Change is a constant in life and sometimes embracing it is necessary to thrive in our environment. This is something that I have heard over and over again from my clients over the years but I learned it from one in particular.
Before I opened my first location, I offered massage sessions in a few different senior living facilities each week. In those spaces, I had the privilege to work with the most amazing human beings from the age of 50 to 102. One of which was a woman that I will call Donna. She was a very petite woman, 4’9″ and about 87 pounds with beautiful, pristine white colored hair that every other woman living in the building commented on.
“I wish I had angel hair like her.”
Donna spoke so softly that I had to lean in to hear her most of the time but her silly, playful innocence was captivating. I couldn’t help but smile when I saw her. In 2008, Donna was diagnosed with cancer and, as an eighty-something year old woman, she wasn’t given much time to live. She joked with me that her old lady wisdom was kicking in and she had decided to embrace everything happening in her body along with the peace that came with her decision to stop fighting change.
Each week, she came into my office to get a little bit of relief from her stress, gain a little bit of much needed connection and as she said, feel a whole lot of love. She would walk through my door and say to me, “How is my ReJennerator” today? Stressing the Jenn part of the word to acknowledge her punny-ness.
Oftentimes, she would have tears in her eyes when she would tell me how much better she felt after our sessions and how grateful she was that I took the time to truly hear what she was going through. A few weeks before Donna passed away, she walked out of my office and said, “When you open a location, I expect that you honor this old lady and use ReJennerator in the name. That is what you are, you know? My ReJennerator.”
I promised her and when I opened my first location, I put it on the wall, “Rejenneration location”. When I closed that location, her memory never left me, even though the sign on the wall was torn down.
As I embrace the many changes in my life, and tear down the metaphorical signs that are no longer current in my life, I am going to continue honoring that “old lady” and her story through my new company, ReJenneration Wellness.
