What does it mean to be the vast, singular awareness while simultaneously living in a physical body?  In innumerable physical bodies, apparently, each with the subjective experience of being one singular awareness?  My sights are on awakening, as they’ve always been, but my attention is often jerked back to my physical experience, either pleasantly through passion and sensuality, or very unpleasantly through severe health problems and economic challenges.  Lately, it’s mostly very unpleasant, which is compounding the dichotomy.  At the same time that I must acknowledge being a human being, I feel like less of a human being.

I’ve noticed that as my health problems consume my attention, my posts become less coherent, less about awakening and love, less about the collective and more about myself.  I’ve wanted to let that happen, to speak authentically.  Nothing is more precious than the truth.  As I allow that contraction, watching it happen, my personal health issues seem to get swallowed up the vastness again, and I no longer care what happens to me or what I experience.  Not only is my personal pain a drop in the bucket compared to global tragedies, but pain is just pain.

There is a fine line, however, between that expansion of perspective and resignation, like the fine line between the pursuit of awakening and the neglect of the physical.  My inner world is continuously and quite obviously manifested in my outer world, and I’ve used that capacity consciously many times before, but I’ve found it difficult lately to want things to be any different than they are.  That lack of desire perplexes me.  I’m not sure if it reflects my ever-deepening, giddy hopelessness or a determination to let go of all desire and attachment (or both), but I’ve also been acutely aware of the coincidence: that after many years of wishing I were no longer in a physical body, my body is falling apart.

My uncle asked me why I did not simply go to the divine light, or the kingdom within, and ask for perfect health.  I have asked for that, of course, but deep down, the conditions of my body seem to be serving a purpose.  After running away from it, I have been forced to chase life.  Slowly, the meaning of being alive, of being full of life, is sinking into my bones (along with the calcium and B vitamins).  Being full of life is different than surviving or being attached to the body.  Unlike mere survival, being full of life is not the opposite of dying.  That is the visceral realization developing in me only now.  Perhaps being full of life is the opposite of resignation.  Whatever the case, the lesson is happening in my body, not my mind.  Perhaps that is the point of being in a body in the first place.

I sent a message to my Buddhist friend asking if he would meditate on my health.  We stopped communicating last fall, but my need was genuine, and we agreed to remain open to one another’s genuine needs.  I didn’t hear from him.  A few nights later, I dreamed that he was in my presence, and he was saying things that hurt while waving a gun around.  I pulled out a gun and asked him to stop, but he kept going.  I put the gun to his head and to my surprise, pulled the trigger.  I felt instant remorse.  The bullet passed through his head as if it were a ghost but came out of the base of his throat, where he bled, and after that, he was unable to speak any further.  He wandered away in mute anger.  I followed him, pleading for forgiveness and contemplating my karma, and then I woke up, abruptly and in grief.

When I returned to sleep, I dreamed of turquoise again.  Months ago, I had a similar dream of a pendant on a copper chain (like the copper in a telephone wire).  The pendant was an upside-down tree, branching out from the center of the throat with aquamarine gems attached to the branches like fruit.  Aquamarine and turquoise are both associated with the throat chakra, with communication.  My ex-boyfriend gave me a large turquoise necklace.  The next day, I wore the necklace and imagined healing light surrouding my Buddhist friend’s throat.

That night, I fell asleep in a state of peace and relative painlessness.  Two hours later, I woke up in sudden wrenching pain, my heart pounding and heavy.  I got up and checked my email to find out if the pain was an empathic response to someone.  My Buddhist friend had just sent me a long message, coincidentally, regarding the well being of a mutual friend, and he addressed my health.  I stopped reading at “I saw this coming,” which triggered a bolt of adrenalin, defensiveness and grief.  Every time I experience physical or emotional pain, there is someone there to tell me how it reflects my failure to do things right.  The byproduct of this pain and its consequences, however, has been the deepest self-forgiveness I’ve ever experienced.  I’m grateful for that.  In any case, I’m beginning to believe that my health problems are strongly affecting my heart and adrenal system, making me extremely overreactive to stress.  I have been praying for stronger nerves.  Someday when I’m stronger, I will read the rest of the message.  Simply and straightforwardly and without blame (or self-blame), I just could not continue reading.  I returned to bed with a racing mind, an erratic pulse, this strange slow throbbing and trembling, and an urge to vomit, but as I relaxed, I opened, and I felt an enormous amount of love coming to me.  I don’t know what he wrote, but I stopped wearing my turquoise necklace and felt more at peace with silence.

In the meantime, my medical sleuthing continues.  I’ve been attributing profound episodes of weakness and fatigue to anemia, but my heart seems to be involved.  My pulse is “all over the place,” chest pains are frequent, my chest has felt continuously tight and heavy for more than a month now.  At rest, my heart beats very weakly, and when I exert myself, I experience angina so painful it brings me to the floor.  Something is not right.  Waking heart indeed.

Last night, I went to sleep asking the universe to show me what is wrong.  I dreamed that I was surrounded by millions of chaotic ants each equipped with some sort of electrical sensor, and they were following or sending electrical signals, but they were disrupting signals that were supposed to happen naturally, and inside the great building where most of the ants were housed, the room was flooded.  I dove in for a short swim.  Not only were the ants in the fluid dead, but the electrical signals were washed out.  Next, I dreamed that the doctor was cleaning out dust and ash from within the chambers of my heart, and he said I had an infection surrounding my heart tissue (i.e., myocarditis).  He also said that my heart is too big.  A metaphor, I presume.

I’ve enjoyed entertaining the romantic yet alarming notion that my waking heart has gotten so big that my empathy with suffering in the world is drowning and weakening it.  At the end of the day, however, I don’t have any notions at all.  The problems are too complex to resolve with the intellect alone, which brings me back to the value of the body (and being alive)… much learning and wisdom is gathered not through thinking but through being.  Direct experience.

I think I need to find a real doctor to complement the multidisciplinary chiropractor bent on healing me with nutrients.  He did discover that my gastrointestinal tract was inflamed, my persistent cough is not accompanied by signs of chest congestion, and my kidney infection never fully resolved and ordered lab tests to find out what antibiotic might finally kill it.

My Zen teacher in Florida called and asked, jokingly, if I could get up from my death bed to talk.  We had a lovely conversation in which he remarked on the palpable intensity of my energetic presence, and I could sense his energetic presence as well.  He sent healing to my heart.  As we spoke, I could not help but feel, deep in my bones, that nothing is really wrong, and things are simply unfolding as they will, which is fine.  There, that’s when I feel it… being full of life.