Oh the Pain!

Often, physical life throws us curve balls. We get cancer or have a heart attack, we break a bone, or we experience chronic pain. What is a spiritual response to these physical realities?

Well, let's start with our regular, human response. We may be shocked, enraged, terrified! We may feel isolated and alone with our situation and our feelings. Prayer or meditation may be small comforts when we feel this way. It's ok to have these human reactions. We ARE human!

Eventually, though, if we want to go on and make meaning out of what seems like a travesty or even like a personal attack from a vengeful god, we begin to try other ways to cope.

Maybe we DO pray or meditate. Maybe we read something inspirational. Maybe we talk to others who have survived our situation. Maybe we find a support group online. Just taking an action is the first step.

I struggle with many physical challenges; this morning I awoke from a sleep made restless by my chronic pain. I sat down to meditate and found myself really resistant. I was avoiding acceptance, even awareness, of my pain. As is my habit, I posed a question to my higher self as a way to anchor my meditation. I wrote: Speak to me of loneliness. I breathed for a few moments and then scratched out "loneliness" and wrote the real word on my mind, "pain." Speak to me about pain.

Ahhhh. That felt right. Snow blew and danced around the edges of my house. A crow floated around the sky. A squirrel was picking at seeds that scattered the ground. Cara, my higher self, said, "They are focused on this task, this day."

Deep breath. On this one day, I can do my tasks. I read somewhere that detachment is doing the next thing and not worrying about outcomes. I'm going to bake an apple pie, Cara. And so it is. Anne

Lineage

Morning after a restless night. I go to my meditation chair and settle in for the first time in many months. I pose a question to my Higher Self. "Cara," I say, "Speak to me about fear."

After many minutes of focus on the breath and awareness of many thoughts swirling in and out of my mind, Cara speaks.

"The ego fears. The 'local self' speaks of death, and failure and the fading of the body."

Because this is part of a workshop that I am taking, I then write back to Cara.

"Cara,
Thank you for reminding me. If I am going to be soooo fond of my local self, I am going to feel fear often. Help me to let your voice and your lineage shape my body, mind and soul. And so it is. Anne"

The word lineage takes hold of me. The idea that my higher self, Cara, has a lineage more powerful and as real as my local self melts my heart. I envision the spiritual entities unfolding over many dimensions into my Cara, all these spiritual ancestors in a sacred circle around the instantiation of this local self, this ego, this physical classroom and its inhabitant, named Anne.

In my physical lineage, I experience in my own body and mind, the manifestation that is Lucille, my physical mother. She, too, suffered from chronic, debilitating pain. She, too, suffered from emotional intensity so painful at times that she lost the bonds of reality, and her local self rejected mine. For a moment, I felt Lucille inside of me along with Cara. My psycho/physical heritage and my psycho/spiritual one together.

And so it is. Anne

Readers, Tell Me What To Do!

What do you do when you're watching someone you love throw away her life? Or, at least, it seems that way. A very young teen whom I love dearly just announced her "engagement" on Facebook to a very young boy (both are under age). How many times in the course of a lifetime do we experience that helpless moment when our blood pressure shoots up, the migraine starts, or the brain goes numb in the face of what looks like a bad choice by a loved one.

Having posed the question, I sit in silence having no easy answer. Prayer comes to mind. Meditation. Letting go. All of these are good things but I'm still stuck at the "she's ruining her life" moment of shock and disbelief.

I'm getting nowhere here. Please, readers, tell me what to do. Roxie

And the Beat Goes On

The Course in Miracles says there are only two basic emotions: love and fear. It further declares that if you're feeling one, you can't be feeling the other. I wonder if that's true. Maybe there are rare moments when we are so fully in the love, that we have no other reality. Maybe there are also moments when we are so fully in the fear, that we see nothing else.

In my own life, there have been such absolutes. When I'm in love with a human, life is transformed. That can also happen when I'm in "the Love" as I experience a sunset or some other natural phenomenon. Likewise I know times when I'm drowning in "the Fear," when having to answer the phone or fill the gas tank makes me quake.

There are manifold paths in and out of these extreme states of bliss and terror. What about the rest of our life when love and fear are intermingled in millions of mutations and permutations, millions of variations on a theme. That comingled dance seems more common in the multiple realities of the human narrative.

The guides and maps in, out, and through the human condition are worth considering. While I am mostly Buddhist in my spiritual outlook, it is infused with my Christian heritage (and, alas, also with my old school Catholic heritage of sin and scrupulosity). Over the years, I've also been influenced by the 12-Step approach to human foibles. I think of this approach as spiritual boot camp, not for the faint of heart!

Recently, I've been attending one such group, more gentle of spirit, more focused on personal growth than on prohibitions. In the process, I've acquired a sponsor with the vigilance of a warrior and the heart of a fellow traveler. I find myself with mixed feelings about the 12-Step process even in such a guise of kindness.

It, like the Course in Miracles, presumes the either/or paradigm. Love or fear. Self-medicating or not. Substance abuse or sobriety. Any other way of looking at things is seen as a rationalization. Call it what you will, I'm not sure that works for me. In this blog and in my life, I presume the human condition means a lot of time in "sacred shit." Sacred shit encompasses both ends of the spectrum and everything between. It includes love and fear exquisitely blended, with hate, compassion, rage, greed, generosity, and loneliness folded in. This is the compost of the human condition. From and through this grows the human, anchored and nourished by the smelly confusion of the earth, reaching outward by some natural internal instinct towards fulfillment and regeneration of its sacred seed.

I'm happy for all the spiritual traditions and guides. I walk as comfortably with a 12-stepper as I do with a Southern Baptist. Both assume a kind of rightness that can too easily slide into righteousness, but both also have inspiration and common sense within their guidebooks. I'll take the hand of anyone who offers it in a spirit of fellowship and kindness. While I doubt any clarity that can neatly divide the human experience into this OR that, I embrace the questing human soul struggling to assert meaning as it flounders through the sacred shit of this oh-so-physical spiritual life.

I'm hoping that love AND fear embrace and teach each other. I'm hoping that no part of us goes without blessing, even when we slide into an addiction or curl up in mortal terror. I stand with the Buddhists in thinking neither loving thoughts nor fearful thoughts are better or worse. They slide in and out of us at quantum speeds and all we can do is be aware of the inner commotion. Enlightenment, may it be so, stands with all the elements and from this rooted spot is unfolding in ways we can't imagine or find words to say. Such is the rhythm as I feel it. Roxie

And Then There Was Light

Dawn. Rosy hued inklings heralding something wonderful. Ah. The birth of light each morning as the sun and the horizon cross. It's true what they say: The night is darkest just before dawn.

As you know, I've been in and out of dark places for quite some time as life took its toll on me, body and soul. This night, buried in the surprise of an October snow, came gently upon me and befriended me before I could say no.

It came in the form of my students. The topic of the day was social capital, civic virtue, and social networks (based on Putnam's book, Bowling Alone. As part of the lecture, I showed a clip from the movie Pay It Forward; most of the students had not seen it. I shared that this was a kind of karmic social capital, not the quid pro quo of the Golden Rule, but the idea that you give your social capital to someone or to society and it goes forward instead of coming back to you.

My students ate the lecture and the video as if it were food. Then, I divided each class in half and sent them into separate rooms. Each group had to "give" something generous to the other group. We reconvened 20 minutes later. One group had trekked out in the snow and come back with a cup of hot chocolate for each person on the other team. Another group wrote something praiseworthy about each member of the other team. Another group went online and read the other team's blogs, leaving generous comments about their work. The mood shifted in the room as we did all this. People were laughing and helping each other, saying nice things to each other. I could feel a "lightness" of Being in the room. Everyone left with an understanding that they were to pay the gifts they received forward to three people.

After class, one young man stayed on and while he was zipping his jacket, his face wreathed in smiles, he said, "You're a wonderful person."

Moved, I said, "Wow! Thank you."

"I'm not just saying it or paying it forward. I've been thinking it for awhile. You're a great teacher and you're a great person."

I drove home in the freshly fallen snow, street lights synergized by the coming of such unexpected brightness. The world seemed to glow. The contagion of my students' young idealism and energy blessed me, paying forward from whatever love they carry with them. "The light of God surrounds me . . . and all is well." Roxie

Anger and the Soul

I bought a sweatshirt that says: Pretending to be pleasant all day exhausts me. I collect sweatshirts with "sayings" on them and I buy them intuitively. I had, for example, no idea that I was "pretending to be pleasant" until I saw that sweatshirt. I wore it for two days and during that time, not surprisingly, I discovered how angry I am.

How is it that a person who purports to be spiritual (maybe the sweatshirt should say: Pretending to be spiritually enlightened all day . . . )can find herself filled with mind-numbing, gut-wrenching, shrieking rage? If we are spiritual beings in a physical world as some would opine, then it's hopeless to pretend that we can escape any of the trappings of this world replete with unrequited passion, career failures, bodily weaknesses, financial blunders, crime and compassion. And, yes, anger.

As much as we like to equate intelligence with spirit, we can't negate that it's soul more than spirit that bridges the chasm between the aforementioned physical being and the spiritual world. Soul is a messy thing. It's full of preludes and punk, sweat and sweetness, birth and murder.

So, I feel anger and now I know it. It's bad enough to feel anger but what if it's at the person who, or so you thought, most loved you, the one who kept you from failure-to-thrive syndrome, your "good" parent. In my case, my dad.

My dad died several years ago by his own choice. He chose to stop eating and he wasted away. At the time, it seemed a perfectly reasonable decision for an old man to make and I did nothing to oppose his choice. Why, then, am I suddenly (aging myself) furious with him?

I don't know the answers, just the question at this point. I know I HATE the way he died. I hate that he chose to leave before his time. I hate that he left me when he didn't have to. That's a lot of hate towards the man I adored all my life.

I don't understand exactly what's happening but I do know that I've been catapulted into some serious sacred shit. Soul work stretches out ahead of me like a dark, ancient road. If you, my fellow travelers, have any road maps or lights to illuminate the next leg of my journey, please share in the comments section. Blessings, Roxie

In the Moment

Did you ever look ahead with fear? Did you ever run an inner monologue that goes something like this? OMG I have to be at work early tomorrow and then there's a school meeting at night; I need to get my nails done and rake the leaves by Wednesday because friends are coming over. Or, I can't do it. I have chemo tomorrow and what if it doesn't work and I get all sick and lose my hair and then die anyhow.

That kind of future dread is a part of the human condition and most of us experience it on a regular basis. The other day I became aware of the reverse condition--memory overload. This is when you add up all the bad things that have happened to you over the last few days, weeks, years, or even over a lifetime and conclude that the Big Dude must not like you (or some other such frightening judgment).

Recently, I've been in memory overload. I fell on my hands and knees and injured my knee. Tests show nothing but I have debilitating pain everyday and am forced to walk with a cane or a crutch. On its own, this is difficult but it becomes catastrophic when I surround it with memory overload. I repeatedly think in this sequence: I've had too much to deal with in the last five years--I lost my job, lost my boyfriend, had hip replacement surgery, had a heart attack, and now I can't walk. Really, Big Dude? What terrible karmic retribution is this?

We can get "stuck" in either the future or the past and our minds run their tapes. Most of us are techno-savvy enough to know that when a tape is running in a continuous loop, we need to interrupt it. Turn off the electronic device if nothing else works. In the case of our thoughts, Buddhists would advocate that we stop and take several deep breaths.

Specifically, Pema Chodron, bless her, shows us her struggles with memory overload and futurizing. She suggests three deep breaths several times a day paying attention for that brief time only to the breath. Of all the Buddhist writers, she seems the most human to me. I am comforted by her descriptions of herself flinging a rock after her husband announces he is leaving her for another woman, by her story of being afraid to walk down a certain road because a scary dog lives down that way.

After we breathe and come into awareness, it's nice to be aware that we breathe within a community of humans all of whom share our struggles, all of whom have future dread and memory overload at various times. Each one of us has to stop and breathe on our own; no one can do that for us. Once we do it, however, there is room for awareness that shared breath is not unlike shared Spirit. In the moment, in this moment, we are never alone. Roxie