Yesterday I went to the emergency room where I was diagnosed with my third or fourth kidney infection in two years. Identifying the cause of my pain, what seemed like a crippling three-week flu, was somewhat validating and marked the end (or the beginning of the end) of another phase in which I feel profoundly powerless to survive. No amount of spiritual practice can compete with Cipro and hydrocodone (well, I imagine that’s debatable, but they sure are helping). I wrote a message to a Zen teacher and good friend asking for his opinion, because I tend to dream of my kidney infections before they set in. How might I tackle this on a spiritual front, I wondered. Long-term stress leads to a compromised immune system, he noted. It is probably that simple (except that a good deal of my stress comes from being sick).
The search for a spiritual cause hides a subtle self-blame. I am inclined to think, without realizing it, that everything that happens to me is somehow my fault. It’s a Buddhist tic, the temptation to see everything in karmic terms. Even illness I take as something I must find a way to surmount. I’ve learned to surrender, but I still have this unconscious sense that my situation would be better if I were doing something right. Taking blame is not, I’m sorry to say, an act of stoicism or heightened spiritual responsibility. On some level, I take on blame in order to maintain control.
That need for control, I know where I get it. I was in the ER when my boys were dismissed from school, and my mother reluctantly agreed to pick them up. She brought them home after I picked up my medications from the pharmacy. I was still limping after a shot in the toosh, my back was still extremely sore, and the medication was making me queasy and sleepy. My boys ran into the house, wild as animals, jumping all over me and throwing toys. My mother commanded my youngest to find a night shirt. When she discovered that after three weeks of illness, I was behind on the laundry and had no clean night shirts for them, she became angry and terse and immediately left, nearly slamming the door on her way out. My boys went monkey, and I fell asleep on the floor.
She does that to me every time, especially when I’m sick. She gets angry when I can’t rise to every demand. Very gradually, it is bothering me less and less. But I have internalized it.
Coupled with self-blame is the strong effect that one’s physical condition has on the mind. Thoughts and emotions recruit the body. We think with our bodies. We use the body to represent our place in the world, so when that canvas is muddied with pain of physical origins, one’s image of the world is darker and rougher. Embodiment was my area of expertise in graduate school. I studied it for twenty years. I could go into a long-winded, academic explanation for why the condition of the body can so affect one’s outlook, but such analyses would leave out something important. Logical analysis, however accurate, is not always the path to healing.
My life lately is a practice in allowing myself to be carried. No matter how dismal my circumstances or my health becomes, I want to carry myself. Receiving help, truly receiving help, is a great act of surrender. I think back on my true helpers, those who took joy in carrying me. They make it easy.
