It is 3 am Eastern Time on a cold and sodden February night. The deer herd we feed every day has come and then trodden away into the moonless night. For days earlier they could not reach our patio for the midnight snack of honey oats. The snow was piled 3-4-5 feet deep with a 3 inch fondant coating of ice which proved too slippery to manage uphill on hooves.
This month has been so strange for this region. We've never had so much snow. The whipping winds snapped towering trees that crashed broken into unsuspecting houses and flattened cars. The chill came and stayed. Except for the days when it warmed to 60 and we could dream of flinging off salt-crusted Uggs. Yes, spring will come, I promise.
Why mention the weather? It is a state experience that we might merge with and feel one with the manifest realm. Ken writes, "I no longer witness the clouds, I am the clouds; I do not hear the rain, I am the rain; I can no longer touch the earth, for I am the earth...." What a test for me! Do not flinch from the icy blast as I exit the car, for I am one with the icy blast. I will also be the crocus daring to poke its precious bud above the residual snow.
But I am also that Witness who will disappear and reflect back these manifestations as an empty mirror, rather than being any one of them as self/other.
For the exercise that I have created for myself of being in this body/mind and using the dis-ease of cancer for serious spiritual growth, what do I take from the lesson I am trying to teach myself?
"My body may be tired or excited, sick or healthy, heavy or light, but that has nothing to do with my inward I. I have a body, but I am not my body."
Why then do I manage to care about the affirmations, visualizations, and meditations, plus the chemo, the 10 daily pills, the cautious eating and Purell handwashing in which I mindfully engage? Patanjali felt that identification of the Witness with the instruments of seeing, the subjects and objects of our daily awareness, created our state of bondage. Am I in bondage, then? Does my agreement to obey the trances of both the orthodox medical establishment as well as the science of mind that advocates visualization, meditation, and affirmation to relieve me of suffering create the cause and effect that will keep me trapped?
The cause/effect dynamic has been proven by the masters and by my own experiences that by beginning with the protocols for dealing with gross reality we can, by grace, achieve the Witness and then Unitive consciousness. At the same time, once Unitive consciousness has been....unveiled, made clear...felt, the need for action becomes of not the slightest interest or importance, and at the same time immediate, natural and simple step to take.
I struggled so with the concept of my own death. Here I am, 65, not young but not too old to die, heaven knows. Why should I expect any special dispensation from fate? "Oh no, why me?" was the piteous mewling that I could sense in my craw, yet I also knew that there was no answer to that dejected complaint. What I did feel badly about was that I had, at last and with great effort, rewoven and healed my ego's terrible wounds, and achieved a new sense of rest and tranquility.
Ha!
I was one mammogram away from terror and crawling fear.
"Not fair! I have done all of this deep reparative work and I haven't even had a chance to put it to good use for the highest good of the Kosmos!" I was sooo frustrated.
And thus I was ready for a spiritual awakening.
"We have seen, then, that the special conditions of spiritual practice show the individual all of his resistances, while simultaneously frustrating them at the very deepest levels....The turning-point comes when the person sees that everything he does is nothing but wave-jumping, resisting, moving away from now in search of wetter waves. Spiritual practice, whether a person realizes it in these terms or not, hinges on this primal point."
I have reported in earlier blogs about that transformative spiritual experience, a powerful hit of Unitive awareness, the realization of shunyata, or emptiness with bliss, heart-opening, and freedom, that lasted for two months. What I have not spoken about was its unraveling for a week of a hapless return to suffering and the effects of a return to duality. Ironically, its origins were meant to bouy me as I approached my first chemotherapy treatment.
I have been led deep into my very cells to rally them to focus on the not-me, the not-healthy; I have manipulated the fractured chromosomes with my hands and breathed wholeness back into them; I have merged with the cancers before their surgical excision, gotten familiar with their growling indifference to the health of the All, and drawn boundaries against any further aggression of healthy tissue. Those UL experiences galvanized and reassured me.
But when I meet with my oncologist at the end of January 2011, fresh from both spiritual and physical rebounding in January, she informed me that I could, after all, have chemo.
NOOOO!!
I thought she told me that hormonal therapy would be sufficient. PLEASE no further assaults on my still quivering bodies.
Well, she admitted, she thought that there had been so many intervening surgical events that I would be out of time, so to speak, to warrant chemo. The protocols have tested its cancer-killing potency for varying months after surgery, and 4 months post-surgery is the outer marker for its effectiveness. The end of February, she found out, is the cut-off point.
But what of the hormonal therapy I had begun?
She laid out the statistics for me: for a 10 year rate of recurrence/metastases of the breast cancer I had, having no further treatment would put the chances of recurrence at 46%; with just the hormone therapy, 26%; but with chemo, it drops to 17%. Do I have any sane alternative here?
And at this point I began to cry in her office.
I do not cry.
Ever.
I realized that the fearless trust I had enjoyed for months had abandoned me. Or rather, the blissful emptiness state experience had come to an abrupt end......
Says Dzogchen Ponlop, "Unless we accept our pain, acknowledge our agony, and are willing to discover what these experiences are all about, the heart of the bodhi cannot arise.....we have to approach the basic heart of suffering and pain with courage and curiosity. We are all afraid of this experience, and because of our fear, we have difficulty developing the basic vision of enlightenment."
What was so agonizing to me that I broke down the next day and sobbed non-stop? Acceptance of what was to come plus a lack of trust that my body/mind could cope with the seemingly limitless effects of chemo. I had read the discussion forums of Breastcancer.org, an invaluable site, and cut/pasted a small book of their wisdom for how to cope with the onslaught of side-effects, from how the scalp hurts before it falls out in radiation-sickness-like clumps, to how to suck on ice pops to keep from vomiting. Having connected on a deep level with my body, I heard its loud complaining and cries that this was too much to expect of it after adjusting to three major cancer surgeries in 60 days. How could I impose this further assault on it for 4 months? My joy dissolved; my trust vanished; my heart shed tears.
My guide Lorraine worked with me to go into that fear as Ponlop advised. What I discovered was that the identity I had created via nurture was that Lynne Suffers. My earlier posts even frame this entire journey as one further tale of suffering, of unjust victimization and outrageous assaults. What she had me do, so brilliantly was to say goodbye to that incarnation I had been handed and that I had self-imposed for 64 of my 65 years.
I visualized greeting that sad self, as she approached me I had nothing but loving compassion for her, how she struggled against the role she had to inhabit to win the acceptance of her family. I held her closely to my heart, and turned away from her as I walked back into my freed Self. I looked over my shoulder to see her sad and beaten countenance smile slightly at my receding back.
And I walked back into the radiant Emptiness.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Possessing Faith
I must confess....I had been taking "No Death, No Fear" along with me wherever I went for days, and now I cannot find it. I have a pile of books next to my bed which I rotate reading. My present stack includes cosmology, "Awakening the Sleeping Buddha", "Cellular Awakening", two books on recent prenatal findings, one on what my dog sees, and a re-reading of a favorite, Sharon Salzberg's "Faith". I find myself finding new meaning from it as I move from cancer surgery to cancer treatment.
I had originally been told by my oncoligst that I was beyond the time after the mastectomy for chemotherapy to have any positive results; but upon her re-reading of the S-K protocols, she found that, should I begin a 4 month course of chemotherapy beginning Feb. 24th, my chances of recurrance of breast cancer drops from 40% to 17%. The lung cancer has been obliterated, and the surgeon informed me that my lifetime recurrence possibility is well over 90A+%---PRETTY GREAT ODDS, I'd say!
So why my current confusion? Why the emotional state of passing fear clouds about chemo? Notice that it is not about death any longer; I have let go of that fear. Now it is fear of having toxins infused into my body 8 times. What IS this dull gnawing at my core? How do I idntify its origin, its deeper meaning, so that I can apply Integral methods of breaking apart the doubting jaws?
Salzberg understands that we are a meaning-making species, and that we interpret our own fragmented experiences into narratives that can explain and map them. Unfortunately, some narratives lock us into fragments that we mistakenly attach to as the whole, whereas other narratives reaveal the whole, relationships, and connection with others and with the All.
I was an intuitive mystic from an early age, perhaps genetically predisposed that way; but my family of origin locked me into those negative fragments that I was told represented the All. I believed with all of my heart that my problem was with who I was and the terribly choices I made, that there was no way out for me, and therefore very little reason to have faith in myself and a belief that I could change my life around.
There was the much-referenced "Curse of the Greenbergs", my mother's maiden name. She and her 2 sisters fervently believed that their family was innately superior to others and also innaterly predestined to tragic fate. When my mother wrote of the horrors and grief of her family back to her great-grandmother down to her own misery, she told me that MY chapter of suffering was to be written next......
And I lived out that narrative for 64 of my 65 years. That is how new faith has been for me. Even reading through this blog, my belief in my and my family's suffering comes through like a growl, a keening lament of generations of suffering that I held close to my heart. Since the "awakening" I experienced in the hospital in December, however, I see this as such serious error. I read the entries as if typed by another's hands. This could not have come through my beliefs, I keep marveling. How could she have thought that way? What a terrible waste of energy. How did I make that magnificent and major change from believing that I was destined to suffer, to belief that I had the ability to change my life, and to live a life free of suffering?
Buddha's Third Noble Truth involves liberation from my distorted concepts of who I think I am, by seeing who I really am in stark reality. radical truth, free of the overlays of our parents' or cultures' superpositions. But that would require my abandonment of my self-hatred and belief in my own limitations to now include boundless, unimpeded love for myself and others without exception. One of my problems with this came from my family's dualist belief in the ultimate superiority of our family members plus a belief in our complete inability to stop our continual suffering. How does one connect this into a coherent narrative that supports an evolving life? That gives me the strength to wake up every day and to continue marveling at each snowflake and frozen tree branch? that permits me to meet the newest life challenges?
When the legendary vile nihilistic figure of Mara set out to dissuade Siddhartha, soon to evolve into the Buddha, from his attempt to become enlightened, he chose to attack Siddhartha's belief in his own potential.
What an interesting choice.....Our modern culture forces us to "fluff" our resumes, and if we can get away with it, to blatantly lie on them, be it for office or for college admission. At the same time, we are to resist being prideful, let we be attacked as "stuck up". In my high school, the cause of 80% of retribution was aimed at those who "thought they were better than" the one doing the attacking. How dare they?
Siddhartha resolved this dualistic tension by asking the earth to bear witness to his right to be sitting under the bodhi tree, his right to aspire to full understanding and infinite compassion. With his arising the next morning, he was enlightened.
I have the right to be happy. No genetic disposition, no ancestral curse, can interrupt that right. The glimmer of possibility can cut through to all of us. I can envision a better life for myself, and for you and you and you....Thus is faith admitted into our world.
Faith is a verb in Pali, Latin, asnd Hebrew. Why? Because it is something that we must do. It is the willingness to take the next step. And where will that next step take us? Into the darkness. Into the unknown. It is a journey, not a destination; the verb takes us into an unknown land where we must risk it all, because of faith. What must we give up in this journey? The firm belief that we are in an unchanging place that will stay as is, for our security.
But what would that really mean for us? It would rid life of possibility. It would keep us stuck in this suffering state, unable to try anything new.
So where am I in this journey right now? I have had three major surgeries in three months, have endured continuing pain from one operation to the other, with my chest still calling for oxycodone to eliminate the pain, and now as I look forward to this pain inching away day by day into pre-surgical normal existernce, I will be infused with poison that will disrupt that status quo and cause new and unknown side effects well beyond the loss of my hair:
• Nausea and vomiting
• Hair loss: Sorry. No two ways about it, you'll lose some or all of your hair.
• Increased risk of infection: You'll be losing white blood cells; the drugs will destroy some of them, along with the cancer cells. You'll be at your most susceptible starting 10 days after treatment, and extending to the next treatment. In fact, you'll get a blood test before each treatment to make sure your white blood cells aren't TOO depleted, putting you at too great a risk of infection.
What can you do about this? The usual things you do all winter to prevent a cold; avoid crowds, wash your hands often, stay away from people who are sick. Remember, an infection you get now will be more serious than a cold, so use your common sense. Don't put yourself at unnecessary risk.
• Loss of appetite/metallic taste in your mouth:
• Sores in your mouth, on your lips, or in your throat: Imagine cold sores inside your mouth-OUCH! These may crop up within a few days of treatment. Try to prevent them by chewing on ice chips during the first 5 to 10 minutes or so of your injection; this works for some women.
• Fatigue: As you advance through your treatments, you'll probably find yourself feeling more and more tired. This fatigue can range from mild (increased difficulty climbing stairs) to major (staying in bed all day). Try some gentle exercise, no matter how bad you feel; even walking helps.
• Loss of fertility Not an issue for me at 65. At least this one doesn't apply.
• Heart damage: In rare cases, "A" may temporarily damage the muscles of your heart, and thus interfere with its pumping action.
• Susceptibility to sunburn
• Bladder irritation
• Bruising or bleeding more easily: You may notice you bruise more easily. Or maybe your gums bleed when you brush your teeth, your nose bleeds when you blow it, you see some spotting in your underwear... your bone marrow is producing fewer platelets, which is what helps your blood clot. This isn't a serious problem-it's not like having hemophilia-it's more an annoyance, something to be aware of. And, along these same lines, don't panic when your urine suddenly turns reddish-pink directly after your treatment: it's not blood, it's from the drugs.
• You may have pretty significant joint pain that (hopefully) lasts just a couple of days, but may stretch beyond that. Ibuprofen, taken at fairly high doses, usually helps with this. Ask your doctor how much to take.
• You may also have tingling in your hands and feet. Not much you can do about that; it's annoying, and can affect your balance, if it's in your feet (since it feels like your feet are asleep); but it should go away once you're done.
• Chemo brain: This rather disheartening side effect is experienced by many women as they go through chemo. And in about 15 percent of women, it lingers for years. Short-term memory loss and difficulty concentrating are its main characteristics. You may forget your best friend's name, your own phone number, or which way to turn a doorknob... any number of heretofore simple tasks are made more difficult, simply because you've (temporarily, hopefully) lost some short-term memory.
So how am I to journey through this with faith? I CHOOSE LIFE. I ALIGN MYSELF WITH THE POTENTIAL INHERENT IN MY LIFE. I GIVE MYSELF OVER TO THAT POTENTIAL.
I had originally been told by my oncoligst that I was beyond the time after the mastectomy for chemotherapy to have any positive results; but upon her re-reading of the S-K protocols, she found that, should I begin a 4 month course of chemotherapy beginning Feb. 24th, my chances of recurrance of breast cancer drops from 40% to 17%. The lung cancer has been obliterated, and the surgeon informed me that my lifetime recurrence possibility is well over 90A+%---PRETTY GREAT ODDS, I'd say!
So why my current confusion? Why the emotional state of passing fear clouds about chemo? Notice that it is not about death any longer; I have let go of that fear. Now it is fear of having toxins infused into my body 8 times. What IS this dull gnawing at my core? How do I idntify its origin, its deeper meaning, so that I can apply Integral methods of breaking apart the doubting jaws?
Salzberg understands that we are a meaning-making species, and that we interpret our own fragmented experiences into narratives that can explain and map them. Unfortunately, some narratives lock us into fragments that we mistakenly attach to as the whole, whereas other narratives reaveal the whole, relationships, and connection with others and with the All.
I was an intuitive mystic from an early age, perhaps genetically predisposed that way; but my family of origin locked me into those negative fragments that I was told represented the All. I believed with all of my heart that my problem was with who I was and the terribly choices I made, that there was no way out for me, and therefore very little reason to have faith in myself and a belief that I could change my life around.
There was the much-referenced "Curse of the Greenbergs", my mother's maiden name. She and her 2 sisters fervently believed that their family was innately superior to others and also innaterly predestined to tragic fate. When my mother wrote of the horrors and grief of her family back to her great-grandmother down to her own misery, she told me that MY chapter of suffering was to be written next......
And I lived out that narrative for 64 of my 65 years. That is how new faith has been for me. Even reading through this blog, my belief in my and my family's suffering comes through like a growl, a keening lament of generations of suffering that I held close to my heart. Since the "awakening" I experienced in the hospital in December, however, I see this as such serious error. I read the entries as if typed by another's hands. This could not have come through my beliefs, I keep marveling. How could she have thought that way? What a terrible waste of energy. How did I make that magnificent and major change from believing that I was destined to suffer, to belief that I had the ability to change my life, and to live a life free of suffering?
Buddha's Third Noble Truth involves liberation from my distorted concepts of who I think I am, by seeing who I really am in stark reality. radical truth, free of the overlays of our parents' or cultures' superpositions. But that would require my abandonment of my self-hatred and belief in my own limitations to now include boundless, unimpeded love for myself and others without exception. One of my problems with this came from my family's dualist belief in the ultimate superiority of our family members plus a belief in our complete inability to stop our continual suffering. How does one connect this into a coherent narrative that supports an evolving life? That gives me the strength to wake up every day and to continue marveling at each snowflake and frozen tree branch? that permits me to meet the newest life challenges?
When the legendary vile nihilistic figure of Mara set out to dissuade Siddhartha, soon to evolve into the Buddha, from his attempt to become enlightened, he chose to attack Siddhartha's belief in his own potential.
What an interesting choice.....Our modern culture forces us to "fluff" our resumes, and if we can get away with it, to blatantly lie on them, be it for office or for college admission. At the same time, we are to resist being prideful, let we be attacked as "stuck up". In my high school, the cause of 80% of retribution was aimed at those who "thought they were better than" the one doing the attacking. How dare they?
Siddhartha resolved this dualistic tension by asking the earth to bear witness to his right to be sitting under the bodhi tree, his right to aspire to full understanding and infinite compassion. With his arising the next morning, he was enlightened.
I have the right to be happy. No genetic disposition, no ancestral curse, can interrupt that right. The glimmer of possibility can cut through to all of us. I can envision a better life for myself, and for you and you and you....Thus is faith admitted into our world.
Faith is a verb in Pali, Latin, asnd Hebrew. Why? Because it is something that we must do. It is the willingness to take the next step. And where will that next step take us? Into the darkness. Into the unknown. It is a journey, not a destination; the verb takes us into an unknown land where we must risk it all, because of faith. What must we give up in this journey? The firm belief that we are in an unchanging place that will stay as is, for our security.
But what would that really mean for us? It would rid life of possibility. It would keep us stuck in this suffering state, unable to try anything new.
So where am I in this journey right now? I have had three major surgeries in three months, have endured continuing pain from one operation to the other, with my chest still calling for oxycodone to eliminate the pain, and now as I look forward to this pain inching away day by day into pre-surgical normal existernce, I will be infused with poison that will disrupt that status quo and cause new and unknown side effects well beyond the loss of my hair:
• Nausea and vomiting
• Hair loss: Sorry. No two ways about it, you'll lose some or all of your hair.
• Increased risk of infection: You'll be losing white blood cells; the drugs will destroy some of them, along with the cancer cells. You'll be at your most susceptible starting 10 days after treatment, and extending to the next treatment. In fact, you'll get a blood test before each treatment to make sure your white blood cells aren't TOO depleted, putting you at too great a risk of infection.
What can you do about this? The usual things you do all winter to prevent a cold; avoid crowds, wash your hands often, stay away from people who are sick. Remember, an infection you get now will be more serious than a cold, so use your common sense. Don't put yourself at unnecessary risk.
• Loss of appetite/metallic taste in your mouth:
• Sores in your mouth, on your lips, or in your throat: Imagine cold sores inside your mouth-OUCH! These may crop up within a few days of treatment. Try to prevent them by chewing on ice chips during the first 5 to 10 minutes or so of your injection; this works for some women.
• Fatigue: As you advance through your treatments, you'll probably find yourself feeling more and more tired. This fatigue can range from mild (increased difficulty climbing stairs) to major (staying in bed all day). Try some gentle exercise, no matter how bad you feel; even walking helps.
• Loss of fertility Not an issue for me at 65. At least this one doesn't apply.
• Heart damage: In rare cases, "A" may temporarily damage the muscles of your heart, and thus interfere with its pumping action.
• Susceptibility to sunburn
• Bladder irritation
• Bruising or bleeding more easily: You may notice you bruise more easily. Or maybe your gums bleed when you brush your teeth, your nose bleeds when you blow it, you see some spotting in your underwear... your bone marrow is producing fewer platelets, which is what helps your blood clot. This isn't a serious problem-it's not like having hemophilia-it's more an annoyance, something to be aware of. And, along these same lines, don't panic when your urine suddenly turns reddish-pink directly after your treatment: it's not blood, it's from the drugs.
• You may have pretty significant joint pain that (hopefully) lasts just a couple of days, but may stretch beyond that. Ibuprofen, taken at fairly high doses, usually helps with this. Ask your doctor how much to take.
• You may also have tingling in your hands and feet. Not much you can do about that; it's annoying, and can affect your balance, if it's in your feet (since it feels like your feet are asleep); but it should go away once you're done.
• Chemo brain: This rather disheartening side effect is experienced by many women as they go through chemo. And in about 15 percent of women, it lingers for years. Short-term memory loss and difficulty concentrating are its main characteristics. You may forget your best friend's name, your own phone number, or which way to turn a doorknob... any number of heretofore simple tasks are made more difficult, simply because you've (temporarily, hopefully) lost some short-term memory.
So how am I to journey through this with faith? I CHOOSE LIFE. I ALIGN MYSELF WITH THE POTENTIAL INHERENT IN MY LIFE. I GIVE MYSELF OVER TO THAT POTENTIAL.
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