It has been fascinating for me to read Pink Ribbon Blues through an Integral lens. Her message has reached into today's NY Times magazine section, the most succinct part being that the pink ribbon culture has no place for the "other" reality: the dying, the ones suffering during treatment, the scared.....The only "proper" way to experience breast cancer is to be sexy, flirty, girl-ishly feminine, victorious over cancer, never doubting your victory, spunky, running races while not whining----oh yes, they give out t-shirts at the races saying "no whining". I have so appreciated her outing this denial of the dark side of a disease that relentlessly kills 48,000 American women a year.
Yet it is true but partial.
She decries the pressure on women to "grow" from the illness, to find transformative elements within its ugly grip. Yes, we cannot put any type of pressure on women, yet growth can indeed spring from this medical trauma, just as a death in a family can reconfigure their relationships.
Where I depart from her warning is that growth and transformation can be offered as possibilities, as openings, not in some magical sense, but as glimmers of hope that can be courted during the depressing sequence of living with cancer. Let it be a treasure hunt, not like "making lemonade out of lemons" which cannot happen if you have no water or sugar at hand. Let it widen the woman's personal perspectives. Can this be the time to leave the abusive husband without stirring up negative feedback from family members? Can this be the time to nurture herself for the first time, without feeling guilty? Can she talk back to people or become more assertive on her own behalf? Might she be freed to reach out to reconcile with those estranged from her?
This aweful experience has permitted a reconfiguration and a happy ending to a very sad decades-long estrangement. I do not wish to go into details, except to say that a happy ending could never have been rationally predicted 20 years ago.
This aweful experience has permitted my communication with my maternal female cousin for only thre 2nd time in our lives. She has had several breast cancer scares, and I shared my diagnosis with her so that she could share it with her doctor. She now signs her cards, "Love". Possible at any time prior to this? No.
This aweful situation has permitted me to face the end of my deep acceptance of a very sad life story that I had embodied within me.
When I was about 16 I read the book The Last of the Just, which recounts a myth that there were 36 honorable Jewish men over the generatrions who took upon themselves the suffering of the Jewish people. When the last of the just Jews died suffering, it would end the tribal history of victimization and historic oppression. I immediately identified with the last young man and deeply incoprorated his plight with my life. As I discovered meditation, my deep times brought up that tale as my own, and I "saw" cleawrly that my role was to selflessly give up my own life to assist my mother and her sisters through their lives. I accepted this "deep wisdom". I was the sacrificial lamb so that the family might be freed in some way. I knew that my daughter would not carry on this tragic legacy.
I went through surgery without looking back or regretting the loss of a breast. Onward....Yet in my deep unconscious I saw myself offering my own body part as a blood sacrifice upon an ancient altar, and thus I had finally paid off the generational and tribal debt. In my meditations I saw myself turning away from the altar and walking into a freer future, although that future contains some terrible possibilities in the nearer future.
I sat readfing Dr. Susan Love's breast book at last, looking at pictures describing what had been done to me on the operating table. I then figured I'd best read the chapter about metasteses....I read it straight through...towards the end of the chapter, a gnertly abiding version of my voice within my head commented to me, "Don't bother reading this. It will not happen to you." At that moment my crown chakra opened and I was suffused with warm golden light throughout my body.
Nothing like this has ever happened to me. Ever. I am not the "type" who ever gets voices or openings of chakras or golden warm light flowing through me.
p. 81, Grace and Grit: "The mystical experience is indeed ineffable, or not capable of being entirely put into words. Like any experience...one has to have the actual experience to see what it's like....
Mystical experiences are in principle no more certain than any other direct experiences. But far from pulluing down the mystics' claims, that argument actually elevates their claims to a status equal to all other experiential knowledge, a status I would definitely accept....
How do we find out [what they mean]? We check it out against more experience----which is also exactly what the mystics have historically done, checking and refining their experiences over the decades.....a track record that makes modern science look like a johnny-come-lately."
So I did just that, to my two Integral experts, and we were able to match it up against the mystical wisdom traditions.
HOWEVER....
Ken cautions that we must first begin at the bottom---the bodily level-- and exhaust those causes before we then proceed upward to any possible emotional causes, then mental, then spiritual.
p. 259: "What is not helpful is taking the fact that these psychological and spiritual aspects can be very useful, and then saying that the reason you broke your legs is that you lacked these psychological and spiritual facets in the first place. A person suffering any major illness may make significant and profound changes in the face of that illness; it doers not follow that they got the illness because they lacked those changes."
And we cannot, and dare not, presume that our thoughts or psychological state caused this major illness.
p. 260: "All things considered, then, psychological mood plays some part in every illness. And that component should be exercised to the maximum..." [my ital.]
Yet I hold all of this lightly, since science can't figure out whether eggs are good for us or not.
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