The Courage of Acceptance

Life inevitably brings us pain -- physical and mental illnesses,  accidents, the "acts of God" noted in our insurance policies -- that we have neither chosen nor wanted. We have no control over the fact of these kinds of events and realities in our lives.

But we're not out of control over how we react to, how we handle life's inevitable pain. Here is where choice begins: when we have gone through and can get beyond our very natural inclination to deny or be angry or give up. Elizabeth Kubler Ross's  On Death and Dying made way for revolutionary and still fresh understanding of how humans handle grief. Her writings have been instrumental in teaching me how to understand, accept and deal with the emotions that come with having chronic migraine pain. (You can read my posts about this, here, here, and here.)

Compassionate understanding and acceptance of our own initial, grieving reaction help get us to a point of energy from which we can make constructive choices about how we deal with the situation.

A person dear to me who suffers from depression recently told me that mornings are his worst times. He'd spent hours after awakening, unable to move under the great weight holding him down. He was

Photo by William Marsh

regularly late to work and losing motivation. One morning he realized if he decided to do one thing -- like feeding the cat or vacuuming the floor -- and made himself get up to do it without planning for or looking beyond that one activity, he could get out of the bed. Getting the one thing done encouraged him to decide on the next thing. One thing at a time, one step at a time, he has chosen a way to combat the depression that could be crippling him.

I imagine his inner monologue on that morning he made a change might have gone something like this: Ok, I'm depressed again. Yet another morning of pain and paralysis. Am I going to lie here feeling sorry for myself? I gotta do something.

And he gets up to vacuum the floor. Seems small, doesn't it? Insignificant, the mundane stuff of an uninteresting life. Yet I believe the creative and constructive actions we take in the face of great pain are the essence of courage, of hope, of believing in the light even while enveloped in the dark.

And it starts with something simple like, ok, I'm depressed again. Acceptance.


Thank you for reading my blog. You can comment below or email me at carold.marsh@gmail.com.

Acceptance Opens the Way for Creativity

In a post a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the Khalil Gibran verse that has meant so much to me over the years.

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was
oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

Gibran accepts that sorrow will carve into our being. He wastes no time reasoning or divining why. Before I go on about creativity and acceptance, I want to clarify one thing. I think Gibran is speaking about the inevitable pain -- death, physical illness, mental illness -- things we have no control over. But there are things we do have control over. We make bad choices, we say mean things, we hurt others, we indulge our addictions to the detriment of relationship and health. 

In other words, the sorrows and pain of life come inevitably and by our own choice. I think it's important to make the distinction, to understand that there are some painful matters we cause. It's essential to our mental and spiritual maturity to take responsibility in these cases.

Photo by William Marsh

So where is the creativity in acceptance? For the inevitable hurt of life, acceptance opens the door to creativity by not allowing us to wallow in anger and self-pity and denial -- those things that can either paralyze us or drive us into unthinking action. The peace of acceptance makes more possible the constructive action that arises from reflection.

More about this in my next post.




Thank you for reading my blog. You can leave a comment below, or email me at carold.marsh@gmailcom.

Reading Mariechild Together: Part II -- In Union We Cannot Harm

"The feminine energy, Buffalo Woman's energy, is very strong in many of our hearts at this time. Buffalo Woman is willing to shine out through each of us who quiet ourselves and call."  Brooke Medicine Eagle

In my previous post I wrote about this feminine energy in relation to how we live in this world. Today I want to talk about Buffalo Woman energy as it might relate to living with chronic pain.

Brooke Medicine Eagle says that this energy will shine out when we "quiet ourselves and call."

One of the most effective pain management techniques I know is meditation: quieting myself in body and mind and spirit, then allowing the vastness of life to dwarf the pain into perspective. In the sense of the words above, I call into life beyond me, larger than me.

It's not a miracle cure: the pain does not go away. But the expansion of my spirit into a broader realm is both calming and energizing, accepting and creative. And it is joyous.

In other words, it's an awful lot like Buffalo Woman's energy as described by Diane Mariechild (Open Mind -- Women's Daily Inspirations for Becoming Mindful): "energetic, creative, caring connection with all of life." "We must go beyond ego to a more subtle state of consciousness, one of realization or communion with the circle of life."

What a lovely thought -- that in meditating to manage pain I am tapping into the Buffalo Woman's energy of creation, of nurture and transformation. It is, indeed, within me for I have been connecting without conscious knowing. I have been reveling in this feminine energy and can agree with Mariechild that in this connection with all of life, "we cannot harm."

We sometime feel alone and worse, irrelevant, in the life that is absorbed in managing chronic pain. Here is a healing reality that brings relevancy and even a peaceful urgency to our practice: when we quiet ourselves and call we become part of the connection of all of life; we bring the feminine energy of creativity and healing and nurture and strength into this fractured world.


I would love to hear from you. Please click on Comment, below, or email me at carold.marsh@gmail.com. Thank you.

Reading Mariechild Together: Two Expressing One

Years ago I realized that my life-long feminism was rooted in a deep sense not so much of the stereotyping of feminine/masculine roles but of the unfairness in the way the masculine was assumed to be more important, more worthy of praise, more relevant than the feminine. Even now, it is not gender roles that upset me, it is gender judgments biased quite negatively against those considered to be the feminine ones.

To me, the dichotomy -- seeing masculine and feminine as separate -- is made worse by the assumption that they are also unequal. And this is frightfully exacerbated in that it also opens the path to the violence perpetrated against women across the world: she is inferior, she is unworthy of my respect, therefore I/man need feel no compunction about brutalizing her.

I agree with Mariechild in today's reflection (from Open Mind -- Women's Daily Inspirations for Becoming Mindful) when she says,

"We have forced women and men into stereotyped roles, falsely assuming that only women can express the receptive and only men can express the creative. Yet these streams are manifestations of the one river of life, and exist together in both women and men."

And Tan Guangzhen, whose verse Mariechild quotes, promises that

"But the day you join them together to form the elixir,
You fall drunken into the jug yet have no need of support."

As with all stereotypes, the feminine/masculine one has basis in genetics and survival. I find it useless to pretend it does not or should not exist. I prefer to clearly see the stereotype without denying its reality so that I can join the dichotomized pair in openness of mind and heart. I don't deny that there are feminine roles and masculine roles; I long for them to be freed of judgment so that we can rejoice in the new life, the richer choices, given us by their joining.

For several years I have been living what might be considered a more "feminine" life. I am unable to work due to the chronic migraines. I stay quiet, alone; I take care of the household and our little dog; I cook and bake; I nurture relationships as much as I can through facebook, email, phone calls, and visits when the pain allows me. When I started school in August (at Goucher College, in their Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction program), I added to my life the more "masculine" pursuit of creativity and study.

I have said that I enjoy being productive, now that I am in school after two years of being unable to manage a job. And yet I know that my creative work is utterly dependent on my receptive work and that to judge myself as more worthy or more productive now that I am writing and studying is to disrespect these years of deepening spiritual growth, nurture of self and others, acceptance and equanimity.

With this realization, I can fall drunken into the jug.


I would love to hear from you. Please click on "Comment" below, or email me at carold.marsh@gmail.com.

Balancing Rest and Activity

Having chronic pain is fatiguing.  Physically, we are worn down by the pain whether or not we have been active.  And even that word, activity, is relative: if we have the kind of pain that is exacerbated by activity (usually the case for my migraines) then our idea of activity becomes pretty restricted.  Yet, as my Mom said when she had a bad case of Lyme Disease a few years ago, "You can't just lie around all the time."

Pain with inactivity is as debilitating emotionally and spiritually as it is physically.  I have felt the depression and feelings of "poor me" rise up almost automatically during a period - anywhere from two to seven days - of a migraine that won't go away, especially if I have succumbed to the pain and fatigue. 

But how do we balance the requirements of our pain - to rest, stay quiet and use our pain management skills in peace - with the requirements of physical, emotional and spiritual health?  For me, this has been a journey of discovery, of trial and error.

PHYSICAL ACTIVITY
During 2010, after I left my job at Miriam's House , I thought that lots and lots of rest was what I needed to encourage the migraines to subside, if not go completely away.  I did need a lot of rest - that was 17 years of a very difficult, although much-loved, job - but not for the migraines.  They continued as before.  The change I noticed was not in the migraines themselves but in my ability to manage the pain.  Better-rested (another relative phrase, as sleep interruption often accompanies pain) and able to take the time to experiment, I learned tools and skills in pain management, most of which I have shared in previous posts on this blog. 

I learned that when I am rested, I have more options for physical activity and health, such as a bit of gardening and walking my dog in the park.  And even though these activities often do make the pain worse, I have also learned that, for my emotional and spiritual health, it is often well to make the choice for a time of activity that may exacerbate the physical pain but is worth it in terms of the emotional benefits.

EMOTIONAL ACTIVITY
Chronic pain is isolating.  So often it just seems far too taxing to make that phone call, or check - let alone answer! - the emails, or write that post.  In order to hold the pain at bay, we choose not to reach out.  Yet friends, family and those warming, loving connections with others are major components of emotional health.  Although the temptation is to avoid these activities because they leave us even more fatigued and/or in greater pain, the fact is that developing a balanced way to include them in our lives will actually help the pain by improving our emotional health.

FINDING THE BALANCE
I think the trick is, for physical and emotional activity, to experiment and find our own balance.  For me, walking the dog and doing a load of wash may be all I can do before going back to the couch or bed for a 2-hour rest.  For you, getting up and going to the kitchen to sit at the table for breakfast may be the sum of your activities for the morning.  One phone call will leave me light-headed and needing to lie down; you might be able to talk for hours as long as you are resting as you do it.  And, goodness knows, these parameters can change day to day: yesterday's migraine that left me wrung out and weak may today feel like the same migraine, yet I am able to bake scones, put dinner in the crockpot and walk the dog without collapsing.

The key to balance is, for me, being gently understanding of the inexplicable ups and downs of life in chronic pain.  The less judging I do of myself and my abilities, the more I am able to try different tactics, not to mention to forgive myself with a wry grin when something I was sure I could handle turns out to be too much.

I think there are several benefits to this gentle understanding:

* When gentle understanding ("I thought I could handle this ... it's sad that I can't, but I'd better go rest.") replaces harsh judgment ("What an idiot I am ... why did I think I could do this?"), we are bringing into our hearts and spirits a spacious allowing that expands our creativity and our ability to love.

* With greater creativity that comes from allowing and understanding our limitations, we become able to develop pain management and life skills that enhance the quality of our lives.

* This spacious allowing pervades other aspects of our emotional and spiritual lives because the truth is that what makes us impatient and unforgiving of ourselves also makes us impatient and unforgiving of others.  This sort of healing begins in our own hearts toward ourselves.

For me, all of these things point toward greater spiritual health.  And that will be the subject of my next post.

I would love to hear from you.  Please use the Comment link below, or email me at carold.marsh@gmail.com.

Motivation for Change: Envision Another Way to Be

The 12-Step program calls it "sick and tired of being sick and tired."  Many recovering drug and alcohol addicts have told me that they could not make the choice for sobriety until things got so bad in their lives that they were motivated to change by their disgust with themselves or with how awful they felt.  This happens at a different point for everyone - your rock bottom may be my half-way down - but when you get there, you know it.

To me, part of the genius of the 12-Step program is how applicable it is to other situations in life aside from the alcohol (and then drugs) for which it was created.  There exist such programs now for codependence, anger, shopping, etc.  I used the 12-Step program to aid in my recovery from flaming codependence, and am now using its principles - along with other methods - to help me with my chronic pain.

Wait.  How does having chronic pain equate with being a drug addict or alcoholic?  How does living with three or four migraines per week remind me of codependence and the need for recovery? 

It's not so much about a one-to-one comparison between getting migraines and being codependent, it's about how the spirit of the 12-Steps helps me cope with a situation over which I feel powerless.  There are two main ways that this happens, one of which I have blogged about before (see Befriending Pain: Part 3, 21 September), and the second of which is the topic of this post.

ONE - It helps to bring me out of victim status.  TWO - It helps me envision another way to be.

ENVISIONING ANOTHER WAY TO BE

There are many ways to respond to chronic pain, and I have probably hit on all of them at one time or another: feeling victimized; depression; denial; pushing through until I am really sick; giving up and going to bed for a few days; pretending everything is all right; pretending everything is awful.  Bouncing around emotionally is not conducive to the inner peace that attracts me and that I desire for myself, so there came a time when I realized I was tired of the chaos I was either creating or allowing to happen inside me. 

I have called upon a variety of support systems such as faith, spirituality, yoga, accupuncture, medication, meditation, prayer and relaxation, many of which I have blogged about and each of which has helped me in its own way.  What makes the 12-Steps particularly relevant to this post is that from the peace that my spirituality, its practices, the accupuncture and yoga afforded me, the 12-Steps then allowed for the vision of another kind of change.

For chronic pain, that change has to do with leaving behind the emotional roller coaster (although I do think it necessary to take a few rides on it before being willing to change), claiming an inner peace that is wonderfully present whether one is in pain or having a good day, and learning to stop allowing one's own pain to cause pain to others (in the form of impatience and anger, emotions that are all too prevalent with chronic pain).

There is another benefit: a kind of constructive energy that helps me to learn how to use the resources I have in new ways.  For example, I cannot hold down a job, given the upredictable and debilitating nature of the migraines, but I can take a couple hours at a time to write a post or work on other writing.  Working only a couple of hours at a time might seem lame, or even giving up, but when the alternatives are pushing through until I am thoroughly sick or lying around until I am thoroughly depressed, a couple hours at a time is a wonderful solution.

So, I am helped to see the possibilities for not only coping with the pain in better ways and for building better relationships with others, but for a life that does encompass constructive work and accomplishment.  This is not about quantity at all, which, in a city that idolizes long, long work days and amount of power, is kind of a radical statement.  Which is another benefit of all this: I have learned that two hours of peacefully focused work is no poor substitute for 12-hour days: it is just right for me.