I have put myself forward in all of these posts and in my forthcoming book as a living human document, journeying through illness and hoping to permit others to have a slightly easier path. But now it is spring.
Renewal. Rebirth of hope. New beginnings. My life has turned the corner as has the season.
After a dismal and challenging winter, the earth did what it is supposed to do---it turned the Northern Hemisphere warm and fecund. Little shoots of pastels and primary colors dared to poke up from the crenelated earth, tortured by freeze, thaw, and refreeze. Oddly shaped protrusions appeared at the ends of barren branches and tiny green feathers began to populate shrubs and trees. The air had fragrances missing for a year, and noises in neighborhoods changed, too. The scraping sounds of the snow plows have been replaced by the louder drones of lawn mowers.
Businesses of all sorts place pansies and hyacinths outside their doors to tempt the natural urge to repopulate the ground with life, the way Noah was urged to repopulate the earth after it had been scrubbed raw by----well, use your own take on biblical writings to fill this in. My clear view of the stream behind our house is becoming fuzzy with the addition of small leaves and growth spurts of bushes and branches. But I can hear it better at night, as melting snow north of me fills it until it can play its music for me once again.
My old stacks of gardening magazines are dusted off and placed lovingly on my kitchen table. I am ready for removal of that which died over the frigid winter, and for the planting of the new. I've been keeping in tune with winter as the time of living inside myself, of going as deeply inward as possible. The bulbs I planted last fall must have time to gestate under the blanket of snow much as I have been tending to my psychological roots and the quality of my personality's soil.
"In the long run, the success of your garden depends on making healthy garden soil. The more you can do to keep your soil healthy, the more productive your garden will be and the higher the quality of your crops.
For the best soil, sources of organic matter should be as diverse as possible."
Read more: http://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/how-to-make-garden-soil.aspx#ixzz302y5tZ3l
My hope for those with health challenges is that you take the time to tend your garden. What will be the ultimate benefit to you if you pluck the weeds, trim the dead branches by surgery or other medical interventions, only to have no bounty flourish in the spring after the snow melts? You have mustered strength and courage during these challenges. You garnered support and praise for how well you have faced illness. And no doubt you want to feel that this episode carries some significant meaning for you.
But what if you have that irritating sense that your thoughts and behaviors have not moved you forward in your development as a human being? You don't feel more empathetic with others who face misfortune. Your illness has been conquered so you push the entire experience into the back of your consciousness; you have a life yet to be lived. What more can be asked of you, after all?
We are a meaning-making species. Such harsh experiences as serious illness cannot help but demand that we find something transcendent in their wake. We rob ourselves of self-knowledge and self-realization if we fail to dig more deeply into what we have endured. To fail to do so permits our garden's soil to remain unhealthy long after the illness has been weeded out.
Each of us is part of an ecology that ranges from the tiniest part of us through the Kosmos. Ken Wilber calls us holons, or whole/parts. Where do you end and I begin? Where does your unhealthy soil stop bleeding into my lawn or garden? I have a beautiful stream running through my backyard. But the neighbors upstream permit their laundry water to be dumped into it, and I often see detergent bubbles floating by. Our local department of public works has sued these people to stop them from polluting the stream that flows past my home and scores of others until it joins with bigger and bigger streams and rivers, and finally merges with the Atlantic Ocean.
These polluters had no interest in maintaining a clean stream for me. Self-centered, they never thought about how the stream would denigrate my soil, and ultimately affect my flower garden.
Let's get clear about these mixed metaphors-----serious illnesses give us a sacred opportunity to look inside ourselves, to go deeply into what motivates us, and to clean up harmful or hurtful behaviors. We have the rare excuse to examine our selves and change whatever has caused us to be unhealthy.
It is said that chemotherapy never killed a single cancer cell. It works by changing the environment to one that is hostile to the survival of the malignancy.
Integral Healing provides the framework by which we can change our internal and external environments to make our lives more productive and with a higher quality to our functioning.
Integral Healing calls us to do more than exercise three times a week or eat organic foods. We need to address our interiors as forcefully as we address our exteriors. But how do we change the environment of the very soil in which we grow ourselves?
Depth psychology has been urged by Wilber in many of his books. This process is daunting and often as psychologically painful as the medical procedures we undergo. Therapy that props up our egos won't aerate that interior; it will merely put mulch to cover up the unhealthy soil.
I have learned over the years that very few undergo depth psychology. I can attest that it is arduous and threatening work. But it frees up the energy that a person facing illness needs now more than ever to fight for health. And it clears the path for further personal growth in ways that benefit others. There is more caring, less fighting, more clarity of purpose, less self-defeating thoughts. Love has a place to flourish.
Writing your sacred or spiritual autobiography is another technique that is showing up in most of our hospitals today as a means of healing. What used to be considered egotistical, vain, or self-indulgent is now being supported by medical professionals as an excellent way to find the transcendent meaning of this illness in your life. Make yourself available to others as a sacred human document. Let us learn from your tears, pain, laughter, and courage in the face of fear how to be more fully alive.
No comments:
Post a Comment