I just looked back over entries from the last couple of years and am left with a very odd feeling. I thought somehow that when I wasn't dealing with my mother's pain, watching her become frighteningly thin with a distended belly like a starving child, wasting from the cancer, her hair gone, her once perfect teeth destroyed and rotting, putting morphine drops into her mouth, lifting her with my husband to clean her, and so on, I would, despite the obvious grief, feel some relief. Yet I don't. I feel much more unhappy now than I did through those two years of physical horror. I miss her so much it's unbearable and now I have the time to actually feel the feeling. Without her, the world feels empty to me. It feels devoid of meaning. She was my soul mate, for lack of a better term. I am deserted.
There is another, subtler aspect. When I was looking after my mother, I had a clear purpose. We were aiming for health and for survival. Each day of survival was a triumph. I didn't think long-term because I couldn't see beyond the day or week. I had no time to myself, no time to think. I would say the main reason I wrote this blog, which I really don't care if anyone reads or not, was because it created a reflection for me in a way that a diary would, yet somehow doesn't. Now I look at my life, the one that I have without her, and I see no clear purpose. I have to create one. I don't feel strong anymore, I feel incredibly small and weak. Smaller and weaker than I can remember ever feeling. It's a little bit like being an adolescent again except that I know better.....I know there are other ways of feeling. Also, when I turn my eyes away for a moment a pile of responsibilities (papers to sign, calls to return, bills to pay, etc.) accumulates so there isn't much room for teen angst.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Thursday, April 17, 2008
New Drugs, New Hope?
It's been a long time since I last wrote. So much has happened, I can't possibly summarize. So I'll just write. Every time I go to the hospital with my mother, the doctors start talking to me about death. I had to bring my mother to the emergency room because she was septic about three weeks ago ago the ER doctor started talking to me about how her father just died of brain cancer. I just spewed tears and I don't see how, in that vulnerable and uncomfortable context, that was helpful.
At my mother's appointment her oncologist tells us it's going to get harder. We know hard. We don't care about hard, we just want good treatment. I feel like my mother has been tossed around because of bad insurance, because of her helplessness, because of I don't know what. I imagine where she could be right now if her care had been thought-out and organized from the beginning. Instead, she's been diagnosed so late, thrown around from doctor to doctor, and I don't even understand what the treatment protocol that we're doing means at this point. I watch her pulling away again and again from the brink of death and so much of it is unnecessary and preventable. The oncologist tells me she has six months to live. Two years ago in May her first oncologist told me eight years. I thought that was too little time. What happened?
The tumors in her cerebellum (the motor cortex of the brain) are growing again. She's had so much brain radiation that, although she responds well to it, they can't do any more. It's too protected by bone and there are too many tumors to do gamma knife or other surgery. So, she's switching to a new, slightly stronger, chemotherapy. This drug's called Irinotecan. It's normally used to treat colon cancer and I'm not sure how it works with inflammatory breast cancer. We were given a number of options, most of which we've already tried (like Xeloda, which caused unbearable vomiting and nausea, or Tykerb, which gave my mother six months of severe diarrhea and three weeks in the hospital, one ER visit). I feel helpless. We both feel like the oncologist would just like to get rid of us and not have do deal with our questions anymore or my mother's difficult case. I feel like everyone around me is giving up on her. But why? She's not in terrible pain, the intestinal problems were finally solved after we arranged for her to get a unit of gamma globulin, she's eating, she's smart, she's funny, her skin is still way better than mine.....And equally important, I spoke to a woman in Texas a few days ago who had the same disease and was following a similar protocol. Her heart began to fail from the Herceptin (trastazumab) and so she was told they had done everything they could do for her and she should go home and sort out her affairs (i.e. die). She went home and tried every alternative treatment she could find and, somehow, she went into remission and has been alright for at least 5 years. I was told that there was no chance of my mother going into remission and that her early death was imminent. No doctor ever gave me any hope for remission. I kept some sort of faith that we would find a way to live with this somehow, but now that faith has some support from outside----a concrete contradiction of all that I've been told by the doctors.
How am I supposed to trust the doctors to do everything they can for my mother when they don't believe that she'll live more than six months? Where else is there to turn? The alternative community is not offering me any answers either. My mother was going to an alternative oncologist when she ended up with over thirty brain tumors and no one even knew until I brought her into the emergency room on the brink of death because they just don't do MRIs. Oh, and the alternative treatments cost us $1,500 a week and are not covered by insurance, of course.
My mother, who has helped so many others with their health, doesn't seem interested in her own treatment. When it first happened, she wouldn't even look at the MRI slides of her spine, where the first metastases were discovered. She would go blank in the doctors' offices. So I've been trying to learn about everything and defend her in this confusing world where the patient needs to somehow make sure that they get thorough care. My mother says she just wants to be with me. She doesn't want to go to a clinic or to hang out somewhere pristine and beautiful, she doesn't want anything other than to be home with me. Somehow, I have to make sure she gets the best care she can get, it's just overwhelming. I've learned a new vocabulary and grammar. Just like I studied languages, now I listen to the doctors and the nurses, I store every new word and remember its meaning. I've learned the language convincingly enough that new doctors we encounter always ask whether I'm a medical student. However, it is still a foreign language; on Tuesday I finally learned what a PET scan actually means.
I feel a pressure suddenly as I realize that no one is going to do it for me. Because I love her, I have to figure out a way to defend her against this invisible and lethal monster.
At my mother's appointment her oncologist tells us it's going to get harder. We know hard. We don't care about hard, we just want good treatment. I feel like my mother has been tossed around because of bad insurance, because of her helplessness, because of I don't know what. I imagine where she could be right now if her care had been thought-out and organized from the beginning. Instead, she's been diagnosed so late, thrown around from doctor to doctor, and I don't even understand what the treatment protocol that we're doing means at this point. I watch her pulling away again and again from the brink of death and so much of it is unnecessary and preventable. The oncologist tells me she has six months to live. Two years ago in May her first oncologist told me eight years. I thought that was too little time. What happened?
The tumors in her cerebellum (the motor cortex of the brain) are growing again. She's had so much brain radiation that, although she responds well to it, they can't do any more. It's too protected by bone and there are too many tumors to do gamma knife or other surgery. So, she's switching to a new, slightly stronger, chemotherapy. This drug's called Irinotecan. It's normally used to treat colon cancer and I'm not sure how it works with inflammatory breast cancer. We were given a number of options, most of which we've already tried (like Xeloda, which caused unbearable vomiting and nausea, or Tykerb, which gave my mother six months of severe diarrhea and three weeks in the hospital, one ER visit). I feel helpless. We both feel like the oncologist would just like to get rid of us and not have do deal with our questions anymore or my mother's difficult case. I feel like everyone around me is giving up on her. But why? She's not in terrible pain, the intestinal problems were finally solved after we arranged for her to get a unit of gamma globulin, she's eating, she's smart, she's funny, her skin is still way better than mine.....And equally important, I spoke to a woman in Texas a few days ago who had the same disease and was following a similar protocol. Her heart began to fail from the Herceptin (trastazumab) and so she was told they had done everything they could do for her and she should go home and sort out her affairs (i.e. die). She went home and tried every alternative treatment she could find and, somehow, she went into remission and has been alright for at least 5 years. I was told that there was no chance of my mother going into remission and that her early death was imminent. No doctor ever gave me any hope for remission. I kept some sort of faith that we would find a way to live with this somehow, but now that faith has some support from outside----a concrete contradiction of all that I've been told by the doctors.
How am I supposed to trust the doctors to do everything they can for my mother when they don't believe that she'll live more than six months? Where else is there to turn? The alternative community is not offering me any answers either. My mother was going to an alternative oncologist when she ended up with over thirty brain tumors and no one even knew until I brought her into the emergency room on the brink of death because they just don't do MRIs. Oh, and the alternative treatments cost us $1,500 a week and are not covered by insurance, of course.
My mother, who has helped so many others with their health, doesn't seem interested in her own treatment. When it first happened, she wouldn't even look at the MRI slides of her spine, where the first metastases were discovered. She would go blank in the doctors' offices. So I've been trying to learn about everything and defend her in this confusing world where the patient needs to somehow make sure that they get thorough care. My mother says she just wants to be with me. She doesn't want to go to a clinic or to hang out somewhere pristine and beautiful, she doesn't want anything other than to be home with me. Somehow, I have to make sure she gets the best care she can get, it's just overwhelming. I've learned a new vocabulary and grammar. Just like I studied languages, now I listen to the doctors and the nurses, I store every new word and remember its meaning. I've learned the language convincingly enough that new doctors we encounter always ask whether I'm a medical student. However, it is still a foreign language; on Tuesday I finally learned what a PET scan actually means.
I feel a pressure suddenly as I realize that no one is going to do it for me. Because I love her, I have to figure out a way to defend her against this invisible and lethal monster.
Saturday, September 1, 2007
Compression
I find myself surprisingly unperturbed.
It may not have hit me yet, sometimes it takes a little while.
Things have been much better and I have begun to work on expansion, rather than constant contraction. But as soon as I begin to get a little bit comfortable, along comes the next challenge. So, yesterday my mother came home from her PET scan---I did not accompany her because I got a slight cold over last weekend and I'm still fighting it off---and told me that it showed she now has spinal cord compression (tumors pressing into her spinal cord). Up until now, despite the total collapse of her spine, she was alright in this regard. Now, of course, she is in a very risky situation; her oncologist wanted to admit her to the hospital right away so that they could keep an eye on her and do lots more tests. However, she said she would rather be at home where at least she feels comfortable and happy. There isn't actually anything that they can do for her in the hospital at the moment other than monitoring her. It basically makes their job easier, but wouldn't actually help my mother in any tangible way. She will probably have to undergo another series of radiation treatments. This will be the second in a matter of a couple of months. Just recently they radiated the breast and the hip for a month and she just recovered from those daily treatments. Before that it was the brain for three weeks. Now it will be the spine itself. The upside is that she has historically responded well to radiation (i.e. the tumors have shrunk) and the side effects are relatively minor compared with what they could be.
One thing that truly upsets me is that my mother gets so scared that I'm going to leave her. I feel like she should know by now (it's been about 21 months) that there's no way I would give up on her, ever. I was planning a trip to Europe, to the Czech Republic and the UK, to meet the family I have but did not know existed. I was told that the Nazis had wiped them all out, which is what my family believed until this other branch found us in the National Archives. She was saying to me this morning that she was afraid of me leaving. Perhaps this is on some level why this keeps on happening. Perhaps she has to learn that I love her so much that there's no way in hell I would ever leave her if she felt uncomfortable with it. I wonder when she'll understand that?
I look at her and I see a baby. I would never leave a baby and so I would never leave her. Only when the baby truly is capable of looking after itself would I begin to let go. So there it is. I can't help it, when I look at her little face I see a baby who needs me. I used to have a lot of nightmares when I was a teenager that I had given birth to an underweight baby and I still wanted to party and hang out with my friends and I had no idea how to look after it. The dream wasn't always exactly the same, sometimes the baby was dead in its crib like the baby in Trainspotting, sometimes it was in my arms and it was very frail and looked up into my eyes beseechingly as I put it down. It would look up at me from this tiny pinched baby face and meagre body with wise, knowing eyes. Sometimes I could smell its breath, a rotting, malnourished smell and I would wake up gagging.
In Gestalt Psychotherapy, which my mother trained in for three years when I was----you guessed it----a baby, you enter your dream and see each part of it as your own self. So I would act out the part of the baby and the teenage mother. I would go into each part and speak as the voice of the 'character'. I've worked on this dream in this way and I can certainly see myself in both roles. In fact, the eyes of the baby look a lot like my own did. I was not nearly so emaciated, but there was a lot of deprivation in my childhood. My mother was working like a maniac when I was an infant and during her pregnancy because my father was not making a living and she was also physically frightened of him, so she wanted to be out of the home as much as possible. I had some wonderful babysitters, mostly lesbians and models. The former would take me to parties and museums and the latter would bring me to castings and such and let me play with their makeup. But there were also some awful places. I remember this one daycare I went to in an Indian family's house where there were a lot of children who were mostly older than me and played rough. No one would actually watch us. I mostly stared at the fish in the aquarium, which gave me hours of fascination and kept me out of their way because they were all glued to the TV. However, I remember once one of the older girls who had long nails poked my eye and I got an eye infection. I don't know what it was about, I just remember how frightening that place was. Also, our house was way below legal sanitary living standards. We lived in a basement and sub-basement and it was full of rats and ghosts, with whom I frequently interacted. The outside of the building was covered in crackheads in various states of disrepair. They knew who we were and I had frequent interaction with them, too. Mostly fine, but once one of them pulled a knife out on me and told me he was going to "Get the bitch outta me"(he didn't manage that one!), which was almost as bad as getting my eye poked with those nasty long nails. Anyway, the point of all this is not very clear, it's more of a rant than anything else, but I would like to make it clear that I'm not upset about any of it. I take it all as the pieces that have made up who I am and I'm constantly working at overcoming the grime and there is an awful lot of it around, let's face it. I'm happy with where I am and I'm happy to be able to face all of this nasty stuff that's going on in my mother's body and love her more and more every day. I want to make sure that I would not leave that baby under any circumstances, no matter how scared I was for my own survival. That baby is inextricably a part of me.
It may not have hit me yet, sometimes it takes a little while.
Things have been much better and I have begun to work on expansion, rather than constant contraction. But as soon as I begin to get a little bit comfortable, along comes the next challenge. So, yesterday my mother came home from her PET scan---I did not accompany her because I got a slight cold over last weekend and I'm still fighting it off---and told me that it showed she now has spinal cord compression (tumors pressing into her spinal cord). Up until now, despite the total collapse of her spine, she was alright in this regard. Now, of course, she is in a very risky situation; her oncologist wanted to admit her to the hospital right away so that they could keep an eye on her and do lots more tests. However, she said she would rather be at home where at least she feels comfortable and happy. There isn't actually anything that they can do for her in the hospital at the moment other than monitoring her. It basically makes their job easier, but wouldn't actually help my mother in any tangible way. She will probably have to undergo another series of radiation treatments. This will be the second in a matter of a couple of months. Just recently they radiated the breast and the hip for a month and she just recovered from those daily treatments. Before that it was the brain for three weeks. Now it will be the spine itself. The upside is that she has historically responded well to radiation (i.e. the tumors have shrunk) and the side effects are relatively minor compared with what they could be.
One thing that truly upsets me is that my mother gets so scared that I'm going to leave her. I feel like she should know by now (it's been about 21 months) that there's no way I would give up on her, ever. I was planning a trip to Europe, to the Czech Republic and the UK, to meet the family I have but did not know existed. I was told that the Nazis had wiped them all out, which is what my family believed until this other branch found us in the National Archives. She was saying to me this morning that she was afraid of me leaving. Perhaps this is on some level why this keeps on happening. Perhaps she has to learn that I love her so much that there's no way in hell I would ever leave her if she felt uncomfortable with it. I wonder when she'll understand that?
I look at her and I see a baby. I would never leave a baby and so I would never leave her. Only when the baby truly is capable of looking after itself would I begin to let go. So there it is. I can't help it, when I look at her little face I see a baby who needs me. I used to have a lot of nightmares when I was a teenager that I had given birth to an underweight baby and I still wanted to party and hang out with my friends and I had no idea how to look after it. The dream wasn't always exactly the same, sometimes the baby was dead in its crib like the baby in Trainspotting, sometimes it was in my arms and it was very frail and looked up into my eyes beseechingly as I put it down. It would look up at me from this tiny pinched baby face and meagre body with wise, knowing eyes. Sometimes I could smell its breath, a rotting, malnourished smell and I would wake up gagging.
In Gestalt Psychotherapy, which my mother trained in for three years when I was----you guessed it----a baby, you enter your dream and see each part of it as your own self. So I would act out the part of the baby and the teenage mother. I would go into each part and speak as the voice of the 'character'. I've worked on this dream in this way and I can certainly see myself in both roles. In fact, the eyes of the baby look a lot like my own did. I was not nearly so emaciated, but there was a lot of deprivation in my childhood. My mother was working like a maniac when I was an infant and during her pregnancy because my father was not making a living and she was also physically frightened of him, so she wanted to be out of the home as much as possible. I had some wonderful babysitters, mostly lesbians and models. The former would take me to parties and museums and the latter would bring me to castings and such and let me play with their makeup. But there were also some awful places. I remember this one daycare I went to in an Indian family's house where there were a lot of children who were mostly older than me and played rough. No one would actually watch us. I mostly stared at the fish in the aquarium, which gave me hours of fascination and kept me out of their way because they were all glued to the TV. However, I remember once one of the older girls who had long nails poked my eye and I got an eye infection. I don't know what it was about, I just remember how frightening that place was. Also, our house was way below legal sanitary living standards. We lived in a basement and sub-basement and it was full of rats and ghosts, with whom I frequently interacted. The outside of the building was covered in crackheads in various states of disrepair. They knew who we were and I had frequent interaction with them, too. Mostly fine, but once one of them pulled a knife out on me and told me he was going to "Get the bitch outta me"(he didn't manage that one!), which was almost as bad as getting my eye poked with those nasty long nails. Anyway, the point of all this is not very clear, it's more of a rant than anything else, but I would like to make it clear that I'm not upset about any of it. I take it all as the pieces that have made up who I am and I'm constantly working at overcoming the grime and there is an awful lot of it around, let's face it. I'm happy with where I am and I'm happy to be able to face all of this nasty stuff that's going on in my mother's body and love her more and more every day. I want to make sure that I would not leave that baby under any circumstances, no matter how scared I was for my own survival. That baby is inextricably a part of me.
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Radiation Termination
Since I last wrote, which is quite a while ago, my mother has had to undergo a month of radiation to her breast and left hip. Because of the infection she had in her blood from the port the chemo is administered through, she was unable to receive any chemo for about a month while she was on antibiotics. When this type of cancer (stage four inflammatory breast cancer/ carcinoma) is not treated continuously, new growths and damage to healthy tissue can occur throughout any part of the body, hard or soft tissue (e.g. the brain and the bones, the breast and the hip). Because this happened, my mother needed to be treated with more aggressive means than the relatively mild cocktail of Herceptin and Navelbine that she receives as weekly preventive chemotherapy. The least painful way of dealing with the problem was radiation, so she had a daily dose for about a month. She was luckily able to go to the hospital by herself every morning because she is much stronger now than she has been for many months. I held down the fort.
Now we're back to just the chemo and will be going into the hospital tomorrow, as it's Friday.
Otherwise, I've begun teaching yoga classes, which I'm really enjoying. I would like to do more. I've been learning so much about people and the ways in which they learn, and also how to just let go of my own ideas about how something is or should be.
I had an interesting conversation with a client today, who happens to be a devout Christian. He mentioned to me how happy he was that I was able to see the opportunity within the challenges that I have faced in recent months and continue to face. It was so wonderful to actually hear someone acknowledge that aspect of this whole surventure. Yes, it has been tough, definitely the toughest time of my life and there have been some others that were pretty tough themselves but don't touch this. My whole world as I knew it is destroyed as far as I'm concerned. Yet, in its place, I've found much more happiness. I can't really imagine what it was like to live inside the skin that I did for so many years now that it has been ripped off of me. I find myself exposed to my own self and I'm able to look myself in the eyes and trust that person looking back at me.
I've realized that I can't live my life based on someone else's idea of what a 'decent' life is supposed to be. I have to pursue what genuinely makes me happy rather than what conventional wisdom states. It sounds trite, however so much of my life in recent years has been based around conforming to some sort of ideal. I have no regrets about it and I'm sure I learned a great deal, but something has profoundly shifted. I've spent the years from about 14-22 conforming in subtle ways. Wearing jeans, doing SAT IIs and APs, teaching English, drinking wine with dinner, going to college, and so on. It's not that there's anything wrong with any of these things and I'm really glad I did them, it's just that many of them were done with the specific intention of going to an imaginary place. The exams had nothing to do with what I want to be learning about. They were hoops and then more hoops. It was a rude awakening to be pulled out of that lull, that safety. But I feel like a fish that's been flung back into the rushing stream.
The line between good and bad in life has changed for me. What appears to be a catastrophe can bring new life. Destruction seems to be the natural partner for creation. It all is making up this layered painting; the new experiences are painted over the old, one coloring the next and it all just looks so beautiful to me. The tragic and the joyous mix together, harmonizing. I want it all. I want to get my hands muddy.
I still feel embryonic, though. I can feel that much bigger shifts are in the making, I can feel my viscera preparing for something I can't quite touch yet.
Now we're back to just the chemo and will be going into the hospital tomorrow, as it's Friday.
Otherwise, I've begun teaching yoga classes, which I'm really enjoying. I would like to do more. I've been learning so much about people and the ways in which they learn, and also how to just let go of my own ideas about how something is or should be.
I had an interesting conversation with a client today, who happens to be a devout Christian. He mentioned to me how happy he was that I was able to see the opportunity within the challenges that I have faced in recent months and continue to face. It was so wonderful to actually hear someone acknowledge that aspect of this whole surventure. Yes, it has been tough, definitely the toughest time of my life and there have been some others that were pretty tough themselves but don't touch this. My whole world as I knew it is destroyed as far as I'm concerned. Yet, in its place, I've found much more happiness. I can't really imagine what it was like to live inside the skin that I did for so many years now that it has been ripped off of me. I find myself exposed to my own self and I'm able to look myself in the eyes and trust that person looking back at me.
I've realized that I can't live my life based on someone else's idea of what a 'decent' life is supposed to be. I have to pursue what genuinely makes me happy rather than what conventional wisdom states. It sounds trite, however so much of my life in recent years has been based around conforming to some sort of ideal. I have no regrets about it and I'm sure I learned a great deal, but something has profoundly shifted. I've spent the years from about 14-22 conforming in subtle ways. Wearing jeans, doing SAT IIs and APs, teaching English, drinking wine with dinner, going to college, and so on. It's not that there's anything wrong with any of these things and I'm really glad I did them, it's just that many of them were done with the specific intention of going to an imaginary place. The exams had nothing to do with what I want to be learning about. They were hoops and then more hoops. It was a rude awakening to be pulled out of that lull, that safety. But I feel like a fish that's been flung back into the rushing stream.
The line between good and bad in life has changed for me. What appears to be a catastrophe can bring new life. Destruction seems to be the natural partner for creation. It all is making up this layered painting; the new experiences are painted over the old, one coloring the next and it all just looks so beautiful to me. The tragic and the joyous mix together, harmonizing. I want it all. I want to get my hands muddy.
I still feel embryonic, though. I can feel that much bigger shifts are in the making, I can feel my viscera preparing for something I can't quite touch yet.
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
Ah, routine once more!
Life has settled much more into a routine, which feels wonderful. My mother's hair is growing back, we're working together most of the time, and everything feels stable for the time being. It feels a little like when you come home after a long and adventurous trip. Everything at home feels at once renewed and comfortable.
I know that new chapters are coming ahead that will be full of all sorts of unforeseen challenges/blessings, but at this very moment I'm enjoying the comfort of home. I'm working out some of the things I neglected during crisis mode. I'm sorting out my basic needs, like getting myself some health insurance. I sent in all the paperwork and I'm just waiting for everything to go through the mill smoothly. I also went to the eye doctor, who does eye exercises with me because I have a convergence deficiency, whom I hadn't seen in two years!
This weekend is the last weekend of my yoga teacher training, which has been an amazing part of my life for the past six months. I've made friends and had a sense of community that I never quite had before in this metropolis of glimpsed faces. I hope that we will all stay in contact with each other and continue to provide that sense of community. I've been working on a quite extensive take-home test and three essays to wrap up my course.
Needless to say, I've only just begun my studies. I'm debating what the next step will be. There's a Kundalini Solstice gathering in New Mexico which I would really like to go to if it weren't so far away. These days I've been wanting to stay close to home and really get to know what's in my own back garden, so to speak. Travelling feels like a drug to me, in a way. It's this intense experience that's disconnected from the rest of my life, my own homeostasis, and it has its own side effects, jet lag being an obvious one. In the same way that I see the value of hallucinogenic or "mind-expanding" drugs when used in the proper context and with care, I see the value of certain types of travel, certainly. But I also feel like it's something I personally have overused for stimulation. Just like when you eat simply, you can appreciate subtleties of taste, I'm finding that as I stay in one place, I begin to appreciate the subtleties around me and feel more connected to the experience of my environment. I'm wanting to explore the climate that I find myself in, the Northeast, not because it's superior to any other, but simply because it's where I am. I'm wanting to see if there is something going on right here, on my own turf. In a way it's harder because it's so much simpler. I bet there are lots of things going on around the corner but because they are around the corner I'm tempted to just stay home. It's easier in a way when I have to search it out and plan and get on a plane, just like it's easier to pop a substance in my mouth, even if the substance is hard to come by, than it is to have the same sort of expanded consciousness through the tools that exist within my own body-mind. They're right there in my own mind, in the same way that the City and it's environs contain enough stimulation for many lifetimes.
Another way of understanding this concept is looking at the way that ascetic yogis or monks cloister themselves from everyday stimulation in order to be able to achieve a different state of consciousness or awareness. It is the way the brain works, it can only take in so many stimuli at one. We do not see everything that goes on, we would not be able to handle that much stimulation. So as we limit one particular stimulus, we make room for consciousness of another.
A similar thing has happened to me in my own physical practice. Since I was about sixteen, I've been going to the gym and using weight and cardio machines. I also did different forms of hatha yoga, but I always relied on other types of physical training. In the last two months or so, I've not wanted to go to the gym and instead I've been doing two to three hours of yoga in the morning, including mediation and breathwork. I'm finding that I'm much more aware of the suble strenght of my own body and it's beginning to really feel like one connected piece, rather than some parts being more developed and 'separated' from others. I imagine this is because I'm never working with anything in conscious isolation. Isolation is an illusion, of course, because everything in our body is connected to everything else or else we would not function as a body. When I used weights, I mentally separated one movement from another, even though intellectually I understood that this was an impossibility. It's one thing to understand something and another entirely to actually feel it. Now I can feel my body beginning to flow. I can feel how my toes touching the ground affect my neck and my skull and even the contents of my skull. Amazingly, although I'm not doing strength training per se, my muscle tone actually feels better and more integrated and although I'm not really doing heavy cardiovascular activity like I was before, I'm never short of breath. The other day I noticed it for the first time as I was walking up five flights of stairs. I felt not even the least bit winded and I wouldn't have even noticed it except that there were some physically fit looking guys in their early twenties behind me and they were huffing and puffing. I was shocked.
I've been going back to really simple poses and getting deep into them. Instead of always challenging myself on the gross level, I've been moving into subtler levels and uncovering layers and layers of tension around the muscle attachments that I never got into before because it takes time. I'm flexible on a superficial level, but the tension stored in the deeper layers, which take time to access, is intense. I feel like the complex postures are a little bit like drugs, again. Sometimes just as much can be gained by just standing in tadasana for an hour and becoming aware of every part of the body, the breath and the mind as could be gained from a class with vinyasa, meditation, pranayama, and all sorts of complex postures and kriyas. I would have thought that as I learned more I would want to have more complexity, but I'm finding myself sticking to basics. I feel like there will be a time when the complex will seem incredibly simple, but that may be many years down the road.
I know that new chapters are coming ahead that will be full of all sorts of unforeseen challenges/blessings, but at this very moment I'm enjoying the comfort of home. I'm working out some of the things I neglected during crisis mode. I'm sorting out my basic needs, like getting myself some health insurance. I sent in all the paperwork and I'm just waiting for everything to go through the mill smoothly. I also went to the eye doctor, who does eye exercises with me because I have a convergence deficiency, whom I hadn't seen in two years!
This weekend is the last weekend of my yoga teacher training, which has been an amazing part of my life for the past six months. I've made friends and had a sense of community that I never quite had before in this metropolis of glimpsed faces. I hope that we will all stay in contact with each other and continue to provide that sense of community. I've been working on a quite extensive take-home test and three essays to wrap up my course.
Needless to say, I've only just begun my studies. I'm debating what the next step will be. There's a Kundalini Solstice gathering in New Mexico which I would really like to go to if it weren't so far away. These days I've been wanting to stay close to home and really get to know what's in my own back garden, so to speak. Travelling feels like a drug to me, in a way. It's this intense experience that's disconnected from the rest of my life, my own homeostasis, and it has its own side effects, jet lag being an obvious one. In the same way that I see the value of hallucinogenic or "mind-expanding" drugs when used in the proper context and with care, I see the value of certain types of travel, certainly. But I also feel like it's something I personally have overused for stimulation. Just like when you eat simply, you can appreciate subtleties of taste, I'm finding that as I stay in one place, I begin to appreciate the subtleties around me and feel more connected to the experience of my environment. I'm wanting to explore the climate that I find myself in, the Northeast, not because it's superior to any other, but simply because it's where I am. I'm wanting to see if there is something going on right here, on my own turf. In a way it's harder because it's so much simpler. I bet there are lots of things going on around the corner but because they are around the corner I'm tempted to just stay home. It's easier in a way when I have to search it out and plan and get on a plane, just like it's easier to pop a substance in my mouth, even if the substance is hard to come by, than it is to have the same sort of expanded consciousness through the tools that exist within my own body-mind. They're right there in my own mind, in the same way that the City and it's environs contain enough stimulation for many lifetimes.
Another way of understanding this concept is looking at the way that ascetic yogis or monks cloister themselves from everyday stimulation in order to be able to achieve a different state of consciousness or awareness. It is the way the brain works, it can only take in so many stimuli at one. We do not see everything that goes on, we would not be able to handle that much stimulation. So as we limit one particular stimulus, we make room for consciousness of another.
A similar thing has happened to me in my own physical practice. Since I was about sixteen, I've been going to the gym and using weight and cardio machines. I also did different forms of hatha yoga, but I always relied on other types of physical training. In the last two months or so, I've not wanted to go to the gym and instead I've been doing two to three hours of yoga in the morning, including mediation and breathwork. I'm finding that I'm much more aware of the suble strenght of my own body and it's beginning to really feel like one connected piece, rather than some parts being more developed and 'separated' from others. I imagine this is because I'm never working with anything in conscious isolation. Isolation is an illusion, of course, because everything in our body is connected to everything else or else we would not function as a body. When I used weights, I mentally separated one movement from another, even though intellectually I understood that this was an impossibility. It's one thing to understand something and another entirely to actually feel it. Now I can feel my body beginning to flow. I can feel how my toes touching the ground affect my neck and my skull and even the contents of my skull. Amazingly, although I'm not doing strength training per se, my muscle tone actually feels better and more integrated and although I'm not really doing heavy cardiovascular activity like I was before, I'm never short of breath. The other day I noticed it for the first time as I was walking up five flights of stairs. I felt not even the least bit winded and I wouldn't have even noticed it except that there were some physically fit looking guys in their early twenties behind me and they were huffing and puffing. I was shocked.
I've been going back to really simple poses and getting deep into them. Instead of always challenging myself on the gross level, I've been moving into subtler levels and uncovering layers and layers of tension around the muscle attachments that I never got into before because it takes time. I'm flexible on a superficial level, but the tension stored in the deeper layers, which take time to access, is intense. I feel like the complex postures are a little bit like drugs, again. Sometimes just as much can be gained by just standing in tadasana for an hour and becoming aware of every part of the body, the breath and the mind as could be gained from a class with vinyasa, meditation, pranayama, and all sorts of complex postures and kriyas. I would have thought that as I learned more I would want to have more complexity, but I'm finding myself sticking to basics. I feel like there will be a time when the complex will seem incredibly simple, but that may be many years down the road.
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
A long way from the Flu!
It's been quite long time since the flu and we are both feeling much better. Actually, better than in a very long time. A number of positive things have happened: I went away to Sedona for a week as a part of my yoga teacher training, for one thing. It was absolutely stunningly gorgeous. Every morning I woke up with the sun and from my window could see the magnificent red rocks speckled with green vegetation, the contrast and the sheer magnitude breathtaking. Then I did two hours of yoga and meditation as the sun rose, had a leisurely and large breakfast and then lectures, more yoga, more lectures, and a hike nearly every day.
It was the first itme I took a trip on my own within the US. I always explored in Europe, Asia and Africa. So I want to get to know my native country. I'm slightly intimidated by its vastness and culture which is far more mysterious to me than Europe. New York is different, it's all squished and full of characters I can relate to. There are many states I've never even been to, like Iowa, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, Kentucky, Washington, New Mexico, and many more. They are uncharted territory as far as I'm concerned. When I gaze upon a new one, like I did in Sedona, the landscapes shock me with their beauty.
I became close with all 28 or so people that were there with me. We all opened up as individuals and as a group in a way that I'd never experienced before. I feel as though we formed a bond that will be lasting and will bear fruit for us all as the years pass and we all develop and are able to share with each other. Each one of us is quite unique and yet we all function very well as a group.
Parts of me I didn't even know existed opened up their petals. I'm now practicing every day and teaching practice classes to my mother and Louis (Ludek has changed his name to Ludek LOUIS Straka since we started calling him by the diminutive because it's so much easier for English speakers). I feel like the yoga has given me tools that I needed to be able to face the challenges that have been coming my way with grace. I also feel like the things that I've been learning, the 'coping mechanisms' and psychological/spiritual exploration are the next level of the bodywork. What I've noticed is that people, including myself, will work through things, both physical and emotional, while they're on the massage table but then as soon as they confront a challenge that 'gets under their skin' the same patterns (sometimes with slight variation) will manifest in the emotional and physical bodies. So there has to be a way to protect the 'skin' of these two bodies in order to maintain inner balance. We walk out into the world, which is chock full of challenges and potentially dangerous and negative situations, yet we leave the emotional body unprotected and the physical body seizes up in an effort to protect us from being permeated. It's like walking around all day on the beach in August without sunscreen or a sun hat----you get burned. The skin reacts to the damage caused by the lack of protection by becoming red and painful and the damage takes much longer to undo than to form in the first place, sometimes the scars are there for life despite all the aloe vera in the world. Like the painful irritation of a sun burn, the physical body forms layers that are painful to the touch. As these layers are broken down, the physical body begins to feel more free, however, even if we talk through the underlying emotions and acknowledge them, unless we have some way of protecting ourselves from the outside, the equivalent of a sun hat, there will be fresh damage or internal defenses (i.e. emotional defenses, denial and physical blocks of tension). Here's an example of what I'm talking about: as soon as I pick up the phone to call the insurance company about the latest insane bill we've received, I begin to feel tension in my jaw, occiput, neck and shoulders. If I merely try to release the physical tension, I do feel somewhat better, but it doesn't really work because the core issue is that I'm scared that we will lose everything and I feel powerless. So, if I say a mantra of protection and use a mudra (hand position) for let's say confidence and clarity of expression, or for faith (which is the best antidote to fear), I'm able to bipass my rational mind, which is all over the place anyway, and get access to the unconscious level. I'm sending myself a different message from all the fear and self-doubt that is coming at it. On another, parallel, level, I'm acknowledging a higher power and a higher self that is beyond the reaches of the present moment on this plane. I'm protecting the lower self with the guardian of the higher self that is beyond the fear and doubt of the vulnerable emotional body. This is one way of looking at the power of prayer.
Yes, just like I need to heal the sunburn, bodywork, on a merely physical level, will heal wounds. However, it is also necessary to build new, healthy patterns for protecting the self from being permeated by everything, or that one nasty thing that gets right to its core. There are tools that function like a sun hat and have no nasty side-effects. When we are confident in the external protection we have, we can delve deeper into the vulnerable parts of the self and gain understanding because we are not leaving them open to attack. I'm not saying that mudra, mantra and meditation are the only tools, in the same way that there are certainly many ways of protecting oneself from getting burned. What I am saying is that it is dangerous to move in this world without some sort of tools and most of us do not learn healthy ways of protecting ourselves or releasing emotional and physical tension.
It has been incredibly helpful to find ways of dealing with my own negativity that are not punishing nor are they indulging, they are simply transmuting. We can use our own energy to beat ourselves up or to protect, uplift and connect with ourselves. Energy is energy. It's neither postive or negative. It's like money or electricity, it can be used for good or evil, destrucion or construction, in itself it is neither. I can see that the same mental energy I use to worry can be used to coax myself away from that anxiety, to create new pathways rather than running around the same ones all the time. And then when I find myself back on the old one, I can always stop for a moment and clear away the brambles to find a new path. Of course it's easier to stick to the old pathway, but it's much less fun.
Luckily, as money can make more money, energy that's used in a positive way makes more energy. Thus when it is expended in worrying and going in mental circles, it's exhausted and no one can tell what inner journeys are curtailed for want of energy.
Some other positive things: It looks like I've managed, with a great deal of help and guidance, to switch my mother to a better insurance company. That is no small feat. So far it has been better than Atlantis and I'm just waiting for one more piece of paperwork to go through to finally be done with the old. What I learned from dealing with Atlantis has certainly helped me to be able to deal with the new company and I'm now extra careful with everything. It's such a relief to find that the wheels are turning after all the huffing and puffing of last summer. Now I just need to get myself some health insurance.....
In terms of actual health, my mother was able to handle being alone for a week and no damage was done. That's the first time since a year ago. We were both happy to see each other after a week, too. One thing I've noticed is that a lot of people seem to think that I'm itching to leave, but infact that's far from the case. I've grown to appreciate my mother so much over the last year that I can't imagine leaving her and feeling happy about it. I enjoy the time we spend together and I realize that it's limited, in the same way that our time is limited with anyone and everyone we love. I've known that on an intellectual level for as long as I can remember, however now I feel the importance of getting the most out of the time we have together on this earth. Nothing else seems more important to me right now. And it's not any less fun for me than college now that there's a lull in the crisis and I have a chance to explore different things. I'm doing a different sort of learning and interacting with people in a different way. I'm not in a college dorm with a whole bunch of friends, but I have lots of interaction with people all day long. I'm not listening to lectures and writing essays, but I'm learning about the science of yoga and the intricacies of the human body as well as how to deal with numerous practical things. I'm learning just as much if not more than I was in college. I feel like I got some building blocks at Oxford, I read the Song of Songs, now I'm singing! Some people look at me with pity, but I feel no pity for myself. I'm the happiest I can remember ever being. That's not to say that things don't come up, because they do, but I feel blessed to be able to express and truly feel deep and unconditional love. The rest will come in good time. I feel privileged to have been forced to face some major challenges that have changed me so much that I can't imagine going back to my old thought patterns and beliefs. I know there will be many more challenges and chances to examine myself and the world around me. So I'm enjoying the slight lull at the moment to center myself and enjoy the pleasures of relaxation.
My mother is asleep at the moment, perhaps comforted by the rhythmic clicking of plastic keys.....
It was the first itme I took a trip on my own within the US. I always explored in Europe, Asia and Africa. So I want to get to know my native country. I'm slightly intimidated by its vastness and culture which is far more mysterious to me than Europe. New York is different, it's all squished and full of characters I can relate to. There are many states I've never even been to, like Iowa, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, Kentucky, Washington, New Mexico, and many more. They are uncharted territory as far as I'm concerned. When I gaze upon a new one, like I did in Sedona, the landscapes shock me with their beauty.
I became close with all 28 or so people that were there with me. We all opened up as individuals and as a group in a way that I'd never experienced before. I feel as though we formed a bond that will be lasting and will bear fruit for us all as the years pass and we all develop and are able to share with each other. Each one of us is quite unique and yet we all function very well as a group.
Parts of me I didn't even know existed opened up their petals. I'm now practicing every day and teaching practice classes to my mother and Louis (Ludek has changed his name to Ludek LOUIS Straka since we started calling him by the diminutive because it's so much easier for English speakers). I feel like the yoga has given me tools that I needed to be able to face the challenges that have been coming my way with grace. I also feel like the things that I've been learning, the 'coping mechanisms' and psychological/spiritual exploration are the next level of the bodywork. What I've noticed is that people, including myself, will work through things, both physical and emotional, while they're on the massage table but then as soon as they confront a challenge that 'gets under their skin' the same patterns (sometimes with slight variation) will manifest in the emotional and physical bodies. So there has to be a way to protect the 'skin' of these two bodies in order to maintain inner balance. We walk out into the world, which is chock full of challenges and potentially dangerous and negative situations, yet we leave the emotional body unprotected and the physical body seizes up in an effort to protect us from being permeated. It's like walking around all day on the beach in August without sunscreen or a sun hat----you get burned. The skin reacts to the damage caused by the lack of protection by becoming red and painful and the damage takes much longer to undo than to form in the first place, sometimes the scars are there for life despite all the aloe vera in the world. Like the painful irritation of a sun burn, the physical body forms layers that are painful to the touch. As these layers are broken down, the physical body begins to feel more free, however, even if we talk through the underlying emotions and acknowledge them, unless we have some way of protecting ourselves from the outside, the equivalent of a sun hat, there will be fresh damage or internal defenses (i.e. emotional defenses, denial and physical blocks of tension). Here's an example of what I'm talking about: as soon as I pick up the phone to call the insurance company about the latest insane bill we've received, I begin to feel tension in my jaw, occiput, neck and shoulders. If I merely try to release the physical tension, I do feel somewhat better, but it doesn't really work because the core issue is that I'm scared that we will lose everything and I feel powerless. So, if I say a mantra of protection and use a mudra (hand position) for let's say confidence and clarity of expression, or for faith (which is the best antidote to fear), I'm able to bipass my rational mind, which is all over the place anyway, and get access to the unconscious level. I'm sending myself a different message from all the fear and self-doubt that is coming at it. On another, parallel, level, I'm acknowledging a higher power and a higher self that is beyond the reaches of the present moment on this plane. I'm protecting the lower self with the guardian of the higher self that is beyond the fear and doubt of the vulnerable emotional body. This is one way of looking at the power of prayer.
Yes, just like I need to heal the sunburn, bodywork, on a merely physical level, will heal wounds. However, it is also necessary to build new, healthy patterns for protecting the self from being permeated by everything, or that one nasty thing that gets right to its core. There are tools that function like a sun hat and have no nasty side-effects. When we are confident in the external protection we have, we can delve deeper into the vulnerable parts of the self and gain understanding because we are not leaving them open to attack. I'm not saying that mudra, mantra and meditation are the only tools, in the same way that there are certainly many ways of protecting oneself from getting burned. What I am saying is that it is dangerous to move in this world without some sort of tools and most of us do not learn healthy ways of protecting ourselves or releasing emotional and physical tension.
It has been incredibly helpful to find ways of dealing with my own negativity that are not punishing nor are they indulging, they are simply transmuting. We can use our own energy to beat ourselves up or to protect, uplift and connect with ourselves. Energy is energy. It's neither postive or negative. It's like money or electricity, it can be used for good or evil, destrucion or construction, in itself it is neither. I can see that the same mental energy I use to worry can be used to coax myself away from that anxiety, to create new pathways rather than running around the same ones all the time. And then when I find myself back on the old one, I can always stop for a moment and clear away the brambles to find a new path. Of course it's easier to stick to the old pathway, but it's much less fun.
Luckily, as money can make more money, energy that's used in a positive way makes more energy. Thus when it is expended in worrying and going in mental circles, it's exhausted and no one can tell what inner journeys are curtailed for want of energy.
Some other positive things: It looks like I've managed, with a great deal of help and guidance, to switch my mother to a better insurance company. That is no small feat. So far it has been better than Atlantis and I'm just waiting for one more piece of paperwork to go through to finally be done with the old. What I learned from dealing with Atlantis has certainly helped me to be able to deal with the new company and I'm now extra careful with everything. It's such a relief to find that the wheels are turning after all the huffing and puffing of last summer. Now I just need to get myself some health insurance.....
In terms of actual health, my mother was able to handle being alone for a week and no damage was done. That's the first time since a year ago. We were both happy to see each other after a week, too. One thing I've noticed is that a lot of people seem to think that I'm itching to leave, but infact that's far from the case. I've grown to appreciate my mother so much over the last year that I can't imagine leaving her and feeling happy about it. I enjoy the time we spend together and I realize that it's limited, in the same way that our time is limited with anyone and everyone we love. I've known that on an intellectual level for as long as I can remember, however now I feel the importance of getting the most out of the time we have together on this earth. Nothing else seems more important to me right now. And it's not any less fun for me than college now that there's a lull in the crisis and I have a chance to explore different things. I'm doing a different sort of learning and interacting with people in a different way. I'm not in a college dorm with a whole bunch of friends, but I have lots of interaction with people all day long. I'm not listening to lectures and writing essays, but I'm learning about the science of yoga and the intricacies of the human body as well as how to deal with numerous practical things. I'm learning just as much if not more than I was in college. I feel like I got some building blocks at Oxford, I read the Song of Songs, now I'm singing! Some people look at me with pity, but I feel no pity for myself. I'm the happiest I can remember ever being. That's not to say that things don't come up, because they do, but I feel blessed to be able to express and truly feel deep and unconditional love. The rest will come in good time. I feel privileged to have been forced to face some major challenges that have changed me so much that I can't imagine going back to my old thought patterns and beliefs. I know there will be many more challenges and chances to examine myself and the world around me. So I'm enjoying the slight lull at the moment to center myself and enjoy the pleasures of relaxation.
My mother is asleep at the moment, perhaps comforted by the rhythmic clicking of plastic keys.....
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Something I found in some old scraps from high school that seems remarkably relevant to a passing mood that comes over me these days:
A Bird on the Bough
Brightly colored girls
smoke in the hallways, congregating
clouds of incomprehensible sound.
Through the windows the sun
beats rubber leaves,
a giant to the tipping plant
in what we will someday call home.
Like a bird I can hear and cock my head, unable to respond.
In the southern lakes of migration my plumes are a faded blue.
From the East, all of a sudden,
my clothing feels worn.
In the light no longer familiar---a sail at port,
my cotton sags.
A Bird on the Bough
Brightly colored girls
smoke in the hallways, congregating
clouds of incomprehensible sound.
Through the windows the sun
beats rubber leaves,
a giant to the tipping plant
in what we will someday call home.
Like a bird I can hear and cock my head, unable to respond.
In the southern lakes of migration my plumes are a faded blue.
From the East, all of a sudden,
my clothing feels worn.
In the light no longer familiar---a sail at port,
my cotton sags.
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