Ileus

It began on Saturday.  I got up at my usual 5:30 a.m., had coffee and a banana then headed to Peggy's 8:00 a.m. yoga class.  I packed my usual breakfast to eat after class, meeting up with my friend and house guest Daryl, who taught some five or six asanas during the 8:00 a.m. Saturday class.  We walked over to Starbucks where I bought some organic milk to add to my dry cereal concoction I eat most mornings along with a couple of small oranges.  I indulged and had a third cup of coffee for the day.  After a leisurely breakfast, we met at Peggy's home studio as volunteer students for Thecla who is going up for assessment soon.  At 1:00 p.m. I headed home, becoming more aware that something was not at all right with my upper abdominal regional.  It felt unusually full, even though I had eaten nothing unusual much less over indulged in anything (except the extra cup of coffee, which wasn't really that unusual).  By the time I got home my pain was increasing, slowly but surely.  I looked in the mirror and could see that my stomach was greatly distended.  I had a light lunch then decided to rest.  When I got up a short while later my stomach pain had increased dramatically.  I did some research on the internet on bloating, distension, constipation, blockage.  Apparently people experience these things all the time.   Just give it some time.  Stay calm.  Eat lightly.  Drink lots of water.  By early evening my pain was becoming unbearable, and by bedtime I could barely stand up straight.  Bent over in pain, I fell on to my bed and realized I was at the point where I was pretty close to not being able to function.  I felt I might throw up.  With help, I reached my doctor and he suggested I get myself to the nearest emergency room, which I did.  By the time I got there the pain was pretty disabling and my thinking was clouded.  I was quickly assessed and given a powerful narcotic, intravenously, which helped but also made me extremely drowsy.  I was given a cat scan and was told there was blockage and that surgery was a real possibility.  They booked me a room in the hospital and said they would talk with me the following morning.  The doctor told me I had ileus--a non mechanical blockage of the upper or lower abdomen.  Basically, paralysis sets in and nothing moves, at all.  There are a multitude of reasons this can happen.  He said he would order up some medication that would totally wash out my system.  Since I've had several colonoscopies I am familiar with this process of quick cleansing.  I drank the bottle of medication and nothing happened.  The nursing staff was small, only two people and the hospital wing was essentially deserted.  The narcotic, which had been administered a couple of more times kept me deeply drowsy.  I decided to get up and walk the halls pulling along my IV stand.  My stomach still hurt but had lessened.  After about 4 hours with no cleansing taking place whatsoever, I asked what was going on.  Could they give me something else or more of the same.  No one seemed to know what they were doing.  No doctors around.  I had a splitting headache and had asked three time for something for that and got nothing. I finally decided I was simply going to check myself out of that place and go home, which I did, after signing a statement that I was leaving without medical authorization.  I got home and felt better.  I'm still not back to normal, but my research has helped.  I called my gastroenterologist and he is going to get the cat scan results and give me a call back, hopefully tomorrow, and we will take it from there. One never knows when the strangest of things may suddenly happen. 

It is now four days later and I'm doing much better but still weak.  Nearly all the pain has gone as well as the distension.  I have thoroughly flushed my system and everything seems to be working again.  My gastroenterologist cannot see me for 2 months, so he must not think there is much to worry about.  I'm going to do a spring cleanse, in all probability I will use the one from Peggy's book.  Each time I've done a cleanse I feel so revitalized and refreshed.  I'd like to start now, but by the time I gather up everything I need it will be time to depart for Dallas, which is followed very soon thereafter by another workshop. 

I am diving into Light on Pranayama by B.K.S. Iyengar.  I feel inspired.  There are times when I forget that in many ways life hangs by a fragile thread--even a breath--and there are countless obstacles and mysteries we will encounter whose meaning we may never understand.  Just knowing that, is, in itself, understanding.  For whatever reasons, aspects of ourselves may become stuck, or paralyzed, but we must keep moving even deeper into those places where we get stuck, literally and figuratively. 
 

Trusting the Power of Our Hard Earned Truths

Today is one of those days when I feel the deepest possible sense of gratitude for my life--my wonderful long time partner, his family which consists of his brother, his nephew and his wife and their two daughters.  My small circle of friends composed of people that are kind, gentle, loving, and working hard at facing life with as much guidance, courage, discernment, and wonder that they can muster, day by day.  My yoga community.  What can I say?  They are a huge part of my life, of who I am, who I want to be.  They are a diverse crew of sadhakas (aspirants).  I cannot imagine a more wondrous group of people to associate with.  So many of us are traveling on the same road, reaching out for similar goals, doing our best to be real and authentic, working hard at finding answers.  We are students of life with voracious appetites.  We want to do and be our very best to ourselves and to others, we want to always be evolving and growing in ways that are of as much benefit to ourselves and others as we are capable of.  We try to live from the center of our hearts.  I am so often in awe at the accomplishments I regularly witness, the wisdom I see imparted and shared, the courage to move into those places of vulnerability for the sake of growth and learning.   It is truly amazing and I am wonder struck.

The protagonist in Wally Lamb's novel "I Know This Much is True," has a recurring fantasy that begins in his early childhood and continues throughout his adulthood.  Because he doesn't know who his real father is, and his mother takes this secret to her grave with little to no chance he will ever find out, he fills this void imagining who his father might be--his stepfather, the priest, the neighbor next door, a long lost uncle, a school teacher, possibly even his own grandfather.  Although the main character, Domenick, does have a step-father who is present throughout most of his life, including his childhood, there is much lacking in the father to son relationship in terms of love, nurturing, caring, understanding.  The step-father is quite the brute and makes life, at times, a living hell.  All of this got me thinking about a recurring fantasy I've had for much of my life, since earliest childhood.  It is a fantasy that serves to fill a void, to compensate for those wants and needs and desires that didn't get met when, ideally, they should have.  There can be within us a deep longing that we may not fully understand, and during reveries or certain quiet moments (or even chaotic ones) we give free reign to our imaginations to help us feed this desire within us, this craving inside that just won't go away.  But I think such fantasies tell us more about ourselves and who we are than we may realize,  perhaps not a lot different from the way our subconscious mind integrates, assimilates, and resolves  the conflicts, confusions, and paradoxes of daily life through the dreaming process.   Granted, much of this is mind chatter and doesn't accomplish much at all unless we pay close attention and study ourselves astutely.  My recurring fantasy was composed of several aspects:  I wanted to be rich, I wanted a horse, and I wanted a brother.  These fantasies filled my voids, my places of emptiness, my places of deep inner longing.  I think I created these myths because I was an extremely withdrawn, lonely child.  I'm not sure why, but I hated being lower middle class and thought that if I had been born into a wealthy family things would be perfect.  I now know that is definitely not true.  When I was a teenager I got a horse from my step-father who let me keep him for a 2 year period before he was taken away.  I still love horses but something within was deeply satisfied in having that relationship with that horse.  My half-brother was born when I was 16 years old.  I changed his diapers, spent a great of time with him, worked especially hard at giving him plenty of space to talk when an early sign of stuttering first appeared, then subsequently disappeared.  I have many fond memories of him.  I was out living on my own by the time he started first grade so I was absent for much of his formative years.  I know things were very difficult for him.  For the past couple of decades or so, my relationship with my brother has been strained and constricted, and seems only to grow worse.  He is an angry man, filled with bitterness and resentment, he is mean-spirited and downright hateful and sarcastic to me nearly every time I have an encounter with him.  His anger is never based on anything that I can identify as being remotely real or germane to the situation at hand, but rather the residual pain of countless issues he has never faced or dealt with in a healthy, productive manner.  Out of the blue, it seems, I'll get a call from him and the next thing I know he is ranting and raving about something he thinks I've done that he finds deeply offensive which I can only attribute to a paranoid mind that I simply cannot identify with.  By the time he gets finished, I feel as though someone has shot me with a gun.  Verbal attacks can really cut to the quick when they come from someone you are related to, someone who is a member of your family, the brother I always wanted and longed for.  I find myself pulling on every fiber of my being to stay calm, to stay non-reactive, to try to bring the conversation back to the "business at hand".  It is extraordinarily disruptive and hurtful.  I am left feeling stunned.  Where does this nonsensical hostility come from?  It is very sad to witness such anger, such bitterness, such combativeness--and it is aimed at me just as surely as one would aim a gun at someone to shoot them dead.  Yes, it is pretty scary.  It certainly lets me know that I have work to do in learning to not let such confrontations linger too long with me, and I need to learn to not replay them over and over in my mind.  What does work is this:  listen to my heart and know what is truth and what is not.  Be compassionate and understanding.  Stand my ground and put into practice everything I have learned about assertiveness, appropriateness, truthfulness.  It is very difficult.  My heart races and the retaliatory impulse wants to rear up and strike back, but I do not allow that.  Everything I have ever learned tells me that not only does my brother's behavior have nothing to do with me, but I am helpless to do anything about it.  Life can be messy, and we are asked over and over again to deal with it, like it or not. 

In "I Know This Much is True," the protagonist has a twin brother who suffers from disabling schizophrenia and for much of his life Domenick feels the need to take care of his deeply troubled brother.  In the end, there is really nothing he can do to change his brother.  In some ways his twin is another aspect of himself and he is forced to deal with some of life's most difficult issues.  I understand this.   

It is now time for me to allow my reactive anger to dissipate, to acknowledge all my emotional responses, feel them, and let them pass.  Sometimes letting go is the hardest thing to do, but also the thing that serves us best.   

Diving and Breathing Into Darkness

I had a dream that left an imprint I cannot readily get out of my mind.  Another imprint I can't seem to get away from (a good thing) is something Anne said to me, albeit indirectly:  "I find it interesting when I observe people being dismissive of their gifts."  The reason this resonates so loudly with me is because of the truth in it, because I am dismissive of my gifts on many levels.  That's a pretty profound realization.  In fact, it stops me dead and breathless in my tracks.  This is something to ponder long and hard.  In the dream one of my cats, Misty, jumped into a quiet, still lake and swam to shore.  In the dream I was both disturbed and fascinated as I watched her struggling to reach the shore, which she did, none the worse for wear.  For some reason I felt inclined to do the same, so I dived deep into the dark stillness of the water and discovered I had gone so deep that I couldn't reach the surface in time to catch a breath of oxygen, and I gasped for breath deeply while underwater and came to wakefulness.

Misty sleeps with me most nights.  She showed up one day a couple of years ago and I started feeding her.  She was meaner than hell.  In spite of feeding her and attempting to pet her, she scratched me viciously on several occasions, sometimes unprovoked when I would simply walk past her.  These bloody scratches fascinated me and scared me.  Clearly she had been abused by someone.  She was not wild.  In fact when I took her to the vet to get fixed, that had already been done.  Since then she has undergone a profound transformation because I have loved her, been gentle with her, never chastising her for her viciousness to me or the other cats.  I can tell that she simply cannot help herself.  The look in her eyes is one of terror when she strikes out.  She clearly expects retaliation, but doesn't receive it.  She never does that anymore.  She purrs contentedly and craves affection.  She is gentle and loving and gets along well now with the other cats.  She is still fiercely independent, she is still Misty, but the transformation has been miraculous.

In the dream, before diving into the water, I saw a school of eels swimming many feet below the surface.  They are slippery creatures, phallic, powerful, elusive. 

Spiritual, baptismal purification, diving deep into still waters is but one metaphor one encounters on the path to self-discovery.  We dive deep.  We have both feminine (cat)  and masculine (eel) energies at work, both at the surface and at deeper levels, skin to bone, outer to inner, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes not.  Taking the plunge and striving to reach the shore of Self.  There is an expansive emptiness that can be found right behind the heart.  Some consider this the seat of the soul, or true intelligence.   In pranayama practice Patricia encouraged us to go there, to breathe deeply into that empty space behind the heart where our deeper, truer selves reside.  Going through the sheaths, diving deep, breathing deeply and slowly, stopping the thoughts, discovering that there is so much more to who we are, more than our thinking mind.  Our breath can take us there, but it cannot be rushed.  It is all slow.  It is most sacred.  When we dismiss our gifts, our discoveries, our evolution, we are slapping ourselves with a denial of truth.  There is balance in all things.  There are moments of intense realization.  There can be gasping but that is part of the journey.  I bow to all the women and men in my life who have been such Teachers to me.  I bow to that in me that gives nurturing love to others, unconditionally, whether it be a person, myself,  or a stray cat that I adopt and love with all my heart.  It doesn't matter why I can do padmasana, it is an easy pose for me, just as importantly, it doesn't matter than I cannot do Hanumanasna.  But I will keep trying and I will keep diving into the emptiness in search of meaning, and I will keep trying, I pray, to reach the shore, to never stop diving, swimming and moving into those unknown places of such rich, fertile energy and discovery.