What the Teacher taught me Part 2

The experience of living with fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis has brought me a whole course of lessons about living in a body. Before I began to engage with these lessons, I was very Spirit-oriented. I experienced Spirit strongly, and in a very real way. Spirit was my source for guidance, protection, comfort and strength. In my early life, when living in a body was frightening and even more painful, it was Spirit who led me to another dimension where I could be safe, a dimension which delivered me from the pain and discomfort of the body and introduced me to the pleasures and joys of the unseen world. So the Spirit and my spirit were good friends, and all was tonking along well, I thought. And then…my body became ill and a whole new dimension of spiritual experience was opened for me, a dimension in which spirit and body intersect, work together, are companions and soul mates rather than opponents. So here are a few of those lessons, presented in no particular order, and certainly not yet mastered.

1. Life is very sweet.
   

   That life is good and sweet may seem like an obvious thing to some, but because of the intensity and ongoing nature of my childhood challenges, I hadn't ever really noticed that the struggles were over and I was alive. I kept reliving the feelings, body sensations, images over and over in my thoughts, dreams, and general orientation toward the world. Therapy helped some with these PTSD symptoms, and I am very grateful to my former therapists. But it was the contrast provided by chronic pain that allowed me to finally appreciate that I was alive, and that life was very sweet indeed. On the days when there was no pain, I was filled with gratitude and delight to be able to walk, work, pull weeds, hike in Canyon de Chelly, enjoy my friends, sleep through the night. Simple pleasures became rapturous delights. I learned that these mundane things, which I hadn't even noticed before because I was so blinded by the memories of struggle, were wonderful blessings. And I came to understand how important they were to my quality of life.
   

2. That I hated my body, and that it was life or death for me to learn to love it.
   

   I never knew that I hated my body while I was hating it. I just thought that it was slightly disgusting – because it was too fat, too weak, too uncoordinated, or too something-else-or-other. I felt ashamed of it, but thought, vaguely, that this was normal and okay. That one should distrust one's body, that somehow a body was untrustworthy and in need of firm handling. So it needed stringent diets, stringent exercise, stringent sleep regimens. (I once tried to exist on five hours of sleep per night because I had read somewhere that five hours was all the human body needed in an optimum situation. I didn't consider, of course, that my situation wasn't optimum, and I certainly didn't consult my body.) I avoided looking at myself in the mirror. Any health habit that I tried to initiate was introduced with a firm resolve to shape up the body and make it over – and so, of course, every resolution failed, and I experienced once again how "untrustworthy" my body was. And then I got sick, eventually receiving the diagnosis of the chronic, inflammatory, autoimmune disease, rheumatoid arthritis (RA). In RA, the body attacks itself – the immune system attacks the synovium, or the smooth lining, of the joints, as well as ligaments, tendons, and other soft tissue. It can result in shortened life span, increased risk of heart attack and stroke, and increased risk of lymphoma and blindness. My body-hatred had finally manifested as a physical disease. When I came to realize how closely linked these two things were - my attitude toward my body, and my body's attitude toward its own mobility – I knew it was life or death for me to learn to love my body.
   

3. How to ask for and accept help.
   

   When I was young, there was no help. Either the trustworthy people could not see – and I could not tell – or the offers of "help" were tricks designed to provide access to manipulating or exploiting me. So I grew to suspect offers of help, and to keep to myself. I was blessed to receive some kindness early in life, however, so I was able to imagine what it might be like should someone just see through the secrets, notice my need, and respond to it. When I had my tonsils out at age three there was a nurse who rocked me and sang to me when I was frightened in the middle of the night, and there were various kind teachers who saw my unhappiness but could not fathom the source of it. Doctors just augmented the trouble, either treating my body like a piece of meat, much like my tormentors did, or heaping judgment on me as a young adult when I was unsure about my willingness to have babies. Years later, my first successful attempt to ask for help was motivated by needing help for my children. So I was able to risk asking for their sake. That asking had a happy outcome, so I found it encouraging to continue, and to eventually learn to ask on my own behalf. A tiny seed became a tree. My advice to those for whom it is hard to ask: choose your helpers carefully, but DO take the risk. It will get easier. And as you receive the living water of others' love and kindness, you will have more in the well to share with others.
   

   More lessons to follow in future posts.
   © 2010 Merry Stanford
   
   

Why "Sink to the Seed?"

When I would hear the old Quaker phrase, "sink to the seed," I used to imagine a roomful of old-timey, plain Friends in a wooden meeting house, sitting quietly, and practicing "sinking down." They become quieter and quieter until there is not a sound except for what floats in through the open window on a lush, sunny, early summer day: buzzing of honeybees, snuffle of waiting horse, singing of robin. What an idyllic scene, based almost entirely on what I imagined the outward experience of "sinking down to the seed" would look like. But what was happening inwardly?

Here is what the experience of "sinking to the seed" means to me now, and why I am naming this blog after it. Let me trace the three strands of my woven faith using the pattern of this metaphor.

When I am close to Jesus and think "sink down to the Seed," I can't help but to think of the parable of the Sower and the Seeds (Mark 4:3-9). We have all heard the story. The Sower broadcasts his seed. Some falls on the path, where the birds come and eat it up. Some falls on rocky ground, springs up quickly, but cannot set down a deep root and so withers quickly in the hot sun. Some seed falls among "thorns," perhaps an aggressive, invasive species of plant, and the thorns choke it out, and it yields no grain. But some seed falls upon good soil, and it sets down deep roots so that it can draw up the water of life into itself, and it is able to grow strong. So it bears a great deal of new seed, sometimes as much as a "hundredfold." (One hundred new seeds grown from a single plant, which was produced by a single seed. Think of it! God gives and gives and gives some more!)

It seems to me that my inward spirit is a complex terrain, and that all of these kinds of soil exist within me. When I feed the good soil and tend the garden, so to speak, the Seed of Christ can set down deep roots within me. When I sink to that deeply-rooted Seed in the garden of my soul, I am immediately in the place of Life and Goodness and Abundance. I am in the kingdom of God, which Jesus assured us was among us at all times. And it has a wonderfully fresh smell.

When I am in touch with my experience of the Light, "sinking down to the Seed" leads me to what Isaac Penington called "the true peace, the true righteousness, the true holiness, the true rest of the soul, the everlasing habitation which the redeemed dwell in." (19.14 in Britain Yearly Meeting Faith and Practice) This is the innermost room of the soul that is both full and empty, the still point, the place where the authentic One lives, where the Light shines continually and the dark, velvet night holds it tenderly, where all is revealed and all is acknowledged and all is forgiven. It is the center where my human limitations and destructive errors (sinfulness) are revealed, where I can acknowledge and move through the brokenness, where I admit that I've been guilty of a god-awfully painful imitation of the Wizard of Oz! And it is also the place where my unique soul is also revealed, where I get a glimpse of what it is that Spirit sees in me, and this gives me a sense of both awe and peace, that this wondrous Spirit has found a home in me, and expresses itself uniquely through me. When I sink down to the Seed, as a child of the Light, I go to the place where I cannot avoid seeing either my human limitations or my original and blessed beingness, and I am reclaimed by the Spirit.

When I am in the experience of being a child of Mother Earth, "sinking down to the Seed" is very like all of the above. But in this case, that part of me which is original -- the part of me which can never be hurt or deformed by the plagues of the world, the part which holds the Creator's original intention for me, the part I sometimes call "big I" as opposed to "little I" -- is the seed, and I drink deeply from the water of the Mother. I plump up, break the now-too-tight bounds of the seed case, send forth a green, juicy shoot, shoot up to the light (Light?) and find freedom in the heady excitement of new growth under the blue sky. In this case I am not so much in touch with my brokenness and healing but with my soul's original template. I am in touch with that aspect of myself which I believe is most like the Creator, that part of me which is made in the likeness of the Creator, which still resides in the garden of the Mother, and which is Green and Growing.

No doubt my experience of “sinking to the seed” will change as I use this gift of blogging to explore the limits of my soul. I look forward to the transformation.