Sick, and Tired of it, With Comments on the Spiritual Path

I was reminded this morning of what took me from trying out all kinds of Buddhist practice to focusing on Zen - I met a Teacher.  Then I met another one.

Both these men, Daniel Terragno and Ama Samy, come to Grailville in Ohio once a year from far places to hold retreats, and snagged me on my very first retreats.  I've also met another Zen Teacher, James Ford, a unique Unitarian minister, and corresponded with a few others.  Now I am gratefully undertaking to practice "distantly" with Dosho Port of Wild Fox Zen, who is extending himself to work with us solitary and destitute types via internet methods. 

Every single one of these people has treated me with the attention you would give to the most important person on earth.  Their attitude is not just about the calmness and general slowing-down that we gradually learn through zazen.  It's about the practice of open-heartedness.  You can think of it as treating everything and every little yellow buttercup as sacred.  Or you can think of it as kindness.

I thought about this watching one of Dosho Roshi's videos this morning, in which he explains the above.  It is not at all abstract to me.  I have been so ill for so long here (see previous posts), and it is frustrating to wait for phone calls from the nurse, the doctor, home health.  It is easy to get resentful of friends who are too busy to offer some homemade soup (see cartoon above).  It is easy to feel entitled to inflict on others the occasional crankiness natural to this situation.

That crankiness comes from animal nature, perhaps, but the Eight-fold Path asks me to refrain from expressing it in harmful ways.  And it reminds me that I am actually not the center of other people's universe.  Jeez.  That I am no more sacred than everyone else.  That we are all seeking happiness.  Even poor Tardar Sauce (above), the cat who looked grumpy from birth.  And maybe was and is, I don't know.  I love him (her?) anyway.

The Goal Anyone Can Set

This morning I read a thread on a group I belong to for people with chronic illness. The subject was important - how can I set goals, when so often my illness makes my plans impossible?

In a wider way, this applies to all of us as we age, and at any age as life naturally changes around us.  For instance, an older (than me) friend was excited about a month-long driving trip she and her husband were planning when she had an inexplicable fall in the night and cracked her pelvis.  She struggled with considerable pain, and not being able to drive, and finally realized they had to postpone the trip a few weeks.  But as she worked to heal her husband fell and it was more serious - a seizure,  perhaps.  He has been hospitalized for weeks now getting all kinds of therapy and trying to adjust to medications.  She told me that their life has a new design, and she doesn't know what it will be now.

That's very large, but things can change radically in other ways.  How I suffered years ago! when I suddenly had a painful stress fracture and had to wear a soft cast and limp around, and stairs to my study were just too difficult.  Now my feet are okay and I'm in a one-story house, and it's my chemistry.  Depression comes and goes these days, and I have to cancel things. As for goals?  On a slow day my goal is to endure the hours with minimal suffering.  Ambitious goals, like submitting my poetry for publication - they come and go like the wind.  On a bad day, I don't care, and there's nothing external pushing me.  On a good day I want to do a dozen things.  I don't have a steady thread of self giving me the discipline to work on major goals of that kind.

But good day or bad, I have fallen into having one goal every day:  To be kind.  It is not hard to be kind; it can be passive, not being unkind or doing harm.  Not making the grocery store checker's life more difficult.  Not snarling at a beloved person.  Giving the cat fresh water.  Calling someone on the phone to see how they are.  Responding nicely to an e-mail or internet exchange.  Sending a thank-you card.  Like that. 

The simple vow to be kind isn't hard, but it actually changes your stance toward the day.  Instead of thinking about what you want, you are thinking about how your actions affect others.  Like shining a light out in a dark room, instead of into your own eyes.

Being Kind

I find myself on this catlove or lovecat theme just now.  A sort of spring fever brought on by the sudden entrance of fall weather, clear and cool.  I enjoyed this video, brought my way on Facebook by Barb Taylor, and thought, Wow, how we need to ask what our children need, our spouses.  And what we need.  It's sort of simple awareness, but then, awareness is not necessarily common. 

Some Zen people I know have been trading fervent opinions about the precepts.  One is a fundamentalist of sorts, who sees things in black and white.  You see that in converts sometimes.

But really, if you are trying to figure out how to act with reference to rules, you can get very confused.  For instance, if it's Not Killing and you believe that killing sensate beings for food is wrong, you may run into the fact that wheat harvested by machine kills all sorts of small lives who make their home in that field.  (If you want to build your compassion for field mice, I recommend one of my favorite books, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.)  I think I plucked the example of animals killed in a harvest from the writings of Bernie Glassman.

Sometimes I feel that my long journey with Buddhism and lots of thought has led me back around to the simplicity of the amazing Christian commandment:  Love one another.  Although I practice lovingkindness meditation, metta, I don't love everyone, so I vow instead to be kind.  The Dalai Lama has expressed it eloquently: "Try to be nice."

Kindness is a heart move.  When I pay attention to that vow it seems to mean that I do and say less and pay attention more. I don't bounce right in knowing what someone needs.  Sometimes I don't know and can't  "figure out" the kind thing to do.  For instance, what do you say to a friend whose drinking seems to be messing up his life?  I still don't know.  Backing up to think about it, I wonder, What would I want someone to do if it were me?  Now that sounds like the Golden Rule.  I can't help it.

Are You Too Sensitive?

Sometimes art is all that saves us

Not feeling so good yesterday, I browsed around some scientific studies, as if to assure myself that I have an excuse for being depressed. I found, or rediscovered, that bipolar brains have thirty percent more monoamines, which produce "dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine. . . the altered brain chemistry due to the excess monoamine cells may directly impact the patients' cognitive and social function." These monoamines send signals between brain cells, or neurons and are involved in mood regulation, stress responses, pleasure, reward, and cognitive functions like concentration, attention, and executive functions. (link here)  Okay, so it's been really hard to get organized.

Then there was this:  "Bipolar disorder . . . is characterized by pathophysiological changes to the visceromotor network, disrupting the regulation of endocrine and autonomic responses to stress, and hence emotion and behavior." (link here)  Yes. So, a while back I got so irritated by a friend that I practically yelled at her. I'm sorry, and I apologized.  Even if I couldn't help it, I'm sorry when I'm rude and impatient.

But - here's something you already know - some people are never sorry for being rude.  I was raised by a couple of them, and I was trained to excuse anything the head alcoholic did or said to me, and he was constantly abusive.  He didn't mean it.  His back hurts.  He has a headache.  He had a hard day at work.  And my favorite, You're too sensitive.  You don't get to do things over, but if I could, I'd tell my mother, "No, I'm not.  He's too insensitive."  But when I was a kid, I didn't have the voice.

Sometimes I catch myself putting up with crap, to be frank, from the kind of friends who sometimes look like frenemies. I was trained, it was my habit, to find excuses for rude, thoughtless people. I was surrounded by them as the scapegoat in a very sick family.  And I want to say, when I had to work with people like that, I got along.  But in my social life, I don't have to. Putting up with their crap may in fact qualify as "idiot compassion," a term that refers, roughly, to enabling people in their stupid or dangerous behavior.

Thoughtless people often build a persona that helps other people excuse them.  (And many people like to have "an alcoholic" around, someone worse than them.)  I have known people who got away with murder because they had a stammer or chronic depression or a visible handicap. My dear, wise neighbor, Marge Endter, now deceased, once told me about such a person, "He trades on that."  Bingo.

I notice that I don't go through these things with people who are on a path, who have a spiritual practice.  Practice makes us more sensitive to the effect we may have on others, and the world.  And the religions I'm familiar with make a point of compassion, or giving, or love.  The Buddhists I know may have their issues, don't we all? but they believe in being kind.  They aspire or vow to be kind.  They write whole books about it. I have one.  And since I do, I will try to be kind in gently letting some people out of my life.  Because, actually, I'm too sensitive to be around them. 

Extending Kindness to Yourself

Above, a very relaxing video with pretty good sound.  The changing pictures are lovely, but I liked to close my eyes to listen, because I'm very distracted by visuals.  It took me back to my first beloved yoga teacher, George, and the time he had us lie in shavasana in a darkened room and listen to Panamanian flute music.  I realize now it must have been shamanistic, because it had a profound effect on me.

Thursday night we watched (on streaming Netflix) a fascinating documentary titled Stress: Portrait of a Killer, because recent behavior on the part of my transplant doctor and nurse has led us to start looking for someone else to work with.  The director of the center hasn't answered my letter requesting a transfer to another doctor, and now I am searching elsewhere.  So it's been very stressful around here, the energy passing from me to Tom and Tashi, who keeps wanting to nibble on my arm.

I am aware that the stress is nowhere to be found, just my mental emissions.  However, it's still there, my mind, conditioned to knot up my stomach when I have to stand up to authority, though I've done it many times.  I need to work more deeply with that, and to relax more.  Maybe listen to many versions of Canon.

The researcher in the documentary was a fascinating guy with lots of curly hair who loves working in the field, brings his wife and kids along.  They documented how baboons' bodies change when they are under chronic stress.  They collect plaque in their arteries, for instance.  The immune system shuts down.  Females don't ovulate.  This was so much more convincing than the endless parade of articles about stress.  It led me to vow spontaneously to be kind to my body.  I'll let you know how that goes.  Right now it goes to meditation.

Working the life koan

This came to my facebook yesterday from the Dalai Lama: 

The more you think about your own self, the more self-centered you are, the more trouble even small problems can create in your mind. The stronger your sense of ‘I’, the narrower the scope of your thinking becomes; then even small obstacles become unbearable. On the other hand, if you concern yourself mainly with others, the broader your thinking becomes, and life’s inevitable difficulties disturb you less.

I wish I'd read it then - dealing with an exhausting day of medical appointments, mine and Tom's, grocery shopping, driving, and then getting home to find a letter from Huntington saying I had been overdrawn by $15 for seven days and they were charging me $23 for the first day and $7 every day after that.  This was my first notice except for a message in a little box online.  I don't read these messages every day, I bet no one does.They have always been general and didn't apply to me.

Interestingly, the letter was dated Feb. 4, mailed pre-sorted first class, mailed from Columbus, and took five (5) days to get here.  Do you believe that?  I think something's wrong.  The kindest assumption is that it's human error.  But do you know, some years ago another bank did the same thing to me.  (They relented when we discussed it.) Ordinary mail gets here much quicker than that, usually in one day.

So today I intend to go out in this awful cold and explain to them why I don't think I should pay all these fees, for one is supposed to have a 24-hour grace period with overdrafts - but that only works if you know about it. See what we can work out.  Pay what they want, or refuse to.  Then go and start a new checking account at Kemba, where we have our mortgage.  They are a nonprofit, and what a difference in attitude!  Then close the Huntington account.

My first impulse was, I hate these people.  But on examination, the feeling was not anger, but frustration. I'd like my life to be simpler, not more complicated. Ironically, the cause of the overdraft was a holiday gift to the church.  Told them they could withdraw it electronically, as they do my regular pledge, and then forgot to enter it in my checkbook.  Why?  Because I was very sick through December.

That takes me to another frustration today:  I now have tendonitis everywhere in my body that has a tendon, head to feet.  This is diagnosed as a side effect of Cipro, uncommon, but I have lots of risk factors.  It hurts.  Everything hurts.  I am not allowed to take major anti-inflammatories, really really don't want steroids, which throw me into worse moodswings.  And here it is:  it was the wrong antibiotic for the UTI.  I went to the OSU emergency room for, on my transplant nurse's advice.  They took a urine sample to culture. And nobody ever looked at the urine culture, which showed that the bug I had was resistant to Cipro, until I went to the Riverside ER six days later.  They called and asked for the results.  By then it was so bad I had to spend 10 days on an IV antibiotic.  Furthermore, Cipro is a big antibiotic you don't want to become resistant to; you might need it some day.

Okay, human error.  It was Christmas season, nobody wanted to work and serve people.  OSU has a big staffing and oversight problem.  It starts with the nursing and medical schools, which should be screening people not for IQ and grades, but for why they are going into medicine - is it just for money and status and regular employment?  Or do they really want to care for the sick?  Maybe the hospitals need to make it clear when they hire people that everyone will work over the holidays, when many many people get ill from the stress and partying.  It is the worst possible time for doctors to take the week off.  But obviously, many do.

About the pain, my excellent muscular/skeletal doc (sports doc) told me to call him anytime if I need to.  Even over the weekend.  Yes, he did.  He is an Ohio Health doctor.  They have a mission of service.

Okay.  Now, like the Dalai Lama, I need to transcend life's myriad difficulties.  I see the sky is blue outside my window, a sort of watercolor French blue.  The old Austrian pine loves it, you can tell.  The oak branches drink it in, so does the cedar near my window, though it is cold as hell.  It is bringing a koan to mind that I can't quite recall, about What do you do when you are plunged into intolerable cold (or is it heat)?  I know the answer, but can't recall the question.  Maybe someone out there can tell me how it goes. 

Meanwhile, it's time for very gentle body work and meditation, renewing my intention to be kind, including kind to myself and everyone I meet. Then off to the banks.

postscript January 2013.  It turned out they had tried to reach me by e-mail, but I hadn't updated my e-mail with them.  Whoops.  Furthermore, they were polite and agreed not to charge me this time.  There was perhaps an absence of warmth, but who could blame them?