2. Morning Light--Emily's Story
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[00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of Morning Light. This is your host, Emily Layton, and I am in bed in my pajamas. We're gonna talk about what morning light is. Now, I am not typically a morning person. I'm a night owl, and find that my most productive times are late at night when it's quiet. Especially as a mother, once everybody else was in bed, that was my time to have peace and quiet, and I found that I loved that time.
In fact, most of my graduate work got done after everybody was in bed and I had that late night productive quiet time. But I find myself as a single mom with a son who needs taken to school every morning. And so I've gotten to be a morning person this past season of my life. And as I have driven him to school through this change of seasons, I've come to appreciate something, and that is that there's a different kind of quality to the morning light.
We started going to school in September, right? And as we go through the fall and then into winter, it got to be that it was completely dark when I would take him to school and come back after dropping him off But as the light started coming back, I appreciated how beautiful the morning light was before the bright sun was visible.
It would light up the clouds, and just that gentleness in the sky of that morning light, and I really came to appreciate that time. We are in the progression of seasons now that when I drop him off and then I'm driving home, I'm driving s- east, e- straight into the rising sun, and it's r- right at that height where it is blinding, where I have to put down the visor and kind of squint to be able to see and not be blinded by it.
And there are times in our life where the energy and momentum of life is just blinding by that-- like that. We're trying to find the insights and the direction and the clarity and, and that resonance with our true selves, and life is just a little too overwhelming and a little too blinding. But I like to call the morning light that time where there's a gentleness and where there's a clarity, where there's illumination, and it just casts everything in a beautiful, gentle light, and we understand it before the intensity of life pours in upon us.
So I want to take these times to reflect on some principles, some elements that n- and connect some pieces of our life puzzles in this morning light that may be harder to connect in the bright light of day. And I also have a very unique situation. In the past two years, I have come to develop a skill because of a unique challenge.
In March, on March 6th of 2021, I woke up on vacation in Hawaii to a different body than I had gone to sleep with the night before. It was [00:04:00] numb and tingly on my right side. And you know when you sleep on something wrong or your leg falls asleep under you after you've been sitting on it for a while and you can kind of shake it off?
I kept thinking that I would be able to shake it off, but after a little while that morning, I realized it wasn't going away, that I was experiencing another round of intracranial bleeding. I have a malformation in my midbrain that we'd known about since, uh, the late '90s, so for a long time. It's something I was born with called a cavernous venous malformation.
But I hadn't had a bleed in roughly 10 years. But this morn- that morning, as I woke up, I realized that, that there was something going on beyond my own power. And in the course of that two weeks, we went to the hospital, two different hospitals on that island, and there was nothing they could do. It's an unusual situation, and it's hard to detect.
It's a, a microbleed inside the brain, and it's not very visible 'cause of past bleeds and residual blood products, hemoglobin. It's a lot of nerdy words, but At the beginning of that first day, I could still feel a bar of soap in my hand when I was showering and by the end of that two weeks when it was time to go home, I couldn't feel myself holding the bar of soap.
I could see it, but the- there was no sensory input. Um, and that was a very disconcerting flight home to the States. My neurosurgeon had me report right to the hospital, um, and there was still nothing that they could do because of where the malformation is. It's not accessible surgically for them to fix it.
I kind of just had to ride it out. And we knew that that was likely the case, but it was really disconcerting. And then as a result, through, as long-term effect of this bleeding episode, I lost proprioception on the right side of my body, which is the ability to tell where your body is in space. And it also affected a lot of, of the sensory perception and creates a lot of the numbness and...
And basically what it boils down to is, is there's always a pain and a tingliness on the whole right side of my body, like my right earlobe, my right eyelid, my right nostril, my right toenails. You know, it's, um, an unusual feeling that That unless you felt it, you can't understand what it feels like and as a result, it is painful and uncomfortable to be in my physical body So at night, it took me a while to learn to sleep well like a long while and to feel rested and rejuvenated, like sleep actually restored something in me But over the months, there came to be this state that some mornings I would wake up and be in this lull before it moved my body and started registering sensory input I realized I was at this place where I didn't feel my nerves and because my nerves weren't activated that, that damaged part of my brain wasn't creating the pain sensations and I could be awake in my brain without connecting with my body yet [00:08:00] And that sounds totally weird and I wouldn't have come to this place of awareness if it weren't for this situation But I began to embrace those moments because those were moments when my body wasn't in pain And so I didn't wanna get out of bed because that meant putting on a physical body that didn't work right and that hurt And my sweet little Brett, um, he was 10 at the time as I tried to explain, "This is why Mom's not getting out of bed."
And I was homeschooling at the time, and he would come into my room and we would do our homeschooling together with me still laying in bed. And as I tried to explain it to him, he came in one day and he, as a Minecraft lover, had drawn a picture of the Minecraft golden apple. And he said, "Mom, I understand it.
It's like when you went to sleep you got to eat a golden apple, and it just restored your health and your energy." And you know, I'm not a Minecraft player and I can't explain it, but there are certain benefits that come from eating this golden apple that in his language as a 10-year-old, that's how he showed empathy and compassion to me, is that he understood that I was in a different spot than he was.
And when I had these mornings that I woke up like this, I could just say, "Hey buddy, I'm having a golden apple for breakfast. Can you bring your school stuff up here and we'll do it together?" And on the days that I didn't, I just put on the mortal body and pressed forward, and I learned to some days deal with the pain well and just press forward, and some days it led to depression.
Um, it was a hard season as I learned to cope with that. But in those times where I would have that golden apple, I learned to tune in to the brain state that is different when my body is not engaged. And I've learned a lot about that in the months, in the year past that. Um, and have been able to access this theta brain wave place differently.
And a lot of clarity, and a lot of answers, and a lot of, um, divine connection has come as I have learned the skill of tuning into my brain, into my intuition, into my spirit without the sensations of my body feeding into my brain. Now, it's not a state that I wish upon anybody, or not, uh, circumstances that have led to that, but it also is something that I want to share.
And that's why though it's not polished, though it's not formal, that I think a gift that I have to share is the clarity and the answers, and the questions, and the pieces getting put together that come during these morning light times for me So as you see on Grow in the Light, podcasts that are labeled as Morning Light, that means I'm just sharing wisdom and insight that came to me in these moments when I was still in my pajamas.
And it's just times where you can listen and see how that insight or that clarity or those questions apply to your life and can help you make some connections and see some things as you grow in your own light and through your own struggles, [00:12:00] that my insights and that I've learned through my struggles can maybe help mentor you a little bit in your light and in your struggles.
So from my pajamas and from my pillow, I wish you a happy day and look forward to spending more time with you here at Grow in the Light.
