30,000 feet in the air is when I have some of my most pivotal emotional moments. The kind of moments where something you didn’t even know you’d one day understand, comes into clear. I’m listening to Jack Johnson’s “All At Once” on my ipod and reading Redbook on my short jaunt from Boston to New Jersey. I realized last night that my plan of running on the treadmill in my hotel, as I’ve been doing at home, will be failed for the next week because I forgot my running shoes in a plastic bag (they had sand all over them) in the car at home.

I’m surprisingly more upset by this than I should be. There is something about running I love and not doing it feels like a disappointment. It’s probably important to note here that I’m not one of those people who loves to exercise. I do it because it makes me feel better afterward. During, I find moments of energetic participation but mostly it's just clock watching to see when my time is up. I’ve come to a place in my life though where I accept that I want exercise to be a part of it, even if it’s not 45 minutes a day of absolute joy. But running is different. I listen not to my many excuses to skip it. I ignore afternoon urges to take a nap instead of go to the gym. I religiously go; and I run. And each day with the same suspicion as the day before, I wonder why it’s something I could easily not do; but choose to do anyway.

And today on the plane, it hit me.

I was reading an article about a 24 year old that had overcome cancer. The piece was well written and a distraction for the building turbulence during the flight. The girl had gone through 5 cycles of chemotherapy and was now running a marathon to support cancer research. One line in that article hit me hard, bringing me to tears. “Running made me forgive my body,” the author writes.  I read it just as a flight attendant walked by to check seatbelts because the plane was continuing to bounce very roughly. She stopped to ask if I was ok assuming I was scared from the mascara stained tears on my face. I smiled and looked at her and said “great” with a smile. I was.

It never occurred to me that’s what this running thing is for me. When I was sick, I remember crying and literally begging my loved ones to cut my legs off. It sounds dramatic and irrational now but the pain in my legs from the nerve damage was so unexplainably horrendous that I wanted no part of them. I hated them and wished them away. With chronic illness, it is so easy to become disconnected from the body you live in – when that body causes you to suffer. My mental perspective was almost always strong, with the will to live propelling me into each new day. But my body, housing the terrible illness, became at times, my worst enemy.

I never really thought about it until today, right now in fact, how damaging to my healing that disconnect probably was; the urge to abandon my body under the premise it had abandoned me. It’s falling apart, I would often think. I wish I could just walk right out of it and leave the pain behind. My mind/body connection fell apart with the rest of it.

The running is putting it back.

It’s been nearly two years since my embryonic stem cell therapy began, and I have literally gone from endless pain meds and hardly walking at times, to running. I marvel constantly at what my body came back from – and the absolute strength it takes to do that, in every sense of the word. I momentarily regret that I didn’t see the disconnect before but am overwhelmed with emotion that I can look back with new perspective. I used to be angry that what seemed like hundreds of treatments I tried didn’t work. Now, I realize that my body didn’t fail me – it ultimately got me to this place of healing. This place of running. If not for those failed treatments, I would have never ended up in India, the most life changing event of my life thus far. Those treatments that didn’t work, weren’t meant to.  The lessons of blame I put on my body for not being strong enough were all necessary evils, as I have arrived at yet another moment where I realize THIS is all part of the process. I have had to forgive doctors that have made mistakes, friends that jumped from my life, and a world that just didn’t understand me. But, I never really thought about having to forgive my body. I see that I do now. And perhaps the inability to forgive myself and the absurd responsibility I carried for so much in my life and in other’s lives, was part of that falling apart body in the first place.

Healing is hardly just physical. The process is a process – and the more I realize that, the stronger my body and mind both feel. And the more confident I am that I will always be healthy and strong. I truly believe that until you learn all the lessons you were meant to learn through any crisis, the crisis will not end. It took years and years for me, and my inability to see my responsibility in it all made the end so much further than it might have been otherwise. But this is my journey. I have finally arrived. My mind and body are both strong and full of life. Finally, after all this time, I feel like they are getting along.