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.  

The voices in my head

Today is a bad day.  My adrenals were overactive during the night and I woke twice in the middle of a nightmare, with my heart pounding in my chest. Now, I'm exhausted, and as a result the skin around my eyes feels stretched and painful.

As I write, I'm noting the voices in my head that respond to what I'm doing; writing about my pain.

'Don't complain,' they say. "This is boring...who would want to read this?...heaps of people are sick, you're not the only one...you don't want to be one of those boorish wingers do you?...'

A few years ago, when I started to do some of Stephen Levine's pain meditations I noticed that any time I so much as approached the areas where I felt exhaustion, pain, or discomfort, these voices would appear.  It has been interesting to observe them - their tone, their level of emotion, and whether they appear to be just a general voice, or the voice of someone specific.

What I started to notice is that the voice was often that of one person, a man, who, when I first got sick around a decade ago, I went to see as a 'healer'.  He used a combination of techniques - everything from meditation and reflexology to Neuro Linguistic Programing.

Unfortunately, instead of an improvement in my health, or any type of healing whatsoever, I walked away from this man with the idea that my illness was my fault, and there was something very wrong with me that I had to fix up in order to heal it.  One of the things he said constantly, as he was encouraging me to visualise being well, was "don't focus on the pain, you just need to walk through it, push through it to the other side."

Now, when I approach my pain in meditation what I hear is his voice, saying, "What are you doing focusing on pain?  This is just weakness...you'll be sick forever if you dwell on this. You're just acting the victim, you're weak." All I can do in reaction is to let this voice be -  to note it, to feel the panicky sensation behind it, and the doubt and self-blame wrapped up in it.

Over time, hearing this voice has become a symbol for me; a  little signpost pops up in my mind that says, 'Keep going! You're on the right track!'  I think this is happening because know that if I rouse this voice, if I hear its insistent tones in my head, then I must be approaching what I am most afraid of, and what is most difficult for me - the minute by minute, present awareness of what is happening in my body right now. If this includes pain, then, unfortunately, that is what is happening.  I try to just allow any feelings to come up around the pain - bitterness, anger, annoyance, sadness, despair, self-blame - and let them all have their say.

In the background there is always the protesting voice of the 'healer' saying, "this is a waste of time, total indulgence!"  But increasingly, I can just feel the anxiety behind this voice, and let my fears be. Occasionally I have the image of the 'healer' standing in front of me, holding something that represents my life (usually just a vague shape) in his hands.  I reach out, take the shape back and firmly say, "This is my life, I gave it over to you, but, I'm having it back. It's mine, not yours."  Each time this image arises I feel like I've taken one small step forward to taking my life back, and making his voice just a fraction smaller in my mind.

In Stephen Levine's excellent book 'Healing into Life and Death' he has a wonderful section on how holistic healers can sometimes be as damaging as they are healing.  Reading this was profoundly important to me in trying to understand how hurt I had been by the man I went to see as a 'healer.'  I felt like I wasn't the only one that had been affected in this way, and this helped to take a lot of my self-blame away.  In my next post I'll type out this section.