The Healing Heart

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.