French translation
German translation
In recent months, I have undergone three significant surgeries.
My situations are not life-threatening, and each step of healing has offered both gifts and challenges.
Although I’ve experienced serious car accidents and sports injuries in the past, this was my first extended journey in the labyrinth of western medicine. Even with its various blind spots, I am awed by the creativity, caring, wisdom and life-giving imagination of so many members of our species. Humanities capacity to both destroy and support life is truly amazing. We carry all of that within us.
One core tenet of my life-path is holding that everything that occurs is ultimately for our benefit. The sooner we recognize this, the better we can respond to unwanted events. When life is a true path, everything becomes material for learning and unfolding – learning how to become more humane, more wise, more authentic and more intimate with self and others. This attitude is not a denial of the awfulness of many events. Rather it is saying, beyond our reactions and preferences, what is, IS.
Stop fighting life, open to it!
Fighting with reality (i.e. what IS), doesn’t help us to live effectively. This is not passivity or bypassing the parts of us that want life to be different. It is a bold, active, dynamic acceptance of reality. My Zen teacher used to say: “acceptance is not soft or passive, it is like biting into an apple.”
As I like to say: “the mail doesn’t go to the wrong address”. We all have received joyful letters and disturbingly challenging ones. Some of us seem to receive more challenges than others. Still, being on a life-path means opening our mail, reading it, throwing out the junk, and somehow embracing both the wanted and unwanted letters.
Don’t misunderstand me – sometimes it’s healthy to fight our circumstances – “to box with G-d”- to temporarily rage, complain, protest. We all have breaking points where it just becomes too much. Some live with chronic pain or disabilities that can be overwhelming. I am not minimizing these realities. And yet, in the end, human freedom lies in our capacity to relate to any situation in more or less life-affirming ways.
Learnings on Suffering and Relationality
I never realized how difficult it was to feel weak and to ask for help from others can be. My identity as “the strong one” and “the helper” was unexpectedly strong. Learning to ask for and appreciate help brought connectivity and gratitude. Feeling more vulnerable, with more needs, brought me closer to others and to parts of myself. The underlying arrogance and hubris embedded in some unexamined inner voices was embarrassing.
Years ago, I had the privilege of giving the spiritual teacher Ram Das a series of private Feldenkrais sessions after his debilitating stroke. Once he commented: “learning to welcome, appreciate and even joke about someone wiping my ass was a major letting go”. Wow! Asking for help can be deeply humbling and profoundly generous to others. As a friend said recently, “you enjoy helping others so much, don’t you think others might enjoy helping you”?
– Pain can be the most isolating of human experiences.
To share our suffering – without diminishing or exaggerating it – can be healing. As an old saying goes: “sharing our joys, doubles them, sharing our sorrows divides them in half”. While it is of course possible to get lost in endlessly complaining, hiding our pain from loved one’s is rarely a healthy choice.
– Still, at a deep level, we suffer alone. No one, even those closest to us, REALLY know what IT is like for us. Communicating our experience helps, but experientially, we are alone. This isolation and sense of being abandoned by life amplifies suffering. There is a way of softening this sense of separation.
In painful moments, I find it surprisingly connecting to imagine others having similar experiences to mine. In my mind, I travel to various countries and picture, mostly unknown people – just like me – dealing with similar or even greater distress. Imagining our shared experience, I say “I am with you, we are in this together, you are not alone”. Perhaps that sounds superficial or absurd, yet, it has profound effects on me. This is not a new practice; over many years this “sharing the pain” has been with me. Over the past few months, its power has greatly expanded.
Larger than Self
– Earlier, I mentioned the term life-path – a way of saying that life exists in a larger context – larger than “me”. This “larger” is hugely important. When our life is defined in a solipsistic way, i.e. centered on a separate self, the apparent meaninglessness of our suffering creates a jail cell, trapping us in our lonely experience.
An authentic connection to “beyond self”, can be anything from: dedication to G-d, participating in our shared evolution, sharing love/beauty/goodness/truth with others, sensing interconnectivity with Life or ?? Beyond language, it points to a larger space into which every experience can carry meaning. Relationality is more life-giving than isolated individuality. We are all endowed with the capacity of seeing our lives as part of a greater story. As long as this story feels authentic and personally chosen, not imposed upon us, it can carry us in profound ways.
– Finally, as I mentioned in the beginning, I come away astonished by human creativity, wisdom, kindness and capacity for good. My gratitude for the brilliant, dedicated surgeons, the incredibly caring and skilled nurses, the warm attitudes of many workers and some of the patients are all alive in me right now. Also, for two months, I took 8-10 pills each day. Somehow, ordinary people, dedicated to science, learned to create miracles. Using raw materials, they create medications, that align with the brain’s brilliance, to: ease pain, invite sleep, relieve constipation, protect the stomach lining, prevent infection, etc. Human intelligence meeting bodily wisdom. This is US!
Even as I see the destructive impulses that are so obvious in the world, these facts give me hope. As a species, we can be geniuses at making life better and better for each other and future generations. Deeply realizing our interconnectivity with ALL of LIFE, transforms every moment into meaning-filled opportunities to feel at home on this planet and on this shared journey.
After all this, I am grateful for feeling very well now!
Thank you for reading and Blessings to us all……..Russell