Softening Around the Pleasure

Today is rest and recovery for me after yesterday's eye exam, which involved three different kinds of drops and bright lights.  This doesn't give me migraines, but I felt the chemical disruption the rest of the day, a certain confusion, a bad stomach.  I could see the yellow stain from the drops still coming out of my eyes onto tissues in the evening.  All this reminded me that I am seventy.

So does my slow arising most mornings, certainly this one.  I slept until my phone alarm nagged me to take my 9:30 a.m. immunosuppressants.  It was past 11:00 when I finished morning things like nasal rinse and practice and made myself the perfect breakfast.  Perfect for this moment.

Supremely digestible Malt-o-Meal with a little butter from our friend, the cow, some Ghiradelli chocolate chips, a few walnuts and maple syrup.  Ah.  Really, it was lovely.  And the sun was out.

I've kept working with the ideas of Phillip Moffitt on handling difficult emotions (a video I posted a while back).  In his book, Emotional Chaos to Clarity, he talks about "softening around the feeling."  I responded to this body-centered metaphor.  Years ago my yoga teacher, Kit Spahr, talked to us about softening around around any specific physical pain that arises when holding a yin yoga pose, and that's worked for me often. It is a way of not slamming the door on the pain, or on fear or sadness, whatever you want to flee. 

This can be hard to do.  So Moffitt makes the interesting suggestion that you can practice softening by softening around pleasant emotions.  I did this as I ate this morning, staying with the pleasure of and gratitude for this just-right breakfast so it quietly expanded and filled me.

I am glad to report that the minor infarction in my left eye had healed.  It didn't have to go that way.  So I am especially appreciating my eyes, being alive and well today, too.

[image: redbud seedpods in May on the ravine.  These colors please me.]

Death is Nature's Way of Telling You to Slow Down

Here I am, wondering whether to call the kidney doctor and let him know about this breakout of cold sores, which Mayo Clinic says can be serious in immune-suppressed people.  But I've had this before since the transplant.  Maybe see how the day goes.  It is uncomfortable and my nostril is affected on that side, and it isn't responding to l-Lysine the way it usually does.  Boy, I would hate to have the shingles flare back up.

Stress.  It elevates cortisol in your body, which then gets sort of exhausted and isn't available to fight infections. Ayurvedic medicine understands this as excess Pitta, which is, roughly, heat or fire unbalanced in your constitution.  I am a Pitta-Vata, an air person whose fire gets aggravated by lots of change.  I also "have" fibromyalgia, which you can feel respond to the kind of big weather change we've been getting, from way too hot to freeze warnings.  And too bright. Here's an old picture of me in the blue sunglasses I like to wear when it's like this.  I have a better haircut now, except that I need a haircut and my beloved hairdresser is on vacation.  Stress

Right away I found this online -

Reduce Pitta-aggravating foods such as sour tasting foods, pungent spices and nuts.
Eat lots of sweet juicy fruits--they are both cooling and cleansing.
Soak a handful of raisins in water overnight. Drain and eat them the next morning. 

I don't mind that. I remember now that I have a recipe for balancing tea, must do that, too.  In fact, I have two Ayurveda cookbooks.  What I have already done was the six healing breaths I got years ago from yoga teacher Kit Spahr - the link is both to the description of how to do this sound-breath exercise, which is derived from Taoist practice and to her blog.  I wish I could do yoga with her now, but I am just barely able to get up off the floor these days, and have a bad knee, ankle, sciatic thing - enjoy yoga while you can.  I still do stretches though, and I learned to relax. Usually.

Nothing for relaxing like sitting meditation, resting in the breath.  Did that, too.  Otherwise, I get it, I need to slow down and stay cool.

You don't want to know all about the stress, do you?  It has to do with aging parents suddenly in crisis in more than one way.  Even poor Tashi is feeling it, so I really must calm down. They say it's the natural way, first the parents get old and die, then the children get old and die.  It's still hard, and a real challenge to practice.

Three tips for instant happiness.

Gerenuk

 First, that this elegant beautiful creature exists - that makes me happy.  (My daughter saw some sort of striking long-necked animal along an Ohio roadway - maybe it was these?) It is endangered.

I'm sorry, I don't have your three things.  It's my warped sense of humor - I am a sucker for lists of tips, reading them is like eating something sweet and salty with no calories.  I don't really think there are three activities or strokes of luck that would suffice to make anyone happy.  Less neurotic and less miserable, yes, generally satisfied with life, yes, able to be happy, yes.  But those are things that take dedicated effort over a long time---for instance, a daily spiritual practice and getting enough exercise and saving for retirement---and do not bring instant gratification. There, that's three - but nobody is interested in tips like that.  Tips are about Instant!  Free!  Easy!!

Here's a suggestion, though.  Start a list of things that make you feel better.  Here are two I experienced this morning:

1. Getting a handle on tonight's dinner first thing in the morning.  I actually got chili going in the slow-cooker, no small feat working with single non-dominant hand.  It smells good, I feel proud, I'm looking forward to dinner.  If you are your own or your family's main cook, what to have for dinner will be lurking on your mind all day long unless you decide in the morning what to have.  Truth is, I learned this from a site called The Fly Lady.  If you need someone to nag you to do what has to be done around your house, go there.

2. Getting three! comments on this blog, and from new people.  This is the obverse side of my personal problem, which is that I hate my writing to be rejected.  On the other hand, I love for someone to tell me it matters to them. New readers make me happy, too.

Your list will be different.  Be careful about putting on it things that society has told you ought to make you feel better, I don't know, massage for example is torture to me.  Stretching, however, is great.  I loved yoga (with a great teacher, whose name is Kit Spahr if you live in the Columbus area) back when I could do it.  Hate running.  Love Ghiradelli chocolate with sea salt and almonds - it actually lifts my mood.  Love soft socks, supportive shoes.  Hate getting a manicure, but enjoy wearing the right nail polish. See, this is very personal.

The list of things that make me feel better is actually a sort of spiritual/psychological exercise that I made up for myself a long time ago. It is a way of paying attention to yourself.

Now I have to go take my noontime immunosuppressants.  I have to do this every day of my life now, and I don't mind it, it keeps me alive, but it doesn't make me feel better.  No pushing the list by putting on things you ought to be grateful for - that's a different exercise.

Following the pathless path

Jizo in the snow, photo by Tom Tucker

This morning I read Open Buddha's review of Footprints in the Snow, an autobiography I also like, and noted that Sheng Yen wrote a book on the Chan form of koan work.  My first response to this news was, I'd like to get that.  Next, I remembered that I have mostly lost interest in formal koan study, which was very good for me when done with Ama Samy, whose method is unique, and good for me in altogether a different way when I worked with Daniel Terragno, whose traditional method was guaranteed to arouse my striving and thus my frustration.  There's a book in that sentence.

Koan work appealed to that in me that longed for mystical, intuitive engagement with the truth.  In fact, the beginning of my work was in a dream after I got home from my first retreat with Ama Samy, one of whose books is titled after the koan, Why did Bodhidharma Come from the West?  I dreamed a deeply felt answer, woke up briefly to write it down that night, and the next day wrote to him about it.  This was in 1999.  He wrote back to me with another koan, "Who is that one?," and I carry that koan to this day, realizing more all the time that this one is compiled of a thousand thousand bits that shift constantly - the truth of no fixed limited self.

During the years that I worked with Ama Samy while on retreats, I also worked with the first book in the Japanese tradition, The Gateless Barrier.  I worked with three copies of it, in fact, by three teachers, studying each koan hard, thinking about nuances.  I embraced this study gladly, finding it much more fulfilling than the graduate studies in literary theory I had recently completed.

It made its way into Zen-flavored humor written by Sherlock, my cat, which I intended to collect as The Sound of One Paw until I got felled by one real-life koan after another.  I also read and reread John Tarrant's marvelous collection, Bring me the Rhinoceros.  In all this, each koan worked its way into my mind.  It's something Tom and I share in that intimate way of the long-married, casual references to something we both did and that we understand.

Well, this is a shorthand description of a few years of journey.  My interest in koans tapered off - I couldn't say when.  At the time, I felt like I was failing.  But now I notice that I carry all those koans, and they often pop up in response to some event.  My practice has become more flexible, is changing all the time.  I'm about to pick back up yin yoga, taking advantage of Lulu Bandha's online site, recommended by the best and most generous yoga teacher I've ever known, Kit Spahr.  I am again interested in poetry, writing my own, reading others'.  On retreat, I was very moved by the visible world, and took photographs, including a sequence of a sunrise and one of a sunset that I'd like to turn into mini-slideshows and publish.  And, well, going to the health club - I have never been attracted to exercise - is a way of recognizing the basic principle of cause and effect we call karma.  Practice is all over the place, if you think about it.

I suspect all serious practitioners think deeply at times of throwing over the householder's life and entering residence, spending more time on formal practices like meditation and calligraphy.  I don't, anymore.  I'm too bonded to Tom, my neighborhood, my home, my church.  Besides, I'd drive them crazy.

My anxiety

I feel so relaxed today, deep in my body, that a quick scan of the past doesn't turn up a comparison. Better than Valium, I think. Better than the phenobarbital I was given at one time for irritable bowel syndrome - that's when your gut can't stand the way you're living or, maybe, who you're living with. A relaxation as good as what I used to feel after doing yin yoga with Kit. That good.

The source of this peace and freedom from anxiety seems to be getting good lab results yesterday. Of the various things they check in my blood every month, two figures stand out: hemoglobin and eGFR. Hg is easy, red blood cells. My poor little kidneys are still producing enough of the hormone that makes them, no downward slide since the last test. Good news.

eGFR is something you probably don't know about unless your kidneys are failing - a number arrived at from plugging your creatinine into a formula. The number indicates about what percentage of kidneys you have left. Mine went up from 8 to 9 this month, not down. What a relief! (What is the new punctuation mark we're going to get that is a quiet sort of exclamation? I imagine the kids, texting, are going to invent it.) It means I don't have to get serious this month about preparing for dialysis.

Peace. It's wonderful. Wouldn't you think that 12-plus years meditating would make it possible for a person to call it forth at any time? I would have thought that, but it turns out not to be true in my case.

Americans underrate Karma, in my opinion. I mean, the reality that our personal will is not in charge, that a great many causes go into making us act the way we do. I wonder, if I had an identical twin turn up, would she be like me in myriad small ways? A person who tends to throw her clothes down instead of hanging them up, say. Or who has to try hard to be punctual. Who gets anxious about things when being anxious doesn't help a bit.

Anxiety is a lot like anger that way, I think. That is, it doesn't do any good, and in fact, probably gets in the way of a good outcome. But my experience is that anger has been easier to work with. Practice has impacted my tendency to get angry until these days I don't get mad. I may feel frustrated, but I can let that dissolve, the way you let stories dissolve when you're meditating.

My anxiety though exists on a deeper level. Maybe I need to do a Chod practice that has helped me with other things - sit down with that anxiety, personify it, name it (Ann Gzieti?), and give it what it needs. That's a serious full-bore approach.

The things I've done up till now have certainly taken it down quite a few notches. Yet, talking to myself about how dialysis is just a medical treatment, telling myself that it won't be what I imagine - nothing is - reminding myself that anxiety will not hold off reality - these intellectual strategies just involve the left brain. They have not gone to the deep layer of self or body where that kind of anxiety resides. Maybe it is something innate, a fear that is natural to us as vulnerable animals. Maybe I only notice it's still there because I meditate, and have become more sensitive to my feelings. Maybe, maybe.

There turned out to be a sure cure for my anxiety, the way there is a cure for the panic you feel when you dream you are confronted with a test in a subject you know nothing about. That is, to wake up. The anxiety was also a sort of dream running in the way-back movie theatre of my mind, and the way to stop it was to for reality to step forth and present good lab results. I couldn't make that happen, but here it is, a gift from a personal karma that has kept these faltering kidneys working for years longer than predicted. Last night I slept an amazing 11 hours. Today I feel the gratitude in my abdomen.

It is snowing here in Ohio, a persistent fall of small flakes, vertical, no wind. We are expected to get several more inches. I don't plan to go out today. My Appalachian friend might add, "the good Lord willing an' the creek don't rise." That is, we'll see what karma brings.

Sticky karma

[photo: a companion animal getting hemodialysis]
Monday night I was talking to Tom about some emotional issue. Maybe about calling a vascular surgeon, which I had not even put on my to-do list for a week now. Maybe about a friend who disappointed me. Maybe I was declaring that I really had to fill the prescription for a wheeled walker, which I'd put off doing for three weeks now. Whatever I was talking about, pow, this bright red ball of pain struck my upper back. I have arthritis in my spine, so I thought the worst, a slipped disc. And I thought, no, not something else right now.

This was pain, about 8 on that scale of 1 to 10, and 10 when I raised my arms to take my tee-shirt off. It disturbed my sleep, coming forward every time I changed position, and it worried Tom - could it be my heart? Women experience heart attacks wierdly. But the next day, the doctor examined me carefully, and became convinced it was a muscle spasm. The muscle relaxant he prescribed has helped. Knowing it wasn't a problem in the spine helped too. And I started to think about why it happened.

It gets obvious now and then that an abused child lives inside me, and is animated when I feel threatened. If there is a magic button you can push and get rid of the million experiences of a dark childhood, my therapists hadn't found it, though they had helped me gain some relief. Post-traumatic stress is what it is.

The walker, that's just an ordinary desire not to be so old. I'll get over that; I do want the thing so I can rest when I walk. But seeing the vascular surgeon involves a more complicated story.
That's what my Zen teacher, Daniel, would have called it, a story; a fabrication in my mind about what hemodialysis will be like, an imagination of dreadful futures.

Mental emissions. I was full of them. Getting an access installed in my arm had meaning far beyond the surgery; it would mean admitting that I really might need hemo fairly soon. And that I would actually do it. Don't want! my abused child was crying out, and I wasn't listening, so my back seized up.

She is/I am afraid of dialysis. The fear starts with being invaded, and goes on to being held down, unable to move. I haven't seen my father's monument these twelve years since he died; I am his real monument, testimony to his cruelty.

My fear extends to another echo of childhood, the possibility of getting a mean nurse. I am afraid I'll find myself in the care of Jan Davis, the nurse I had when I was on dialysis for a short while two years ago. They exist, nurses without compassion. That's who's on your shift. You are stuck with them, like you were stuck with a mother who never gave you cookies and milk after school.

Buddhism says that enough practice will liberate you from your conditioned self. That may be true for some whose childhoods weren't as damaging as mine, who started practice earlier in life. I suspect I was wrong about liberation, anyway - that it only makes you able to recognize your self and control your behavior, but doesn't wipe the past away. How could it?

I felt like taking the day off today, putting heat on the spot, doing some gentle yoga (and blessing the teacher, Kit Spahr, who taught me so generously). No to-do list today. Just random unimportant stuff. Clean out my sewing box and pack up the stuff for machine sewing to store downstairs until my daughter inherits it all. Contemplated summer courses at the local art school. E-mail offered courses sponsored by the James Cancer Center; I signed up for two. As for dialysis, I am taking Scarlett O'Hara's path today - I'll think about that tomorrow.