It's a Long, Long Trail: Some Thoughts on Spiritual Practice

This is a popular quote, and there are a lot of images of it on Google.  I like this one, which shows a woman who is experiencing some "negative" emotion.  Negative emotions are those the culture doesn't want women to have, like being royally pissed off.  Men are allowed to have those; in fact, they're the hallmark of a Real Man, the kind who beats his wife, then apologizes abjectly, blubbering, drunk, of course, then beats her again and again and so on until something gets her to a safe house.  It should be called Rage Disorder, but the women could not get that into the DSM-IV.  There's a whole book about that.

Or maybe she's experiencing the astonishment of realizing what she's been put through because she was born with a vagina.  Not leaving out you men; there are victims among you, too.  But in my category - intractable PTSD caused by childhood sexual-and-emotional abuse, it seems that more of the victims are women. This is usually not diagnosed.  Instead, the locked-off pain manifests as chronic depression or bipolar disorder or fibromyalgia or underachievement, or all of these with anorexia and psychosomatic ailments thrown in.  Don't leave out the alcoholism.  Girls Wine and Whine.  And then, Smile!  There are no effective medications for any of these effects of abuse.  How could there be?

Here's the truth that pisses me off: the quote is true.  Reality is sometimes hard to face.  That would be why a lot of people don't.

What you think when you start meditating is that it will cure you, relieve your stress, make you happy, and also nice.  Yes, it does allow a space for healing, it will relieve stress for a while, maybe even for a few hours afterward.  But that just gives you fresh eyes on your condition, your life.  After a while, little unwelcome insights will start creeping into the meditation itself, Yow!  The mind clamps down on that, and the meditation becomes boring.  You get restless.  You think, This isn't doing a thing for me.  You decide to try something else.

The road to realization is less traveled for a damn good reason, in other words.  There are passages on the Way that are subject to avalanches of unwelcome memories, tears, rage.  Most people - even those who've had a chance to work with  genuine teachers - quit the Buddha way.  From where I live, it looks like half the Buddhist Teachers in America are in California, but you wouldn't believe how many unenlightened people are lying around beached out there.  People with opportunity.  Some of them - most of them, I bet - tried meditation.  My (estranged) sister once told me she went to hear Thich Nhat Hahn.  Shrug.  "It didn't do anything for me."  Well, neither did the desert in bloom (a wonderful metaphor and fact.)


If you are practicing outside an authentic system, if you don't have a teacher who's actually walked the whole damn path, you haven't got a chance.  Facing life will scare you to look for another self-styled Life Coach or Guru, another cheery book, another sweet quote, a great new recipe, oh, of course, new shoes! - in short, another way to escape reality.  That's the road more taken.

You wouldn't believe how I had to search to find a version of this as I remembered it.  Thank you, Kenneth Moody-Arndt.   I especially like this verse:
You must go and stand your trials.
You have to stand them by yourself.

What is that Original Face?

What I am thinking about this morning:

We act as if our true self was something unique to us, what makes us "special," whether by virtue of our special talents or sensibilities, or on account of the particular traumas we've suffered, or group we belong to. But our Original face is neither special or ordinary, happy or sad, white or black, male or female. What pairs do each of you put in place of Hui-neng's good or evil when dividing up the world?

The whole talk by Zen psychiatrist Barry Magid sets this in context.

Of course, we make great effort to maintain that face we put on the world; no accident that Facebook is called Facebook, though it could be called TheSelfIPresenttotheWorld.  But we are also at pains to define ourselves by all these terms.  Surely no one is more likely to think in polar opposites than someone like me who has bipolar disorder:  I am up or down, high or depressed, high-energy or lazy, creative or . . . you get the idea.

But I think undiagnosed people think the same way, though the terms may be different.  To some degree it's about what you want, whether you feel like you prefer to.  I have fibromyalgia, too, so I think sick or healthy, pain or happy . . . And there is weather:  good weather (see picture above from last week) or bad weather (what I don't enjoy).  But what is this that stands in the middle of all these words?  How can I make this clear space wider?

Letting Things Change

the most fun thing I photographed all  week

This morning I woke up miserable - many pains and bad dreams/memories of a bad time in my life that I survived only through luck. I tried ducking back in bed, warming up, but it didn't work, so I got up, dazedly drank some coffee, and stretched and meditated. Sigh. This is the fibromyalgia at work, caused by major weather systems and the change of seasons. As if it's not bad enough to be bipolar.

One thing I have learned by experience is that I am not so depressed when I am meditating. I think that's partly because I am working, concentrating on following my breath, turning down the volume on unhappy thoughts. Also, when I meditate I intend to be receptive to space and the universe, a sort of listening similar to contemplative prayer.

But after that I was a mess again. Had to ask Tom for advice on which sweater to wear (he chose orange), spent ten or fifteen minutes putting a necklace on, partly the clumsiness of arthritic hands, partly the brain fog, a feature of fibromyalgia. It depresses normal (non-bipolar) people. And I think I'm over-medicated now as well; we'll see where this mood goes. But got dressed, got to church - on time! It was a beautiful sunny fall day.

At the door I met Catherine, a woman I know largely through Facebook. She is someone I feel warmly toward, because a while back she offered to tie-dye some of my boring white socks after I posted how frustrating it is to look for socks when you have large feet. I was on the tall side earlier in life, 5'8", though I am compressing now, and my feet have spread with age to size 11 1/2 narrow. I don't mind having big feet anymore, as I have figured out what feet are for, and am glad to be walking on them, but I can hardly find shoes that big, and no pretty socks.

Catherine stopped and said she wanted to tell me she reads my blog, and Thank you for sharing. Ahh. I was still cold, but I felt warmth in my center. And I felt somewhat enlightened by her comment; I realized my identity a little better, that I see this blog as an extended circle of friends.

I was still morbidly depressed. The sermon was interesting, and during it I wrote a poem that touched down on the memory of that very bad time in my life I had dreamed of. I wondered whether this was a significant date - I am sensitive to birth and death dates, sometimes unconsciously. And indeed, my mother's birthday was September 17, tomorrow. I don't remember her death date consciously; it was also in the fall. And here we are in this parade of deaths, our friends Teena and Greg, and now Tom's father, whose service is next Wednesday. Travel with our array of health problems can be an ordeal. Add to it all that grief.

After the service we came home and Tom cooked sausages and whole-grain waffles with maple syrup, and as I ate my mood moved up, who knows why.  I have never enjoyed a meal more. It inspired me to clean up the kitchen and put together a casserole for tonight. Cooking has become a sometime thing for me, and I welcome the times when I feel like doing it.

The thing I know now about pain and depression is that these things, too, change, and change faster if you don't grasp ideas that now your day is ruined, or your week.  Or that it's not fair - that was part of Mark's point today - it's not about fair. If you make a point of staying open to the moment, the whole world around you is changing, full of potential. This understanding is one of the teachings that makes Buddhism a religion, distinct from meditation for your health or to improve your business decisions.

[The image is the canopy for a fairy-tale like little bed in one of the Sunday school rooms in our church. Creative dance was held in that room yesterday.]

You Call That a Good Day?

"Every day's a good day."  I've written about this Zen saying before, and still haven't got there.  Yesterday, for instance, I had pain in eight places, and a London pea-soup fog of a mind, and insomnia.  And missed a terrific sermon at church, I hear, because I couldn't get my head clear enough to get dressed.  But there was one good thing about yesterday:  it moved on.  Things change, and that is sometimes a blessing.

This is probably the dead-on koan for anyone with bipolar disorder.  And it would apply as well to anyone who is handicapped by chronic illness and/or pain.  A day with pain a good day?  Please.  I find myself having to think about this a lot.  There must be something I don't get.

I tie it to the famous verse on the seasons by Wumen that you may have seen recently on my facebook page, The Dalai Grandma. Here is my own (constantly changing) rendition:

In spring, flowers; in autumn, the moon.
In summer, breezes; in winter, snow.
If idle things do not hang in your mind,
every season is a good season.

 It's that third line that is tricky, and is translated various ways.  As I get it, it refers to being stuck hard on your preferences, ideas, plans, bucket list - all those things in our minds that are not the present moment, that are not the current reality.

We are funny about our preferences.  For one man I knew, liking butter pecan ice cream was not merely a preference; it was him, part of his identity, a thing to know about him.  For another woman who felt validated when other people needed her, being active and useful was not a preference or a pleasure, but a religion. She had to be useful. It's who she was; so slowing down with age was unthinkable, a failure - wrong.  There are many people in America these days, the Baby Boomers who are now entering old age, who are committed to the delusion that youth can be maintained forever; you just have to exercise harder and not eat anything good.

Good days and bad days.  The verse and the koan make me question how unhappy I get when I feel like I did yesterday.  I was probably having a flare-up of fibromyalgia, for which no cure is known, due to major weather systems moving around.  And I may suffer extra mentally with these because I have a bipolar mind.  What is good about being in pain and depressed?

One answer I've come up with is that illness can teach us.  For instance, I know people who are disabled by mood disorders or pain or chronic fatigue, and I do not think they can just up and fix themselves if they'd only try.  I understand how disabling these things are, and how invisible.  There's that.  And, as I said starting out, it makes me appreciate the constant change of carbon-based life, which sometimes goes in directions I don't like.  Yes, good luck can go bad. On the other hand, bad luck can change, too, and some days it does.

Enlightenment

Stella Doro lily doesn't know it's too late to bloom.  Note the sheltered ladybug.

Salvation, if we can talk about it at all, is the end of ambition, which is when you become completely one with your experience. Knowledge becomes one with wisdom, which is called buddhahood or the awakened state of mind. You realize that you never needed to make the journey at all . . .
Chogyam Trungpa, “The Human Realm,” in Transcending Madness: The Experience of the Six Bardos, page 258.

My main practice is Zen, but with an interest in other streams.  A year or so ago I bought "The Practice of Contemplative Photography," which includes some photographs by Trungpa Rinpoche, and that stimulated my interest in his work.  Like Shunryu Suzuki, he is more difficult to understand than his American followers, but worth the effort.

What these words remind me of is that I am perfectly what I am, what I was made to be by long and wide streams of karma, national, genetic, historical, environmental, and so on.  In Zen we talk about "the self," or "the conditioned self."  At one time I believed my task was to get rid of it.  I did, I believed that, because it was becoming clear to me that my histrionic hypersensitive over-responsible and bipolar self was the source of my suffering.  I remember Daniel Terragno asking me reasonably, "How could you do that?"  I thought we weren't communicating very well.

You cannot not be who you are. Your brain and your butt are the shape they are.  And you are okay.  But (as many teachers have added), you still need to work a little harder.  You may be OCD, but you can learn how to throw away a cereal box. You may be hypersensitive to criticism, but you can learn whose criticism to avoid or how to deflect it. It's bit by bit, inch by inch. There's always work to do

When I started a regular meditation practice, it was in a frenzy of fear that the cancer in my breast would kill me.  This was irrational; it had been discovered on a mammogram at stage one.  Nevertheless, I began doing a white light healing meditation you can find taught all over the world.  From there I somehow moved into just sitting following my breath, then a lot of other practices.  At this point in my life, I was also in torment with my alcoholic family, and they weren't the only people in my life driving me crazy.  That was how I saw life then: they drove me crazy.

There was some truth to that.  Some people are hard to take, and you should have a really good reason to spend time with them.  Over the next couple of years I was going to leave behind several people who just weren't good for me.  It was hard every single time.  Now I am amazed that I ever tolerated them.  But I didn't see the reality then.  My reality was governed by an idea that I should like everyone, tolerate rudeness, cultivate patience, and enjoy pool parties.  I mean, of course. 

You know what?  I like a genuine beach and a nice big body of water, as well as a creek and a waterfall.  I hate swimming pools, chlorine, cold water. It's a matter of personal preferences.  But I had to take swimming lessons and push push push myself to try and try harder - in the face of fibromyalgia pain - because, well, everyone said swimming was good for you.  And I thought I should learn to like it.  And certainly I had to go to my brother's pool parties because, well, he invited me.  Though another thing I really don't like is being around people who are devoting themselves to drinking all day.

One of the things Zen says is that when you are enlightened, you will taste a cup of tea and know for yourself whether the water is hot or cold.  It's a metaphor.  You learn you don't like Carol, and you're cold when you're cold, and hungry when you're hungry.  Other children of alcoholics may recognize the denial of ordinary needs that was enforced in my childhood.

I thought practice would teach me how to handle all the problems in my life back then. It has, including that some things can't be solved.  Also, I often see more clearly now where the problem lies, and how it can be handled.  This is hard for me to say, but there's actually nothing wrong with Carol, and I bet some people like her.  She is what she is.  I just - sorry, I just didn't like her.  And don't miss her.

In short, what I am gradually approaching with practice is not universal joy but being aware.  That includes, though it is not limited to, what you like and don't like, moment by moment.  It applies to many mundane things that can add up to STRESS.  It's very interesting how the little raft takes you far, but not where you thought it was going. 

[In looking up the hot and cold thing, I was led to a dharma talk I think must be by Shinge Roshi, for those who want to think more about this.]

Against Fibromyalgia (a poem)

A crocus in my back yard, which some one I never knew may have planted, though the squirrels do that too. This is the only one like it there.











Against Fibromyalgia

Rain coming in. My hands start to ache.
Shoulder muscles hurt, neck, some strain
in my jaws. And the sky
beyond the clerestory windows
is gray. The spring buds have gone from green
to a quiet statement, withdrawn,
as it were to an old lady grey
(which I wish to spell the British way).
It is early yet. Nests can still be seen
easily, as last night in the park
we heard an unknown bird,
stood and listened, looked up
until the silhouette flew away.

    from Poems Written on 3x5 Cards (unpublished)

[In church on Sunday morning, I often feel a poem come on. I carry 3x5 index cards, so that's what I write on, and that does affect the form of the poem, though this one carried over to a second card. Writing by hand also seems qualitatively different than writing with a keyboard. These are not "difficult" enough for the literary journals, so I never send them out.  Today thought I would begin sharing, especially as this one moves from pain to remembered beauty. The title of the chapbook in which I would publish them is sheerly optimistic.]

Hire Human Beings, or How to Fix the Economy

Click here for story

So I am on hold with the nice clinic where we have what used to be called "family doctor" but they didn't make enough money, so now he's our PCP.  This is not a horse tranquilizer. . . . So spent 7 min. on this call, 6 min. of it on hold while their hideous execrable music blared at me, ruining a Brandenburg Concerto, sometimes interrupted by ads about how wonderful this clinic is.

Why?  Did you ever think about why most medical systems use these * menus now?  Which everyone hates. Because some sales rep, or some presentation at a convention paid for by drug companies, convinced them that - .
(a) it was very cool and state-of-the-art to use technology any way you can get it.
(b) it would save them $MONEY$

And it certainly seems these days that's why they went into this field.  American doctors earn much much much more money than I ever earned at the jobs women of my generation were allowed to do.  If you want to see how inflated US physician earnings are compared to others in the world, click here.

It is my dear hope that all the women and people of color entering medical school will make the pay scale go down by sheer supply and demand - i.e. more doctors than we actually need. Although I have noticed that capitalism doesn't work as logically as we think it would.

But let's go back to the * menus (* means "obscenity deleted").  What happens when a dr. installs an elaborate $50,000 piece of technology/software to answer the phone?  He thinks it saves money - how?  By firing or not hiring a low-skill person who can basically answer the phone and make appointments.

Who did get work from this?  Educated aggressive entrepreneurs who run companies that design stuff like this, and their salespeople.  I'm guessing that the guy (man or woman) who actually designed the actual system isn't paid much. Who doesn't get money?  The one or two people this phone menu system replaced.

So, Buddhist thought leads us to our old familiar poison, greed, doesn't it?  This is the kind of thing that happens when people feel their job is to Take Care of #1, and believe they are separated from the rest of the world, so it is not their responsibility.  This is what happens when people just don't think of the result of their behavior, don't ask, What effect will this action have?

Want to fix the lagging American economy?  Hire more human beings, folks.  Stop hiring technology to replace the many who couldn't afford a college education, who need work.

Okay, I have to make another appt. now. . . . There. That one only took 2 minutes.  Their menu efficiently directed me to a human being.  There are lots of those running around the McConnell Spine and Sports Center. Lots of people taking phone calls and efficiently making appointments.  I love them, and my doctor there, who has given me his cellphone number in case I need help on a weekend. He seems to be about more than making money.

When I told the woman on the phone that I was having enhanced pain she asked, "Will you be able to get through the weekend?"  Jesus, I almost got tears in my eyes. Yes, I thought I would.  This kind of pain won't kill me.  Calling it fibromyalgia doesn't really get me anywhere - just a label for inexplicable pain in lots of places.

If you want to think Buddhist about this, think about Right Livelihood, one of the precepts, and one point of that Eight-fold Path I wrote about recently, which can help us discard our suffering.  (Along those lines, I should probably stop and meditate, which would cool my irritability here.)

Right livelihood starts with not harming, just like the Hippocratic Oath American doctors take.  Why do I even go to the clinic with the maddening menu system?  Because there are lots of things musculo-skeletal docs don't do.  Because it has the best doctors I've been able to find. And surely, having it take from 6 to 12 minutes to just make a * appointment is not enough reason to change doctors.  Is it?

Now, sigh, to make an appt with a dermatologist I will have to be totally naked in front of while she examines every square inch of my body to make sure the immunosuppressants have not yet given rise to skin cancers.  Yes. Staying alive is a full-time occupation. . . . flash:  I got a human being there. It was so easy, so nice.

Against Positive Thinking, Again

Well, February almost over.  I had ideas to blog about today between about 10 and 11, now mostly gone.

Danger everywhere was one of them.  I am now doing mask and gloves when I scrape the litterbox, worry about touching own face or food after touching the little cat, which I do a lot.  It seems astonishing to say this animal is worth the risk to me.  But a facebook friend, Rusty, writes that his mother died of a virus you catch from a litterbox.  I recall New Year’s Eve saying, I don’t even want to live feeling like this, then going to Cat Welfare.  I so much mourned Sheba, the loss of an animal in the house.  Many tx patients feel like this, and do have pets.

I am discouraged with yet another UTI bad enough to require hospitalization, and a dangerous IV in my arm leading to my heart.  Taking a shower is a big risk, means wrapping arm very carefully in plastic wrap and silk tape.  It never stops, and it’s all making me feel hopeless, like why do I bother?  start looking - there is danger everywhere, everywhere.  A wooden-handled knife, are bacteria hiding in that wood?  Leftover cooked chicken in the frig could have listeria, you can get a horrible stomach infection.  No church food of course, no potlucks or buffets, you are taking your life in your hands to eat chili from Wendy’s which is at least governed by some sanitation laws.

A friend shares my discouragement - I do so many things to be healthy, she says, and she does, yet this.  Add to this in my case a badly damaged relationship with my tx surgeon, contradictory orders, and worst of all, his nurse (I assume he ordered her) throwing a tantrum at me because my PCP put me in the hospital where he has privileges.  She was probably just repeating the tantrum he threw at her.  I am waiting to hear about being assigned to someone else.  Yet, as Tom comments, sometimes the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know.  Yes, you are stepping into unfamiliarity.  I have low expectations now.  By and large, doctors I have met over the years in teaching hospitals are unbearably arrogant, given to telling you what they are going to do without explanation of the options, and to hell with the common knowledge that patients do best when they feel in charge of their care. 

Cellphone alarm.  Now what?  Time for noon pills.  Rapamune.  Siroliumus, that is.  One after another these meds make me feel sick.  Nose bleed, upset stomach, headache, just plain disgusted with the medical profession.  It’s one thing to be sick and old and die, another thing when someone has promised you a new life and you get one infection after another (because of the immunosuppressants) and never a week off to feel good.

And this moodiness caused by who knows what - big weather keeps coming thru, I have fibromyalgia, which can cause depression among many other things.  Not helped by the conflict with Dr. God touching on my ancient beginningless issues around an abusive father not acting like a father should.  Well, of course, your ideas and expectations get you in trouble.

Good mood, bad mood - who the hell am I?  One day I love this new book of poetry I got by Tony Hoagland.  The next day it is boring.  I am bored by pretty much everything.  Okay, opportunity for a major Buddhist insight: Wun is constantly changing, influenced by everything, many of those things invisible to our stupid blinkered western eyes.  Hang on, this too will pass.

And you feel what you feel.  I've been arguing on facebook against "positive thinking," which is a synonym for what?  Optimism, which is often unfounded.  You hope, you get disappointed.  Just experience without judgment.  I told my friend Bob Parks, "Positive thinking is against my religion."  He is a minister widely read in various religions, and told me how he gently encourages people who are very ill to be with their experience.  He knew exactly what I was talking about.  So often that's all you need to comfort you a little, which is all anyone can do.

A Theory of Life Management

I take it back - my last post. I was in my more optimistic mood, I guess, and thought there must be some way to manage life so I could have time to do bodywork and meditate, wash my socks, make and keep an Artist's Date, water the plants, all the etc. - the things I want to do, as opposed to the thousand things I have to do.  Put on the organic nail polish that finally came from the internet, that I hope will keep my nails from peeling and breaking - yes, another side effect of the drugs that are saving my kidney.

But that was before all this weather rolled in here in the US.  Major weather kicks up my less important health problem, fibromyalgia, causing pain, oh, just about everywhere that didn't already hurt.  Fibro also causes depression, which inclines me to use obscenities to modify the word "body," as in "my *&@! body."  Indeed, these things are not life-threatening and even all put together are not as bad as hemodialysis through a permacath in your neck (as I would have to have), I'm sure of that.

Maybe the worst thing about a fibro attack is the mental fog.  I had more to say about that, but I had to go take my noontime pills, and I forgot it.

We have been writing on the kidney transplant e-list about pain.  One guy is feeling much, much more pain immediately after his transplant than anyone led him to expect, so various people have been writing to him about it.  The few who say they were back to work and off painkillers in two weeks have thankfully refrained from comment.) One woman wrote that she didn't feel fully recovered for a year.  This led me to write back---

The whole first year?  Oh, gosh.  My post-transplant  nurse says most 
people don't feel good - recovered, that is - for six to nine months.  I told her nobody told me any of that.  She said, "I know.  But I tell 
everyone.  That's why they don't want me anywhere near pre-transplant."

But I would have done it anyway if I knew, because to me, dialysis is 
worse.  And I decided I wanted to live.

I'm almost at 4 months and still have plenty of pain and problems, 
though not abdominal pain.  I won't list them, it would ruin my day.

But as you can see, I did just list some of it, though not every single place in my body that hurts.  And here's the thing - when I wrote last Tuesday that one could somehow manage to have a life - you know, do your hobby or art, have fun cooking something good, get online and buy a thermal coffee mug - I must have been in a lot better mood.  The one called "delusion."  

Sometimes you can't manage.  Every *&!@# thing goes wrong.  That isn't even true.  You think everything is going wrong.  But in fact, 100,000 people here in Columbus lost power in the ice storm, and we didn't.  A friend called to offer us his guest room if we needed a place to stay.  I am going to have lunch with another friend right now.  I found time this morning to move my pathetic orchids to a south window, and water them.  

Maybe sometimes you just feel the fundamental truth - there's quite a lot in life you can't manage.  And the things you usually manage or count on, like electricity, can go to hell any minute.  Then you're into spiritual practice, I guess, saying to yourself, I'm sure there's a pony somewhere in all this crap.

[image:  "Silhouette Rose" by Ann Felicite.  Artist's depiction of the individual complexity of the fibromyalgia pain syndrome.]

The pain in your neck

Ten years ago the pain in my neck was a great problem to me.  Whenever I was trying to sit still, as when  sitting with a group or just conversing with someone, the pain set up within 90 seconds, and I had an irresistable desire to move my head around and ease the stiffness.  But that didn't . . .
[interrupted by a phone call - it wasn't the transplant center]
moving didn't work for long.  In another 90 seconds, the neck was stiff and painful again, and I wanted to move again.  But shrugging or circling my head around didn't work for long.

When I started taking private tai-chi lessons, Nathan asked me what my physical problems were.  I told him about my neck, how moving the neck just didn't ease it.

He replied, "That's because the pain in your neck isn't really in your neck."

"Where is it?" I asked, surprised.

"Down here." He indicated my lower back. . .
[interrupt to search for neck wrap and put a load in the wash since I'm downstairs. heat neck wrap in microwave.  aah.  it lands on shoulders just right.]

Nathan could see in tai chi class how stiffly I held my back, not moving from the core.  For our first private lessons all he did was work on pressure points to relieve my stiffness, and at the same time release my energy.  Everyone cries.  He uses a lot of pressure.

The tai chi was a good thing for me, uniting my body with its parts and with my mind.  It seemed more effective than the reiki treatments I'd had - but who was I to lie flat while half a dozen strangers almost touched me?

Today the pain in my right shoulder and neck is partly, I suppose, about waiting for that phone call - are we Yes on the transplant and head into a new life, or No - start over?  But it is also partly that two nights ago Tom wrapped my lymphedemic arm with compression bandages before bed.  When the wrap is really tight, so I can't bend my elbow, it can lead to this.  And then, my dull headache is the usual these days, uremia it's called, basic poisoning from waste the kidneys are not able to remove from the blood.

And then I do have fibromyalgia, confirmed by two doctors who know all about it.  You get these miscellaneous aches and pains.  When I was first diagnosed with that back then - complaining about the chronic pain in my lower back - I thought it was a big deal.  Now it is just unpleasant background noise. 

[image:  a neck wrap stuffed with healing herbs, so maybe better than mine, which is filled with just plain buckwheat, but also microwavable.  Mine is shaped like an enso, and is better for shoulder pain.]

The gateless box

Last night we invited our Zen group here to watch the PBS special on Buddha's life. Some of the people who came were new to us. All said at the door, "I don't have a television, myself." Sigh. Tom and I manifest our flaws. I was glad to see this touched upon in the special - that even Buddha himself could get angry. I liked that. Just that afternoon I'd gotten too tired and had a temper flareup. Stupid. After that I found myself sitting and trying to dispense with the sense in my ribs and throat of having had an adrenalin spurt. Then I talked to myself about just accepting how I am, adrenalized and all. I don't think this is some form of mental illness; rather it's pretty much what we humans do. It just takes years of practice to notice yourself doing it.

We enjoyed having people here, just the right amount of people, the right people, bringing the right snacks. I was amazed to see Sheba take up position in one of the little blue armchairs and watch the program. This is the cat that six months ago, even a month ago, left the room when anyone came into the house. We talked about how much cats like meditators.

Let's see - what was I going to write about? Oh, maybe how I am at a fruitful time right now; every day or two I clean up some little mess, some square foot of my territory. The other day it was my closet floor. Took out the pictures-we-don't-know-what-to-do-with-but-are-grasping. Put all my purses in the right size plastic box. Put shoes on top of said box. It was awe-inspiring. We've been here seven years; I am beginning to address the problem of what to do with the pictures. A couples project. Ah yes.

Today my spring nest-cleaning went even better. Calmed and softened, refreshed by being with meditators, I realized I could take a different approach to the archive box that has been sitting on my study floor nagging me, haunting me, insisting it had priority over more interesting things to do. Sorting these old papers was a job that was going very slow.

Wait, I thought, isn't there room in these file cabinets? I refer to two four-drawer file cabinets, the ugly old functional kind that you thought you needed at one time. Actually, they're very pretty, now that I look at them with gratitude. For these cabinets yielded two empty drawers to me, and I filled them with the stuff from the box.

You might say that wouldn't satisfy you, and I can't blame you. You might say all I have done is hide the papers from myself. But it's bigger than that, somehow. After months of hating that box, I saw my way around it - an obstacle that's not an obstacle, really. Its solidity melted as I realized that the only reason those old papers mattered was because I could see them. Now they became nothing but a bunch of old papers in two drawers, to be handled at some other time. Or not.

But before I closed the drawers and took the box downstairs to Tom, who's been wanting an archive box, I pulled out a fat file titled humor in red like that. I remembered how I went through a spell of writing short humor pieces after I got my PhD, a sort of finding my voice again.

I liked the first one, which is about my negative attitude toward pain. Reading it, I was pleased to be reminded that in 1996 I suffered keenly from fibromyalgia. A combination of years of sitting, Flexaril at night, and the slow magical unstressing of personal growth has made fibromyalgia pain no longer an issue in my life, though I left it in the piece, because it worked so well there. That was then; happily, this is now.
[image: a type of box, from this creativity website]

Taking a break

Fifteen years ago fibromyalgia was my worst problem, so I got a book about it - back then that's how you researched things. I read with disbelief that "fibros," who tend to be intense (the book said), need to learn to work 50 minutes and rest 10. What? rest 10 minutes out of every hour? How would I ever get anything done? Then again, if I did relax, would I ever get my nose back to the grindstone?

This came back to me this morning I was lying peacefully on the acupuncture table thinking about how my energy is so good in the morning, and dwindles all day long. Even if I take a couple of hours in the afternoon to read and nap, I'm often lackluster (great word!) in the evening. I wondered, What could I do to make my energy last longer? and into my mind snuck the idea of taking breaks. One of them is about to happen right now.
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So I took 20 min on yoga mat, eye pad on eyes to relax them, and little sandbags on my twitchy hands, to encourage stillness (a handmade gift from a friend and yoga teacher). Toward the end of the rest I wanted to stretch, and slowly remembered the pose called cat/cow. I've had trouble with knee and ankles for six months, and had forgotten all about doing any pose that involved them, or pretty much doing any pose but corpse. Being able to do cat/cow made me realize that I am finally back on the fast track, for me. . . . Time for physical therapy.
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It's 5:11 - curse the unnecessary accuracy of digital time - it's a little after five, and I am home, feet burning from too much footwork, none of it dancing, and from a depressing, enervating experience at Kohl's, where they have no cardigan sweaters. In fact, I think "In today's modern contemporary world" (as composition students sometimes begin a paper), cardigans are so totally like old lady that I am going to have to go to the thrift store, where they have them by the rack full. I'd much rather shop there for that reason - last year's fashions, yea, last millenium's fashions are waiting for me there, and suit me better than things with all sorts of trim so that you can't put them in the washer. But I digress.

Got home tired from multiple errands but with a single gorgeous pink gladiolia, and had a mishap trying to put it in a vase. It involved spilling a bunch of glass marbles down the garbage disposal. Fortunately, it wasn't running. Also, Tom wasn't in the room. Still, it unnerved me, and I had to sit down and have slightly sweet iced tea and a few White Cheddar Cheezits and the end of a chocolate chip biscotti, which had fallen out of my purse earlier. So there was my second good break of the day, and badly needed, too.

But mostly, the need for breaks is not about working too hard for me - it's about being too intense about my work, and even my play. This is the core of my personality, so I don't mean to malign it. But I did get to remembering with a smile how my Tai Chi teacher once told me to "Chill out." I'd been told that before in other words, but the slang surprised me, coming from a sort of spiritual person.

What, was I taking something too seriously, trying too hard? Well, I suppose. But do you want to know how much good it did to tell me not to do it? About as much good as it would have done if I had told the young mother at Kohl's, "Be kind to your children." She looked like "kind" wasn't in her vocabulary. I don't know how to fix this world, not even one young mother. So it was good to come home to a New Yorker in the mailbox, and go through back to front, the way all normal people do, looking at the cartoons.

"Slow down, you crazy child . . . "

Several years ago I learned that tai chi Masters never use more than 75% of their energy at one time. The idea of slowing down and using the minimum required energy for any task fascinated me.

At that time, I was in the early years of daily meditation practice, and pain from my fibromyalgia was announcing itself more insistently. That sort of thing can happen as you begin to pay attention. If I sat still, my neck began to hurt in about 90 seconds, and I had to stretch it a little. Then it would begin to hurt again 90 seconds later. I had long ago been diagnosed with fibromyalgia. Now I was more aware of my chronic pain, more troubled by it.

I tackled the problem with my usual vigor, began tai chi classes (adding two classes a week to my full schedule), and bought a book on fibromyalgia. There I read that it was essential to slow down. The book suggested that those of us with this pain disorder were too intense. I thought, They’re writing about me.

The authors said fibros should take a ten-minute break every hour. Stretch, relax, walk around, do something different. I found that almost inconceivable. Waste ten minutes every hour? How could I? I had so much to do! Homemaker, cook, caregiver to my mother, whose dementia was advancing, and to my husband, whose post-polio syndrome meant he couldn't do much else but work. I was learning to write poetry, and really wanted to steal hours every day for that. (I still do.) And I loved gardening and had kept adding gardens until it was all much too much for me. Then there was church work. And spending a day a week babysitting my new grandson so my daughter could have some time off.

It was all really important, and it all demanded to be done right now. I have to make a point of having compassion for that past self when I recall this crazy-busy time.

This particular period of addiction to all kinds of work crashed, as things will, when, tired and distracted, I ran a red light one day. The accident totaled my pretty little Acura and hurt my back, and the driver of the car I ran into threw a tantrum at me, so that I began crying and cried for 24 hours. Then I became afraid to drive, afraid for a while to even get in a car.

I had been running on empty. Now I had sailed off the cliff, so to speak, and mid-air I had a chance at a fresh start. Sometimes, lying on the floor with my legs on a chair to rest my back, I would listen to Billy Joel's Vienna. It is a beautiful song, and wiser than I knew.

Obviously, I recovered, with somewhat shuffled priorities, slowly overcame my driving phobia and finally bought a new car, a 2000 Honda Civic. It's not as sporty as the Acura was, but that's okay. I am a more cautious driver now.