How I Got Out of This Mess

The winter started mild; Christmas was green. I practised walking, first to the stop sign a few yards away, then to the stop sign at the other end of the block. By New Year’s Eve I could make it pretty much all the way around the block, slowly, with much trepidation. But mostly I sat in what came to be known as “my” chair, in the corner of the living room, where I listened to the gurgle of the fish tank and the rumble of the furnace below. A pile of books found their permanent home on the table next to me, and over the course of the winter I made my way through them.

Being of academic bent, searching for answers in books came naturally as a starting point for working through my crisis. I desperately wanted the incessant pain to end, and I looked for ways both to cope with it and, hopefully, to eliminate it altogether. I could not accept that chronic pain was my life sentence, although there were, and still are, many, many days when I felt like it would be. I read a lot about mind-body issues, meditation, stress-related illnesses, health, pain, back pain, spirituality, Buddhism, and mothering. I also read children’s books, specifically the Harry Potter novels and Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. The children’s books allowed me to begin my journey to the past; The Art of Happiness by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama in conversation with Dr. Howard Cutler, allowed me to learn how to live in the present.

I acted on every bit of knowledge I acquired, even when I knew that the things I had to do would perhaps temporarily intensify the pain. I forced myself to confront the pain, to experience it thoroughly, whether it was physical, emotional, or spiritual. I revisited parts of myself and my past that no-one who knows me now would guess lay dormant and heavy in my soul.

I started with meditation. Being forced to be physically inactive, and finding it painful to breathe, I had no choice but to sit still and pay attention to my breathing, shallow and labored as it was at the beginning. Focusing on the breath is of course the foundation of meditation; with guidance from my books and a few excellent websites I gradually incorporated more formal meditation sessions into my daily routine. I also, on the advice of a friend, paid for a session on breathing and meditation with a yoga instructor at an Ayurvedic Holistic Centre.

Indeed, my first trip to the Centre foreshadowed in part the journey I would undergo through meditation. The small studio was located at the end of a strip mall behind a gas station, indistinguishable from the many other strip mall/gas station landmarks on any number of suburban thoroughfares. The strangest thing happened as I opened the door to the studio: the odor of incense, like Proust’s madeleine in Remembrance of Things Past, instantly and forcefully transported me back in time to various stages of my youth. Everything I had summarily rejected as part of growing up and moving on and just surviving was recalled through the scents of sandalwood and patchouli. I had so thoroughly cut myself off from these abandoned elements of my being that I found it painful to revisit them, like pangs in a phantom limb long ago amputated. I saw my father regularly taking me to cult-like gatherings of people to listen to lectures given by his spiritual leader, who always lit incense before his talk and kept it burning throughout. I saw my family doing yoga with private instructors, either in the living room of our rustic (read: filthy) wooden house in the country, or in the basement of my grandparents’ mansion in the Bridle Path area of Toronto. In both settings, the incense burned. I saw myself, the only one of my parents’ four children, accompanying them to a weekend meditation/spiritual retreat; I saw us all out for dinner at an Indian vegetarian restaurant we used to frequent; I saw my father and I years later at the same restaurant: always the incense, burning. These sudden apparitions from the distant past came to me in an instant through the wispy and ephemeral clouds of smoke. And ever-present in these smoky strands of the past was my father, who had died six years before. My father, the one who loved me, but also the one I had been most angry at. I realized that in my anger, I had thrown the proverbial–but also literal!–baby out with the bathwater: as I approached adulthood, in my attempt to fit in, to appear “normal,” to escape my difficult childhood, I had rejected everything alternative, Eastern, and non-conformist about my upbringing, and in so doing I had lost not only some vital tools for coping with life, but also an integral part of my childhood self.

My continuing forays into meditation uncovered other long-buried memories from my youth, most of which were shrouded in negativity and despair, loss and grief. Through meditation, the shroud was gradually lifted, the despair transformed into reconciliation and hope.

In the early months, I observed during my meditation sessions a fascinating progression: one day, as I sat down to meditate (by then I was able to sit on the floor with my back against my bed for support), I saw myself in a dark room with thick, high, stone walls, essentially a tall tower. There were windows near the tops of the walls, through which I could see blue skies and clouds passing. In the room was a large, soft, warm bed with many layers of warm blankets, a roaring fire, and a bubbling hot tub. I was alone in the tower, kept warm and comfortable and protected by the fire, hot tub, and impenetrable tower walls. (The emphasis on warmth is important here, because in reality I was so cold that winter that I could never get warm enough. I felt cold drafts everywhere, and no matter how many sweaters I wore I could not get comfortable.) In my mind, I went somewhere as warm and protected and interior as possible, both to protect myself from the cold but also, and probably more importantly, because that’s where I was residing, the I that had been hidden for so many years, protected but isolated in the prison I had hidden myself away in.

Slowly, over several weeks and months, the images that came to me during meditation started to change. I observed these changes, but did nothing to control or direct my mind. Gradually, the room I was in got bigger, so that the hot tub and the fireplace were somewhat separated. Slowly, the bed became a comfortable couch. The stone floor was replaced by wood, the high walls by big glass windows. Eventually I was able to see a lake and some mountains through the windows. As winter turned to spring, the countryside in my mind came to life: a stream fed the lake, animals appeared, snow melted, buds opened, and, months later in my mind, I was swimming in the lake with my children and grandchildren (who aren’t even born yet!). Swimming. At a time when in real life I couldn’t raise my arm to shoulder level without setting off debilitating spasms across my upper back.

There was, in fact, a country house in my past—the house my parents had moved us to when I was 14. I feel about that house the way that Forrest Gump’s girlfriend felt about her house in the movie. But the truth is, as much as I resented being forced to move to the country against my will, overnight, without ever having a chance to say good-bye to my friends, my home, my life, and as much as I remember with bitterness and pain the way I spent my formative teenage years there, there were things I enjoyed about living in the country. The country setting itself often provided consolation. I remember, for example, swimming in the lake with my brother during the long summer months, swimming to the raft in the middle of the lake, the raft with the high wooden diving board. I remember us taking turns jumping off the diving board in the hot bright sun, seeing if we could touch the murky mucky bottom of the lake, swimming back up, up, up towards the light and the air, over and over and over, our bodies fit and tanned and whole. We would take the pedal boat around the lake, our basset hound between us, looking over the front of the boat, a drooly long-eared figurehead. When we got hungry we would go in to devour a basket of fresh farm peaches, followed by a tub of Laura Secord ice cream, then jump right back into the lake to wash off all the stickiness. We played boggle until late at night, then slept, deeply and fully. Now the house is gone the lake is gone the boats gone and our dear dogs deceased. Even peaches don’t taste as good today. I haven’t seen my brother in close to 10 years. But I have those memories, memories I had buried under the bitterness and anger and hatred of much else that went on in that house. It was time to reclaim those memories, to hold them close, and to let the other, less happy ones go.

One meditation exercise that I learned from the Ayurvedic Centre involved scanning the chakras, starting from the lowest one and ending with the head chakra. Each one seemed to hold such a plenitude of emotion and feeling. The heart chakra, for instance, made me weep with vulnerability for everyone I loved, everyone I was terrified of losing: my husband, my kids. In my throat I felt so much grief for all that I had already lost. But on my head, I felt my parents’ hands, blessing me at Passover, smiling with love. This chakra was my mirror of Erised, in which I saw what I most deeply desired but could never again have: parents whose eyes glowed with love, protecting their child and blessing her. These memories reminded me that not all of the past was disappointing; at the same time they brought me closer to the absence that is now here.

That opening to my past was the beginning of a reconciliation that continued for the duration of my healing. Everything that I had buried, that I had run from, that I had tried so avidly to forget found a conduit to the present, and I could begin the process of forgiving, of putting back together the fragments of my self, of becoming whole.

While meditation was important for unlocking the past and opening the doors of the prison I had kept myself in for so long, equally important to helping myself out of that prison was music. Music has always been an integral part of my life: I have played piano since I was four years old. But, strangely, for many, many years I had been almost unable to play piano at all, and hardly even listened to music unless I had to. I had forgotten all the music I used to know and although I had made several attempts to pick it up again, my efforts were rarely satisfying. One day, and a miserable day it was, a student sent home a CD for me to listen to. Many of the songs I didn’t know, but some I did. One of these songs was “Fire and Rain” by James Taylor. The student must have chosen it because of the line, “My body’s aching and my time is at hand,” a line which did in fact resonate, as did much of the rest of the song, dealing as does with loss and recovery. What hit hardest however came after I had listened to it. I sat at the piano and picked out the chords, and sang along. And all of a sudden I saw her, the little girl locked away for so many years, that girl who used to spend endless hours on a piano bench picking out songs and singing them and even sometimes writing them. That girl who, bit by bit, was covered up by adulthood, by practicing the classical repertoire 8 hours a day, by being praised for performing, not enjoying, by learning that only hard work, not fun and ease, was what counted. The girl blinked in the daylight, starving and pale, looking around to see who she recognized. It was overwhelming to see her again. And most overwhelming was the realization that although the people closest to me had abandoned me, often inadvertently, at various points along the way, the most important person who had abandoned me was me. I knew I couldn’t do anything to bring back those people who had been unable to care for me for one reason or another when I was younger, but I could certainly choose to honor that part of myself that had been buried away for so long, presumably safe from the potential infliction of pain, but also buried alive, craving connection, sunshine, and caretaking.

Music was my father’s most precious gift to me–music and books and critical thinking. Again I realized to what extent I had rejected the whole package, out of anger, rather than picking and choosing the things that would help me through life, and discarding the bad stuff. Thank you, Dad.

By coming to terms with the past through meditation, music, and being forced to confront an all-encompassing, never-ending pain, I was somehow able to lay that past to rest, to accept it for what it was: by no means horrific, but nevertheless filled with a unique mélange of bizarre difficulties. In letting go of the past I felt less of a constant need to flee the present and fear the future. I have developed an imperfect equanimity. I know who I was, what happened and who I am.

Healing continues to take place at a rate comparable only to the incremental edging of the profoundly frozen Canadian winter towards miraculous spring: it is so slow and variable as to be hardly observable. Yet, just as springtime inevitably does come, in its own way, at its own pace, I know, I try to have faith that healing will continue to take place, that eventually the pain will finally dissipate. Despite the possibility of snow in May and semi-frigid temperatures in June, the flowers continue to bloom, the ice melts, and leaves always reappear on the trees.

Despite the profound impact that the simple teachings of the Dalai Lama had on my life, and despite my Eastern-tinted upbringing, I don’t identify myself as a Buddhist: I don’t feel the need. What I have learned doesn’t feel so much like religious transformation, but rather good, common, practical sense for living my life. Nevertheless, I can say that I did undergo a spiritual rebirth, and for that I am filled with a gratitude that encompasses, as it must, both joy and sorrow; hopefully one day it will transcend both. The late Jeff Buckley (paraphrasing Leonard Cohen) said it best:

It’s not a cry that you hear at night
It’s not somebody who’s seen the light
It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.

Amen.