Tomorrow the Pain, Sickness and Death telegroup starts 5:15-6:45 pm Pacific Time. There are still a few spaces! We meet for six weeks.
It’s interesting that this class is starting tomorrow.
Because I’ve had a sore throat and swollen glands and a stuffed up nose. I’m sick!
On this great hierarchy of maladies, it’s the least concerning in most of our minds, right?
I feel the symptoms. My ears hurt a little. I’m not awake at my usual very early morning hour. My voice is off.
But I really don’t know what the actual cause is, specifically, in THIS body. There are simply sensations moving about, changing, aching.
And I have an awareness that the body is making corrections, adjusting, healing, moving something through.
But my mind is not afraid. It’s not thinking “I could die from this”. It’s not thinking “I’ll never recover and live the rest of my life with this pain in my throat”.
It’s not getting all dramatic and going off on tangents trying to find a cure. I don’t feel panic, or sadness.
However, if a doctor or someone I thought of as educated, someone whose opinion I trusted, said “Uh oh. This is a dangerous situation. It’s not just a cold,” I would probably have a jolt of adrenaline run through me.
That’s what happened when I had a little mole biopsied almost seven years ago.
The mole was so small, that this “biopsy” (meaning they take some of the tissue by cutting it off carefully with a very sharp medical knife) practically removed the whole entire mole from my right thigh.
It had been there for about a year. My doctor had said it didn’t look like anything to be alarmed about.
But it grew a little bigger over that year. I kept feeling it all the time, more and more often. This bump in my skin, like the eraser on a small pencil.
The biopsy required four stitches. There was a round ball under the surface of my skin.
My doctor said to come back in a week and she would send the tissue off to a lab so they could analyze it.
The next week, back in the doctor’s office, she came in and said with a smile “let’s get those stitches removed”. I had only had stitches once in my entire life, and that was in 1976 with a broken right ankle after a crazy gymnastics vault landing that required surgery.
I thought about how amazing it was that humans found that the skin is like fabric, and that you can sew it back together.
But then the doctor said “OK, you can put your pants back on and have a seat here, and I’ll be back to talk about the results of the biopsy.”
Oh yeah, the results! Cool!
Wait.
You mean, this is like “results” that have to wait for me to be seated? Not the kind of results that you say while you’re also removing stitches like “everything looks good”.
That doctor hadn’t said any of those light sounding words.
Then it washed through me like a wave crashing.
Damn.
It’s cancer or something. What else grows a “tumor”? It’s cancer. What else requires me to get fully dressed and have a seat?
That all happened within 30 seconds.
She came in. I heard the words “sarcoma” and “….generally see this in people of color”….and “need to go see a surgeon who specializes…”
I couldn’t really hear everything, because my mind was having a heart attack.
That’s one of the moments that was born in my life for The Work, for personal inquiry, for looking at what I was afraid of, that I thought was true.
A few days later, I took out paper, and began writing down my thoughts.
Thoughts about death, treatment, dying, hurting, surgery, the future, the past.
I found out, by doing The Work, that things weren’t as bad as I thought.
Who would I be without the thought that this situation was dangerous, that cancer was life-threatening, that I was doomed?
Not terrified. That’s all I could come up with at first. Not exactly “happy” and welcoming….but NOT TERRIFIED was surprisingly better than terrified.
Who would I be without the thought that cancer was horrifying, the worst that could happen?
On a continuum that carried forward into the unknown. On a mystery ride.
Just like everyone else.
“Loving what is, is not kinda liking what is, or kind of appreciating what is, it’s not accepting what is….it is good. It is really exciting.” ~ Byron Katie
If you want to take an interesting journey into questioning beliefs about sickness, physical ailments, pain that seems to hurt, cancer, death…then come join the telegroup starting tomorrow. Click here to register.
You do not have to have something serious occurring in your life, or be a survivor of some kind of trauma….
….you can simply notice that you have fearful, annoyed, angry, or very painful beliefs about physical threats, conditions, or circumstances.
You notice you are interested in honestly questioning these beliefs about living inside a vulnerable body.
Who knows, whatever ails you may be your spiritual path.
I know it’s been mine.
I’d love you to join me in inquiry, to end the fearful thinking.
“Welcome the present moment as if you had invited it. It is all we ever have, so we night as well work with it rather than struggling against it. We might as well make it our friend and teacher rather than our enemy.” ~ Pema Chodron
Love, Grace