Self-Denial

[comment] ...what I am seeing in facilitating of the [Sunday School] classes on Buddhism, as well as the ongoing study of Ephesians, is that they are both saying the same thing: life here hurts, but it is possible to some extent to transcend the pain (dukkha) of this life and find enlightenment and freedom, even while enduring the pain.  From what I see from the Buddha, the pain is intensified as we focus on ourselves (tanha), but it dissipates as we—to use Christ’s term—deny ourselves (anatta), a concept that is not easy to explain; I’m not sure what “no self” (the usual translation of anatta) means.
               We talked in the Ephesians class yesterday about the martyrs, who were burned at the stake, and sang hymns until they could no longer breathe.  Sure, they were in severe pain, but there was something else going on for these mystic martyrs. 
               Well, I did not mean to preach [about your ongoing chronic illness], and I don’t intend that you say, “Aha, that’s what it’s all about!”  These thoughts are nothing new to you; you undoubtedly know more about them than I do.  I relate them simply because I was reminded of the tie-in. 

Illness pulls one’s focus inward.  Anyone with a sick child, or the stereotypical sick husband, knows that there is nothing like illness to make a person self-centered, completely uncaring about anything other than the miserable experience in his own body.  One of the first signs of recovery in acute disease is when the patient’s attention turns again outward.  A minor illness makes people cranky, a more serious one takes them right past cranky into sullen and distant, turned so inward that all interventions are mere nuisance.  As healing happens and the patient returns to an outward enough consciousness to be a grouch, the nursing staff breathes a sigh of relief (at least initially).  And as recuperation continues, the child once again clamors out of bed to run and play, the husband heads back to work—both a return to the outer world.

We are at ease when our Selves are able to expand into community.  Dis-ease occurs when we are contracted too far into our individual existence.  Religions of all kinds tell us that spiritual health is when we can expand our self so far outward that we merge with the community—when we lose the self to gain Christ, or attain the No Self.  We all live on this continuum of individual ego, moving from points of solidified ego consciousness, selfishness, complete inward focus, to points of community, spiritual unity, dissolution of ego consciousness, and back.  It is a dynamic continuum and we are always shifting our position.

Like all continua, the endpoints are not opposites but meet up as in a circle.  One can lose ego boundaries in pathology, just as one can look inward beyond the Self to find a Higher Consciousness.  In an unexpected turn of the wheel, this hysterical illness of mine has served to bring me from a place of ignorant spiritual disease to a place of greater spiritual health.  Although I thought I was psychologically healthy, spiritual aware, before the onset of this illness, actually I was lost.  Lost in externals, my boundaries defined not by a healthy ego but by demands from society, ideology, family, I participated in the rat race of parenting, homeschooling, career planning, never realizing that my actions were dictated by influences outside my Self.  I lost myself in trying to be the best crunchy granola mom in the homeschool group.  I defined myself by how well I followed all the rules—eating the most organic, local foods, buying only natural hand-made toys, making my own medicines and condiments and cheese (okay, I really failed at cheese)—rather than by internal standards of compassion and grace.  Everything I did, no matter how well intentioned I had thought it, happened because I sacrificed myself to my family’s perfection.  My own boundaries were much too porous; I didn’t know where the external demands of family and culture stopped and I began.  I identified myself by my ability to exist for others. It was a pathological lack of ego structure.

And I burnt out.  My adrenals quit supporting all the demands I put on myself.  For two years, I was crazy, neurotic, more than a little psychotic at times.  I lost even the illusion that I had a Self.  In moments of lucidity, I found a name for this physiology—hypoadrenia, probably Addison’s disease if I’d found a doctor who took me seriously enough to test it back then—and worked very hard at recovery. 

I was pretty successful. I got healthy enough to think about employment, or maybe taking up my education again.  But I had only addressed the physiology of my disease.  I was still identifying myself by what I could do—become a doctor, homeschool my kids, cook a damn fine meal—rather than what I was.  My Self was still lost, dissolved in the expectations from family and culture.

Regaining a healthy Self required me to pull inward, define myself by internal standards, even develop those standards by which to define myself.  Illness demanded that I look inward.  Particularly illness that didn’t go away.  I couldn’t simply grit my way to the end, wait out the fever or the cough—though I tried to “just hang on”.  As month after month became year after year, and I could do less and less of the work that I took such enjoyment (and pride and identity) from, I have been forced to reconsider my boundaries.  As I have to tell my kids, myself, “no” again and again for even the most commonplace of demands—grocery shopping, staying functional through a whole play or swim meet, snuggling on the couch—I learned that my Self is not defined by these things.  My Self, I, am stronger and steadier, more secure, now in this chronic debilitation than I ever was in my “healthy” before-illness state. Even in my bitchy, bitter, weariness.

Is this the grace? The transformation of the mud into the flesh that holds Life?  The breath that gives life, that sings through death?

A Glimpse of Normal

On the Feast of the Epiphany, I began treatment with a new healer.  By the end of last year, after slogging from doctor to doctor to doctor for my bleeding and other health issues, I was incredibly frustrated, exhausted, and desperate.  The dysfunctional bleeding finally stopped on Christmas Eve after my having bled for about 70 of the previous 95 days. After lots of testing, not very much listening, and quite a bit of passing responsibility to other practitioners, the best the medical profession could diagnose me with was pre-menopausal hormone disruption and being “as good as diabetic”.  Neither of which could begin to account fully for my last four and a half years of chronic fatigue, pain, and cognitive dysfunction.  I was grasping at straws, including paying good money for some online, unlicensed and barely legal naturopath who suggested about ten different diagnoses and told me that if I’d lose a hundred pounds (going to a fat farm if necessary), all my health problems would get better.  Note:  I do NOT carry a hundred pounds of excess weight on my body!

Over the holidays, which were horrible and mostly spent in bed, I stopped in at a nearby gluten-free store and found a single business card for a guy who practices acupuncture, applied kinesiology, and NAET.  I thought, “what the hell, I’ve been to everyone else, maybe this guy will think more like I do; he certainly has the credentials for Weird.”  He works out of his living room, sets up his schedule from his cell phone, and was willing to let me grill him on his philosophy of healing for twenty minutes before even making an appointment!  My kind of practitioner.  My first visit was on the Epiphany, which I thought apropos for beginning new directions in healing wisdom.

He let me talk for an hour and a half, telling my story, letting me say for myself what was wrong with me.  That in itself was worth his fee!  I came home feeling very much like I’d hired a team player rather than submitted myself to yet another person’s expert opinions.  That first visit I got nothing more than a formula of Bach flower remedies from the healer and I myself changed the delivery system of my homeopathic remedy but for the first time in over six months I didn’t have to spend most of my waking hours in bed (or desperately wishing I were). 

I was able to do all our grocery shopping by myself, a full restocking of the kitchen since my husband has been trying to keep things running for the last several months, not his forte.  I hadn’t been able to shop unaccompanied in years.  Before I had quit altogether, I’d had to take a kid and use the motorized wheelchair carts and now suddenly I had the physical stamina and mental clarity to plan and execute a shopping trip to three stores, put it all away, and then start cooking up a storm.  I cooked for that whole first weekend!  I hadn’t so much as made a complete meal for myself in months, much less whole family dinners and prep-ahead meals for the freezer. 

I lost another fifteen pounds in addition to the twenty I’d already lost by going mostly grain-free and low-carb.  My clothes are falling off me, I have to wear my wedding ring on another finger, I even had to go back to an old pair of glasses because the prescription for my visual acuity changed.  I was able to take my daughter to an open house at the technical school she hopes to attend and the same day go with my other daughter to her music competition, unthinkable even a few weeks before.  I attended swim meets, went to a movie with the family, and I’ve even gone clothes shopping for my ever-taller teens.  I felt normal, healthy, and capable of living the life I expected of myself for the first time in five years. 

And then the honeymoon ended.  The healer and I have begun a course of treatments designed to realign that nexus between the physiological autonomic nervous system and the spirit/psyche, to cause it to function harmoniously as one whole rather than acrimoniously as two separate aspects of Being.  The treatments reset unconscious beliefs that cause adverse physiological or psychological reactions.  The treatments themselves are innocuous—some holding of tiny vials of liquid, some thumping along the spine, and a little acupuncture—but the changes that occur afterwards are enormous.  The healing is deep and requires a lot of forebearance as issues come to consciousness to be released.  I am again tired and quickly fatigue, often lose my temper, and am forgetful or foggy.  But it is the tiredness of healing rather than the weariness of disease. 

That brief interlude of glorious health, that glimpse of normal, was a splash of grace.  Having experienced that two weeks, I can eagerly accept the challenge now of this healing work.  It was a foretaste of vibrancy that was sorely needed after these long years of increasing despondency and resignation, a reminder of what I can be, the impetus I needed to do the work remaining, allowing these treatments to dig deeply into the foundations of my Being and to rebuild my whole self from the very inmost soul-depths.

Another Ash Wednesday

Another Ash Wednesday.  Another Lent. Another season in the liturgical year to contemplate “what does it all mean” and “how do I live like it means anything at all?”  No matter what Jesus’s followers thought he was all about—and the Gospels record their opinions as all over the map—the events of that fateful Passover had to have taken them by surprise.  Whatever their expectations for the Jesus movement, his execution for criminal sedition was a big game-changer.  Who could have foreseen such an event? (Arguably Jesus, but if so, he didn’t seem to go about making it very clear to even his closest followers.) And having seen their leader die ignominiously, what were they to make of it?  In order to go on with their own lives, how were they to integrate his death into their own personal histories as a meaningful event? 

Eventually, the various atonement doctrines, revisionist messianic prophecies, and the deification of Jesus by the increasingly political church provided catechistic answers to these hard questions.  Ultimately, though, we each have to answer that question of meaning for ourselves just as the original followers grappled with it in the first century.  Each of us must find our own meaning in life regardless of what answers are served up to us by church or culture. 

Lent is a six-week period designed to reflect on what meaning we will give our lives. Two years ago, I began The Chronicles as a Lenten exercise, expecting 40-Days-to-a-Renewed-You.  What I got was a continuing odyssey in spiritual death and resurrection.  I thought that February of 2010 that I was nearly recovered from my then two-and-a-half year struggle with dysautonomia/adrenal dysfunction.  Little did I know I was only beginning a whole new adventure in chronic disease and spiritual health!  Like the first disciples, who could have foreseen how often in the last two years I would beg that this cup should pass from me, how many times I cried out from the depths of my soul for the God who had forsaken me, how close I would come to sighing simply, “it is finished.”

This sojourn in my personal Abyss has been more malevolent than I ever expected, the skeletons in my closet became demons that nearly destroyed my soul.  Not for lack of willingness on my part did they fail; more times than I can count, I pleaded just to die and to let the inner struggle cease.  But God kept waking me up to one more dawn; weep though I did at yet another day of hauling my weary, aching, broken self out of bed.  Grace is a terrible thing.

Lent has come around again. Why am I still here?  What is my purpose in continuing to breathe, to think, to move?  In the last few weeks I have been slowly resurrecting from the ashes of my old dead self, why do I live?  Grace transforms, whether we will or no.  What has grace wrought?  Like those devastated survivors of that crucial crucifixion, I look around me and begin to pick up the pieces of myself that I find and discover that they fit together differently that before.  I am not the same person who went into this grave, who is this new person Grace has borne?

Jesus’s followers began their fateful journey, leaving every part of the lives they knew in Galilee, traveling to another country for a religious celebration, only to find that everything on which they had staked they hopes and dreams was staked instead to a cross as a common criminal. Their lives, their plans, lay destroyed at the foot of the cross that scattered them to the winds.  Grace transformed those shattered people into a force that changed (for good as well as evil) the course of history.  What will Grace make of me? 

Lent. Six weeks to nurture the new healing, the tender green spirit that has sprung new roots into the Ground of my Being.  Forty days to reach for the light, to burrow into the ground.  Who will emerge from the seed of the resurrection?

Big Lies I Believe

Fundamental beliefs (aka Big Lies) held in common by people who suffer from chronic illness:

1.     I have to be strong. (Strong enough to handle anything, regardless of whether the weight is unbearable by anyone.)

2.     It is not right for me to be angry. (I have no right to anger, my anger is not justified, or even that anger is a sin akin to murder.)

3.     If I’m angry, I will not be loveable. (Love and acceptance are earned by our character or our behaviors—which are inseparable.)

4.     I’m responsible for the whole world. (Leading to hyper-controlling behaviors, being the Fixer, a compulsion to “save the world.”)

5.     I can handle anything. (It is easier just to do it myself than get other people to do it, if you want it done “right” you have to do it yourself, needing to be perfectly competent in all areas of life—perfect mom, perfectly decorated and kept house, perfect garden, perfect on the job, in the bedroom, in the ministry—being good enough is never acceptable in anything.)

6.     I’m not wanted—I’m not lovable. (Regardless of others’ intentions, I perceive that I am unwanted/unloved.)

7.     I don’t exist unless I do something.  I must justify my existence.  (My only worth lies in my utility.  I cannot fathom being valuable simple for Being.)

8.     I have to be very ill to deserve being taken care of.  (I should be able to buck up, mind-over-matter, just get on with things, no matte what.)

A major contributor to the genesis of many diseases… is an overload of stress induced by unconscious beliefs.  If we would heal, it is essential to being the painfully incremental task of reversing the biology of belief we adopted very early in life.  Whatever external treatment is administered, the healing agent lies within.  The internal milieu must be changed.  To find health, and to know it fully, necessitates a quest, a journey to the center of our own biology of belief.  That means rethinking and recognizing—re-cognizing: literally, to “know again”—in our lives.

…The key to healing is the individual’s active, free and informed choice.  … Liberation from oppressive and stressful external circumstances is essential, but that is only possible if we first liberate ourselves from the tyranny of our ingrained biology of belief.

From When the Body Says No by Gabor Mate, MD (the parenthetical remarks are my own)

Day of the Dead

Partied down with the ER docs last night. I went as a middle-aged woman with dysfunctional bleeding. It was a heart-pounding, dizzying experience. My costume rocked! Risque cutaways at the bust and booty, super realistic-looking blood on everything. I got some drugs and spent a lot of time on my back with my feet in the air while men toyed with my ladyparts. I even got to bring home pictures. Best Halloween party I ever went to but this morning after kinda sucks!

Ha!  The backstory is that I’ve been spotting or bleeding for nearly six weeks.  While each burst of actual bleeding was accompanied by extreme anxiety, I knew that I wasn’t bleeding anything like a hemorrhage so I tried to breathe deeply. Compounding the panic was the memory of my mom’s odyssey with cancer that started with exactly the same symptoms at exactly my age.  She was dead two years later.

I tried some of my own healing arts but found that I couldn’t concentrate through the anxiety.  Not surprisingly, my efforts were ineffective.  Last week I started a round of visits to conventional medical professionals—I posted some of that story on my Facebook Page.  None of the medicos wanted responsibility for my long term care: the GP sent me to a gynecologist, after ordering a raft of blood tests and radiology; the gynecologist insisted that I needed to follow up with the GP, after ordering more tests, because they “only do vaginas and babies here” and clearly I had bigger issues going on. 

The ob-gyn did prescribe some Provera (synthetic progesterone, the hormone that down-regulates menstrual bleeding among other things) to shut of the faucet, as it were.  Being the crunchy granola, nuts and berries kinda gal I am, I asked for natural progesterone but she never studied the natural stuff and didn’t know what it would do.  I agreed to take the Provera after a two-day trial of over-the-counter progesterone, though I would rather have taken a prescription compound that was regulated for potency, if the progesterone didn’t do the trick.

It did seem to work fairly well—if I didn’t eat or ingest anything that inflamed the ongoing allergic cough I’ve had for weeks, or do too much (since hubby was out of town, as usual, it was hard not to overdo)—until Saturday, when it didn’t.  So I trotted off to the pharmacy only to discover that the script never arrived!  Argh!  I called the doc yesterday morning to have it called in again but couldn’t pick it up until evening.  I planned to start it this morning after the hormone cream I’d been using all day had worn off. 

Just before five in the afternoon, I heard from the GP’s office that my bloodwork, ultrasound, and x-ray had all come back normal; everything seemed fine (!?!) But about nine o’clock last night, the bleeding switch turned on overdrive and I started to bleed quite heavily.  By ten-thirty, I was checking into the Emergency Hospital.  They were so quick and efficient, I didn’t even have time to make the necessary Mom arrangements.  I ended up phoning and texting my daughter at her party, my husband in Indiana, and other moms to pick up my slack, all while lying on the gurney with my feet in stirrups or being briskly wheeled around the halls (wow, talk about dizzying!)

Of course, the ER ran their own blood workup and ultrasound but their results agreed with the GP.  Nothing obvious to be causing the bleed—which, while heavy, was becoming clear was not nearly the dangerous state I feared.  So they watched me take the Provera that the ob-gyn had prescribed and sent me home.  Within a couple hours, the drug did its thing and dried everything pretty much right up.

Now that major polyps, tumors, giant fibroids, etc, have all been ruled out, I have a couple more tests scheduled: still to come, endometrial biopsy for cancer and something long and painful for fibroids not otherwise visible on ultrasound. But it is looking like a hormonal disruption consistent with incipient menopause—also consistent with the autonomic nervous system dysfunction that I can’t get anyone to notice. 

Meanwhile, on this the Day of the Dead, I feel hung-over, exhausted, and used up.  I feel beat up on the inside, weak and helpless on the outside.  Getting out of bed to use the toilet seemed more effort than it was worth.  In the last couple hours, though, I have been able to scramble some eggs, shower off my Halloween party residue, and crash back into bed.  Had enough energy to write this post but I feel a nap coming on now!

Reluctant Mystic

(driving to yet another lesson, practice, class, one of my children’s activities, someone made a comment about my hysterical illness, to which I made the following reply.  While I sat waiting for said kids to be done with their activities, I continued my rant to myself.)

I don't think you have any idea how much energy it takes to live in my body.

I drive around town with the AC on max. My right side is so cold that the bones in my shoulder and behind my ear ache but my left side is still red, rashy, and burnt from what sun and heat come through my tinted windows. The stark summer glare through my windshield gives me a migraine in about fifteen minutes. If I make more than three in-and-outs of my car (into a store, a meeting, an errand, the house) even using my special SPF clothing and a sun-umbrella, I will be queasy and I can't bear to be touched. Tomorrow my muscles will ache as if I'd worked out too hard. The hotter the weather, the quicker I reach my limit. Today was 115F/46C.

My good days feel like I had the flu last week; most days feel like I had the flu yesterday; bad days feel like I have the flu now.  Everyday I over-react to minor variations in heat and cold, drafts like the air conditioner exacerbate the over-reaction but being too hot makes me claustrophobic in my own body.

My ankles swell and feel like overstuffed sausages. The joints in my toes ache. My elbows feel like live electrical wires run through them. My knees crack and pop and feel like dull pins are stabbing from the inside out. Water burns my stomach but I am so thirsty. My face itches from the inside. My eyeballs feel like they are filled with heavy, too-dense jelly.

When I try to do just a little more, maybe pick up some dinner between picking up kids, I exhaust my body and my mind begins to suffer. I inadvertently cut people off in traffic. I miss my freeway exit or drive past my turn. I constantly have to check my calendar because I can't remember what the next stop in my day is—even though I've looked a dozen times already. I can't remember what is planned for tomorrow or if what we did was last week or the week before or last month. I forget between the car and the grocery store what it was I came to get, even if it was only one item.

When I'm tired, which is everyday from the moment I arise to the moment I pass out, I cry too easily. A commercial for allergy medicine chokes me up. A casual criticism from a self-absorbed teen or distracted husband can make me cry so hard I ought to pull out of traffic.

I read a book, listen to a lecture, watch a documentary and often can't put more than the main theme into words. I have a thought, draw some correlation between the new subject and something I've known but before I can pull up my phone or a notepad or my laptop, the connection fades leaving a weird twilight in my mind, a sense of brilliance remembered, the comfort of darkness unreached.

I have moments of clarity after I've crashed on my bed with my feet up and my head supported. I litter my friend's Facebook threads with wit and thought that I can't sustain in a blog post or even an email. I owe so many people responses but can't wrap my brain around what I wanted to tell them.

And then I feel guilty. Because I haven't cooked a meal in so long I don't know when it was. Because my house is overrun by small animals that spring to life from the accumulated dog hair, cat hair, and dust. Because I flinch when someone wants to hug me. Because I can be cogent occasionally for other people but pick fights and speak rudely to my family.

And I am angry that this is as good as I get. That it costs me hundreds of dollars a month in pills and drops and remedies to maintain more-or-less this state of unwellness but medical professionals look at my blood-work and say nothing is wrong, maybe a shrink? That people who agree that I'm unwell tell me it is my fault:

“Just suck it up, get on with things”

“Mind over matter”

“Have more willpower, just do it”

“Exercise more”

“Eat less”

“Follow this diet”

“Read less on the Internet”

“Take this curative I'm pushing”

“Quit thinking so hard, just let it go”

“If there weren't some payoff for you, you'd be well”

“Pray more, confess sin, give it to Jesus”

Okay. the last one hasn't been said to me personally but it has been the fix suggested in get-well articles I've read online.

I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired. Yet, we are not entitled to exuberance and vigor. Bigger, faster, louder, brighter is not our birthright. Sometimes abundant life is deep and still and quiet and slow. And often it hurts.  A lot. In our New-York-minute, fax-it-yesterday, multi-tasking, texting-while-driving culture, maybe this condition is my divine gift to remember the timeless, the wordless, the boundless. The weaker my body, the more incoherent my nervous system, the more surely I meet God.  My visions come easier. My healings are stronger. My assurance of divine reality is more certain.

So then, why do I continue to fight against this thorn in my flesh? God wrote this destiny into my Being. Why can't I embrace the gift without counting the cost?  Why do I listen to the chatter and static instead of God's holy descant in my soul?  I long to be one with the Presence yet I fight it with everything I have. Was there ever a more reluctant mystic than I?

Sent from my iPhone

Mourning the Loss of a Dream

Grief tightens my throat and tenses the back of my neck.  My belly aches; my eyes are hot with unshed tears.  Three times I have started the journey to become a doctor, moving my family across state lines to go to school, demanding sacrifices of my husband and children to my dream.  And three times, life has thrown me violently off that track.  I have wanted to be a doctor since I was five years old.  Twice I was in the process of pre-naturopathy prerequisites and, most recently, I was attending a homeopathic medical school with the intention of rolling into their doctoral program as it became available (it is still stuck in the planning stages, however).  Even after the homeopathy school fizzled, I looked into naturopathy again but was too sick to think about pursuing it. 

Today, I stopped by the Naturopathic Medical Center to pick up a remedy.  I haven’t been back there since before I even began to recognize the pattern that destiny was drawing in my life, since the last time I was applying there.  At least seven years.  The place has really grown up in the intervening years: a big new medical center to house the clinics and labs and the oh-so-pharmacy-looking medicinary.  I parked next to Physician Only parking spaces.  I walked past doctors and students in their white coats and intense expressions. 

In the medicinary, the clerk questioned my remedy request.  Their in-house policy (exceeding state and federal law) requires a prescription for high-potency remedies.  Since I lack their credential, I couldn’t buy the potency I wanted in my own name; they would only sell me a lower potency “suitable” for the uneducated layperson.

I bought the lower potency but walked back to my car with my mouth working hard and a harsh gnawing in my chest.  Why?  Why couldn’t I have completed this dream?  I could be one of those white-coated authorized people by now.  I could park in the best spots and order any damn thing in the pharmacy.  I could be someone my kids could brag about again the way they did when I was in school.  Best of all, I could be someone I would have been proud to be.  I fought long and hard with myself to believe I was even capable of medical school and I was so immensely gratified to find that I did very well in my classes. 

Obviously, destiny has another plan for me.  Each time I attempt to pursue medicine, I come closer to dying with the ferocity that Life requires to derail me.  I’ve been sick for three and half years; I may never fully recover from this last attempt. 

In memory of a dream that will forever remain a fantasy, here is my excerpted admissions essay to the homeopathic college.  It is still as true for me today as it was when I wrote it five years ago.

When I was five years old, I decided to be a doctor.  After a deep gash on my knee, which I was left to attend alone with only a wet cloth and a bandage, I discovered beneath the flowing blood and assorted gore a hard gleaming white thing that I decided must be my knee bone.  This sight, an inner mystery of the body revealed, awoke in me a fascination with how the body works that has never left me, although it has deepened and broadened to include the mysteries of the whole of Being—body, mind, and soul.  I decided then and there, in the attic of my grandmother’s house, that I must study medicine and be a doctor; I must bring this fascination with healing mysteries to the world.

Thirty-five years later, I still have a scar across my knee and I still feel that breathless awe in the presence of the healing work.  My family culture, learning differences I had not yet accommodated, and just plain life intervened and I never made it to medical school, but I have never stopped being fascinated by the healing process, by health and wellness, and by the myriad ways to affect it. I have been studying this process informally although seriously since my early teens. 

I discovered nutrition as a way to affect health as a teenager and began a never-ending, always-something-new experiment with foods, eating habits, and supplementation.  I continue to learn the food/health connections today with my family and my healing clients.  How we nourish ourselves through food, physically and spiritually, is the foundation upon which we daily create ourselves. 

Also in high school, I was introduced to psychology—the inner mysteries of the mind—and learned to observe.  I continued formal study of psychology through a Bachelor’s Degree, to the offering of a place in a doctoral program at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  Although I didn’t continue the credentialing process, I have never stopped observing, analyzing the patterns of the workings of people’s inner selves.  The incredible drive for wellness and wholeness in all that is alive is astounding.

Not quite ten years later, after dabbling with a few alternative health ideas, I entered a struggle with fertility that finalized my break with conventional medicine. Doctors ignored my plight, my midwife was not trained in miscarriage prevention, and I was left to find my own cure.  For three years in the mid 1990’s, I researched reproductive endocrinology and alternative therapies, diagnosed my own problems and prescribed my own treatments.  My midwife was my connection to therapies to which I had no access.  Her trust in my work and willingness to learn as I learned was the first indication that I had something to offer the world through medicine.  Her suggestion that I become a doctor made me realize that I had forgotten my childhood dream.

First, though, we had the joy of homebirthing my first daughter.  Homebirth pushed me firmly into the alternative health world—as if I had that far to go! But it was during my pregnancy that I realized the power of homeopathy: Sepia 200C saved my marriage and my sanity during my second trimester. My midwife gave me some of her own personal supply, which worked the miracle.  I still have that little bottle of Sepia grains and for years turned to it in times of need.

Since then, I have devoted my life to mothering and the study and practice of holistic healing methods. I have raised my children exclusively with vibrational medicine. In addition to homeopathy, other modalities I use are kinesiology, flower remedies, aromatherapy, botanical medicine and direct resonance healing.

So why, now that I have the space in my family life to consider medical school, am I wanting to study homeopathy? I have become more fascinated with the facilitation of healing through working directly with vibrational energy.  Of all the modalities of vibrational healing, homeopathy seems the most inclusive of the body, mind, and soul in equal measure.

Homeopathy is a study of the whole human Being:  from the physics, to the psyche, to the soul, acknowledging that there is no body without soul, nor mind without body. Homeopathy is poetry and science, psychology and theatre, cosmology and philosophy, and all at once.

And, lastly, I choose the homeopathic path because the formal study and credential will allow me to be what I already am—teacher, mentor, healer, parent—in a deeper, more profound way.  As a Wholistic Kinesiologist, I am fairly certain to select a healing remedy if I have a sufficient pharmacy from which to choose but, without a thorough education in homeopathy, I don’t know why it will work or why it is the right remedy.  I want to understand the homeopathic paradigm of disease and healing.  Without that understanding, I am still only able to offer superficial knowledge to others and that is neither sufficient for me nor for those whom I seek to help.

Perfectionism III: Thanksgiving Dinner

Oyster Stew

Rocket Salad with Pear, Pine Nuts and Beetroot

Cider-brined Roast Turkey with Sausage-Fennel-Crouton Stuffing

Wild Rice Risotto with Cranberry and Mushroom

Mashed Red Potatoes with Giblet Gravy

Sweet Potatoes Roasted with Figs, Shallots, and Pecans

Grilled Brussels Sprouts in Balsamic Vinaigrette

Sautéed Green Beans with Hazelnuts

Hot Red Cabbage and Apples

Maple-Glazed Carrots

Ambrosia Salad with Marshmallows and Mandarins

Cornbread and Butter

Cranberry Orange Chutney

Olive Tray

Radishes

Assorted Pickled Vegetables

Pumpkin Pie

Apple Cobbler

Chef Kee’s Cheesecake with Sour Cream Sauce or Pomegranate Sauce

Cranberry Bread

Fresh, Candied or Salt and Pepper Nuts

Apples, Oranges, Pomegranates

Assorted Cheeses

Hard Cider

Sparkling Cider

Chateau St. Michelle Wines

Mineral Water

Coffee

As a confirmed foodie, the annual food orgy in late November is my holiday. During my teen and college years, I lived close enough to my grandmother to celebrate Thanksgiving at her house.  Early in that decade-and-a-half, we feasted with grandparents, a great-grandmother, a great-aunt and uncle, and at least a half-dozen assorted cousins of my grandfather, along with the five of us in our family. My mother’s family history abounds in childless or single-child families so the gathering was heavy in WWII generation and I and my siblings the only children. 

My grandmother provided a meal whose tables truly groaned from the weight of the many dishes.  My father jokes that my grandma didn’t think a holiday was rightly celebrated “unless there were 93 sides dishes”. With so many celebrants, groaning tables were quickly demolished. As the older generation of relatives died off, Grandma continued to cook in the same variety and quantity for fewer of us.  We stepped up to the challenge and continued to consume prodigious amounts of food.  The holiday became for me a festival of bounty, manifest in gratuitous variation of edibles.

Because I love to eat, I learned to cook and Thanksgiving is a made-to-order opportunity to indulge.  My family of creation, however, is not nearly as passionate about food as I am.  Unless I insist, we eat boring, busy-suburban-family meals-on-the-run. When I did insist, I would pull out all the stops.  I made far too many dishes of kinds not much appreciated by my family but that I wanted to eat.  And, of course, in my perfectionism, I tried much too hard, took on far more than I could reasonably handle alone, so that always at least one dish was ruined and the meal never met my expectations.  I was grumpy and irritable long before sitting down to eat.

When I got sick, making even daily meals became too much for me and we spent over a year without celebrating any holidays at our own house.  Since summer of 2007, I’ve only made one holiday feast.  Last year, I finally agreed with my husband’s declaration that what it costs me to attempt a full-hoopla holiday is just not worth the effort.  We decided that I would pick one holiday a year to go all out with food and trimmings.  Naturally, I chose Thanksgiving since it is the only holiday strictly about the Eats. 

I found it a relief, oddly, to know that there would be once a year when our house was the destination feast.  We would invite guests (something else my family dislikes), make loads of food, and no one would complain because it was only once a year.  So, last year, that’s what we did and I loved it.  This year, however, I’ve been sicker than I was last fall and then I complicated the issue by going to a conference in Vancouver last weekend.  The conference was the first official, organized educational attempt I’ve made since the conference in 2007 when I first realized how sick I really was becoming. It took way more out of me than it seemed to deserve—just the travel left me huddled in bed, shaking and incapacitated, by six that night and required the whole next day to rest and recuperate while the family saw the sights.

Needless to say (although I was the last to admit it), any kind of effort at all was more than I could manage this Thanksgiving.  I left the entire day to the rest of the family to plan and execute.  The girls only wanted sandwiches made with deli-processed turkey on their icky sandwich bread and “stuffing from a box”. 

The other evening as I lay resting with my feet up (amazing how much difference that posture makes in handling chronic fatigue), I began writing a fantasy menu.  Of course, everyone in the family ridiculed it—when a foodie lives with non-foodies, it is given that no understands the power of simply thinking about good food.  One daughter asked if this list was all the food I wanted to eat that I hoped someone would make for me; she thought it was a joke but she hit the nail on the head. 

So I share it here in hopes that another misunderstood foodie enjoys the Thanksgiving wishes in every dish.  I am thankful today for my readers.  And for my husband who understands me enough not to serve me a kid’s sandwich and was willing to plan, shop, and prepare a real turkey breast, a spiral ham, chips, shrimp starters, some decent bread, and all the sandwich accessories.

Laughter Therapy for the Recovering Fundamentalist

My daughters are 12 and 13.  They take a lot of classes at the homeschool enrichment center through our public school system.  We joke that our homeschooling is mostly on-the-way-to-school-schooling because almost every day on the way to school something comes up in conversation on which I give some exposition.

Some months ago, early in my explorations as a recovering fundamentalist, during one of these extemporaneous lectures, one daughter summed up my explanation of growing up fundy as “living in the fear bubble”.  The phrase has become a family word for the fundamentalist paradigm that results from being afraid of everything Out There and wanting to control the fear by following some magic formula.

Today on the way to school we got to talking about how living in bubbles isn’t just a religious thing. After I left Christianity, I didn’t start breathing fresh air, I simply stepped into a new bubble whose rules weren’t theological but were educational (Waldorf, Montessori) and nutritional (Nourishing Traditions, Michael Pollan).  We reminisced about my days of being violently anti-Barbie dolls, plastic toys, and most television; how I maintained rather rigid rules about organic food, no sugar, making our own flour.  I had, upon being pressed, to admit to continuing to hold all these ideals as virtues but we all agreed that I no longer see them in such black-and-white, all-or-nothing polarities.

The turning point, I said, came when I got sick three years ago and it became so obvious that following the nutritional advice from the expert that was guaranteed to bring me health instead made me much sicker and way crazier than I’d been before I sought help. After that, I was just too ill to maintain my bubble—everyone had to feed themselves, educate themselves, take care of themselves—and I realized that, for the most part, everyone thrived on a mixture of healthy and crap food, that how they related to their toys was much more important than what materials they were made of, and that television had an awful lot to offer.

But now that I have recognized how much of my life as a daughter and as a parent I have spent living in a bubble and I’ve consciously stepped away from the bubble, I am struggling to breathe that fresh air outside.  (The fresh air metaphor is not mine; it is my younger daughter’s.) I agreed that when one has been brought up having to accommodate some deformity of environment, there is great difficulty in learning to accept and physically use the healthy environment.

At this point, general discussion wound down as I got revved up on a lecture.  I brought up an experiment on cats wherein the kittens were raised in specialized environments in which there were only vertical lines or only horizontal lines.  When the cats were allowed into normal environments that had both vertical and horizontal lines, the cats were functionally blind to the lines they had not been accommodated to seeing.  They literally could not see what was right there in front of them. (From the back seat, there was a glazed-eye gaze and a white-noise hum, but I paid no attention and forged on.)

I extrapolated to my daughters’ upcoming teen years.  My only reference points to teen-age girl development are my own teen years in fundy evangelicalism, the waldorf education paradigm that can be just as isolating and legalistic as religion that I had gravitated to for their earlier years, and the extreme negative pole of the promiscuous partier that was what the bubbles are designed to avoid.  Obviously, between my reference points is the huge arena of Normal Teen Stuff that my girls will inhabit but, since I’m so entrained to the extremes, I really can’t see what that might be.  I concluded my lecture with the acknowledgement that we will all three of us be exploring normal-teenager together.

The silence was complete. 

“So, uh, when did you guys quit listening?” My overachiever first child assured me that she had still sorta listened because sometimes I give pop quizzes on my lectures.  Both girls quickly started volunteering keywords that they remembered—cat? bubbles? blindness?—so I asked, “did you at least get the take-home point?”

“You’re not normal?”

“We’re horizontal lines?”

“She’s horizontal and I’m vertical but you’re so used to seeing crosses that you can only see half of us?”

Wounds and Scars

[commenter]  The poem is good, but it seems a bit hard to get a handle on in my book.  I’m not very esoteric, more practical and hard nosed … and hard headed.  So I get the idea that God won’t give us what we cannot use, and maybe we’ll know more later than now; but how does one “live the questions”?  That I don’t get.

Maybe I should just tell you the questions that I am living so that you can see the Rilke quotation in the context that it became appropriate to me:  Last month I hit another boulder in the path of my psycho-spiritual journey.  Instead of climbing atop the rock and surveying the landscape around me, instead of taking the long broad view, I curled up into a little weepy heap underneath it, letting its looming shadow overwhelm me. 

I know and have known for months that I am not 100% recovered from hypoadrenia, not even really back to where I was before I realized that something was terribly wrong three years ago, but I've been pretty functional for most of the last year.  Until this summer, when I’ve felt increasingly less able to see the healing process moving forward.  Stagnation would be the most positive spin but backsliding seems the most accurate description.  Or perhaps just setting aside the blinders of denial I’ve been wearing, trying to convince myself and those around me that I’m not really as ill as I am.

A friend of my daughter’s has been very ill this summer with what has finally been diagnosed as dysautonomia with POTS as its most outstanding symptom.  As she and her family have struggled with finding help and healing, I became increasingly conscious of how much her symptom picture, and even more, the corporate symptom picture of dysautonomia in general, resemble my own situation.  With that awareness, I also became less able to trick myself into thinking I was almost healthy.

Desperate for encouragement about my physical health, I pulled out the Adrenal Fatigue book I used to guide my healing journey.  I haven't done the function tests since mid 2008 when I got the book.  So I thought I could cheer myself up by retaking the tests and seeing how much better I am—NOT!  I still flunked the tests really badly, although not quite as spectacularly as the first time I took them in 2008.  I got really depressed after that and wrote my Middle Aged Rant.

So the question has become how do I live from here on out?  Do I accept the diagnosis and prognosis of a chronic disease that I will probably never fully recover from, accept my limitations, accommodate them, and turn my focus on living the rest of my life well?  Or do I keep focussing on trying to find healing, to be not physically limited, even if that means another year or more of my life spent in little more than pursuit of physical health?  Do I start looking again for outside help (doctors, therapists) again in a vain chasing after diagnosis and prescriptions? Or continue with my own self-care but with the attitude of maintenance rather than recovery?

I am convinced that fundamentalism in its various guises, with its insistence on pursuit of perfection and shaming attitudes for failing that perfection, is largely responsible for my having become ill in the first place.  Fundamentalist legalism, fear and shame, the cognitive dissonance that most fundamentalisms perpetrate were the driving forces that used up my adrenal function and left me prey for this half-life I feel as though I now have. The question I live is whether the fundamentalist disease has left me wounded (with the immediacy of healing) or scarred (all possible physical healing has occurred, accepting limitations and moving on is the focus)?

Of course, the correct response to any of Life’s apparent either/or questions is not to accept limiting polarity but to look for the resolution that accommodates both/and.  Therefore it is true that I have both wounds still in need of healing and scars that need accommodation.  It is true that I have both physical disabilities and that I have psychological conditions that exacerbate those disabilities.  A hysterical disease is neither “all in her head” nor not-at-all-in-her-head.

It is also a long-established pattern in psychoanalysis that when a client comes very close to uncovering deeply-held unconscious issues, the protective strategies that enabled those unconscious issues in the first place work very hard to maintain the status quo, often manifesting as a worsening of the client’s presenting condition.  Looking back this summer, I notice that my illness took its steepest turn for the worse immediately after a week in which I got very excited about a new direction in theological reading I had begun and I had an interview for a volunteer position where the director was strongly hinting that I consider a new career direction (the hinting was not significant psychologically, the fact that I encouraged the hint was significant).  By the time I got home from the interview, I was overset by symptoms that have not let up since.

Quite obviously, when I can look with eyes that see, …

… although I can say in my head what I see so clearly, I am not able yet to admit it in print.  As I got to this sentence, I was interrupted by several things that included a fight with both daughter and husband and a subsequent crying jag.  Some time later, now I just can’t get back to writing that concluding paragraph; I’ve been on several procrastinating tasks and I’m admitting defeat.  I’ll write what I’m beginning to acknowledge to myself as I can.  It will surely be less startling to others than I have found it myself.

Ranting From the Depths of Chronic Illness at the Height of Midsummer

One of the first psychiatrists I knew told me that depression is repressed (denied) anger.  Since then I’ve heard it described in a variety of ways, including several chemical descriptions that take away all ownership of the state from the individual, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard one that is more to the point.  Depression is anger turned inward, that is hidden from the self.  Depressed people are the angriest people I’ve ever met, perhaps particularly so because they don’t even know they are angry.

I know that for me growing up, and probably for at least two generations of women before me, anger was not allowed.  Rage at circumstances, at the system, was not permissible.  Christianity is all about love, right? So only loving feelings are allowed.  Christ gives the believer a new being of joy; anger and rage belong to the old sinful nature that doesn’t exist anymore.  That was the dogma anyway. 

Of course, it doesn’t work that way.  When life doesn’t turn out to meet my expectations, when it seems that life conspires to constrain me, when any healthy person would say, “this really sucks and I’m seriously pissed off!” but such an expression is not acceptable to the New Creation in Christ, where does all that energy go? Where has all that energy from three generations of angry Christians gone? 

************************************************

I thought I was depressed but actually I am seriously pissed off.  I am less than four weeks away from being 45 years old, at least half my life lived already, and what have I done with myself?  Who have I been?  Who am I? I spent the first 25 years trying my damnedest to be a good Christian woman—with all the contradictory roles that meant—and I spent the next 20 years hiding from what I had let religion teach me about smart, accomplished women.

************************************************

I have let many potentially fruitful opportunities pass me by out of fear:  in college, my professor approached me with the chance to turn a paper I’d written into a real experiment on gender role acquisition in children, the University of Illinois at Chicago offered me an unsolicited place in the doctoral program in psychology.  After a semester’s interning, Tom Ong (the O of the former MR&O Advertising in Philadelphia) wanted to hire me. I blew them all off with blithe disregard—looking back with the hindsight of middle age, I turned them all down because I might have been successful in any of those endeavors.

I’ve started the path to graduate school four or five times (I’ve lost count), begun multiple different careers (teaching, two different times, not including homeschooling; naturopathy, twice; kinesiology, twice; retail sales in natural health, a couple times, once I even tried to buy the store but the place went bankrupt first) that never got off the ground.  I’ve been fired from every job I ever had, except one—probably the best paying job I ever had—I quit that one. 

I suspect that I’m unemployable now.  I haven’t even got callbacks from any of the jobs I’ve applied for in the last 5 years, despite persistent follow-up on my part.  I suspect that I’m too old and know too much for an entry-level position in any field but I have no credentials or legitimate experience that qualify me for anything else.

************************************************

It was damn hard work being perfect at never achieving anything.  The constant stop-start of job changes, school plans, dropping out to raise kids (and don’t start on how my kids are my achievement because my kids are at their best when I interfere with them the least), the struggle to maintain excellent mediocrity.  Always starting but never finishing a plan.

************************************************

I read once in a novel, so it is not scientific evidence but it sure made sense, that chronically ill women (who tend to be of a certain age and socio-economic status) use their illness to give them a sense of purpose in a situation where their intelligence and talents are not valued—basically, in the story, middle-aged housewives are just so freakin’ bored they develop malingering hypochondria.  I really don’t think the condescension of blame-the-victim is particularly helpful but the basic point seems to fit.  It was certainly not considered acceptable for me to be too terribly smart (but neither was I allowed to skate through school with bad grades) and having professional goals that couldn’t be easily seconded to my future husband’s career was clearly frowned upon. 

Anyway, between the desperate fears I experienced, the ongoing cognitive dissonance between what I was taught at church and home and the visceral knowledge I had of spiritual realities, the disparity of the secular schools who said I was really smart, much smarter than I demonstrated (“does not work up to her potential” I think was the recurring phrase from the teacher conferences) and the need to be dumber than any potential spouse, into adulthood where I kept trying to be perfect but not achieve too much, just look like I was (yes, I know this is really run on bunch of clauses—today is stream of consciousness writing)….

******************************************

I am so frustrated and angry that I developed hypoadrenia—burned myself out trying to measure up to all the disparate standards I had internalized, all the while compromising my own intelligence and wholeness.  I’m angry that I had to get sick to see how killing my belief set was.  I’m angry that when I did get sick, no one (friends, family, medical professionals) took seriously how ill I was.  I’m angry that following the medical advice I did get turned the illness toward my central nervous system and I went crazy.  I’m even angrier that when that happened my doctor dismissed me.  I’m angry that my daughter still throws it in my face that I “still have holes in your brain”.  I’m angry that three years later I still have to carefully conserve my reserves—can’t take on too much, can’t work too hard—I’ve become the shadow of a person I had set out unconsciously to become.

I’m pissed as all hell that I can’t write the way I used to, can’t pull the words out of the air to perfectly say what I mean as easily as couch collects dog hair.  It frustrates me that I can’t write up my thoughts quickly and concisely anymore. Yes, I can at least hold a thought long enough to string a sentence together—most of the time, May wasn’t a good month for that—but oh it is difficult compared to what it used to be!  I feel like a runner after a traumatic brain injury who has to relearn how to walk but remembers the feel of skimming the surface of the ground.

********************************************

This collection of complaints is, I guess, only peripherally about religion. Or maybe not.  I certainly sacrificed my health, my sanity, came close to losing my marriage and my kids, on the altar of trying to follow the rules, of black-and-white thinking that I learned from religion.  I have succeeded in being a martyr to legalism—if not to the fundamentalist Evangelical brand.  I am climbing down off that altar before it actually takes my life. 

My mother died at 49.  I’m going to be 45 next month.  I refuse to continue digging my early grave to prove something to no one in particular.  I want to spend the next 45 years embracing the freedom, the peace, and the abundant life that Jesus taught was our birthright—he never promised Easy Street but he promised an easy spirit.  I want to find out just what I can be and be All That.