This was something I just happened upon this morning as I was searching for a work of art on one of my hard drives. It was written right before they found out I had Celiac’s Disease, 8 years ago, so my health problems were at their absolute worst. I was in agony from Fibromyalgia, my guts were a wreck, I had constant yeast infections and I was always so tired that I could have never slept enough yet I suffered from severe insomnia. I was a mess. But this writing sparked something in my heart today and I want to share it with you. There is still so much truth to this in my life and hopefully in yours too.
Compassion and Suffering, 2009
What I am about to disclose is not easy to write. I was brought up not to complain and that was that. Over the years, I’ve realized that there are valuable lessons in everything I have gone through, not just for me perhaps. I’ve put my illuminations, my visions, the realities of our higher selves into my paintings. They are what I would consider dealing with the sacred. This writing deals far more with the profane, the everyday.
When I was 15, for no foreseeable reason at all, I lost my periods. I wasn’t stressed, over excersizing, not eating enough or any of the many other reasons that the doctors were trying to convince me and my mother was happening to me. Nope, I was seemingly healthy, but with no periods from one month to the next. For the next year and a half I went through test and after, MRI’s, CAT Scans, more blood drawn than I care to remember, all with no conclusive evidence of “anything wrong.” This was a little low, that was a little high, but all well within range so none of my doctors thought it any problem. During this time I began to lose considerable weight and the more I lost, the more the specialists were convinced it was because of that, heedless of the fact that I hadn’t lost any weight prior to losing my periods. Finally, after all that time, they decided that perhaps, “these things sometimes happen” (ie. They had no flippin’ clue) and they recommended I go on the pill to jump start my periods. At 17 I went on the pill. I gained back the 25 pounds (plus a few extra) I had lost over 2 years in about a month which sent my self esteem, health, emotions, and mental stability over it all in a tail spin and I suffered from relentless eating disorders for the next several years.
I was on again off again with the pill. It did jump start my periods so when I went off around 19, we thought all was well. My weight was a gain 5 pounds lost 5 pounds every month and within the next year I began to have such severe cramping that I would be doubled over from one minute to the next like someone had karate kicked me in my ovaries. I was having night sweats and random day sweats, like I was going through menopause. Without any real conclusions from “regular” doctors, I was taken to a holistic center for some testing. They determined I was indeed going through menopause as far as my estrogen levels were concerned whereas my progesterone was fine. Treatments were expensive and not covered by my insurance so back to traditional medicine and back on the pill I went.
Whatever doctor I had gone to was promoting a certain new type of pill in her office so that’s what I was given, assured it was the right hormone mix for my slightly too low estrogen and slightly high progesterone. In the next few months, I developed horrific sweats and I had to eat every 2 hours or I would faint. That developed into eating, then throwing up 15 minutes later what looked like stomach acid and bile. I lived on toast for 2 months. I was in college at the time and I went to see someone else who reviewed my history and told me the pill I was given was exacerbating my condition and switched me to something else. More tests, endoscopies and colonoscopies, blood work and nexium later, I was back to my semi-normal state.
By this time, I was about 21. I had severe depression symptoms and a healthy drinking habit. About a year earlier I had experience what I call the “Kosmic 2×4 on the head” (which I will write about in a later blog) that was the impetus of my awakening, rather, the gigantic reminder of who I really was. However, with all of my problems and the fairly jaded viewpoints of the academia I was immersed in seemed very incongruous to my opening sentience. Reconciling my very traditional shamanic rebirth, dealing with being torn asunder by some cosmic force, leaving me open, raw, bleeding uncontrollably, feeling the ecstasy and pain of all the world from plants, animals to humans, to the very earth herself, so acutely that I could barely keep from erupting in wailing tears from moment to moment was a bit tough, to say the least. Drinking heavily seemed to at least keep me asleep during the night while my dreams were ravaged by phantoms and horrors like I’ve never known before and it kept the edge off just enough so I could deal with functioning in the “normal” world.
About a year later my depression and drinking had come to a head and I’d finally convinced my parents that I needed help and depression was a real thing. I was put on Wellbutrin and some anti-psychotic. After several sleep walking terrors and hallucinatory (not in the good way) episodes, I was taken off the anti-psychotic and kept on the wellbutrin. It gave me the space I needed, away from the depression and the drinking to begin to sort out what had happened to me, and most importantly what I needed to do with my life from now on.
Since then I have delved into the world of visionary art as well as kept a firm foothold in the academic art world. Again, most of that story is for another entry so I’ll get back to my topic in this one. My health had not really improved, it was just put on a back burner. In the next several years following, my condition had invited along some new fellows, yearly hairloss, hypothyroid disease, chronic fybromyalgia (incurable muscle pain that doctors don’t know anything about) where my day to day life is hindered from crippling pain, regular hypoglycemic episodes (I’m not diabetic, hypoglycemic shock according to traditional medicine only happens to diabetes patients, yet it happens to me often enough and they don’t know why), acid stomach from years of pain medication, weekly migraines, carpal tunnel, cubital tunnel (in the elbows) and tendonitis in both of my arms (they were going to operate on both my arms and I said absolutely not and sought massage therapy instead), and I haven’t had a good night’s rest in probably 3 years. Because of all of this, I’ve had even more MRI’s, CAT scans, blood tests, you name it, I’ve had it done at least twice, most with unclear results and a sketchy diagnosis. There have been days I couldn’t walk because my legs and back muscles were clenched so tight I couldn’t move. On a daily basis, my back, arms, neck, stomach muscles hurt, not just ache. I’m on a diet of muscle relaxers (daily), Tylenol (several times a week), Vicodin (“as needed”) and Oxycodon (again, “as needed”) and a whole host of other medications to “treat” all my other ailments and symptoms (never of course what is causing the problem), all of which just barely take the edge off.
In all of this time I’ve also tried treating myself with every imaginable green, holistic, live culture, biotic, good-for-you-raw-grass, minerals, nutrients and vitamins, all of which again, help a bit, but just barely take the edge off. So now what? Now, 8 years later, I am about to explore the arena of holistic medicine once again but in a different way and hopefully that will get me somewhere.
Now, the reason I went into all of this is that I’ve had my fair share of suffering in my life, this is just the personal, not to mention the amount of funerals I’ve been to or any other kinds of loss, disappointment, physical injury, you name it, it’s probably happened to me. One of the many things that really stuck to me when I was reading all sorts of books and trying to figure out what on earth was going on with me and my Kosmic 2×4 explosion, was that when we are doing the thing in life that we are supposed to do, doors open for us. This has been unequivocally true. Along with all of the ridiculousness I’ve been writing about, there has been unbelievable coincidences, serendipities, and synchronicities so with no question in my mind, I know I am doing what I should be doing. So during those days where I’ve stubbed my toe three times, hit my head on something giving myself a concussion, my fibromyalgia is excruciating, I just dropped and broke a plate because I have no feeling in some of my fingers and for every jump ahead I have Mount Everest to climb I often ask myself why am I the universe’s cruel joke. And then, when I’ve cleared my head a bit, the answer I know to be true comes to me.
I’ve come to believe in Karma and I must have a barge-load. But more importantly, there’s several lessons in all of the craziness, tough lessons that are not easily understood and hard to fully integrate, that continue to drive their meaning home to me. When I was reading Daniel Pinchbeck’s “2012,” there was something amusingly I could relate how these teachings and lessons get transmitted in my life. He referred to the Iboga Spirit as a harsh teacher, one that will never sugar coat anything and will call it how it is whether you like it or not. That’s pretty much how the universe has dealt with me over the years, but on some level, it’s best in the long run if you can cut the crap as it were and call a spade a spade. Hope and fear as the same emanations from our overactive egos, which delude our honesty, most importantly the honesty toward ourselves.
Life, for every creature, plant, great and small, is tough, hard, difficult and painful. I’m not saying at all that there is no sunshine after the rain, but when it comes right down to it, surviving, dealing with whatever each life has thrown at it, is not easy. Now if I were reading this the eternal optimist in my head would chirp something about how we’ve got to measure the good with the bad and when there’s love in the world all is not lost. Yes true, but that’s not what I’m talking about right now. Love, good times, laughter, everything that we refer to as “positive” are the glimmers, the brief glimpses of sacred space that we involve ourselves in. That isn’t the regular drudgery of life. While we continue to assign value systems to things, this is good, that is bad, that was negative, that was positive, we will continue to be affected by things and we will continue to suffer. We choose to look at something with rosie glasses and with a positive outlook. That’s not necessarily how they are. It is our choice to conceive of things in that manner, same with thinking of things negatively. Things are just the way they are and for the sake of this discussion, nature is nature and we are making the value judgment on it that at its very essence, it does not discriminate and things happen that are what we would consider cruel or unfair. Whether you’re a rabbit running for your life from a lynx, a tree growing in the rainforest, a bug on the leaf of that tree, a mom with depression with three crying children, a dad trying to provide for his family, or a plant growing towards the sunshine, it’s tough.
I was at a meditation retreat where there was someone there with a condition that had landed him in a wheelchair. He made the comment that it’s easy for me since I’m young and healthy. I didn’t want to get into how the only truth about that statement was that I was young. It made me think though, how all of us assume things about people when we have no idea what their story is, and everyone has a story. We are so quick to make judgment when we don’t know what someone else is going through. The only thing that we really should do is give our fellow humanity the space they need, give their suffering space, and maybe we can learn something from them rather than assume we already know.
That space is also called compassion. As if I wasn’t sensitive and open enough (which clearly I wasn’t and still am not, according to whoever is driving this thing), my own trials and tribulations have taught me to feel great compassion for everyone and everything, whether it be the angry woman at the grocery store who probably just had a horrible day to the parrot in the pet store that has been there for over a year, watching potential friends come and go never really being allowed to spread her wings. Compassion is putting yourself in someone’s shoes. It’s the age old expression, “Well, how would you feel if I did that to you?” It’s the golden rule. It’s feeling as though that were you in the tiny cage at the pet store, or you who had a horrible day, and then allowing it and understanding it.
The step 2 part of all of this is non-attachment. When that woman yells at you in the grocery store to hurry up, our instinct is to think, wow what a bitch and then our feelings are hurt for awhile. So we feel compassion for her plight, but she’s still a bitch, right? Nope. Our feelings are hurt because we are attached to that instance, attached to our pride and dignity that we feel were just wounded unfairly, attached to the idea of “fair,” and attached to the idea of “right.” For me personally, sometimes I wonder if I just learned not to be attached to the pain, not to be attached to “me” so much, it all would just get better. All I know, is that when I first came across non-attachment in a book years ago I thought, sure that’s easy, “look, I’m not attached to______.” It’s a lot harder in practice than it seemed at the time.
I was speaking to a friend of mine and it hit me like a ton of bricks. It was a spectacular “ah-ha” moment in realization, so bear with me as I go over this. After many years of Shambhala Buddhist readings, trainings and meditations, I’ve come to understand that one of the most important lesson the entire thing has to offer is what it means to be a warrior in the world. To be a warrior, one must be open-hearted, to taste the bittersweet of life, the joy and pain of every living thing, to feel the burning compassion for all of our fellow beings, to be overcome with love and sadness so fully and completely that is all that is left. It is living like that everyday. All the time. It is from this space you feel non-attached to whatever is going on. You feel like it was you experiencing it authentically in the first place, but because of your openness, you can let it pass through you and let it go (that’s the tough part). Non-attachment, therefore, does not mean “no feelings.” Quite the opposite, I think. If true compassion comes from experiencing someone else’s pain, you couldn’t possibly have true compassion if you didn’t feel any emotions at all.
We can suffer in vain or we can learn from our experience. See it as an opportunity to understand what others go through, to feel compassion in its full extent, to know life through good times and bad, giving you the singular opportunity to experience both. Like a shaman’s trials in the land of the otherworld, like the yogi’s acetic self-inflictions, like the monks years of self ascribed solitude, perhaps this is the way the universe is teaching us, forcing us to see, to experience existence in all of it’s pain and all of it’s glory. To live and embody to dualities of Being, the dark and the light, the death and the birth, the extremes of both ends o the spectrum. I’ve had this strange sense ever since I was much younger that somehow the Energies were creating problems for me so that I would learn not just to lie with them, but that I may overcome them one day. There are lessons every day of our lives that we can either let pass us by or we can see them for what they are and learn from them. The cosmic intelligence that we participate in is not sympathetic to the whimpers of our defiant Ego. A stern teacher, the ground of Being calls to our higher selves when it’s time to wake up, no matter how strong of a hold our Karma and Ego have upon us. Perhaps our physical maladies are the tangible result of this dualistic existence, something within us not at total harmony as one aspect of our selves wants to run in the fields of higher consciousness but has not yet truly assimilated in order to do so.