The Story Unravels

Meaning-making...my life's theme, what I teach to others, what I write about, whawt I am grappling with myself.  What can this health crisis come to mean for me and others, since they are always front and center in my awareness?

For one thing, my "story" is unraveling.  The victim, the acknowledged tragic life I have led...has there ever been a therapit or advisor who has not commented on the tragic nature of my life??  Friends have abandoned me during my life due to the sheer unlivability of it day to day, hearing about the unfolding currents of betrayal and illness and sickness.

And yet...I am not depressed, I have adaptive capacities, which at times have been bypasses.  My numbing out, dissociative abilities, have stood me in good stead over the years, but they have also kept me within my "story", haven't they?  As the Diamond Approach counsels, the superego was needed at one time, but it has outlived its helpful and healthy capacities.  Let it go along with the ego.  Time to abide....
p. 86: "As Plotinus puts it, a flight of the alone to the Alone---that is, from the self to the Self."

Time for death and resurrection.  Big-time.

p. 87-8: "The Lankavatara Sutra decribes this enlightenment experience as a "completer turning about in the deepest seat of consciousness."  This "turning about" is simply the undoing of the habitual tendency to create a separate and substantial self where therer is in fact only vast,open, clear awareness.  This turning about, or metanoia, Zen calls satori or kensho.  "Ken" means true nature and "sho" means "directly seeing."  Directly seeing one's true nature is becoming Buddha.  As Meister Eckhart put it, "In this breaking through I find that God and I are both the same."

My story is unraveling and I can actually feel this turning about!  I can feel how I have looked backwards over my maternal lineage to the way they lived, or failed to live, their lives, the stories that they inculcated me with, about the meaninglessness of my life other than to serve them and care for them; how there was a curse on their family; how there was as tragic chapter waiting to be written by me.  No, I do not mean this metaphorically.

My mother, who adored me in her own way, was a gifted writer/poet/singer/artist/piano player/seamstress.  She wrote the story of her maternal lineage and about their sad, terrible lives, their victimhood, their lack of adaptive capacities, asnd she made me sit there and listen to it.  I squirmed and begged to be let go, but her claim was always that she "had no one else but me" around to listen to her (no surprise there), so I sat and was awash in intergenerational pain.

When she finished her impassioned reading to me with the recounting of her tragic life, she turned to me and with an odd half-smile, half smirk, said, "Now there is your chapter."

I have worked extraordinarily hard over 3 years to claim the ability to "see" my true nature.  I have turned around to focus forward, not backwards.  There is more to be done, but I am catching glimpses of my own true nature.  This health crisis will avail me plenty of chances to continue burning off this story, this legacy, this worldview.  And learning to soften and open my heart, which can radiate powerful love outwards, but is damned picky and reluctant to open to accepting love.  Only as the story unravels and I go through the various deaths that Zen speaks of, will I be free of the protective shields that permit only outward movement of the Great Love.

p. 103: "First we die to the material self--that is, disidentify with it---then we die to an exclusive identity with the bodily self, then to the mental self, and then finally to ther soul.  The last one is what Zen calls the Great Death.  We make stepping-stones out of all our dead selves.  Each death to a lower level is a rebirth on a higher level, until the ultimate rebirth, liberation, or enlightenment."

I've gotten such a late start on this journey.  I have had to untangle soooo many knots while trying to walk, hobbled as I was, along the Path.

Re-reading Grace and Grit   the day before my surgery is a mixed exercise of terror, when reading about her recurrence and metastases, and cold hard facts that her treatment and the years of experience learned by the doctors puts me in a slightly more positive medical position.  But I must let go of this story as well.  There is no story, no statistic, nothing to hold onto but Spirit, and the Mystery.

So on this day before surgery, which honestly will be just one day in the entire progression of "Lynne has cancer", where am I?

Abiding.
Just abiding.....

Not-knowing.  In the gap.  No stories to scare or support me.