Healing Gifts

Today, for the second time, I listened to a guided healing meditation by Jack Kornfield, whom I had the great good luck of sitting with just once at Spirit Rock. It was more satisfactory for me this time, though my back still hurts - there's only so much you can do about getting old.  I thought I'd share it here, though I always feel somewhat shy about sharing spiritual experience.  I don't know whether visualization can work for everyone, but it's worth a try, and Kornfield leads it well, makes it easy.

This time my mind went back to a place that felt like a healing temple to me.  This was a small art gallery we visited during a vacation in Toronto Montreal that was simple, clean, and silent.  I rested on a bench there, not examining any particular painting, just enjoying the peace of the place.

The healing presence who came to me looked quite a bit like Andrew Weil, a healer of the body and the whole self....

And also like Bernie Glassman Roshi, whose specialty is the mind, or consciousness, and ethics. 















And when I thought about it they both reminded me of someone generous I loved in childhood.........

So there you are.

You do various things during this meditation, and at two points the healing presence gives you something.  The first time I got a small jewelry box that contained a clear glass heart pendant.  I liked that.  I do a lot of heart-cat meditation with Tashi; she prefers being held against my heart to sitting on my lap.

The second gift was even better - a small white book, the cover handmade paper.  I smiled, because I knew instantly that the book was blank, and when I opened it, it was.  So, I thought, every day is a blank page.  Anything can be written on it.

And I thought I'd pass that on.

Along the Healing Path

Tibetan body mandala

I feel I'd like to write about how I feel these last few days, without a UTI or a cyclical biochemical depression. Maybe this is a place spiritual practice can put some people in full-time. Calm, clear, balanced, without anxiety, focused, unhurried, just okay. It is at least pleasant to be alive, maybe quietly joyful.

Before I began serious daily practice, I was never in this state, unless it was in yoga class. I had far too much anxiety, anxiety about everything you could name; that's the nature of the stress syndrome in a traumatized child. My father had it from his service in WWII, if not before then, and passed it right down with moment-by-moment criticism and worse personal invasions.

What does meditation have to do with that? For one thing, you are brought face to face with yourself (an odd image). You can't handle anxiety until you listen to yourself, and know when it's there, and begin to see what gooses it up and to work with it. 

The other part of feeling good is, for me, being balanced, neither depressed nor manic, fire not too low, not too high....I don't know yet whether long difficult moodswings are the heavy furniture of my mind, nailed to the floor, since I'm not dead yet.
~~~~ next day:
I am enjoying a Deepak Chopra online program, and as I lay relaxing this afternoon, I remembered something I heard him say on the radio a long time ago. It didn't take long to find it in an online ad for his healing retreats:

Consider the example of multiple personality disorder. People suffering from this severe psychiatric illness aren’t affected only at the psychological level. When they shift from one personality to another, dramatic changes can occur in their bodies. For example, one personality might have high blood pressure, while another personality within the same person may not. One personality may have diabetes, while the other personalities test normal for insulin levels.

I know blood pressure is very responsive to emotion; it was the insulin claim that struck me then.  Now I understand better the intricacies of metabolism, and of energy, and am not so automatically skeptical, so the diabetes claim sounds reasonable.  I lay there and thought of myself as a healthy person without UTIs.

Meanwhile, the universe tried to help me today by having the Humana nurse call me just to figure out if there's a way to make me less expensive.  I talked with her about the UTIs, and she said, "Drink water."  And a little talk about how it keeps the system flushed.  I recently upped my water from 3 liters a day to 4, having this in mind, and I was glad to hear it again. I like to work on all possible angles.  As they say, Trust in God, but keep your camels tied."

The Dancing Onion

You can have fun on YouTube trying various versions of this wonderful song.  It comes to us so poignantly from the terrible heritage of slavery in this not-so-nice country.  And to imagine how slaves must have felt singing this in church, in the fields if they were allowed, feeling a resting place in God.

Our little one-act plays are always trivial in the light of history.  But not to us.  I am dancing this afternoon because the followup urine test showed clean!  Healed!  And within an hour the home health nurse was here to take out the PICC that was installed 13 days ago in a long tiring hungry stupid (ran out of adjectives) day at the hospital.  The infection wasn't that painful, but the depression that comes with it was.  And the antibiotic made food taste bad.  It got us grimly talking with the doctors (again) about getting my old kidneys removed.

So now I have asked the universe to give me a week of no new health events.  Just let me get over the shingles, let me get off the oxycodone without too much pain, please let me not fall, or Tom, or Cassie get in a wreck . . . you know, just a nice ordinary week with only 83 problems.  There you are, craving.

But it's hopeful all around.  I drove twice this week, including on the freeway - first time in six months.  And I concluded the weekly massages on my lymphedemic arm.  It is now back to the size it was before I broke my arm.  Another graduation.  And tomorrow I'm getting a haircut. You won't know me.

You can think about this act, "lay my burden down," in other contexts.  It is our practice in meditation to simply be here with no burden other than the present moment.  Practice being here.  No big sack of the past or the future or unfulfilled desires.  This is where you are safe, because you are safe right now as you read this, I am safe as I write this. Getting rid of all those burdens is not the work of a moment, more like peeling an onion down to its core.  I have been attracted to the onion on my kitchen windowsill, which thinks it is spring, and is dancing in its translucent skirt.

The Joy of Healing

Remember that - amplify that memory, driving the Civic down through the ravine and around and home.

Immediately had it back, the skill.  Then the pleasure of being able to stop and roll the window down and take the picture I wanted to get of the orange construction fencing down there.  I love the colors orange and bright gold in this weather.

And all this mixed with the realization of pain and dis-ability in that right arm.  Pain behind R shoulder blade, which PT has me exercising now with “pinches”.  Pain up neck - other muscles trying to take the load from the arm.  Still, pain in the biceps and simple limitation.

However, able to reach forward with right hand and turn on the key.  Able to make turns, mostly using the left arm.  So, able to drive.  The trick now is to do it in moderation day by day, not upping the pain level too much or tearing something else.  It is obviously going to be a real exercise, physical therapy.

The backstory:  In early September I fell walking across a room and broke my right (good) arm up near the shoulder.  Six weeks in sling, four more before I felt up to physical therapy, now doing that.  I haven't tried to drive in all that time.  Meanwhile, the shoulder essentially got "frozen," which means PT is about stretching it to gradually break through the lesions that formed.  You do this by taking a pain pill before you go.  The cool thing is that I run into friends at the PT-rehab place (McConnell) - we are all in this together.

One more thing.  Yesterday was a very hard day for me, and this morning I was deeply tired.  But stepping out into the cold (43' Farenheit) was refreshing.  I love the energy of open skies.  And I felt really fond of the little 2000 Civic, bought new, 34,000 miles, it will run forever.

My arm is healed! But wait, there's more

Leaf showing its bones

I just feel like shouting it to the world.  Today the sports doc had it x-rayed, and I got to see the picture side-by-side with the picture he took in October ago - and the bone is completely healed. Seamlessly.  I fell and broke it in early September (the first x-rays were taken out of town), so it's been a long haul.  It's my right arm, and I have refrained from posting here a very long list of all the things you do with your dominant hand, including use your mouse, and participate in touch typing.  Feed yourself.  Slice bread.  Like that.

So you're probably wondering why, then, does this beautifully mended right arm still hurt so much?  Because, he said (after expertly moving the arm this way and that), he thinks I tore the rotator cuff when I fell.  That would be the other rotator cuff.  The left arm already had a torn rotator cuff when I fell.  It was very painful.  And that's the arm I've had to use all this time.

The odd and interesting thing is that the left one hurts much less now than the right one.  And I don't care.  This is partly because it hasn't caught up with me yet.  And partly because he gives me oxycodone, since I can't take most painkillers due to the kidney (transplant), and because I am a sweet harmless old lady in tennis shoes and obviously not a risk for addiction (and he controls the quantity, it's not a bottomless prescription).  And partly I am not upset by this news because the left one has been healing, despite being subject to doing all the things a left arm normally doesn't have to worry about.  So they do heal.

I felt so empowered by this news that I chopped up some zucchini for dinner, using my right arm.  It's very hard to chop vegetables with your non-dominant hand, and just plain impossible to use scissors.  The zucchini was very good, sliced about 1/3" thick, steamed not too much, glazed with a little butter and dusted with lemon pepper.

Unintended consequences

I have only tried this exercise from a mystical yoga teacher once, and it did not awaken that deep well of joy some Buddhist teachers purport to experience, nor a sense of bliss, but it did relax me, seems promising, and I feel I should be offering something now and then on this blog.  I am disappointed in a couple of other bloggers I follow by email, who have stopped posting regularly, leaving me with an inbox that is stultifyingly boring - [what?  now spellcheck is telling me stultifyingly isn't a word - nor is spellcheck.  Nor is bloggers.  I HATE this.  (The computer capitalized hate by itself, don't blame me.)]

Here is the whole world at my command, yet I am bored.  Or say, unimpressed.  Ah, there is the sun, a lot of golden leaves outside my window, a pale blue wash of a sky, water with just a drop of indigo  . . . Speaking of painting, I may be ready to pick up a paint brush in a week or so.  Suddenly yesterday I found myself basically not using the sling.  Well, the day before I hadn't used it much, either.  Found myself loosening it whenever I was sitting, just resting the arm in my lap.  Ah-ha. Healing.

The arm is tending to hurt now in the rotator cuff area.  Another ah-ha recently: maybe these problems with torn muscles (torn rotator cuff in left shoulder, remember?) have been caused by the *&%(# steroids at surgery (one whole gram).  That, or the misprescribed Cipro.  Or the years of levaquin.  Well, an ordinary life. Even if all this crap hadn't happened to me, I would still be getting old.  Or, already old.

And I think that's what I've come to as I digest the fact that it is now one year since my kidney transplant, and the kidney is very unlikely to reject.  I am possibly not going to die of kidney failure, but of something else.  It first came to me almost like a revelation, the mundane words you keep reading as you wait and pray:  A transplant is not a cure, but a treatment.  Like I said, mundane.

But under that lay something else - I had been led to believe it would mean a whole new life.  Being restored to health and vigor.  Maybe that is the curative fantasy one of my favorite Zen teachers, Barry Magid (who is a psychiatrist) talks about. 
~~~~~~~~~~
creativus interruptus - a phone call from my favorite best nurse, Joanie at the transplant center.  Yes, the urine culture taken last week does show an infection.  They are going to prescribe an antibiotic taken four (4!) times a day for ten (10!) days.  Well, thank God, I said, in italics, because I thought I should feel better than this.  These damn infections sap your strength and depress you.  And why am I having them?  Seems related to the transplant, since this is the fifteenth one in about a year (15!)  Ah, yes, I am immune-suppressed.  Sigh.  And always will be (as far as we know now).  That leads us to the title of this post.  Wikipedia on the subject is excellent:

More recently, the law of unintended consequences has comes to be used as an adage or idiomatic warning that an intervention in a complex system tends to create unanticipated and often undesirable outcomes. Akin to Murphy's Law, it is commonly used as a wry or humorous warning against the hubristic belief that humans can fully control the world around them.

Sounds Buddhist, but then Buddhism is so loose and accomodating, a lot of things do.  I bet anything that if you look at your own life, you will see that you - a complex system - have experienced such consequences too.  Like the way sex leads to babies, and babies become teenagers.  If they were born teenage, nobody would ever get pregnant, at least not twice.

Rest in natural great peace

When you are very tired of the news - of heat, riots, wars, the decline of nations, suffering in general - these words are soothing.  Here "neurotic thoughts" is not used so much in a psychological sense, but as a description of what goes on in the usual busy conditioned mind. 

Rest in natural great peace this exhausted mind,

Beaten helpless by karma and neurotic thoughts

Like the relentless fury of the pounding waves

In the infinite ocean of samsara.

Rest in natural great peace.

— Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche

Healing with Music

the music
Exploring YouTube I came up with this.  After several starts, it was the one that went straight to my core, started me singing along and moving in rhythm.  Listening to music before breakfast is a new practice I have found energizes me.  I believe it is healing, too . . . thinking how it is a way of breathing, and how very human it is.
 
on the medical side
My friend is in the infusion lab right now getting chemotherapy.  I wrote to her about it.  I did infusion once for several days for iron stores "in the toilet."  There was nothing threatening, as there would be with cancer, no major side effects, and I enjoyed the rest and the peaceful atmosphere.  It also reminded me that everyone there was probably worse off than me.  I didn't know then how awful chronic kidney disease would become, that I would be facing death or dialysis - a more prolonged dying - by the time Laurie heard I needed a kidney.  I knew the iron would make me feel better.

The day I had to be on the drip 3 hours I took a book by Lama Surya Das, who is an easy read, and elected to be in a hospital bed instead of a chair, and enjoyed reading and breathing.  They even brought you a packed lunch if you wanted.  I felt pampered.  It is my nature to feel overloaded by my sense of responsibility, and being sick all these years I really can never get things done, so I sort of enjoy being tied down, even being in the hospital (for a short stay), having someone bring me food, choosing just what I want.  However, I do like normal life better.  Whatever normal is these days.  And there is no "normal," is there - that's just a statistical term.

Today promises to be my last IV dose of cefepime, with all its damn uncomfortable side effects, so maybe I'll have a week or so of wellness before the next UTI hits.  Have to work on getting a new kidney doc and examining this problem.  Meanwhile, "sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."

Miracules of healing

It is with great relief and gratitude that I can report today that Sheba is clearly much better.  My gratitude is general, to the universe, that brings forth marvelous forms capable of healing, and particular, for the friends at home and online who understood and made helpful suggestions.

Today Sheba is eating again a select variety of expensive canned catfood, even her dry kidney diet if it is soaked in chicken broth to soften it.  Her digestive system is operating as it should. She has resumed her usual schedule, lying up against my hip while I read in bed. (I knew she was really sick when she stopped doing her rituals.)  It does seem reasonable now to hope that what caused her weight loss was not kidney failure, but pain in her mouth that made it hard to eat. The antibiotic has helped.  Next week she will go to the Vet to be sedated and have her mouth examined. 

She did not entirely heal herself, but was helped along by those two daily doses of liquid amoxicillin.  We have become more skillful in administering that to a cat who does not like to be held in any way, let alone having her pretty little head immobilized for a few seconds.  Maybe she has realized something, for she seems to swallow quicker.  Thanks to my daughter, Cassie, who recommended I look in Sheba's eyes and talk to her, explain why we are doing this.  Cassie said animals may not change their behavior, but they understand. I had a sense that this was true when I did it.

It is thundering.  I just went to the screened porch expecting Sheba would want to come in.  Our last cat, Sherlock, did not like thunder, and went to a special place under the guest bed, way back against the wall.  But Sheba was watching the dimming light and blowing leaves through the screens with interest.  We are all  unique.

Her gains in health caused me to look at her as a remarkable collection of organs and patterns, including immune response.  She is so small, 7.3 pounds, so delicate, so complicated, and able to heal, as all life is.  If I stop for a moment I can see my own body the same way, how my pancreas has been healing by merely following a different diet for a while (and discontinuing the drug responsible for the illness).  No major medical treatments involved, just let the pancreas rest.  It fosters a sort of awe.

I feel that awe often now that I am back on my feet - when I walk across a room barefoot in the morning, or take the short sidewalk to my acupuncturist's office.  It feels miraculous to be up on my feet (with custom insoles in my Asics), after last year's long difficulties.  I am even able now to grocery shop without using an electric cart.  I love a little verse by Thich Nhat Han that goes like this:

Walking on the earth is a miracle!
Each mindful step reveals the wondrous Dharmakaya.

[image:  a portrait of Sheba in morning sun]

Sheba and the Way of Healing

We brought Sheba home late last summer. A very nervous little tiger cat, who had spent six months in Cat Welfare in the little glass room where unadoptable old lady cats like to stay. She sat on a low pillar there, jumping about in fright whenever the door opened. Jumping down to take a bite of food, jumping back up to safety to eat it. When we visited, we were not able to pick her up or even to pet her - she was so generally afraid.

When we brought her home, she kept her distance. She was starved, starved for touch, and allowed us to pet her a bit, but then ran away. When anyone else came into the house, she walked away and curled up in a bedroom.

Here it is, about six months later, and Sheba is sitting on an armchair in the living room watching TV with our friends. She is letting strangers come in and disturb her nap and pet her. She has gone from neurotic to just, oh, timid. Cautious. You still can't pick her up, and she won't come up on my lap, but my friend Scott assures me that just takes patient training.

In other words, Sheba has substantially healed. I remain impressed by that. What has healed her? No therapy. Just a safe, affectionate environment.

When we think about healing from our own psychological difficulties, the fears that constrain us, the unmet desires, we so often think of doing something. Often we need to do something. But the other kind of work, meditation, is about "just sitting," doing nothing. Being there without any hope of gain, letting ourselves abandon our thoughts and desires instead of working them.

Zen postulates that this is a healing activity, this plain sitting. When we do it, we are giving ourselves the luxury of time in a healing environment, for in the present moment there is nothing to harm us. It is a safe place. I have often had the sense walking into a Zen center that there is a deep, healing silence there. These bright days of riotous bloom, I sometimes feel that when I come home and into a dim room.

I have also found that as I meditated, I have become more sensitive to how I feel around certain people or in certain places. Whether someone is good for me or makes me uneasy. This enables me to keep putting myself in the environments I need. "What is good for me" becomes simple. I find myself thinking, these beautiful spring days, of Julian of Norwich's famous revelation, a reassurance that we can abandon striving and trust in the Tao or in God, who she believed spoke these words to her:
"…All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well"

[image: Sheba in zazen, sitting on a sacred text (the morning Times).]

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]

One More Time When I Didn't quit

[image: Granny Weatherwax, by Paul Kidby]
My mood is much improved - thank you again, acupuncture - and I find myself moving into new territory in my life. One thing it means is that I have a sense of being ready to leave behind this blog, its persona and its subjects. "Dalai Grandma" was, after all, not my secret name, but my daughter's nickname for me, a sort of joke to say "I don't take myself too seriously," and it feels outgrown. To me, it suggested a persona (a word we literary types use for a self fabricated by the author) that was, oh, a little bit of kind old granny. That I am not, or let me say, I think there's more to me. A model I might be ready to incorporate is Granny Weatherall in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels - a no-nonsense practical witch, a healer who knows herbs and human psychology, like most witches, and who tackles evil with the fierce determination real work sometimes calls for.

I don't know whether I'll start a new blog tomorrow, or five minutes from now, or never. I do intend to leave this blog up and open to moderated comments for now. That means a comment on a post from last year would end up posted underneath that post. I have so liked making the friends I made here, and intend to keep following you in your blogs.

p.s. 2013  Obviously, I came back.  Maybe a little witchier and more like Granny W.  I imagine the main reason this has had so many hits was that for a while there, anyone who landed on the blog landed on this.