Interlude: On Grace and Grit

Last month I spoke at the Warriors of Hope AGM. It was an honour to speak to a group of (mostly) women who have fought their own battles with cancer — in addition to all the other challenges life throws at us humans. It was humbling to speak to a room full of brave and inspiring people. “Why me?” I asked the warrior friend who invited me and who had been a big help during my recovery from breast cancer. She said I embodied the values of the Warriors of Hope — camaraderie, commitment, courage, and compassion. I demonstrated true warrior spirit, she said. So I spoke to how adversity and mindfulness have worked together in my life to bring about those qualities.

Grace

Throughout my cancer journey, people remarked on how calm I was and the word grace was often used. I love that word, grace. I’m not Christian, but as I understand it, grace in that tradition means to empty yourself of all the obstacles to receiving God‘s love. God’s love gives one strength to face the vicissitudes of life and to have compassion. In the Buddhist tradition I find grace applies in a similar way because they teach about emptying oneself of three poisons: greed, hatred, and ignorance. To the degree that we eliminate those in our lives, our suffering lessens, we grasp the suffering of all beings, and we open to compassion for all of life. Grace allows us to greet the moment as it is without expectation or resistance, because we trust, we have faith. This might not make sense in our society where we learn to expect the best and resist the worst. There is a constant wishing for circumstances to be other than they are. But life is a roller coaster of ups and downs. Things never stay up as long as we wish they would. And the downtimes, even though they feel like they will last forever, inevitably pass. The trick is finding your balance.

A window opens

That was the challenge when I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 2003. I learned that my immune system was attacking healthy nerve tissue and leaving damage and inflammation that caused disability. My brain was going to lose control of my body. Things like wheelchairs, needles, and incontinence swirled in my head. I was 33, working in a stressful and demanding job at a magazine in Toronto, my boss was a tyrant, and city life, although interesting, was also very stressful. I was at odds with a lot of people. I was full of self-doubt, painfully shy, and constantly feeling overburdened. When I realized that the diagnosis was true, a lot of that blew apart. Over the next while I found myself forgiving people I had long resented. A little window opened onto how I caused myself a lot of suffering. Those around me were negatively affected by this energy so that harmful cycles often ensued and painful patterns were reinforced. It’s not reasonable to expect life to change or other people to change, but our relationship to them can change.

Mindfulness

When in 2010 the MS symptoms and general agitation were getting worse, I took a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction course. It was truly like music to my ears and transformed my life. Afterward I continued meditating regularly, attending meditation retreats, and exploring Buddhist teachings. I credit mindfulness with seeing that I was at war with life, stopping the war, and cultivating those qualities valued by the Warriors — qualities also valued in every spiritual tradition. With a mindful approach we begin to see things in a different way. We can feel less hard done by and more grateful. We can be an agent for peace and kindness. We can pause in any circumstance, take a breath, and gradually learn that there is greater power and freedom in being able to respond calmly and kindly, than there is in aversion, anger, and habitual reactivity. Usually we feel that we have so much personal stake in what is happening to us. We are blown around easily by what in Buddhism are known as the eight worldly winds: pleasure and pain, praise and blame, gain and loss, fame and disrepute. In my 30s, I was caught in all kinds of these whirlwinds, defensive, easily hurt, a people pleaser with poor boundaries. The MS diagnosis had shaken up this painful conditioning and mindfulness was helping me to see how that conditioning played out in my life. When we see the painful patterns, we can do something about them; also, we can’t unsee them and they start to change by themselves.

Dear friend and fellow artist, Kim Kitchen, designed this and other t-shirts for herself and companions on an artist residency adventure in Greece. I bought one from her and wore it at the art exhibition below. Witty and apropos!

In 2017 I was diagnosed with polymyalgia rheumatica, another autoimmune disease. I was prescribed prednisone for the pain and it worked, but didn’t get rid of joint stiffness. I couldn’t put my hands behind my back or get down on the floor to do yoga for almost four years. It really felt like it would last forever. Long-term use of prednisone brought additional challenges. By this time I had learned to learn from adversity: wherever we react, we are stuck in some kind of war. And if we never stop to look at the stuckness, we can be at war until we die. “Please, may I stop the war,” became my mantra for a while. 

I learned to soften and open, two qualities that have connotations of vulnerability and weakness. We are learning so much about trauma these days, and we know that feeling vulnerable is truly risky for some of us. If that speaks to any of you, seek help. I’ve met so many people who suffered deeply because of trauma even — and maybe especially — when it was buried or unacknowledged. Mindfulness can also help with trauma because it reveals how the mind works. How our thoughts, views, and judgments are the compilation, the conditioning, of a lifetime. The majority of our conditioning happens in childhood. Not to blame our past, but to recognize that many of those habits are still in play, they don’t work anymore, and rather keep us stuck in a painful cycle, hurting ourselves and others. This is true for any of us, whether we are successful or struggling. Softly opening to what is actually happening in the moment helps us see and acknowledge our particular set of conditions so that its hold on us is lessened. Then possibility can explode open for us because the conditioned mind is actually a realm of limits. Possibility, it turns out, is limitless.

What grace really is

So, by the time I got to breast cancer, you could say I was ready. When I was getting the first biopsy, the radiologist commented on how calm I was. I told him it was not my first rodeo. And that was true. It seemed like he was so used to calming frantic people, I needed to reassure him that I was OK. Nothing wrong with being frantic, mind you — cancer is scary and I had my moments. I’d loosened up enough of my own painful and harmful conditioning and habitual reactions to be able to receive each moment as it is. Whatever it is. 

My cancer journey seemed harder on my friends and family at times than it was on me. They were caught up in the stories of what might happen, the unfairness of it, and the ugliness of cancer. Such stories, and there are many of them, take us out of the present moment. Fear is future oriented. Resentment is oriented to the past. I was practising opening to the moment. What looked like grace was this ability to be in the moment and not somewhere else, to be really present for those around me, to accept help with gratitude. And also to be stubborn, determined, and brave when the moment demanded it. “Just do it,” I said once to the nurse trying to pull out the stuck drain that had been in my chest for a month — while I also looked away and tightly squeezed Michael’s hand.

Team Renee: Kicking Cancer’s Ass AKA Renee’s Angels. Christine, Sarah (me), Dianne; Renee, Corina, Jessy. Missing: Pam, Tam, Sharon, Sue.

Love

A friend of mine is facing a really challenging third round with cancer. She is determined to prove the doctors’ prognosis wrong. She has much love and support around her including a supportive group of friends — whose compassion I experienced last year when I faced cancer. Another friend has been posting pictures of the group of friends supporting her as she navigates a second bout with cancer. They are about a decade ahead of us in age. I caught a glimpse of us angels in the years to come still laughing and crying together, gracefully kicking ass. As much as we adopt the language of fight, stronger-than, and some good ol’ cursing, what lies beneath it is love. We sense that tenuous thread of life, realize suddenly how precious each of us is, how precious each experience, each moment. Suddenly a beautiful sunrise can shatter you. The touch of a loved one can melt you. The pain of a friend extends your reach across the miles and into the universe, until you feel large enough to be touched by it all. 

The language of love came to me more easily when I was going through cancer, when I was at my most vulnerable, when there was an openness to receive life at its most beautiful and its most painful, to bear it all, because to do so was something like bliss. To have the wisdom to know what we can’t change, and to let that rip us. And to that we can change, respond, authentically, in a way that acknowledges our common shifting and unsteady ground. How we respond then ripples in the moment as softly as gentle rain falls on a pond, as surely and inevitably as gravity. 

Everyone here has been kicked so hard it knocked us to our knees. I suddenly understood Leonard Cohen’s line: “Even though it all went wrong, I’ll stand before the Lord of Song with nothing on my tongue but hallelujah.” Life can break us, or it can break us open. Rayner Maria Rilka expressed it this way:

Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.

Buddhist aphorisms echo this too. “Make all of life the path” means to let every experience ripen you, even the most challenging. “Hate by love alone shall cease” means that resisting, defending, or attacking blocks life whereas love is more like the Tao, flowing like water seeking level, or like working with the grain of wood. Like nature’s fractals: complex systems like clouds, trees, waterways, lungs, venous systems, and tumours are actually very simple repeating patterns.

The fight may be necessary and natural, but it will only get you so far. Love will take you the rest of the way. Reverence. For all of it. In The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran wrote “forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.” American poet, Ellen Bass wrote,

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.

In the midst of the diagnosis and treatment, suddenly resistance falls away and you simply respond to what the situation calls for. In her book, Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness, Sharon Salzberg wrote, “Sometimes we discover that right in the heart of a very difficult time, right in the midst of a painful situation, there is freedom. In those moments when we realize how much we cannot control, we can learn to let go.”

Every ounce of your being can be in tune with the situation whether it’s lying down for a nap, shaving your head, or receiving chemo. It may be scary, and it’s fine to be scared, but don’t invest in it. Letting go into the moment can dissolve pain which is often based on our previous experiences with pain; and worry, which is based on our fears of the future. The moment reveals a great freedom that is compassionate, wise, and awake. Bass’s poem ends so:

Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

Grace, courage, friendliness, perseverance, compassion, and many other positive qualities are the natural response of the bodhisattva, the spiritual warrior, the one with an awakened heart. You are all Warriors of Hope; I’ve come to think of myself as a spiritual warrior. Our common values are echoed in these lines of the Bodhisattva Vow:

However innumerable beings are, 
I vow to meet them with kindness and interest.
However inexhaustible the states of suffering are, 
I vow to touch them with patience and love.

I’ve been facing new challenges lately. The old pattern of wishing for circumstances to be other than they are comes up. “Oh, you again. Let me take your face in my hands, gently, and say, ‘of course you want things to be different; this is hard. But I will hold you in love so we can remember … to soften and open. It’s ok. Let’s see what will happen then.’”

~

“Onto a Vast Plain” by Rainer Maria Rilke

“The Thing Is” by Ellen Bass

“Bodhisattva Vow,” translation by Tarchin Hearn, Daily Puja, p.7.

In the Spirit of Play, a most joyful group art exhibition curated by yours truly, is up until March 30th at the Callander Heritage Museum & Alex Dufresne Gallery in Callander, Ont. For me, it was a curatorial experiment: 14 artists x the theme of play = X.

X, it turns out = joy.

In the Spirit of Play Opening Reception had a record turnout!
Photograph by Liz Lott