“Eight times down, nine times up”
Everyone who knows me knows this past session has been personally harrowing! 12 weeks ago my husband was told he needed urgent spine surgery to address the loss of mobility in one of his legs. The next couple of weeks were a blur of tests, second opinions, scheduling, re-scheduling and structuring our lives for the next 3 months of lifestyle limitations & healing. Soon he was on the operating table. The surgery went well but shortly thereafter complications developed and the next month was spent trying to navigate debilitating nerve pain and an even greater loss of mobility. Emergency rooms, powerful medications, pain, confusion, fear, and his true suffering marked each moment of our daily lives.
I found myself on the front lines of advocacy within the post-covid western medical system. Unable to get to the right people to give clear answers as to what was happening, my days were consumed with ongoing ferocity and frustration. The worse part was being completely inept to ease my guy’s suffering. Finally, I broke the doors of the system down and it was determined he needed a second surgery. Thankfully, that surgery mitigated the pain, but unfortunately it set the clock back to the beginning of the healing process, including activities to help regain mobility. The whole experience was, and remains, extremely stressful as you can imagine.
Amid Kevin’s crisis, I had my own unexpected health shock. On a routine DEXA scan, it was found I had very low bone density. I was really thrown for a loop on that one. How could a person such as myself, with my lifestyle and decades long level of fitness, have osteoporosis? My world view of myself and how I knew my body was shaken to its core. On top of it all, the school had its biggest enrollment since the before times and I was hosting a large workshop with teachers from England with many local and out of town students. I barely had time to digest anything that was happening.
I’ve long since known one of my superpowers is navigating balls in the air with equanimity. I take pride in applying my discipline of practice to my daily life. I’m organized, I have a plan, I figure things out, I am calm, present, and focused. Almost all the time, either by my training or by my will I can make things happen and they work out. This was not how it was going. My mental health was completely frayed.
I called my therapist, a long-standing Zen Roshi here in Seattle. I’ve known Genjo for many years and consider myself fortunate to be able to consult with him on such matters as these. Sitting on his couch I queried, “what do you Zen people do with this amount of overwhelm?” He laughed and said, “we say, ‘and now this.’” And now this. Admittedly it took me a few minutes to reconcile my, “I can DO this” with “and now this,” but doing so allowed me the breathing room I needed.
Having a practice of teaching during this time has been hard. I worried about the lousy job I was doing of setting an example of equanimity. There were more times than I’d like to admit I was nowhere near my body. I questioned revealing so much of my personal life to my students. After all, it is not a student’s job to process their teacher’s life. I was definitely not at the top of my professional game, and because I pride myself at being so, I questioned the long investment I had made in my practice. Shouldn’t I be better able to navigate my life right now? In a moment of shared despair about how failed I felt, student Micha (also a therapist) reminded me that practice is not about creating a barrier to life, it is about creating the resiliency to keep showing up in the midst of the mess that life actually is.
I felt subpar, but I kept at it. For my husband, for my job, for myself, for my life. Don’t misunderstand me, it’s not that every day I wanted to participate in my life! Rather than advocate, go to the gym, water the garden, shop, step on the floor and say, “feel your feet, raise and lower arms,” I might have preferred to stay in bed scratching my cat and binge-watching Ted Lasso. I remember one of the exercises from my early days of Judo – on our bellies, fisted arms reaching forward, dragging ourselves across the mat like a snake with no swish. Most days felt like that.
As difficult as the “to-do’s” of my daily life have been, the hardest to do, next to watching my guy’s suffering, has been allowing people to help. I’m much more skilled at holding space for other’s challenges than dropping the veil of mine and allowing people behind the curtain. As I gave my friends & students a front row seat to my family’s and my struggles, many people, some of whom I knew only from our time together in class, offered to help - by words, deeds, and holding loving space. It took everything I had left inside of me to say, yes, please, thank you, that would be great. Thank you. I even got a little practiced at taking the initiative and asking for help.
Life did begin to calm down, but as if there needed to be one more test for the road, last week I ended up in the emergency room with a severe allergic reaction! I guess it was to me sticking my face in flowers or perhaps it was some spider bites, or maybe my immune system just said, “enough already!” Sitting in the ER texting my friends photos of my swollen face looking like a bee, I may have said a few other choice words than “and now this,” but knew as long as I was still breathing, I’d be ok.
And now this became a touch stone for me over these past months as did sharing my challenges, as did asking for and receiving help. I was able to maintain my practices, personal and professional, ragged as they may have been, while unexpected life just kept rapid firing my way. I even found my body in it all and the session ended on a high note. As I write these reflections Kevin is better, the garden thrives. My face looks like me again. I’ve made my peace with my thin bone genetics and am grateful for the intentional life that gives me strength, balance, confidence and resiliency. Perhaps most importantly I have deepened relationships and even several new friends in my life. I have learned first-hand about receiving human generosity. Thank you.
Happy summer everyone. Steady on.