had an interaction with that and right afterwards I had a flashback. Flashbacks are not just like remembering a memory. Flashbacks are things that people that have extreme trauma can have, and when they do it’s like jettisoning back into the experience itself and re-experiencing it. This reality goes away and that reality is all there is, until you pop out of it.

I have had that happen a few times in my life, not often. That happened and I flashed back to when I was about, I’m not entirely sure but about five or six. I was in the hospital – and for those of you that don’t know, by the time I was that age I had already been in the hospital fifty-six times, which a lot of that had to do with my parents, why I ended up in the hospital that many times. They generally kept me in the hospital for a week each time that I was in, and in those days nurses didn’t come in all the time. They didn’t come in to check your vitals all the time. They didn’t come in to see if you were okay. They came in to deliver your food. They came in to just check and see if you were alive (laughs) but they mostly stayed at the nurse’s station. They didn’t really come in and interact with the children. I was always in a room by myself, so that was not fun either. Being in the hospital then was a trade-off. It was also traumatic, but it was a lesser type of trauma than being at home. So I got sick a lot and that was how to get out of my house.

The flashback was of a day that must have been in the middle of the week of my stay in the hospital. A nurse did come into the room and she said, “You’re getting better and you’ll be able to go home soon.” I just smiled at her and she left the room, and I immediately was thinking, “Oh no! How can I make the medicine not work? No. I don’t want to go home soon. How can I make this go on longer?” I wasn’t thinking about that just in that moment, and I wasn’t thinking about it just in the day in general. I was thinking about it and trying to figure out what to do about it, hour by hour. Every hour that I was awake I was thinking about it. And this is going to sound absolutely crazy, but remember, I was only five or six, that I believed that there were all these little people inside of me, teeny, tiny, tiny, like microscopic people that had a whole city inside of my body. That when medicine went into me, it rained on the people, and instead of getting umbrellas they got buckets to catch all of the medicine because then they would make like stew and stuff with it so it was healthy. I was trying to communicate like crazy with all these little people inside of me, telling them, “Don’t catch the medicine! Don’t get the buckets! Go in your house! Stay away from the medicine.” It didn’t work, but I was determined to do that.

Then I popped back, and what I realized was oh my god, I’ve been looking at this so from the wrong angle. I’ve been thinking I know what started this and what is my perception about that. That has nothing to do with it. What has to do with it is what is the threat right now that I’m facing hour to hour every day, and keep making myself sick. I keep choosing to make myself sick and injured every single day, but not every single day only, hour to hour I’m making this happen. So what is so threatening to me, that I would rather do this and make myself this sick and injured, than deal with something else that is obviously more threatening or more scary than being this sick? I did actually figure it out, and the thing that I engaged that influenced the flashback was the thing that I was feeling very threatened by, and enough so that I couldn’t deal. It was not something that I could deal with. I was too… not afraid, but too threatened in a way that I didn’t feel that I was able to direct myself.

I’m intentionally not saying “control” because it’s not about control. It IS about being able to be me, and I lost myself during that time. I didn’t know who I was. I wasn’t anybody. I was a blob. (Laughs) The people that were there at that magic session saw what a blob I was. Oh my god, it was horrible!

Anyway, I realized this is something that all of us do. It doesn’t matter what the subject is. It doesn’t matter if it’s being sick. It doesn’t matter if it’s how you’re thinking or what you’re doing. It’s when you get into this type of state where things are not going right and things keep happening that are uncomfortable or more than uncomfortable and scary. Something is influencing us that is stronger than whatever it is that we’re experiencing. Whatever that thing is, it’s more scary for some reason, whatever reason, than what you’re experiencing.

But the other thing that I realized also is that that thing that can be more scary might not actually, now as an adult, be that scary. But we’re not looking at it, we’re not thinking about it and so because we’re not seeing it because we’re not looking at it, we just react. We just react as if that thing IS some big monster and that it IS really horrible and it’s going to do something really bad to us. But when you can see it, you can realize that you’re not that little kid anymore, that you’re not in that situation anymore. (To one of her dogs) Meaning you too, Missy. (Chuckles) You’re not.

But it’s really… It’s like this. It’s really hard and it’s really affecting and very emotional, that you feel all those feelings of when you were a kid, and all those things that were scary or were threatening, and it was legitimate and it was real. But now – and I’m going to do it a little bit differently – now we’re not those little children anymore and we get to make the choices, if we can see what we’re doing, if we can see that we’re making choices hour by hour each day that are not necessarily good for us. That if we can look at what we’re doing, if we can look and listen to our own bodies and our own self and look at the choices that we’re making, which is really sometimes hard to do, but when you can, you can start making different choices.

Elias is right. You can’t make different choices if you can’t see the ones you’re making. But if you can see them, you can start making different ones and it makes all the difference in the world. I could have kept going in the direction that I was going in, and I probably wouldn’t be here right now. I probably would have checked. I was that close. There have been other times in my life where I have been super close to checking out and might have even made that choice but didn’t. But this time I had this nagging thing inside of me of, “No, I’m just not ready. Nope! I’m not ready.” Even though I kept thinking, “I’m going.” (Laughs) I kept going in the direction of “This is it. I’m not going to be able to sustain this and this is going to be the thing that’s going to take me out.” But it didn’t.

The cool thing is that I don’t look like Jabba the Hutt anymore. (Group laughter) I actually – this is no joke – as of this morning, I actually have lost thirty-nine pounds, which is a miracle (laughs), since June. Because I was pretty blown up, like a balloon, until June. But my knee is good, my breathing is good and I feel good. I feel like I’ve still got stuff to do.

LYNDA: Well, that’s good! (Group applause and cheering)

ANN: What an example, Mary. What an example you are. That is the most powerful form of teaching.

MARY: Thank you. Thank you. Well, I really wanted to share that this time because the journey was so crazy and so rough, and you know if I can pull out of that… Let me tell you, I don’t get a whole lot of help from the dead guy. (Group laughter) You guys talk to him and that’s great, but he doesn’t give me a whole lot of pull-ups. You know, I’ve got to pull myself up just as much as everybody else does. This time was really hard, to pull myself up and out. But… Because I really felt like I was sunk into the deepest well on the planet but I did it, and if I can do it then everybody else can do it too. No matter what your experiences are, no matter how much your trauma has been… I mean, I’ve had some pretty horrific trauma in my life and if I can pull out of that, then yep, everybody else can too.

So that’s why I wanted to share my story this time.

GROUP: Beautiful. Thank you. Love you, Mary, a lot.

MARY: You are very welcome.


(Mary’s talk ends after 36 minutes)

Copyright 2025 Mary Ennis, All Rights Reserved.