It is Spring Break at last, and I am nearing the end of my old journal entries. I think there are just six or maybe eight more. So I thought I would take this time to dip my toes in the pool - get a feel for what it is like to compose on the computer for the blog. It is different, isn't it?
What I need to share is my experience this winter and how I finally came to realize that I had been pursuing spiritual growth for the last few years with only part of my self, and how I have been trying to fix that, and how there have been all kinds of starts and stops and backtracking since that moment.
Some of you know and some of you may have gathered that I have had a lot of health problems this year. I guess I am one of those people that have to be hit over the head - several times and with something hard - in order for me to learn my lesson! And even then, the odds are only 50/50 that I'll take the hint.
In 2005 I got the shingles, and that turned into post herpetic neuralgia which did permanent damage to my nerves and probably my spinal column itself. So I've struggled with just dealing with that pain, and really, as a permanent source of unrelenting pain that will never cease and that has no known cure, you would think that should have been enough to give me a hint that I might want to find some ways to begin to work with my body, to incorporate it into whatever healing and growth I entered into. But that really did not occur to me.
I did do quite a bit of work on trying to learn to stop fighting my body, and to stop thinking of it as my enemy, and I guess I do need to think of that as progress. It is a long way from the kind of hatred and pure loathing I used to spew at the poor thing. When I was working my way through the Tao te Ching I especially focused on trying to accept the pain as it was and not label it as "bad" or undesirable. But that did not really translate into a broader approach to checking into my body as a whole.
I'm not sure why I didn't go there; I even bought one of Mantak Chia's books on Healing Through the Tao, which I know uses Taoist concepts to help us connect to our physical forms. The notion of xi ought to have alerted me to the idea that I could indeed come to see myself as something more than a floating head, or a head attached to a bothersome ball of pain-we-must-learn-to-ignore-or-no-I-mean-fully-accept. I just wasn't ready, I guess.
So beginning last spring, I began feeling even worse. I didn't know what was wrong with me, but over the summer we began sorting things out and in July I had my gallbladder removed. In August I had my right ovary and fallopian tube taken out. Recovery from both went fine, and I was rapidly enmeshed in the fall semester.
My body, all through the fall, kept disappointing me. Instead of just bouncing back and being all fixed up, it seemed like it kept getting weaker and weaker, and it kept losing weight, and I continued to have all sorts of pain - some new ones and some old ones. I began to feel really betrayed and confused and concerned. Come winter break, and a new set of problems pounces on all my free time; oral surgery is required, then a pesky infection, and then I am told I need a more invasive surgery (for hemmorhoids) that was going to be really difficult and require a long, brutal recovery period. That was the week before classes were starting up again.
So - I began to figure out about then, but it wasn't until after that surgery that I actually truly put the pieces together for the whole picture. I wrote, on January 22, having just arrived home from that surgery:
"Have I learned the lessons I was supposed to learn from all of this? Probably not. But I do believe I've had a major breakthrough or insight. Was given the grace to have a major blind spot illuminated. The short version - I cannot keep leaving my body out of all the spiritual growth. All the efforts I've made to come to know and walk with the Divine have been in my head and heart. Intellectual and some emotional. But we have bodies, as has been made immanently plain to me. Mine has asked politely to be included. It has whined, and then it began screaming non-stop. My response was to shut it out. And then to shut it out even more competely. I've made some attempts here and there to be kinder and more inclusive; to feed it better, get more exercise, etc. And we've gotten along better when I've made those efforts. I've come a very long way from the days of hating its looks and being verbally abusive and mentally brutal to myself in that way. No more "ugly, fat" taunts all day long.
But I am not conscious of this vessel my soul has chosen for a house. I don't listen to it. I don't attend to its needs and desires. The more it hurts, the more I tune it out, the more I consider it an irrelevancy. That is wrong. I believe all these surgeries, this cascade of problems is/are the result of that shutting out. Not in a punishment or blame sort of way - just cause and effect.
I have to begin to integrate my body - this temple of god, into my spiritual development plan. If I don't, it will contine to break down, and it will hold back my intellectual and psychological development. So - hatha yoga it is, as soon as I'm able."
I have several ideas as to why it took me so long to come to the realization that my body might be important, and that hatha yoga might be part of the solution. I'll save those for next time. In the meantime, I wonder if there are others out there who also have a hard time remembering - or ever realizing - that we are more than just the thoughts in our heads?
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