The Molly Hale Story is of course several stories - one of courage, of determined recovery, of physical, emotional, and spiritual insight, of an extraordinarily supportive partner, and of a community coming together to facilitate healing. Please see the documentary pages on this site for information about the film that begins to tell all of these stories, and look for the DVD when it comes out for even more details about Molly, her recovery, and her community.

Three parts of her story are told below - 1] the day of the accident itself back in 1995, 2] 7 years later, a typical day in Molly's life of a recovering incomplete quadriplegic, and 3] Observations 10 years along. Please note that while this "day in the life" chapter accurately portrays a single day, the particular healing elements Molly chooses to weave together on any given day is a constantly evolving tapestry, particularly considering that she is still learning more about some of these methods all the time, and is constantly adjusting her recovery regimen based on everything she learns.

The morning of the accident, Molly woke up in time to get dressed in her gi and hakama and walk across campus from the dorms to the gym for the 9:30 am class. She was, along with 150 other martial artists, training at the San Rafael Aikido Retreat - an annual event held north of San Francisco that is equal parts pilgrimage, practice, and party. That she made it to this last morning class is impressive, considering that she’d been up till 5:00 am telling stories, singing songs, dancing, and hanging out with friends that come to San Rafael each year from all over the world.

Two of the three primary instructors at the retreat split the final 90-minute class, and then the third instructor organized everyone loading the training mats onto pallets till about noon. Everyone then went off to lunch, to change into street clothes, to pack, and to say goodbye. Molly and her passengers - her daughter Kyrie, and aikido friends Sam and Alfons, took a short drive over the coast, then spent another hour at the beach in the afternoon sun, for a bit more hanging out and saying goodbye. They then made a brief stop in San Francisco’s Japan town, and set off south along Route 280, headed for Molly’s home in Menlo Park.

June 24, 1995 was the hottest day of the year. Oppressive hot, sweltering hot, air conditioning on full blast, windows up, and sunroof closed and covered hot. Everyone in the car had been up late the night before, and it had been a long week of intensive training and late nights. Compounding this, the Acura Legend was a comfortable car with a smooth ride. One by one the passengers nodded off, Sam first, then Kyrie. Alfons remembers Molly drumming her fingers on the steering wheel trying to stay alert, but she said she was fine, and he let himself nod off too. Just south of Bunker Hill road, about 20 minutes from her home, Molly was not fine, she was asleep. The car sped up and veered across three lanes of traffic. Alfons called out once, but got no reply - it was Kyrie’s voice that woke her - “Mom you’re going off the road!”

Molly distinctly remembers that voice. At this point the car was already in gravel, and immediately afterward on the grass of the center divide. Molly didn’t try to veer the car back onto the road, as there was too much traffic. Instead, she just tried to slow down.

Route 280 is a divided highway, and at this point the northbound lanes were higher up the hillside than the southbound lanes. The Acura was not on level ground. Or smooth ground. A rock or tree stump - something low but strong enough to stay put when hit by a speeding car - launched the car up and over the driver side front corner in a graceful roll. Graceful that is, until it hit the ground again, crushing the driver’s side front corner roof down to the dashboard, the headrest, and the windowsill. Another flip end over end, another compacting blow to the driver’s side roof, and then one barrel roll for good measure. The entire world went from bright sunlight to shadow and grass, to sunlight, to shadow and grass, to sunlight, and finally to shadow and grass. The car came to a stop upside down. There was glass - from the crushed sunroof, from the windshield, and from one of the side windows - everywhere.

The passenger cabin, with the exception of the roof above the driver, was basically uncompromised. So too were the passengers - each of them hanging upside down by their safety belts. Kyrie’s seat had broken backwards during the crash and the headrest had flown off, but she was only bruised along the line of her shoulder belt, and had a bump on her head. After a moment to catch her breath, she released her seatbelt and crawled out her window. Sam and Alfons, in the backseat, were both completely uninjured (though Sam found a piece of glass in his leg a year later), and, once they’d released their own seatbelts, maneuvered around the broken seat and crawled out Kyrie’s window too.

It took Kyrie a moment to realize that her mother had not emerged from the wreck to join them. Bending down and looking through her window, and then walking around the car, made it clear why. Molly was pinned between the crushed roof, her seat, and the steering wheel. Her seat had been fully upright and her headrest had remained in place - which is the only reason that the roof had not collapsed any further. As it was, there would not have been enough room for anyone taller than 5’ 4”. Molly, thankfully, is 5’ 3”.

Even so, Molly’s head was trapped against her left shoulder, and enough of her body weight was pressing down on the right side of her head that it was difficult to breathe. The first impact - that crushed the roof to the headrest and the windowsill - had broken her neck, and thus she might not have been able to move her head even if there had been room to do so. If her weight had not been mostly suspended from the point where her pelvis was hanging on the steering wheel, she would have suffocated more or less immediately.

What had been the windshield lay flat upon the dashboard, punctured by the top of the steering wheel, which had clumps of grass clinging to it from dragging along the ground. Kyrie’s bicycle, which had been strapped to a trunk rack, had flown across all four lanes of the freeway and come to rest down the hill on the other side.

Molly’s hands had been on the steering wheel, and her foot on the brake, at impact, and the shock traveled predictably thru her arms to her shoulders and ribcage and up her leg to her hip. She had been thrown sideways into the door during the first roll, and had slammed into the steering wheel with her chest. Her seatbelt strap line left a bruise so dark it turned green before it finally disappeared. The impact of the sunroof - striking the top of her head above her left eye - left bruising and implanted glass shards that kept coming out for the next few years. There were scratches all down the left side of her face, and dirt and weeds in her hair.

Everything hurt. She was upside down. And it was hard to breathe.

Drivers directly behind the Acura assumed Molly was carelessly changing lanes, probably swore under their breath, and were already past by the time she had entered the center divide. Several cars, a bit farther back and having seen the Acura flip and roll, pulled over immediately to see if they could help. The first of these was a doctor, and as he was walking up, Kyrie grabbed his cell phone to call Jeramy.

That call, as told by Jeramy . . .
Kyrie was sputtering and yelling way too fast for me to make out what she was saying, but the words “accident” and “Molly” and “pinned in the car” sort of rose out of the noise. At first I thought she was pulling some sort of joke, but when I said “Wait a minute - Say that again?” she kept saying the same stuff, only more coherently this time, and as soon as she gave me a general idea of where they were, I jumped in my car and raced off.

It took Jeramy about 45 minutes to get there, partly because Kyrie didn’t know exactly where they had crashed (she had, after all, been asleep when this all started), and partly because once he did get close, there was traffic backed up in both directions, and he had to drive slowly on the shoulder to pass everyone.

Sam, with Kyrie on the phone, was looking for something to do and started unpacking the trunk, perhaps hoping that this would help the rescue workers get to Molly faster.

Alfons searched in the car for a small bag, and emerged with some homeopathic medicine, which he offered to Molly and the others. With Kyrie, Sam, Alfons, and the doctor who’d stopped, they had enough people to flip the car back on its wheels, but thought that this might make Molly’s injuries worse, and decided to wait for the ambulance.

They didn’t have to wait long. There is a Hillsborough Fire & Rescue substation two blocks from the exit they had just passed, and the first rescue vehicle was there in less than ten minutes. EMT and Fireman Bill Tutti arrived in that vehicle, and took charge of the rescue operation. Despite the fact that this was his first command, 20/20 hindsight suggests he made every decision correctly.

The first decision facing him was whether to flip the car back over. There were enough people at the scene to do this, and cutting the car open would be much easier and faster if they did, but there was concern that Molly might not survive right side up - if her head shifted positions when they rolled the car back over, and she could not keep her windpipe open, Molly would suffocate before they could cut thru the roof and extract her. Tutti decided to leave the car upside down.

This required lots of balloons - not the birthday party kind, of course, but inflatable rubber bladders that were going to hold the car up off the ground once they cut thru the roof supports. The first rescue truck did not carry enough to support the whole car, and a call was made for a backup vehicle to bring more, while they set about the task of stabilizing the Acura so it wouldn’t shift once they started work.

Officer Dave Ferre, a local Redwood City Sheriff, happened to drive by moments after the accident. He did not recognize the car or any of the people standing by it, but assumed someone had been speeding and lost control of their car or swerved to avoid a deer. Rubbernecking drivers had already begun to slow down traffic, and several cars had pulled over on both sides of the highway. His immediate concern was that some Good Samaritan who’d pulled over on the right shoulder wanting to help would cause another accident when attempting to cross the 4-lane highway to get to the center divide and the overturned vehicle. He was also worried, on this oppressively hot day, that an onlooker’s dropped cigarette would catch fire in the dry grass, cooking anyone trapped in the car.

Highway Patrol had not arrived yet, and so Sheriff Ferre stopped to provide some traffic control until CHP could relieve him. He was also hoping to find a doctor, as the Paramedics hadn’t gotten there yet either (he did not know that one of the onlookers who’d already stopped was a doctor). The Fire and Rescue squad arrived while he was directing traffic, and once Highway Patrol showed up, he was able to walk over to the car.

Molly Hale knows two police officers - one is a long time buddy of her husbands, and the other, a blue belt student who she trained with at her home dojo in Redwood City, was Sheriff Dave Ferre.

Officer Dave Ferre:
So I walk around the car and realize that it’s Molly trapped inside. The paramedics start to ask me to step away, but when they realize I know her, they encourage me to stay and talk to her to keep her calm, because the worst thing for her at this point would be to succumb to the panic that hits most people in situations like these. I suspected Molly was not the panicking type, but nobody knows how they’ll react in a crisis until they’re in a crisis, and so I squatted down by her window and talked to her for about ten minutes. It was surreal - I don’t remember what we talked about, just that we didn’t talk about her being trapped upside down in a car wreck. We had an entirely ordinary conversation we might have had over coffee - which was an extraordinary thing to do in those circumstances.

After those ten minutes of extraordinary ordinary conversation, Sheriff Ferre had to get back to his patrol, but it was clear by that point that Molly was going to stay calm and the danger of her panicking, if there had ever been such a danger, had passed.

A tow-truck, which had been traveling north on 280, turned around and came back to the accident site - and the driver latched onto the Acura so that it didn’t slide any further downhill.

The paramedics continued to prepare the car for being cut open, and an off-duty nurse who’d stopped to help climbed into the car with her. The nurse’s job was primarily to keep Molly awake, to keep her focused on breathing, and to talk to her like Sheriff Ferre had done to prevent panic from setting in. She also took and reported Molly’s vital signs to the paramedics busy working on the car - which gave them some idea of how much longer Molly could hold out.

Molly, while the feature performer in this particular drama, was not the only one the paramedics were concerned about. Kyrie, who wanted to stay with her mother, kept getting pulled away by rescue personnel who wanted her to sit down so they could examine the bump on her head and determine if there were any other injuries. One look at the car made their concern understandable - the idea that three people could have crawled out of that car unharmed seemed incredible. Eventually, Kyrie was convinced to submit to the paramedic’s attention, and they packed her into one of the ambulances so she could be taken to a hospital and examined by a doctor. Just before leaving, she called out to her mom that they were going to take her away, and Molly’s emphatic though R-rated reply was “Kyrie, get me the F&#% out of this position!”

Sam, though everyone agreed that he seemed unhurt, was sent off in the ambulance with Kyrie, which did wonders for her morale. They overheard the radio conversation discussing where to take them - Chope Hospital in San Mateo had two available beds in the emergency room, while Mills Hospital (now the Peninsula Medical Center) in Burlingame only had one. Kyrie and Sam went to Chope.

Jeramy arrived about 45 minutes after the accident, with a pediatrician friend who’d been at the house when Kyrie called. The paramedics led him over to Molly’s side of the car, where they announced his arrival. Besides saying “Hey, I’m here”, there wasn’t much he could do, and there was so much rescue activity around the car that he had to step back to keep the area clear. He watched them work for about another half hour, installing and inflating the balloons carefully so that Molly would not shift position until they could pull her out completely.

Throughout the ordeal, Molly had sensation throughout her body - mostly unhappy sensation, but sensation nonetheless. In order to keep her airway from collapsing, she had to maintain a yoga headstand - not much of a challenge for her to do for 10 minutes under normal circumstances, but these circumstances were decidedly not normal, and she ended up being in the car for an hour and a half. Her concentration slipped once, and she let herself relax - her airway closed and she would have passed out, permanently, if she had not been able to wriggle around enough to get it open again.

It helped that she was not alone - she could hear and feel, though not see, the nurse who had climbed in with her, and Bill Tutti checked in regularly. She also felt like she had spiritual company - immediately after the vehicle came to a stop upside down, she experienced an image of the scene as if from outside and above herself, and had been looking down at the car when a woman’s voice exclaimed “Molly Ruth Hale! Get back in your body!” That voice, using the full name reserved for stern admonishments in childhood, brought her back into the car, but the presence did not abandon her:

Molly:
Energetically, I felt cocooned. I was enveloped in pink and blue energy - translucent and soft colors - I felt that I was bathing in the light, even that I was of the light. There was a presence there, offering me a choice - I could stay or I could go. A voice asking “Do you want to be here?” I had been given this choice twice before - as a two year old with an undiagnosed burst appendix, and at the age of 23 with viral pneumonia. This time, like the other two times, the answer was Yes!

While her conviction was critical, the human body, especially the bruised and battered human body, has limits. The next time Fireman Tutti checked in, Molly let him know that her strength, and therefore her ability to maintain the yoga headstand, was fading - “You’ve got to get me out of here now. . .” Bill alerted the other paramedics. Instantly, the operation took on a new intensity, and Molly felt the tension level on the crew increase. Within moments they started to cut thru the roof supports.

Even without an integrated safety cage or roll bar, the Acura Legend was a solid enough car that cutting thru the roof supports and using the Jaws of Life to pry the roof away from the driver’s windowsill took about ten minutes. Molly was sure these were some of the last minutes she could handle.

All that Molly remembers of the actual retrieval were Bill’s arms around her legs holding her up against his chest, that someone else was holding her front, and that only then they realized she was still belted in, so a third paramedic had to crawl in thru the window to cut her loose. She remembers the sensation of going from sitting upside down to being strapped down to a board, and then, from some mixture of exhaustion, shock, and relief, she passed out.
With Jeramy in the ambulance, they arrived at Mills Hospital at 6:15.

“Are you awake?”

“ Not really, you?”

“ No, but I gotta pee”

“ Coming back to bed?”

“ Maybe”

Molly Hale wakes up just like the rest of us – to the sounds of life inside and outside the house beginning to stir. It could be birdsong in the backyard, her husband Jeramy walking up the ramp towards the kitchen, or the cat demanding to be fed.

The rest of her day, from the moment her eyes flutter open, will be dramatically different from the 16 hours most of us spend between waking and sleeping. Molly Hale is an incomplete quadriplegic, and abilities we take for granted – walking and the use of humankind’s wondrous opposable thumb in particular – are not available to her – or at least they are not available to her yet.

Learning to walk takes children about a year. Besides eating and sleeping, acquiring control over their bodies seems their primary task. A healthy child’s developing nervous system is specifically designed to amass, process, and learn to use the information coming in from the world around them. Molly Hale’s nervous system is neither intact nor untrained – and she therefore has more to overcome. Toddlers may be starting from scratch, but at least all systems are operational. Molly broke her neck in a car crash. Toddlers have to figure out what all the mysterious but normal signals coming in from eyes and ears and balance and skin mean, and how to direct hands and feet to move. Molly also seeks to stand, to grasp, to balance, and to walk - but she has to coax coherent movement out of a body beset by a chaotic storm of unregulated stimulation.

Molly’s task, simply put is:

• To convince muscles trained in a lifetime of normal use
• to respond to an entirely new set of stimuli
• delivered along different nerve pathways
• using a badly damaged nervous system

Just to get out of bed in the morning.

Molly Hale has to do all of these things, and do them every day, if she is to remain on the path of recovery she began seven years ago. How she got onto this path will be discussed in the next chapter, but for now our attention is focused upon the extraordinary work required to simply make it through an ordinary day.

Getting dressed is a workout in itself. Getting dressed requires fifteen minutes on a good day when the body is being cooperative. Getting dressed requires hands to hold, legs to bend and then straighten, and spasms to subside on command. While additional layers take additional time, fifteen minutes usually gets underwear, pants, shirt, socks and shoes where they are supposed to be. Trying to hurry doesn’t help, as the hands need attentive guidance to make up for the fact that their grip strength is so limited.

Depending on the particular day’s schedule, getting dressed often waits a few hours, and a long shirt serves as adequate modesty for whomever might drop by in the morning, as it is so much easier to pee.

And pee she does – 7 or 8 times a day – each time grateful that the process is once again under her control. Drinking a half-gallon of water a day pretty much guarantees that there will be regular trips to the bathroom. Each of these trips will take 5 minutes if she’s dressed, and three if she’s just wearing a long top. Just getting out of the chair, to illustrate how this can take so long, requires her to

1. position the chair adjacent to the toilet
2. lean forward and lock the wheels
3. initiate a conversation with her feet such that one at a time they can slowly step down from the chair rest
4. continue that conversation with her legs such that they will bear weight instead of collapsing
5. use her arms, her legs, and the installed handrails, to hoist herself up from the chair and over the toilet, and then
6. get the legs to relax enough to let her sit

The first bowl of tea in the morning is a deliberate and meditative process. The fact that a pot of boiling water is a single moment’s inattention away from her nearly naked skin requires an unwavering concentration to prevent disaster. What are for conventionally-abled people unconscious rituals – putting the kettle on, dropping a tea bag into a mug, pouring the water, etc. - are rigorously attentive and Zen-like procedures when Molly performs them. Reach to the faucet to fill a pot, hoist its weight onto her lap, turn the chair around, and lift the pot two-handed up onto the stove. Reach the knob and push down while inducing enough turn to engage the auto-light spark and ignite the flame, turn the knob again to become a cheerful tea-warming fire. Maneuver the wheelchair so she can open the cabinet doors, pull out the sliding tray, retrieve a tea bowl, place it next to the stove, pick a teabag, put it in the bowl, and arrange the tag so it hangs over the edge. By this point, the water is boiling, so it is time for Molly to fumble with the knob to turn off the flame, slip into oven mitts, and grasp the kettle with both hands. Constantly aware of the danger, she pours, puts the kettle back on the stove, slips off the mitts, places the tea bowl in her lap, spins the chair around gently, and rolls to the kitchen table.

Molly is fond of local honey, and mixes a healthy spoonful into the swirling tea, then adds milk up to the rim – creating a bowl so full that even with normal handedness, it would be hard to pick up without spilling. The tea bowl rests on the edge of the table, where she can lean forward in her wheelchair and sip the top half-inch or so without actually picking it up.

While she could, laboriously, work her way thru cooking breakfast, her nephew David joined the household after the accident, and serves as both cook and gardener in exchange for rent – a convenient arrangement to be sure – and often will prepare the morning’s meal. When David isn’t available, Molly may well grab a few strawberries from the fridge, carefully grasp a knife between her palms, cut them up, and slide them into a bowl. The spoon she uses is a regular spoon, wrapped with a brightly colored rubber spiral (like all of the adaptive technologies mentioned, where-to-buy information will be provided, when we have it, on the links page) that serves to make the spoon fat enough for her hands to hold onto.

It is now around 9 o’clock, and the day’s work of recovery begins in earnest. The daily physical regimen includes time spent with gym equipment, time spent in a heated therapeutic pool, and time sitting or lying down while performing a wide variety of stretches and breathing exercises. While there is no rigidly fixed schedule of exercises, a typical day’s workout might run as follows:

1. 20 minutes for Aikido wrist stretches – a minute per each of five wrist stretches in Aikido - on each hand.
2. 10 minutes - finger stretches – lengthening and loosening each finger for a minute each
3. 10 minutes - finger dexterity and coordination work – touching each finger to thumb and similar exercises.
4. 20 minutes - rolling a 1.5” copper sphere between her hands
   o creating concavity in her palms
   o stimulating the skin and nerves
   o retraining the hand to coordinate the small movements that move the ball around.
   The copper sphere gets surprisingly warm as the exercises proceed and, as a potent conductor, seems both to help signals move around within the hands and to magnify the energy available to her
5. 1 hour - Yoga stretches – about 5 minutes on each limb pushing it through its range of motion, and about 45 minutes of extension stretches of her legs to lengthen her hamstrings.
6. 20 minutes – Gym ball – on her belly to flex her spine, and straddling the ball to stimulate inner thighs and her pelvic floor.

Throughout the workout (and indeed throughout the entire day) Molly does her best to breathe with intention – in one of several patterns that she will rotate over the course of the day. There are only a few patterns she uses in any given day, but has used numerous patterns over the course of her recovery - each with it’s own properties and results.

At 11:20, six days a week, Molly prepares to go swimming. The Santa Clara ParaTransit Outreach vehicle arrives at the prearranged time, and Molly rolls out the patio and down the driveway to meet the van. The wheelchair lift platform descends, the operator opens the gate, and Molly rolls onboard. Once she transfers to a seat and the wheelchair is strapped in (her lightweight titanium wheelchair is not strong enough to be strapped in with her in it), they’re off to the pool.

The Betty Wright Swim Center , a 92° heated therapeutic pool facility in nearby Palo Alto, CA, has been a critical component of her recovery. The hot water acts as a muscle-relaxant, a spasm-reducer, and a gravity-reduction field – where each of these functions is critical to her particular condition. Molly grew up a competitive swimmer, but she does not go to the therapeutic pool to swim 20 laps of butterfly and 40 freestyle as she might have done 35 years ago. She goes there to experience the kind of movement her body, in that relaxing and buoyant environment, is capable of. Only by regular practice of correct movement in water, she believes, can her body, in the more challenging environment on land, ever hope to slowly regain normal function.

Progress is slow, frustratingly non-linear, but reasonably steady nonetheless. Conventional wisdom within the traditional western medical community at the time of her accident was that traumatic injury patients could recover some functionality over the course of their first six months of rehabilitation, but that no further improvements can be expected. Current thinking is that progress can be expected for as long as two years. Molly is still progressing after seven, so “current thinking”, while better than it was, is still severely limited. And while Molly may be independently minded enough to shrug off conventional wisdom, this “wisdom” guides both federal policy and health insurance support for long-term rehabilitation in the US, which is woefully inadequate.

Her sessions in the pool – almost two hours of water time a day for six days a week – continue to generate real and substantial gains in functionality. A typical routine entails about twenty-five minutes of walking, sometimes with water up to her armpits, sometimes no higher than her hips. Molly follows walking with standing at parallel bars and performing hip rotations up, forward, down, and back. The rise, crest, fall, and retreat movement – which she describes as just “being ocean waves” triggers familiar responses and movements which she wants to retrain and reinforce. Still at the parallel bars, fifteen minutes go to balance and Chi exercises – standing on one foot, extending energy out down into the floor, out through her hands, and stretching hamstrings, with the intent of overcoming the muscle foreshortening that occurred when doctors, early in her recovery and assuming she’d never walk again, instructed her to keep her legs bent all the time so that she’d be easier for staff to move around.

Somersaults and other tumbling exercises – in deep water with a snorkel and mask – earn another fifteen minutes – as they help her practice whole-body integration, and simply (and playfully) experience the freedom of movement that the warm water makes possible.

Molly’s two hours of water time is an intentional balance between chaotic and ordered movement, between strenuous effort and relaxation, and between outgoing movements starting in her mind and thrust through her body, and receptive movements which start in the water and flow through her body, with her mind letting itself just observe.

Once a week, she works with a former Russian Olympic Coach, named Vladimir, who has made extraordinary progress rehabilitating patients with cerebral palsy, stroke, and neurological damage. Molly works with Vladimir each Wednesday, and the sessions clearly help – since she started working with him in the heated water of the CAR facility pool two years ago, she has regained the ability to stand and bear weight, albeit briefly, on dry land. In water, she can now walk up the ramp in the pool from shoulder-deep water to where the water reaches her mid-calf.

After her sessions at the pool, Molly heads for the showers, usually along with three or four other women who are finishing at the same time. Instead of the frustrating drudgery of each trying to trying to get their suit off, get themselves clean, and get dressed, these women acknowledge, nay embrace, their challenges, and help each other - so the next 45 minutes become a communal shower, sing-a-long, back-washing, getting dressed party.

The Outreach Para-Transit van picks her up at 2:40 and gets her home shortly after 3:00. Her musician-entrepreneur husband Jeramy works out of a home office composing, publishing, and guiding a small web enterprise, Enlightenment.com, through its early growth, and is thus there when she arrives. Suit and towel get hung up to dry, and it is time for a fashionably late lunch. If she’s doing the fixing, this will take 45 minutes to prepare a salad, or half an hour to steam some vegetables. On any given day, David, Jeramy, or her son Sebastian might have lunch ready when she gets home.

If this is a Monday, she looks forward to a 6:00 pm appointment with Alan Dodge, an Aikido friend who has been coming over every week for the last 3 years, as part of his own Jujitsu training in Amma energy-stream massage therapy . Each of Alan’s sessions last an hour, and she emerges smelling pleasantly of the eucalyptus-laced lineament that he uses . Monday evenings they call her “spice girl”.

If this is a Tuesday, her afternoon is spent at the computer or with the day’s paper, keeping in touch with the world, and around 6’clock she and Jeramy start getting ready to go to Aikido West to train with their sensei Frank Doran. Dressed in the traditional “gi” top, but settling for tights instead of the complex black skirt – known as hakama, that her black belt status entitles her to, she will train alongside the mat in her wheelchair, or on the mat sitting cross-legged. There will be more about Aikido, and the Aikido West community’s role in her recovery, in subsequent chapters, but for now let us just say that there has never been, within its reverently sanctified walls, a standing ovation to match the one that greeted Molly at the conclusion of her San Dan (third degree black belt) test in June 2001. Her current training focus (as of this writing in April of 2002) is the preparation of a brief demonstration she has been asked to put on at a major upcoming Aikido seminar in Las Vegas. The stakes, and expectations, are high – Molly is the only person to have ever taken a San Dan exam in a wheelchair, and living up to her reputation is a daunting responsibility.

If this is a Wednesday or a Friday, instead of coming home from the pool, a friend picks her up at the pool and they head off together to an equestrian center where Molly rides a pony, with the friend acting as side-walker. Molly has been riding since she was six, and had her own mare that she rode bareback as a teenager until she went to college. While she had not ridden regularly for years, it turns out that riding is a very powerful therapy. Riding a horse moves and stimulates, in ways human-powered massage therapy simply cannot, the entire pelvic body – loosening her hips and helping establish and strengthen the energetic connections between legs and torso. A horse’s movement is uniquely suited to this task, and Molly was the first person in California to articulate this to the medical and insurance authorities in a way that convinced them to pay for what is known as “hippotherapy”. She started riding at the National Center for Equine Facilitation Therapy (NCEFT) a few years ago, and “graduated” from their program, which focuses more on the needs of developmentally challenged children, Having graduated, she cast about for a way to keep riding.

Molly lives in Menlo Park, California, which, presumably looking down its ultra-prosperous suburban nose at the idea, does not allow homeowners to keep horses on their property. This has forced Molly to either find a suitable horse to buy and keep at a professional stable, or find a riding school that can accommodate her special needs. (Though she is still on the lookout for the perfect pony, Molly currently rides once a week at the nearby BOK Ranch).

On Wednesday nights, after riding, there is a seven-years-and-counting dinner and massage-work evening with two friends, Patrick McKenna and Jerry Stolaroff. Patrick – an ox-strong boat builder who stands 6’3” and looks like a modern-day Viking, spends about an hour on Molly’s hands and feet each week. While part of this work is strictly physical – the work of strong hands kneading muscles, tendons, and joints and helping loosen, lengthen, and relax – there is also an energy consciousness at work – Pat is a former Aikido practitioner and also brings a background in mechanical engineering and sailing to his sessions with Molly. The engineering logic helps him work to solve the problems faced by the interrupted nerve messages, to use massage to help stimulation travel along alternative pathways so that Molly’s body can progressively communicate with itself more fully. The sailing background helps him appreciate, and work with, the spasmodic waves of tension that would usually emerge, particularly in the first few years, during deep massage. Jerry Stolaroff, while also a skilled Aikidoist, is primarily there in his capacity as a certified Orthobionomist, practitioner of several massage styles (Traeger, British Sports Massage, Regenesis), and Kirtan, which involves the healing use of sound. A typical session with Jerry will involve some hands-on massage, some intuitive prayer, some gentle orthobionomic manipulations, all accompanied by his rhythmic chanting, and often Jeramy playing piano in the next room.

Every Friday morning, prior to exercises and the daily trip to the pool, another friend has a regular massage appointment. Mike Kupfer, training at Aikido West for a few years prior to Molly’s accident, has come over before work every Friday for the last seven years to work on Molly’s hands and arms. There is no particular school of massage represented, just the willingness of a friend to grab an arm and start rubbing, and Molly’s exceptional ability to make that friend feel welcome, appreciated, and wanting to return, week after week, to participate in her recovery.

Indeed, practically every visitor to the house becomes part of Molly’s recovery – or at least part of the ever-growing legion who have grabbed an arm, a hand, a leg, or her neck (whatever seems to want the attention most) and started rubbing. One of Molly’s greatest gifts is her ability to embrace and receive the good intentions everyone has, to harness that energy, and to put it to work where it will do her the most good. As much as she is using them, none of them feel used – for everyone who works with Molly is bathed in her resounding gratitude, and nourished both by her wisdom and by the knowledge that they have, on that day and with their hands and hearts, made a difference.

There is a massage table in the living room. Whenever Molly is not in her wheelchair, she likes to lie out flat. After dinner, after massage work, and typically during some late-night Star Trek reruns, Molly will be there, covered by a blanket. Most nights she usually nods off there on the massage table, sometime after the Star Trek episode. She’ll wake up about 2:00, get back into her wheelchair, and roll off to the bedroom at the other end of the house. Passing the computer, she might stop to check email, depending on the time. Jeramy will have been in bed for a few hours by the time she gets out of the chair, crawls in next to him, and falls asleep; ready for the next day, the next step, in her long recovery.

Lying in bed in ICU, hours after being extracted from my car, I remember the surreal experience of listening to the sounds of voices fading in and out "her neck is broken…we can take the pressure off the cord…paralyzed from the shoulders down…people don't come back from this…."

Folks were parading by; husband, family, friends, doctors, nurses, all speaking in hushed tones of concern. Drifting in and out of drugged consciousness, I found myself looking quietly to my interior for the voice of comfort that always comes in stillness and meditation, grateful that I was familiar with quiet — for everything in my body was quiet and unmoving, except my mind and my lungs.

I've been at this quadriplegic thing now for ten years. Pondering how I continue managing my physicality in life, I’m struck by the thought that "every experience that came before I rolled my car and broke my neck was preparing me to respond to just such an occurrence." Hmmm! I had familiarity with and practiced healing modalities that allowed me to bring an alternative approach to my injury and thus, my life. The question "Why me?" didn't get much of my attention. It was more "Why not me?"

Knowledge from years of studying mind-body relationships was all coming into play. Was I going to "walk my talk?" (no pun intended), or would I collapse into some desperate abyss? It’s easy to talk of kindness, compassion, loving action, perseverance, and right action when life is moving along easily. This was to be the true test.

Growing up in a home with a basic attitude of "there is a silver lining in every cloud," I had practice and success looking for the "good" in things, and my mind naturally drifted in that direction when I was injured. "What is this about and what am I here to do, because here I am. Resistance is futile." This attitude enabled me to ignore my medical team when they told me I was "too optimistic about my future."

I had the great fortune of being introduced to the idea that I was responsible for the way I respond to conditions in my life. Wow! A little scary since every moment has choice involved. Each moment an opportunity to choose a path, a way that feels good in the mind, the soul and harms no one; a choice that brings joy, contentment, peace, resolution. So empowering. Self-awareness grew and I became adept at recognizing what my mind was thinking and what emotions were stirring. Then, I could act using a lovingkindness model with others and myself. This was a deeply critical skill to develop; it enables me to feel my sadness when it comes yet not dwell in it.

I have a body, yet I am not my body. I have work or employment though I am not defined by my employment for work is an aspect of my interests. I have a vision of myself walking but am not attached to the outcome. Interested? Yes! Attached? No! Whatever animates me continues dwelling inside this body and is totally intact.

The process of recovery and stabilization after injury is not linear. I am familiar with activities that require practice, doing something over and over and over. I swam competitively and was trained to put in the time and effort to increase speed and stamina. As a martial artist practicing aikido for eleven years at the time of my injury, I knew how to arrive at each day’s training with a beginner's mind, looking for what was new in a technique I had been studying for years, seeking freshness. The process of learning to be comfortable with the plateaus — the times when my art seemed to be stagnant or even going backwards — has proved to be a great asset as I faced my spinal cord injury.

I suddenly sense that this sounds as though I’ve been out here living my life alone. Far from it. My injury did not occur in a vacuum. I had many established relationships: husband, children, mother, brothers, friends, martial art community, employment community. All were effected by my injury. Everyone was a beacon of light and loving as they gathered around feeding me, dressing me, attending to me, massaging me, including me, visiting with me, caring for me. Over the years, many of these relationships have changed, for that is the nature of relationship. What remains stable is my attitude, my gratitude, and my mantra, "God, grace, gratitude, love, appreciation, forgiveness, healing, energy, synchronicity, patience, abundance, peace, bliss."