The Church of Hard Knocks

This post was written in December 2009, when I was spending a month staying at a Buddhist monastery near Sydney, Australia.

13 December

I’ve been reading a book by Petrea King called ‘Sometimes Hearts Have to Break.’ Petrea is a well known Australian healer and counsellor who’s worked for years with people who have life-threatening conditions. In her book, Petrea tells her own story of recovery from leukemia, and the stories of some of her clients.

One of the stories was of a young, newly married couple who were members of a type of Christian Church where illness was believed to be caused by lack of faith.  Getting any treatment or using pain-relief to deal with an illness was seen as mere pandering to the devil; the person had to heal through faith alone.  If they didn’t heal, it was because their faith wasn’t strong enough.

Tough stuff – but could see how I run a particular branch of this church in my mind.  I have a strong belief that my illness was caused by something I did wrong.  This is how the thought pattern runs in my head: I’ve been kicked out into the wilderness of pain and illness by some spiritual or ethical flaw, and my task is to work as hard as I can to fix myself and be allowed back into the land of the well. These beliefs run very deep and are hard to see – and when I do see them they’re difficult to deal with.

In Petrea King’s story about her clients, the husband had been diagnosed with bowel cancer 6 months previously.  He’d had no treatment, and no pain relief.  Now, he was dying, and as well as having to deal with an early and difficult death, he felt an enormous sense of failure because his faith obviously wasn’t strong enough to save him. Petrea counselled the young couple and talked to them about the idea of a loving, compassionate, caring God – not just the judgemental God of the Old Testament. The man died the day after he saw Petrea – with less physical pain (because he accepted morphine), but also, with some freedom from the terrible burden of self-blame that he’d carried.

Here’s what Petrea wrote after telling his story:

‘Many people fall into the trap of trying to earn their recovery, believing if they only find the right combination of therapies they will be able to undo the cause of their disease.  This thinking is quite popular in our society at present and the worst misunderstanding of this philosophy is that we create our illnesses in order to learn some spiritual lesson from them....
This is a complex area and is often grossly simplified by proponents of this philosophy.  It can serve as a terrible judgement and certainly doesn’t facilitate the experience of deeply joining together in our humanity. There is often a hidden agenda which says, ‘If you eat the right foods, forgive the past, meditate for hours a day, drink your vegetable juices, take your vitamins, and only focus on the ‘positive’ , then you might not die of your disease.’

 It seems natural that we all search for certainties when the only constant in our world is change. Impermanence is scary. I can see that my mind struggles constantly to find reasons for things I can’t explain – why am I sick? Why are some babies born with AIDS? How can thousands of lives be snuffed out in a tsunami?

Sometimes this immense and incomprehensible suffering leads us to develop systems of judgement and blame – just so we can feel some small sense of control.  We can use these systems to assure ourselves that we can find a way out of our own pain (if we just meditate long enough/eat raw foods/buy enough crystals/fix our flaws). We can also use these systems to reassure ourselves that the terrible pain that’s happening to someone else won’t happen to us (she got cancer because she repressed her anger – but that won’t happen to me!)

 I can see the system of blame I’m running in my own mind, but I can’t change it. A constant thought stream buzzes through my head- if I just work harder at meditation, if I could just relax more, if I could just be more peaceful/less angry/more open-hearted – then I’d get well. Those demanding and critical thoughts run deep, and fighting them just seems to leave me more exhausted and entrenched in blame. I’m trying to close down the church branch in my mind – but it just doesn’t want to go! I try to remind myself that just witnessing it, just being aware of its existance, is an important first step.

Holes...and Half-holes

In my last post  I wrote about my experiences seeing a holistic healer who turned out to be somewhat less than 'healing' for me.  The following is an excerpt from Stephen Levine's book Healing into Life and Death which I found enormously helpful and illuminating when I first read it.

In this excerpt Levine is writing about a friend of his, a doctor, who called himself a 'Holistic Practitioner' - until he got cancer.  After his experience with cancer, the doctor started calling many of his colleagues offering holistic healing 'half-holes,' because of the partial truths they offered about the reasons why illness occurs, and how it is healed.

This is the doctor's story...

"I used to call myself a holistic practitioner, but I was not particularly whole myself...I was sort of trying to force myself to be whole with diets and workshops and stuff like that.  But I was doing it all in my head...Then when I got cancer, this idea that I had created my illness, that I had stressed myself into it, which I had previously taught so many clients, made me feel so helpless it almost killed me...I was doing everything I knew to get rid of it, but nothing worked.

I was in both private and group therapy.  I did assertiveness and anger-release workshops.  I was on a special diet.  And all of these treatments seemed to help a little - I mean, I wasn't quite as underground as I had been, but I was still dying. Then I saw the war.  All these concepts were making me hate myself and my cancer more.  I felt like such a hypocrite and a failure. 

But I saw all these ideas about being responsible for my sickness were just making me sick with anger and self-hatred.  I felt so helples; I was my own worst enemy and couldn't trust myself to heal.  I felt I was wrong-minded and wrong-hearted because I had caused it but couldn't cure it. My life was filled with tension and "doing it right"; I was only half-alive.

But then I saw the awfulness of how I was treating me, and I began sending love and forgiveness into my tumours, and after a few months they just seemed to dissolve.  It was learning to pay attention, to love and forgive.  I shopped thinking me and started being me. The cancer taught me what ten years of practice had never touched.  

It is hard to believe I was so superficial, so righteous, as to tell patients they had a choice to live or die and it was solely up to them. ...  But that cancer turned things all around.  It made my holism so much more whole. It has been seven years now since they told me I was going to die, but I am more alive now than I ever was. In fact, I think if it weren't for my cancer I wouldn't be alive today."

 One of the things I think this story illustrates, is how, if we're attracted towards the idea of using an illness, or other life difficulty, as a way of reaching more wholeness in our lives, then the ideas other people offer us can be useful - but may also be damaging.

For example, if someone tells you, 'you created your illness,' how does this make you feel inside?  Does it make you cringe inwardly and feel guilt or shame?  Or, does it open up new ways of seeing your illness and its causes, and how you can best deal with it?

For me, it's guilt and shame all the way!  It doesn't help me to be told I caused my illness - I just feel helpless and judged.  (My feeling is that it's empowering for the person saying it...but not quite so empowering to be on the receiving end.)

After my experiences with a few 'half-holes' (!) I am now very careful about whose opinions I listen to.  I steer away from writers like Louise L Hay - whose teachings I find simplistic - and tend towards Buddhist writers/teachers such as Tara Brach and Stephen Levine.  (I've listed my favorite books on the home page of this blog).

Like the doctor in Stephen Levine's story, I've had to go beyond the ideas and opinions of other people and really tread this path for myself.  I've had to really investigate my thoughts and feelings about my illness - to sit with how I feel when someone tells me 'you chose your illness,' and just allow myself to feel the shame or blame and see what lies underneath. I'm starting to learn to sit with each and every feeling I have about my illness, and just see where this sitting gets me.

What is important though, is that I have both awareness of my feelings, and compassion for them. The compassion is the most important part of the 'mix' for me.