The Woman with a Toothache

You may also be interested in...

During a break in a class I was taking, I saw my teacher holding her head. I went over to ask what was wrong and she said that she had a horrible toothache; the dentist couldn’t find anything wrong with it and he would do a root canal in a couple of days. I asked her if I could put my hands on her jaw for a moment. As I did her head twisted around to the side and she said, “What just happened?” This was not a willful twist of her head, and I was just lightly touching her jaw on both sides.

She came to my office a day later with a friend of hers. I had asked her to bring a friend in case she started speaking her native language. I thought it would be a good idea to have someone there who understood and she only knew me in the context of the language class. It turned out that her friend and I knew each other from some meditation classes we had taken together.

The short history was that several years ago in another country she had been in an automobile accident and had been in a coma for 6 months. Her doctors had said there would be permanent damage to her legs and arms. She worked hard to overcome these problems and succeeded. The toothache had only been going on for a few days. At that time I did not ask what happened just prior to the toothache, or what she thought had caused it.

She got on the table and I began with a Zero Balancing. When I moved up to her head and had one hand on each side of her temples, she began moaning and writhing on the table–except for her head. This became quite alarming to me and I stopped and asked if she was OK, and asked her what was happening. She said that she didn’t know what was happening but she wanted me to go on. I then went to her clavicles and placed my hands under her back and lightly just below her clavicles (the thoracic inlet). Again her body began writhing as though she was trying to get away from something. I was not holding her down and she could have just gotten up and walked away at any time. But it was as if someone was holding her down and torturing her. I stopped and checked often and she would tell me to continue. I would move back and forth from her head to her thoracic inlet. The writhing felt almost unbearable to me at times.

Suddenly a window opened up in my mind and I saw a beautiful young woman with long black hair all the way down to her seat, lying in a hospital bed being orally raped. I thought I understood what had happened. This was a thought that was totally new to me, I had never even conceived of the possibility that that could ever happen.

At that moment I stopped because I wanted to tell her what I thought had happened. But literally, my mouth was stuck closed. “Okay,” I thought, “I’ll tell her at the end of the session. It might be better timing.”

This session lasted about 2 hours. I couldn’t stop until there was calmness in her body. I was so glad that her friend was there and that she knew me and had some trust in me. I think that allowed the whole process to happen. At the end of the session she said, “I don’t know what just happened, but I feel more relaxed than I can remember.” We talked for a bit and I again wanted to tell her about my thoughts, but I still I couldn’t open my mouth to tell her. “Fine,” I thought to myself with a bit of an attitude, “I’ll tell her tomorrow when I talk to her.”

The next day she called to tell me about her unusual evening. “Before I got in the car, I walked around outside for about 20 minutes because I wanted to get used to how my body felt, to feel the breeze on my body. It just felt so good. Then I went home to take a nap. I got up a couple of hours later and my husband and I went out to dinner with friends. We came home and I went to bed. Around 2:30 AM I woke up and ran into the bathroom and began vomiting. Judith, I couldn’t believe that I vomited up quarts, it seemed, of this white milky stuff. What was even more weird is that there was no food in it.” I said “Oh, how interesting.” Inside me, I was like the kid in the class who wasn’t being called on. I was jumping up and down with my hand up saying, “I know, I know.” But I said nothing, and thought to myself, “Well, I’ll tell her on the last day of class if we get a moment together.”

On the last day of the class someone from the staff came in to sell us a set of language tapes. And for some reason he said, “You probably don’t know this about your teacher, but she used to be a model in her country, and over her fireplace is a beautiful picture of her and her black hair is so long, it went all the way down her back.”

I was truly speechless then, but at another level.

After class, she came up to me to thank me and told me that her tooth had not hurt at all and that she had cancelled the dental appointment. That was the last time I saw her, though I heard she and her husband had divorced and she had moved. I was frustrated for years wondering why I couldn’t say anything. I told myself, “Maybe if I could have told her, she would have been able to work things out in her marriage,” and all other sorts of psychobabble.

Years later I was really grateful that I had held my tongue. I have learned that trauma can leave the body without having to relive it. I’m sure that if there comes a time when the memory of this will serve her in a good way, she will remember. And most likely it won’t be necessary.

I learned so much from her and am so grateful for the entire experience.

And many years later I saw Kill Bill.

Copyright © Judith Sullivan, all rights reserved.