Real Listening

 I just got off a video call with my new Zen Teacher - new to me; he's actually very experienced, started studying with Katagiri Roshi back in those hippie days when the only Teacher who didn't want to live in California was Katagiri.  Talks like this might be the best thing about Zen - at least with some teachers, you get to talk, real talk, and they listen. Really listen.

I've had many experiences by now with therapists and ministers whose job is to listen, who are paid to listen, but they can't do what an authentic Buddhist Teacher does.  They can't engage with you in the same way.  Good ones know how to settle into a listening mode and let the patient pour out their heart.  Generally, they want to shore you up a little, too.  Basically, you are their employer, and they want you to keep coming back.

Still, sometimes ministers and therapists do engage deeply, but that is still not Zen listening.  Zen Masters have spent decades seeing through their personal egos, learning to put their desires aside in the service of ritual, demanding retreat schedules, study, serious vows.  Their job is not to shore you up, but to encourage you to find your true self, which is not the self that drew up a bucket list.

I am coming up on the 16th anniversary of my surgery for breast cancer and my meditation practice.  That diagnosis led me to decide to begin meditating every day, and finding other ways to deal with my fear and the stress in my life. 

Most of that time my practice has been solitary.  But I have had the chance to work with three Teachers, the first two during the years when I could go on retreat, now a web-based Teacher.  It's in the private interviews with them, phone calls, emails, ongoing relationships, that I've been able to drop off some of the barnacles that made my shell feel really heavy. 

Zen is a rigorous path, distinguished by the policy that there is no charge for the teaching - you give what you want in gratitude - and by the insistence that you do the work.  They don't give you what you want, a dose of bliss, maybe Dad's approval, maybe an A in koan-busting.  Their job is to help you stay on your  path.  A big piece of how they do that is the spacious welcome of just looking at you, listening to you, being interested not in your bullshit or persona or gift to the building fund, but the you that is unique on this swiftly tilting planet, and the you that is true self, all of us.

Meanwhile, their authentic listening and caring gives you a model for how you could act with other people.  And being really seen and heard is fundamentally affirming and encouraging.  I don't care who you are, everyone needs a good tummy rub once in a while. Don't let them kid you.

No, he won't bite.  Probably.

On getting a mammogram

I awoke this morning with a sense of being light as thistledown, my trunk made of air. I had dreamed I was part of a large festival of choirs, and in my dream I sang "Marching to Pretoria" very well, on tune and able to shape the notes without that quavering of old age. It is still running in my mind. I am used to my tinnitus. Because I have it, I think I might welcome the silence of death. As for the song, we used to sing it in church camp. We didn't know what it was about, but didn't care. It has a rousing rhythm.

In the kitchen I pointed out to Tom the paperwhites, soft green blades that shot straight up from a large bulb in a nice little vessel, gift from a friend who does this every single Christmas. I said to Tom, "All that was stored in that bulb. All it needed was water."

He is a scientist, and he said, "It is water."

I said, "And a code." It fascinates me that a living thing is an association of patterns held together by a code. But that's my way of seeing. Something holds it together. A consciousness? Just the karma, it is made of so many bits and pieces, and they will wear the way they do, like parts in a car. Carma.

I have had so much illness that I have no future. I realize that when I sit with friends who talk of major life changes. To people with their health, there are infinite possibilities, and so often I see my friends sitting on those possibilities, procrastinating, in the belief that they are in control of their future, and that it is definitely going to be there, like some storage room full of gold that cannot rot or be stolen. They can do it next year, or the year after that. I don't know how next year will be for us - probably worse. I am very comfortable in the knowledge that this is all I have: my home under my feet right now, the wood floor vibrating as the furnace runs. The sound of Tom in the kitchen, turning a page in the newspaper.

You have probably noticed that there are many things to remind me of my mortality. Yesterday it was the annual mammogram. When I called to make the appointment they got me right in just a few days later, because I had breast cancer once, many years ago. That's the policy, to get us in for those mammograms.

I don't really think of myself as a cancer survivor now, but as a kidney patient. As for cancer, I like to consider myself not in remission but cured. I liked to think that five years out, when I got off tamoxifen, I was done with cancer. But deep within I now know that it can strike any time, anywhere. You don't have to have symptoms. And my first cancer was found on a mammogram. So I don't want to have a mammogram, and somehow the appointment gets procrastinated.

Of course a mammogram hurts, and worse in the breast that had surgery, even though the people at JamesCare are both skilled and kind. But what hurts worse is sitting afterwards waiting while the radiologist looks at the films. The waiting room is thoughtfully arranged, with coffee and tea and snack bars, and cheery bright magazines. But you wait. This time it was about half an hour. The door opens, people come out, but they are not for you. I felt raw. I leafed through the pages of a Metropolitan Home without interest in decorating anything in my home. It's where I live.

Finally the door opened and the nurse called my name. I gathered my parka, bag of clothes, and essential comfort scarf, and went through the door with her. They don't tell you anything until you're through the door into the hall. Then they say it right away with a smile:

Everything looks fine. You're free to go.

Everything went out of me with a whoosh. It was as if I had been holding my breath all this time. Then I clumsily found my way through the halls to the exit. I have been doing this for 13 years, but I get it wrong, and someone helps me.

In the car I ate part of a snack bar, willing the sugar to help me concentrate and drive home safely. There I told Tom that next year I will ask him to drive me. Sure, he said. That's what it's about.

A thought about this little ordeal. In early years I believed that if I meditated enough I would be calm in the face of anything. I guess that's how I saw enlightenment, as a state that was beyond being human, as detachment from everything. But it seems to me that now these medical events rock me more than they once did. That that's being alive. I'll take it.

Surviving doctors

[image: Sheba in my study on her very own chair. Normally, she sleeps there while I write, sending me much-needed alpha waves.]

At this point in my life, I wish that many years ago I had decided to avoid Western medicine. I wasn't that eccentric, and the choices were not clear. For instance, when I was pregnant in 1961, I had never heard of midwives. The hospital was impatient with my desire to breastfeed, and no one helped me, so that I ended up with a painful infection called mastitis.

But I stayed on the track, going to doctors. This morning I found myself awake early, running over the mistakes they have made with me, remembering how last year a urologist prescribed a maintenance antibiotic that would have finished off my kidneys. Since my internist caught the error and warned me against the medication, that error didn't loom as large as other things. But it was.

Western medicine does some things well, handling infection, and fixing up traumas, wounds and broken bones. Antibiotics have saved my life at least twice. The first time was straightforward, a shot of penicillin that magically cured acute bronchitis. The second time, I had peritonitis. The antibiotics cured me, but it was Western medicine that had made me ill - the peritonitis followed on a simple D&C. That was long ago. I didn't learn from it.

I can't count the number of grave medical mistakes made on me since then. One was the unnecessary removal of my lymph nodes when I had surgery for an early breast cancer. The surgeon pointed out that by doing that, we could know whether the cancer had spread. He promised certainty, which is very appealing when you have cancer. I'm surprised, looking back, that I thought certainty was possible.

Total lymphectomy is no longer routinely done, but the change happened too late for me. This body is doomed to live with a lymphedemic arm. It could be worse. Ten years earlier, they would have routinely done a radical mastectomy on me, because that's what they did then - to be certain.

The lymph removal turned out to affect my life greatly. Like a great percentage of women - maybe 25%, maybe 50% - I developed lymphedema. The arm is so swollen my grandson calls it "your Popeye arm." It's almost impossible to find women's clothes that fit over it. I have to wear an elastic sleeve at all times, and sit with an electric pump massaging the arm every day. There is no hope of cure for this, no way to restore the chain of 17 healthy lymph nodes. They were part of the mechanism of the body.

Because they were removed, the arm gets infected easily, from the tiniest cut. I was not told until after the surgery that I must garden in long sleeves and gloves, never handle dirt, never get stung by a bee or mosquito, or pricked by a thorn. It made gardening miserable. That is the kind of quality of life issue very few doctors care about. And clearly, the many infections I've had in that arm are more life-threatening. The last one seemed to be caused by a tiny paper cut, which I did clean with an alcohol swab, but not quickly and thoroughly enough, apparently. The resulting cellulitis put me in the hospital yet again.

Here I am, going way back, maybe because today is the 12th anniversary of that surgery. In all this it is still true that I survived breast cancer. The surgery probably lengthened my life, though there's no way to be sure, is there?

I learned something about cancer then, that Wun's body is always being invaded by cancer cells. The key to health is Wun's own immune system, defending. This knowledge terrified me into beginning healing meditation, which became a daily meditation practice and led me to an immersion in Buddhist thought. There is nothing like a good jolt of fear to get you going. It keeps me going even now, much as I hate to sit still and do nothing.