True Adventure: Fear in the Dentist's Chair - A Turning Point - Post 3

(continued… click here for post 1, post 2)

Now I understand better the relationship between spiritual awakening and illness, including tooth decay.  Awakening causes a major and irreversible shift in identity – it can change one’s role in society and one’s concept of self.  This is part of the reason awakening can be psychologically and emotionally stressful. 

In some of us this shift occurs more slowly and in others the transformation is very quick.  Likewise, there is a physical component to consciousness.  When our consciousness changes at a core level we can experience physical changes along with mental, emotional and spiritual changes.  One way to understand the physical component of consciousness is to consider that different parts of the body hold or are correlated with different emotions and aspects of self.  As a general matter teeth hold our attachment to our identities.  (In The Subtle Body by Cindi Dale - see page 377 - the author includes a diagram pinpointing which emotional issues can underlie disease in individual teeth).   

In my case, spiritual transformation was - and, for that matter, continues to be - quick.  These rapid changes meant that I needed to process large amounts of emotional energy to maintain physical - including tooth - health!  Ten or so years ago, however, it was just dawning on me that I had a spiritual self.  This was the extent of my insight into the process!  As a result, I was frightened, as if my teeth might fall, en mass from my gums, in a landslide of enamel, pulp and nerves!  I was too young - I felt - to be considering false teeth, implants or bridges!

Driven by the commands of the dentist and my own fear, I brushed and flossed at every opportunity.  I began gargling religiously with a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and water hoping to kill the dastardly decaying- causing bacteria before it had a chance to go to work on my teeth.  Yet, the situation continued to spin out of control with additional crowns, more decay and a firm promise of future work necessary to maintain the integrity of my mouth. 

During one visit, I asked my dental hygienist if there was anything more effective than hydrogen peroxide at preventing decay.  The hygienist looked at me with grave and sympathetic eyes.  She shook her head slowly as if to say "no".  Then she replied sadly, “Only Listerine.”   

And so I switched to gargling with Listerine.  Still, the decay kept coming....

Yet, in this moment, when I heard from the hygienist that there was nothing certain I could do to stop the spread of disease in my mouth, I experienced a turning point.  In this moment, when I should have given up all hope, things began to turn around.  In this moment, I made a decision.

(for more, see next post)

True Adventure: Fear in the Dentists’ Chair - I Must Ask Your Forgivenes - Post 2

(continued - click here for post 1)

Here I must ask your forgiveness.  As it turns out, the phrase I used to explain why I did not go to the dentist for the roughly 8 years leading up to 2011 - “my teeth had begun falling out of my mouth” – was an embellishment, though not by much.  A decade or so ago, around the turn of the century, spiritual awakening took hold and tooth decay surged in my mouth. 

Since childhood, I have had nightmares in which I have the wrong number of teeth, or, sometimes, my teeth fall out as easily as rows of dominos falling against a table top.  In these dreams, I catch my teeth in the palm of one hand and look down to see that their roots are coated in a pale sheen of blood.  Occasionally, I have awoken from these dreams to find myself standing in front of the bathroom mirror, heart pounding and mouth open, examining my molars. 

However, the phrase, “my teeth had begun falling out of my mouth,” is descriptive of more than an emotional and psychological state; it alludes to something deeper than a sense of anxiety and helplessness.  Though no teeth were lost in this dramatic bout of awakening, the dentist’s chair became an abode, a place where I lived and faced myself, a leather-upholstered sanctuary cum sanitarium where I was forced by medical necessity - and the fact that my mouth was filled with dental damns, suction devices, and the dentist’s latex-covered fingers – into silence and from there into reflection. 

As a child, my teeth were prone to decay. The culprit was as much, I suspect, a diet of sugary and refined foods as a lifestyle of over-activity and identity development based on social expectations more than an authentic sense of self.  As a result, long hours at the dentist’s office on sunny summer days, the force of the drill against my small jaw, and overdoses of nitrous oxide were as much a part of my childhood as Captain Crunch cereal, cinnamon-sugar-white-bread toast and Saturday morning cartoons.  This confluence of dentistry and sugar left me – and at least one other sibling - with “mouth trauma” and firm habit of avoiding the dental chair.

As an adult, in the throes of awakening, I squirmed in the dentist's chair and asked for extra injections of Novocaine to numb the pain.  For several appointments in a row, shock and fear registered within the soft brown facial features of the dentist.  Once, she furrowed her brow, drew a sharp breath and whispered, “Oh my god!”  With her mouth formed into an O, and her black eyes darting up to the face of the dental hygienist sitting across my belly from her, she dug her dental pick deeper into the now soft portions of a tooth whose decay ran to the root.  When she removed her tools from my mouth, a tear ran down my cheek.  I expressed remorse for the preceding 8 years of dental self-neglect.  At this, she muttered a grim promise before rushing me off to a nearby root canal specialist, “We will do everything we can to save the tooth.”  

Another time, the flesh of gums around new crowns was dying due to inadequate blood circulation even when the crown was only months old.  One night, I had eaten a cookie and fallen asleep with crumbs in my mouth.  Within a few weeks decay had crept under the new crown necessitating a filling on the already compromised tooth and a replacement crown.  In this phase of awakening and decay, it was as if my earlier nightmares of ill-tooth loss were manifesting in my waking life. I was scared. 

(for more see next post....)

True Adventure: Fear in the Dentists’ Chair

On a cold morning in February 2011 I sat shivering on the 23^rd floor of the Muni Tower in Downtown Seattle.  Gateway Dental in Seattle had done everything possible to make patients comfortable.  I reclined in a dental chair, that if memory serves, was upholstered in deep purple leather.  The chair faced a wall of pane glass.  I took in views of the surrounding architecture and the lake beyond, including snippets of pink and orange from the fading sunrise reflecting off the surface of the lake.  As the hygienist, Lolita, took x-rays of my mouth the catchy, piped-in music was a pleasant distraction from sharp-edged rectangles of film and the intrusive plastic ring that held them there between my molars. 

It was Monday and the weekend had been cold - 25 degrees at night, 37 degrees average for the day. One of the Gateway staff – a woman who helps clients navigate insurance when they have it and figure out how to pay for things when they don’t - mentioned that heat in the building had been turned off since Friday at closing.  That morning, the building - still in the process of warming up – was chilly.  However, cold wasn’t the only reason I shivered.  Fear also had me quaking.  You see, I had not been to the dentist in 8 or so years.  I know I am not supposed to admit this, but it is the truth.

  

Why? Why did I stop seeing the dentist. Truthfully, because my teeth had begun falling out of my mouth.

(for more, see next post)