Still reeling

“You look great.”  That is what everyone says now when they see me.  “No, I mean it.  You really look great.”

My response when they repeat themselves:  “Do you want to see my boob?”  Yes that is exactly what I say followed  by something like, “Yeah, that is the funny thing about cancer.  If you do not have chemotherapy and lose your hair,  you look good, like you are not even sick.  I call it the secret disease.  If you did not know me, you would never know I was sick.”

I do not feel like a sick person.  I felt the best I have in years when they discovered my most recent tumor back in March.  Never better.  Strong, steady, happy. . .  all that.  Then boom, they dropped the C-Bomb.

“Ms. Nichols, I am sorry to tell you but we have found a mass in your right breast.  I think we need to do a biopsy.”

“Today?”

“No you will have to wait about 10 days.  Please see the nurse.  She will set you up with an appointment. ”

My mind is racing.  Ten days.  How can I wait that long to find out whether I have cancer?  You just will.  And I did.  I convinced myself the results would be negative.  Well they were positive.  Surprise.  My second round of cancer and only two years after the first bout.  Two frigging years.

But I did not begin this post to tell you about my cancer.  I am trying my best to write about my experience after cancer, after surgery, and radiation.

“Now the surgery is a fairly simple procedure.  We will remove the mass and the centennial lymph nodes.”  Okay how did I miss the part about injecting dye into my breast to find that “node or nodes?”  Did the surgeon tell me I would be placed on a cold metal table only to have a plate of concrete lowered to just inches above my face?  No he did not, because I would have explained that I could not do that.  “I am extremely claustrophobic.”  Let is suffice to say that I survived this ordeal, but I did have to ask once to be pulled out so that I could close my eyes, recite my mantra and use my breath to stay calm and in the moment.

Did the surgeon tell me how painful the catheter that he placed in my boob after the surgery would be?  No.  Nor did he tell me that the radiation itself my be painful.  No.  In fact, all medical personnel stated unequivocably that the radiation would be painless.  Let me make this perfectly clear.  I am do not consider myself a wimp, but I suffered, yes suffered from extreme discomfort when anyone touch the device which I wore in my right breast for 8 days and 7 nights.  All the gauze padding in the world did not relieve the stabbing sensation in my breast.   When the doctor asked, which he did each time I came in for a treatment (twice a day), “Are you in any pain?”  I said, “Yes, all the time.”

His response, “Take another Percocet.”

“But they give me such terrible stomach cramps and constipation.”

“Get a stool softener.”

“Any suggestions.”  He blurted out a couple of words I never heard of and immediately forgot.

“Okay are you ready for the treatment?”

The radiation did not hurt, but hooking the machine up to my boob was excruciating.

“This should no hurt.”  the nice man administering the treatment said condescendingly.

Crocodile tears are rolling down the sides of my cheeks.  Every time he touches one of the limbs of my device, my body convulses.  Radiation doctor says, “We will have to give you a stronger pain medication.  I am going to write a scrip for long release morphine.  That should do it.”

“Morphine?’

“Yes you will take on every 12 hours and continue to take the percocets an hour before you come to treatment.”

And so it went for 5 days.  At one point, lying on the table, reciting my mantra, I thought, I am going to have post traumatic stress from this.  I did and I am.

My emotions are off the charts.  Giddiness moves quickly into boredom, into anger and resentment, into bitchiness, into fear and foreboding and finally into deep sadness.

When I joke about cancer, people’s expressions reveal disdain and shame.

“Look, if I can’t joke about cancer, who can?”  There is humor in every situation and I plan to look for it.  I only made a crack about all my friends buying me dinner the week of my radiation.  I guess that is one of  the cancer “perks.”

Hardest part about being well now is everyone still looking at me with deep, questioning eyes when they ask, “How are you doing?”  To most who inquire, I say, “Fine.  Really I am good.”  To my closer friends I reply, “Physically I feel great, but mentally I am off the charts.”

“Oh, but I thought you got a good report.  All clear, right?”

“Yes, all clear.  No cancer now.  But will there be more?  No one knows.  No one knows.  Each day is a gift.”

 

 

 

less than 24 hours

12 hours later –

stomach ocean calm.  mind squall

moves through tomorrow

.

 

Harsh Reality

not very good at this.

alien creature burrowing…

breast home to the beast

cancer and its treatments

 

mantra

I am doing this.

manufactured out of hope

and fear.  I exist.

Lack or the Lack there of…

What is lack.  Lack of money.  I have plenty.  Lack of time.  Have a lot of that since I sold the business.  Food.  No lack there.  We alway have more than we can eat.  What do I lack?  Do I write all day due some sense of emptiness.  Do I lack attention, love.  No.  If I feel less than, not good enough there must be something I wish to attain.  “The belief that we are lacking something, if we believe it thoroughly, must arise out of the assumption that there is something to attain.” (Wake Up To What You Do, by Diane Rizzetto)  When and If we are awake to what is, to Just This, then we are full, full with the richness of the moment.  Our minds are full so there can be no thoughts of lack.  Full or 1/2 full, a glass of milk, a bottle of juice, is just that, just as it is.  There is no attainment, no effort to attain.

I judge myself by what I attain, what I can do, how I much I achieve in one day.  We are taught by society to place an emphasis on acquisitions.  We are impressed by people positions.  This even happens in the spiritual world.  Pema Chodron refers to it as going to the “spiritual smorgasboard.”

Listen to yoga practitioners talk about how long they meditate, how many times they went to class last week, how long they can stay in handstand, and how much calmer they feel now that they are using mantra meditation.  There is always more to learn, more knowledge to accumulate.  Spiritual materialism is real, but the truth is that what we do not know is always infinite

Many people want to achieve enlightenment.  I guess that means that we are never good enough as we are in this moment.  We must always be trying  to improve ourselves and the world we live in.  Funny thing is a mind that sees a glass half empty will never be satisfied.  There can never be enough no matter how much you learn, how much you earn, how much you have.  Satisfaction is impossible.  So sad.

What do we lack?  We lack the awareness to know the difference between being and having.  We care little for the    well-being of our own planet, mindlessly depleting it of its limited resources.  What will we do when there is no more natural gas, no more fossil fuels, no more water, no more bees, no more clean air?  Then we will know the meaning of “lack.”  Will we then attack other countries who have these resources?  Should we ever take what is not freely given to us?  And can we ever learn to give freely of what we have?

The hungry ghost mentality breeds greed and deception.  The less we think we have the more we attach to what is ours.  We have less and less to give because we believe we are  somehow lacking.  If we do give, we put a price tag on our giving and use it to manipulate others.  “The price tag says, ‘I give, but you pay back.  Now you owe me.” (Waking Up to What You Do, by Diane Rizzetto).  We want to be appreciated, to be seen by others as generous and kind when in fact we are selfish and self-serving.  Giving with conditions closes down the heart.  Paying attention to our patterns around giving and receiving, bringing as awareness to our ability to give freely can shine a bright light on how we define ourselves and others.

The act of giving, dana, as the buddhist refer to it, is a practice that opens the heart.  Giving freely, unconditionally, can heal anger, fear, resentment and jealousy.  Taking is an addiction that can rule our lives.  Giving stops this compulsion in its tracts.  Giving, letting go of what we have, teaches us that everything we own is only temporally ours.  The minute someone needs it more than we do, it is time to let it go.  The key is to cultivate the awareness, the understanding, the ability to see the need in others and give what we can to help them without any expectation of return.

“One act of generosity, no matter how small, generates yet another.  The flow of giving and receiving is endless.”  (Waking Up To What You Do,  by Diane Rizzetto).

 

Eat, Sleep, Poop – Motivation?

Miss my morning latte.  My sweet husbands gets up and says, “I’ll let you know when the coffee is ready.”  He leans over to kiss me and leaves the room.  I roll over and catch a few more minutes of sleep.  Sometimes I get up.  Just like that.  I rise up, put on my robe and slippers and head to the bathroom.  Rod Stryker said, “Life is the movement from the bedroom, to the bathroom, to the kitchen, to the bathroom and back to the bed.” Pretty much sums it up.  We eat, poop and sleep, something like that.

So what motivates us to fill the time in between sleeping, eating and defecating? Even our ancestors, the cave men, had time on their hands otherwise we would not have seen the evolution of technology over the centuries.  They created tools that moved us from the Stone Age into Bronze Age and forward to the Iron each of which is distinguished by the development of technology.  What motivated them to sit down and play with the materials they had at hand, to create something from seemingly nothing?  Isn’t that what we as writers do every time we sit down at our computers or our notebooks?

As a yoga teacher, I have prepared for classes in a multitude of ways.  I have written out class plans some based on the anatomy of the practice, others on philosophical themes, sutras, ancient teachings, mantras, still others on a what we in the yoga world call a “peak” poses, sequencing the class specifically to help the students successfully do a more challenging pose like ashtavakrasana.

What I have found is that I do my best teaching with no plan at all.  If I do my personal asana practice, if I meditate, and empty my cup coming to the studio with an open mind and open heart, the teachings flow through me.  I sit with the students as class begins, eyes closed, breathing and I silently say, “Please let what I teach tonight be what these students need at this time.”  And it works.  I am a channel, a portal, I disseminate and create from what I know, what I have learned and what lies beyond understanding.

So do you suppose the cave man sat down one day at the fire and said to himself, “I need to  figure out a better way to get wood for my fire.  I have learned how to make fire by placing a leaf in the sun, by rubbing two sticks together, but now I need more wood to make a bigger, longer lasting fire.”  He had to be curious.  He had to recognize a need and believe that there was a solution.  He trusted his instincts.  He was observant.  In searching for materials to make a tool for wood cutting, this man or woman had to understand what a sharp object was and how it could be used.  Perhaps he started with a rough edged rock binding it to a sturdy stick with a vine.  “Looks pretty good,” he thinks.  He walks to the nearest tree and tries to chop off a limb.  The tree is alive so the branch is fibrous.  He cannot easily cut through it.   When he does manage to get it down,he throws it into his fire only to discover that a green limb does not burn well.  It smokes and smolders and gives off little heat.  Now what?  He remembers the wood he has used he collected off the ground.  It is dead wood.  Light bulb!  “I need to find a dead tree and chop branches off of it.”  And so it goes.  Bigger tools for bigger jobs, using fire to make more durable materials out of what he finds.  Bonding one thing to another, melting, crafting, making molds, until one day there is bronze and now this man who started with nothing can break rock and build specific structures shaped for his particular needs.  When his needs are met, he becomes more creative, making things of beauty, embellishing what he makes with other found objects, pieces of shiny rock…. Now he has jewelry to wear and to offer in trade for things others have learned to make.

Whole communities are established out of the need for shelter and food and as men and women come together they share ideas.  The ability to create and build is enhanced by common interests, needs and the innate desire to be creative, to ornament, decorate and beautify everyday objects.  Out of nothing comes a work of art, an expression of the soul’s desire to expand beyond its limits.  This is the basic principle of Tantric Yoga.  All of life longs to thrive, has the potential to overcome obstacles, to stretch beyond limitations, to pulse energetically with the wave of creation referred to in Tantra as Spanda.  In the ancient language of Sanskrit, the definition of Spanda is the vibration, the creative pulsation of the universe; the sacred vibration that exists within us.  Spanda is a quivering, a palpitation, a throbbing, a quickening that moves us from one place to a better place, to a place where we understand more, where we innovate, we are more capable of using our innate gifts to create something out of seemingly nothing.

Words on a page, the discovery of quarks, telescopes to see beyond the stars, satellites that float in space able to track our every move, cell phones, and computers, all created in the space between the time we eat, sleep and poop. It all started with a stick and a rock or maybe a leaf and two sticks.  Pretty cool.

Start Where You Are – Begin Again

“Let the mind flow freely without dwelling on anything.” ~Diamond Sutra                   (Posted today by Roshi Joan Halifax)

I am going to use this as a mantra today.  “Let the mind flow freely without dwelling on anything.”  Look at the  word dwelling.  Oddly enough the word dwelling alone is defined only as a residence, a place to stay, where the verb dwell takes on a much broader meaning:

1. to live or stay as a permanent resident; reside.
2. to exist or continue in a given condition or state.
3. (of a moving tool or machine part) to be motionless for a certain interval during operation.
4. dwell on or upon, to think, speak, or write about at length or with persistence; linger over.

I like to keep things simple so how about dwelling =”staying put?”  If I dwell on something I persist:  To hold firmly and steadfastly to a purpose, state, or undertaking despite obstacles, warnings, or setbacks.  Not a horrible thing to do when applied with awareness, but  at what point do we let go?  How does one recognize that point?

The Diamond Sutra suggests we should never dwell.  Swami Rama said, “You should not have a house unless you are willing to burn it down.”  Life constantly confronts us with the dilemma of attachment versus detachment, holding on and letting go, doing and being, fear and trust, hope and emptiness.

To exist in a state of moksha, freedom, is liberation from attachment.  It does not however mean giving up, stopping all activity, or living as a renunciate.  it suggests that we not dwell on anything that clouds our perception and engagement in this present moment. Gandhi said “Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.” We will err.  How long we will dwell on the mistakes?  That is the question.

Both yoga and Buddhism teach us to start where we are.  Begin again and again.  Like a child who learns to walk by falling, we learn to live by our mistakes.  What works and what does not?  Overtime we accumulate knowledge and experience which enlightens our choices and our actions.  However,  The Diamond Sutra reminds us that even our knowledge and perhaps especially the evidence we accumulate, can hold us back, distort our vision and prevent us from living fully in the moment.

Begin again.  Start now wherever you are.  For the moment practice allowing the mind to flow freely.  Be willing today to relearn what it is that you do.  As you notice your mind wandering off looking for a dwelling spot, start again.  Come back to your breath, back to what is in front of you, the sky above, the room you are in, the person you are with.  If necessary begin again and again.  Notice the freshness of your touch.  Come back not to what you think you must have to survive, but to what you have now.  Be willing to unlearn the preconceived.  As I said in a post earlier this week.  Everything we know expires including us.  Consider that “all conditioned existence, without exception, is in a state of flux.”  Thus we have impermanence.  Dwell on nothing for truly we have nothing ton which to dwell.

All composed things are like a dream,
a phantom, a drop of dew, a flash of lightning.
That is how to meditate on them,
that is how to observe them.[18]

Also from The Diamond Sutra

Expired – Going for the Gusto

There are multiple levels of clarity and  well-being.  I realized today that I have been operating on the lowest of the low, slogging through my days, trying to be motivated, but really having a sense of drowning.   I can put on a happy face with the best of them,  even teach a great asana class, but underneath the façade lurks a murky bog waiting to suck me down.  I have been chronically depressed most of my adult life.  It was not until I turned forty that a doctor finally diagnosed my depression and prescribed Prozac.  I immediately felt better.  Endless days of malaise turned toward sunnier times.  I wanted to be with my children.  I wanted to leave the house.  I was no longer afraid to go to the grocery store where I might see someone, god forbid, who would want to talk to me.  I felt more energetic and more engaging.  That was 1991.

Fast forward to   2005.  I am still taking Prozac not knowing that after years of being on serotonin uptake drugs the effects tend to flatten out.  I figured, “Well I am getting older.  I am probably going to have a shift in energy.”  Then I started studying with Rod Stryker who I heard claim, “If you practice yoga, pranayama and meditation correctly, you should not have to take antidepressants.”  That may not be what he said, but it is what I took away from the teachings.  So I got a mantra, started doing more pranayama, designed my private and public yoga classes, including my personal practice, according to the energetic principles of Para Yoga.  I let go of my vigorous vinyasa practice which included lots of surya namaskars with chaturangas, arm balances, head and shoulder stands and overall steady, but constant movement.  Rod suggested slowing down the momentum, giving the unconscious mind a chance to reveal its dark secrets.  That part worked.  I did heal many old wounds, but the effort to stop taking meds failed over and over again.  I felt like such a failure.  My therapist at the time tried to convince me that my long-term depression was chemical and not likely to be remedied by meditation. In fact, she recommended aerobic exercise.

January 22, 2014. I continue to use my mantra, to meditate and practice asana in a slow, steady way.  But something is shifting.  Yesterday I added Wellbutrin to my antidepressant cocktail.  I am ready to move beyond flat.   I am not giving up meditation or mantra.  I am, however, going to up the ante in my physical practice.  I am 62 years old and I want to be strong physically as well as mentally.  I am bringing back head stand, hand stand, shoulder stand and arm balances.  I am going to play music in my classes.  One of my friends and a wonderful yoga teacher, Jennifer Brilliant, whom I have not seen in years, said, “Everything a yoga teacher tells you eventually has an expiration date.”  Time for slow and steady has expired.  Going for the gusto.

I want to be her, the lady pictured below, in twenty years.

January 12 -One Year, One Day at a Time -Life is Good

A remarkable day.  Slept in late, long meditation, good coffee, started yet another book, worked on the one in progress, went to Whole Foods and took advantage of the 20% off sale they were running (they are closing tomorrow to reopen the new store on Tuesday), came home and continued work on book #1.  Writing this book resembles riding a roller coaster.  Just when I think I know what is going on there is a sharp turn and steep incline. Okay good.

I gladly stepped away from the computer to get on my bike.  Jimmy and I rode for two solid hours.  Yes, there was sunshine.  Yes there was wind.  Yes, my legs felt strong and my lungs robust.  Great ride on the Greenline,

out to Germantown Parkway and back the Greenway route which again meets up with the Greenline.  Home just in time for a yummy lunch of left over dal and butternut squash with figs and onions.  And, my favorite, Prairie Bread, non-gluten bread which we got such a bargain on this morning at Whole Foods.  Before I knew what was happening, the clock read 3:30 pm.  I taught on of my favorite longtime private clients at 4:00 and then put on my quitters (pajamas and a robe).

The Memphis Grizzlies are beating Atlanta. Yeah

Dinner was easy,  leftover meatloaf and sautéed brussel sprouts mixed with broccoli florets.  Now this.  Who could as for anything more?  I have an amazing life.  Thank you God for all the blessings of this day.

Forgot to say we made our reservation for Seaside, Florida in May.  I love family vacations.

One glass of wine with dinner.  Had 3 glasses last night.  Two when I was out to dinner with the girls and one before I left the house.  Over my limit.  Oh well.

January 5 – One Year, One Day at A Time – Fire

I will definitely weigh in at the end of this amazing day, but I had to post now to remind myself and you to keep the internal fires burning.  We are in for a real Arctic blast.  No worries.  Do not hold up in your house.  Get out.  Go to yoga.  Have dinner with a friend.  Do those things in the next few days that bring the light of the Divine into clear view.  Remember that your internal fire burns brighter and hotter than any external heat you can create.  And it’s free.  It does not harm the planet.  Your fire, the light within you is the light of your Soul.  It is a powerful source of limitless energy, but you must tend it.  Do abhyanga daily.  Practice agni sara, uddiyana bandha, and ashwini mudra.   If you do not know what these things are, find out.  Ask your yoga teacher to show you. If he or she does not know, find another teacher.  Take time to sit, be still.  Meditate. Do prana dharana.Wait for the light to appear from within and then bath in its warmth.  Bath in the Light of the Divine Artist in you.