The Moment Before

Last week, after posting one of the poems from Dreams of Desire (a small chapbook of poetry I put out in 1995) someone on FB asked for the prose-poem below. It is another piece about our spiritual-sexuality – two of the primary indivisible ways (along with creativity) that the sacred life force manifests in a human life.This piece celebrates the passionate desire for intimacy with another and, beneath that, the longing for a “great love," for the touch of the Beloved. It is an honouring of the spectacular capacity of our physical-spiritual-self for experiencing the ecstatic.

But this piece focuses not so much on the fulfillment of desire but on the “moment before” – the place where, in bringing full consciousness to what is held back for a moment, we are better able to taste fully the ache that opens us to our own longing- that in us which calls out to the Beloved. This awareness, this willingness to slow down, to consciously co-created and fully anticipated what is held back is an element of many tantric teachings. In that moment before, we find the container that holds and directs the fire of daring to dream of union with the Other.

Pausing in the throes of desire, allowing desire to deepen, even for a moment, is a hard sell in a culture of instant gratification and fast-paced living. But the sweetness of life, and love, and learning to let go is in the slowing down and the savouring of the moment before.

The Moment Before

I want to touch
the sharp taste
of the moment in between
the second just before
the place where
the breath catches
in anticipation.

It's the scent of heat held in the air
between two mouths
reaching for each other, hungry.
The shine of moisture on slightly parted lips
just before
it melts into
the wetness of the other.

It is the skin that tingles
waiting
fine hairs at attention
reaching
aching.
It is the places that have not yet been touched
but know they will be.
It is the smooth, quivering paleness
of the inner thigh
as the outer is stroked and kneaded.
The muscles of the abdomen tightening
the back arching slightly
begging
come here
quickly
slowly.

There, in that moment
do not take your eyes from mine.
I am here
awake

I am
reaching
to be
met.

Do not touch me and keep your soul
out of your fingertips.
Die into me
or do not come into me at all.
Ever after is in this moment
happily or not.

Sacrifice the daydream.
Dare to hold the desire
for a great love.

Be with me.

Oriah Mountain Dreamer © 1995 from Dreams of Desire All rights reserved.

Confessions Revisted

Twenty years ago I wrote Confessions of a Spiritual Thrillseeker: Medicine Teachings from the Grandmothers, a book about apprenticing with and then leaving a teacher who was both shaman and sorcerer. I’ve resisted suggestions that the book be republished. I lived the story a long time ago, was at a very different stage of my life, and have a different perspective now on many things. I also like to think my writing has improved and I have no desire to rewrite the text.

But recently, someone I deeply respect told me how he has lent the book to many folks new to spiritual exploration and that they have found it very helpful for their journeys. Prompted by his urging to consider republishing and moved to think others might find it useful, I decided to take another look. My reservations remain and yet, I find I am not particularly attached to what others might think about either the writing or the struggles and choices of my early thirties. (A friend who knows the book recently commented, “Well, there’s lots of sex in it.” “Yes,” I replied with a somewhat wistful sigh, “that’s because there was lots of sex in those years.”)

I have not finished rereading the book, but I thought I would put a small excerpt on the blog (sorry, no sex in this excerpt.) Not sure why, but when I thought of the book, this was the scene I remembered first. So, here it is. Whatever else the book is, what I can tell you is that the story is true.

So here it is:

Something is terribly wrong. I look around my living room trying to orient myself. Nothing is where it should be. The furniture is gone, the room completely bare. The door to the hallway is on the south side of the room, the fireplace on the north. Everything is a complete mirror image of what it should be.

Immediately I realize what this means: I must be asleep and dreaming. I wonder if I should go upstairs and check to see if my body is still in bed, but I’m afraid to leave the room. There’s something here, something that shouldn't be. I can feel my heart pounding, my breath coming in shallow gasps.

A man I do not recognize enters the room. I know he and I have been married somewhere at sometime in a past I cannot recall. He is concerned for my safety. Before we can speak to each other a dark yellow streak with a dull luminosity enters the room and zooms around our feet. It looks like a tennis ball with a tail—like a miniature, three foot long, dark comet.

“Look out,” the man yells, “he will try to enter your body!”

Paralyzed, I know that whatever this is, I must stay away from it, and I begin to banish, using the words I have been taught by Raven. I’m surprised that despite my fear I am able to remember the words exactly. “I banish, into all eight directions, by the power of Law-Jup, Law-Jup, Law-Jup, Law-Jup, all energies or entities, incarnate or disincarnate, who do not love me or would do me harm to be gone from this place now!” The yellow streak leaves the room, but moments later flies back in,about six inches off the floor.

“Keep banishing, keep banishing! If it enters you it will be impossible to get rid of!” The man is screaming now.

I continue to banish, strengthening my tone and taking care to say the words correctly. Each time I do, the yellow streak circling menacingly around me leaves the room for a minute or two, but returns immediately. My banishing only seems to keep it at bay.

The man leaves the room as I continue to banish and returns with the vacuum cleaner. He plugs it in, turns it on and, holding the hose close to the yellow streak, sucks it into the vacuum, immediately detaching the hose and unplugging the machine. I’m surprised that his strategy worked, but I wonder how long the vacuum can hold this thing.

The man looks at me. “It’s the energy of a dark sorcerer. He’s trying to possess you.”

I nod, watching the vacuum cleaner. It has begun to glow and shake, and I know somehow that whatever this is, it will find a way out. I continue to banish.

Suddenly a glowing, twelve inch wooden ruler, like the ones I used in elementary school but with writing on the back of it that I cannot read, slides noiselessly out of the front of the vacuum and flies straight at me. It hits me in the center of my body, dissolving into my solar plexus and knocking me to the floor. Stunned, I sit on the floor, feeling a warm tingling moving around my navel.

The man is frantic. “Oh, my God, he's done it. Banish! Banish now and don't stop!”

My mind is clear and calm. I know that I have only a few moments to rid myself of this thing in my body. Once it is there for more than two minutes, I know it will be almost impossible to get out without a great deal of help, and may do me permanent damage. I also know it will be useless to continue to banish as I have been doing. I know I must increase my intent and focus, remain calm and gather my will, taking all the time I can to do so. If I rush I will not have the focused energy to be rid of this thing. If I take too long it will be too late. I must take all the time available and not one second more. I must not panic.

I sit and follow my breath into my body, relaxing all my muscles and feeling my weight drop to the floor. I pour all my energy and attention into my words, like focusing the light of the sun beneath a magnifying glass to start a fire. I speak quietly but with force, my tone low.

“All that would do harm, get out! Be gone!”

A murky yellow light streaks from my body and out the door. It’s gone. With a jolt I find myself back in my body, awake, lying in my bed. I can feel heat in my chest and belly. Was any damage done? Sending my attention down into my body, I check it out. Everything seems fine except for a blossoming headache. I touch my belly, my solar plexus and, moving my hand up between my breasts, realize my necklace is gone. I had gone to bed the night before with a silver chain around my neck—a Goddess figure hanging from the chain, arms upraised, holding a round piece of polished, deep-blue lapis lazuli. Now it’s gone. I search the bedding, the bed, the room, but it is not there. I’m disturbed by her disappearance. Somehow it feels connected to the dream, and I wonder what it means.

Excerpt from Confessions of A Spiritual Thrillseeker by Oriah Mountain Dreamer © 1991

To Be Cherished

Last Sunday, unexpectedly, I found myself crying in a public place.

I was at the service of the First Unitarian Congregation in Toronto. The choir sang a musical version of the 23rd Psalm, an arrangement by Bobby McFerrin. It was a slow sweet melody, an unhurried heart-opening harmony of men’s and women’s voices. The lyrics referred to the “Lord” as “She,” and I smiled remembering how, thirty-five years ago, I and many others had challenged the practise of exclusively referring to the divine by masculine pronouns. For many years I have neither experienced nor conceptualized that Sacred Wholeness beyond and within all things as a Super-person, so I’m less reactive to personal pronouns regardless of gender now. Still, it was lovely to be in a place where the choice to use a wide variety of terms to point toward the Mystery we experience but cannot define reminds us of the limitations of our words.

The song reached a conclusion with an invocation of the Christian trinity, replacing Father, Son and Holy Ghost with Mother, Daughter and Holy of Holies. And I was stunned to find my eyes filling with tears. I have often heard the traditional trinity renamed. Mother/Father, Child of God, and Holy Spirit is the most common choice. Sometimes “Son” is changed to what some see as gender-neutral terms- “The Christ” or “the divine made manifest.” But I cannot recall ever hearing Son replaced by Daughter before.

I was embarrassed and mystified by my own reaction. But I sat quietly, wiped my tears away and considered what chord has been struck within. For some reason “Daughter” had stirred something- an unattended sorrow and an almost forgotten longing.

For as long as I can remember my mother has told me the same story of my birth. Although the details of the actual delivery are sketchy she never fails to tell me that my father, although excited, was “of course, disappointed” when I was born, because I was a girl and “every man wants a son as his first child, not a daughter.” She would say this as if she was stating an obvious truth, something so apparent that it hardly needed to be mentioned. And yet, she did mention it- emphatically and repeatedly. Early on I took her repetition of the story as evidence that she was disappointed that I was a girl. (I’d never gotten any sense of this disappointment from my father who, interestingly, was never present when my mother told this story.) It took me years to realize that although she may have been disappointed to have had a girl, what she was probably unconsciously expressing was her fear or belief that she, an only child, had disappointed her father - a man she adored who loved her dearly- by not being a son.

My mother was not alone in her belief that sons were better than daughters. When I gave birth to my first son, Brendan, my neighbours would come up to me on the street and ask, “Your first?” When I’d nod in reply their anxiety clearly rose as they asked, “A boy?” When I'd respond, yes, they were visibly relieved and, clearly delighted for me, would nod with relief and say, “Oh, good, good.” I wondered what they would have said if I’d told them my baby was a girl- oh, too bad, better luck next time?

Please understand me- I know where this comes from and all the analysis about the impact such attitudes have had on women and men over eons. All my adult life I have understood that personal stories and choices reflect and shape cultural and political realities that in turn impact us all. Happily some of these realities have changed.

But my response to the lyrics in Sunday’s song went below my knowledge of social norms and prejudices to an old sorrow of the heart. Even though I don’t think of or experience the Sacred as a Person, when the language used to point toward the Mystery includes familial metaphors, I am struck by the sadness of not knowing myself as a cherished daughter. Yes God the Father can also be the Great Mother but can the divine manifest in The Son also be manifest in The Daughter if daughters are by definition second best, not as desirable, a disappointment by virtue of their gender?

Sometimes it seems that life is a continual deepening of the heart‘s understanding and healing. I know the essence of the sacred is something below or beyond gender, but it is also something that manifests in infinite ways and many of those ways are gendered, male or female. And surely the sacred is also manifest in our relationships, in the ways we relate to and cherish life in its many forms. There is a great loss if our circle of caring for the world does not encompass all aspects of ourselves, including our gender, the particular form the Mystery takes for a short while through us.

So, unexpectedly last Sunday, a song opened me to holding myself in my own heart as cherished daughter of the divine. Just that phrase- cherished daughter of the divine- makes my breath catch with the miracle of unconscious limitation opening into conscious revelation, the seemingly impossible transformed into a fuller celebration of the joy of being. And I am filled with gratitude for this unexpected healing of an old wound.

May we each hold ourselves and each other in our hearts as the cherished sons and daughters of the divine.

Mid-Winter Stirrings

Today is Candlemas or Imbolc- literally “in the belly.” It is the celebration of the first stirrings of the fire of life in seeds that will sprout with springtime warmth. Because the seed that stirs deep in the belly of the earth portends new life to come, it is considered a good time for reading oracles, for catching a glimpse of the life that is to come (or, more mundanely, predicting the weather by the actions of the proverbial ground hog.)

I’ve been reading William Bridge’s wonderful book The Way of Transition. Drawing on his experience of the death of his wife, Bridges (a prophetic name for his life’s work re: helping individuals and organizations move through times of transition) offers wisdom on how to move through the three aspects of transition: the ending- the acknowledging and letting go of what is no more; the “neutral space” when what was is no more and what is to come is not yet known (but is eventually sensed as an invisible, indefinable stirring); and the new beginning.

Sometimes Bridges’ “neutral space” doesn’t feel very neutral at all. It can feel like falling through an endless abyss as our sense of who we have been, what dreams we’ve held, and how we’ve functioned on a daily basis no longer fits. This can feel threatening, difficult, frightening and bewildering. Things we once enjoyed no longer hold interest or value for us. We can feel quite lost. And in a culture that loves speed and action, goals and focused attention we can feel like there is something wrong with us.

It has been ten months since my marriage ended. I consider what has ended, what has been let go:

I am no longer someone’s wife.

I do not intimately share my home, my bed, my heart and my dreams with one other daily.

I no longer have a home in the country, nor the furnishings I’d collected over thirty years- my Grandmother’s dining set; the four poster bed I saved for ten years to purchase while sleeping on a futon on the floor; the earthenware dishes I bought for hosting dinners with friends and family. . . . .

I no longer have to find room for all of what I had accumulated over thirty years.

I do not have to shape my day around another’s needs.

I cannot use another’s needs as the reason or excuse for not doing what I say I want or need to do.

I no longer dream of a co-created future with this man.

I am no longer confined in my dreaming to what would speak to or work for us both.

The implicit agreements to play certain roles no longer hold- he as Mr. go-with-the-flow, me as the planner; he as the spender, me as the budgeter ; he as messy, me as neat-freak and many others. I no longer have to hold to the boxes we (largely unconsciously) agreed were mine. I am allowed my own ease and worry, my own frugality and spending, my own spontaneity and planning. (Okay, I'm still pretty consistently a neat-freak.)

There is more of course. Beyond the logistics and agreements of a shared life, an old pattern of being, a belief planted in me at an early age that I had to work hard in every moment, taking care of others to earn my right to be- is made available for letting go. It’s a choice- not a once-and-for-all choice- but a choice that is available to me each day, a practise for one who was trained to be the means to others’ ends.

And, as I let go, I step fully into this time of in-between, of not-knowing, of Imbolc- the place where I feel a stirring of a seed that was planted before any beliefs were learned, a seed that holds the blueprint, the spiritual DNA of a life more true to who and what I am.

So, on this Imbolc, on this feast day of the Goddess Brigit, patron of smith-craft and poetry and midwifery, I light a candle to honour the stirring, and open the dreaming eye to catch a glimpse of colours to come:

a slash of the blood-red vermilion of my own intensity of being, unfettered;

the swirl of the rainbow robe of the story-teller who has secrets to tell;

a movement in the mist- a figure cloaked in blue, headed for the isle of dreams;

bare feet twirling on dark earth, dancing close to the fire;

clear eyes silent, watching, steady in their gaze, mirroring a turquoise sea;

yellow of blazing sun, silver of silent moon;

the brush of an owl’s soft wing on my forehead;

words on a page whispered aloud into the darkness, ripples across still water;

ease and strength in muscle and bone;

a tall silhouette standing in the shadows by the river- maiden, mother, crone carved in one body;

water, dark and foaming, rushing through the gorge between high walls of stone. . . . .

What is stirring in your belly and in the darkness of the earth beneath your feet? What would you honour in lighting a candle? Can you catch a glimpse of movement, a scent of something that foreshadows what is to come that you might till the soil of your life in preparation?

Spiritual Wincing

I pay attention to what makes me wince- words in my head or those that are spoken that make my toes curl a little and my shoulders head for my ears in a defensive posture.

I’ve figured out that in matters of spirituality there are two things that my radar regularly picks up and shies away from: spiritual cheerleading and harsh admonishments disguised as spiritual truths. Of course these are both easier to spot when they come from another, but I’m not immune from using either on myself. Depending on the day, either one can make me want to hide out.

The cheerleading of spiritual ambition is in the slogans that focus on what You Can Achieve Now! In writing they're usually like that- short phrases with lots of capitalized words most often punctuated with multiple exclamation marks. Even on the page they generally make me feel like someone is shouting at me. Things like: Live Your Ultimate (or Most Authentic or Biggest or Greatest or Grandest or Wildest. . . . ) Life!!

It’s not that I don’t want to live authentically. It’s just that I don’t find general slogans helpful for navigating the challenges of the human heart and daily life. More importantly they seem to exacerbate a push that is all too prevalent in the rest of the culture, urging us to try harder, do more, run faster, work longer, climb higher, get more. . . . when maybe- from a spiritual perspective- what we need to do (at least some of the time) is slow down, sit down or drop down more deeply into our experience of just this moment. These kinds of slogans feel all too in-tune with an economic system built on convincing people to buy what they don’t need and can’t afford to maintain a way of life that is basically unsustainable for us and the rest of the planet. They make me weary.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for supporting each other's dreams and celebrating each other’s successes- although I am more likely to define success in terms that include things like not internally or externally growling at the driver who cut me off in traffic, or opening my heart to a person or myself when one of us is behaving badly because, in a moment of pure grace, I'm able to perceive the fear or pain behind less-than-stellar behaviour.

I’d like my spirituality to have a little less cheer-leading and a little more cherishing of the moment- whether or not it is an extroverted moment of sharing or an introverted moment of solitude. When Jungian analyst, James Hollis, was in Toronto he mentioned that the Jungian Association was lobbying against a move to include "introversion" in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Really! Now the DSM has always been a reflection of the culture (at one time homosexuality was listed as a mental illness) and certainly the culture in North America over-values extroversion. And maybe that’s why so many of these slogans feel like cheerleading to me- because they feel focused on outward achievement even as they claim to be about an inner journey.

Closely tied to notions of spiritual achievement is the intolerance for the pacing of slower aspects of the self. I’ve come to recognize it in the hard edge buried beneath the seemingly benign advice to “accept and move on;” (reflecting a fear that without prodding one might not move on according to some ideal and speedy timetable) “forgive and let go;” (which similarly, as one FB comment pointed out, can be a way of saying- we’ve had enough of hearing about your pain/grief) and the judgement laden language of-“let’s not have a pity party,” “I don’t like to wallow,” and “you’re only a victim if you choose to be”- all of which point toward an underlying harshness toward our sorrows and losses.

Rereading Stephen Levin’s book Unattended Sorrows, I’m reminded of the real long-term cost to our emotional, mental, physical and spiritual health when we do not give ourselves permission to tend our sorrows and grieve our losses. Stephen chronicles how these unattended sorrows are held in the body and heart and are sometimes triggered by small daily losses, leaving us bewildered when we unravel in the face of a missed deadline or a failed recipe.

The thing is, the overwhelming majority of us we will move on, forgive, let go, move out of self-pity and recover our sense of agency in the world, if we allow ourselves to heal from the inside out. And that takes whatever time it takes. Most of us are already dancing as fast as we can. Urging more speed will not help.

It occurs to me that the both the achievement-oriented cheerleading and the admonishments to pick up the pace of healing are about the same thing: a lack of faith in how we are made.

I have faith that we are made for life- for healing, for continuing and deepening and expanding our capacity to live from compassion and kindness, and for the co-creativity that will find new ways of sustainable living. I know we get stuck sometimes but if, in our fear of getting stuck, we keep pushing and pulling ourselves and each other it becomes difficult if not impossible for us to slow down and hear the life that is calling to us.

I have faith that our essential nature is capable of holding it all: the joy and the sorrow; the births and the deaths. So, maybe a quiet “nicely done,” or “I love your ability to be with him/her/yourself,” or just a silent companioning of each other is all that is needed.

As I write this I have an image and a body sense of us all taking one long full breath together and allowing our shoulders to just drop a little as the breath leaves our bodies.

Ready? Inhale. . . .exhale. . . . Ahhhhh. . . .

Finding What Was Lost

I am making my way back to God.

God is the first word I learned to point to the sacred Presence that was with me when I was a child. When I was young I could taste that Presence within and around me all of the time. I talked with this Presence, I lived inside that holy heart beat. Walking down school hallways, sitting in classrooms, crossing the frozen river on the way home in the darkness of a northern afternoon, I could hear the voice of what some call God and others call Love surround me. And when the frozen river heaved and cracked, ice buckling and rising, long fissures opening, I was not afraid. I knew the Beloved was with me there, like the cloud of ice crystals forming with every breath- warm moisture from one small self meeting and greeting the dark vastness of the atmosphere at forty degrees below zero.

Years later, I reached out and felt the soft breath of Spirit on my skin when purple welts rose from the place where my face hit the kitchen floor. The angry young man I’d married had thrown me across the room. Even then, I could pray and knew I was not abandoned.

What do we do when we pray? Surely we do not summon what has never left us, what lives within and around us.

Prayer is our way of coming into alignment with that which is always there, waking ourselves up to what has become hidden by distraction and preoccupation with things that will not last. Prayer can be a movement- a way of finding and following the rhythm we sense within all things. It can be a song, a phrase of music, a story or a poem. It can be tears or terror brought to the surface by heart break. It can be surrendering to or wrestling with the pain of heart ache. But it is always sending out a voice that signals a willingness to be found, a willingness to come into alignment with something more than our small worries about life and death.

I did not think I would ever move outside the possibility of prayer found with ease.

But I did.

For the last few years of my marriage, I would open my mouth and there would be no music with meaning, no words that held connection, no way to find the willingness. I was not, you understand, unwilling. I was just so deeply disconnected from my own awareness that I could find no way to cry out. Laying in bed, staring into the darkness I thought- perhaps, I am. . . . just. . . . done. I could hear my heart beat, but I wondered, was curious to know if I was dying.

Nothing anyone else has ever done could have rendered me unable to pray.

What I did- abandoning who I was in an attempt to pay for a love I thought had to be earned- is what made prayer feel impossible. I whittled away at who I was, cutting off little pieces- an ear lobe here, a pinkie there, my love of ideas and my intensity of being, the things he found “too much." Hoping to create, or to become someone the other one would want, I lost myself.

And even then, although I could no longer feel the Presence that was with me, it reached out and shook me awake.

My angels are old women with dark skin and long grey hair. Some have eyes of light. The eyes of others are bottomless pools of darkness that lead to inner worlds. They have come to me in my dreams for years. In that time of forsaking myself it took them a couple of years to get one clear message through the fog of my disorientation. When I finally heard them, I was startled.

“Get out of here now!” they whispered. “Wake up! Your house is on fire.”

And I awoke in a smoke-filled dream and finally moved to save my life.

I am making my way back to all I ever wanted with my whole being: God, the awareness that is awaring itself in all things. Back to the kiss I wanted with my whole life, the scent of what has always been home, the Sacred Mystery.

I am like someone who used to run and then had a terrible fall that disrupts messages between mind and muscle, like someone who has to learn all over again how to crawl and walk, how to balance upright, how to move one step at a time. I used to be someone who ran with ease, without thinking, simply for the pleasure of the wind on my skin, skimming along the ground lightly. Prayer was first nature to me and now, learning it again I see things I could not see when it came so naturally.

Moving deliberately, consciously one step at a time, I pray with my whole being- body-heart-mind-soul-self. And the holy song finds me in a way it could not before.

Sometimes we pray for ease, for things to move without struggle. Understandable really. But sometimes, it is the thing that is consciously sought and welcomed, the thing that demands a re-learning that is not easy that teaches us to rejoice, that opens us to a deeper gratitude.

What has been lost and found is savoured and appreciated more deeply.

I am making my way back to God with each breath.

And I am grateful.

Learning from Fried Friends

I’ve just read the new book by my dear friend Joan Borysenko- Fried: Why You Burn Out and How to Revive. Joan’s sharing of personal stories along with her well-trained scientific mind offers a profound and insightful guide to recognizing and recovering from burnout.

Fried has given me an incredible gift, although it’s not one I’d anticipated.

First, let me say- I have experienced burnout. In 1974 I was nineteen and assistant director at a children’s residential summer camp. Because the rest of the staff were headed to far-flung campuses (while I was returning to Ryerson in Toronto) I was left with closing down the camp. Alone. This was after a summer of supervising the program and staff for a rotating group of one hundred and fifty campers a week, many high risk kids from impoverished homes who’d already been involved in criminal activity. Everyone on staff was exhausted by the end. After the back-breaking work of closing the camp, I went back to school (already a week behind in full-time classes and the fifteen hours a week of social work field placement,) and the two part-time jobs I had in the city, moving my belongings to a new shared living arrangement with The Roommate from Hell. By October I was, as Joan so eloquently puts it: toast.

Joan's book charts the stages of burnout offering us ways to recognize when we are on the way to becoming crispy critters (my personal favourites being “Driven by an Ideal” and the emergence of the “Bitch in the Basement” -not a pretty picture.) From there she offers insights into why some of us are prone to run screaming toward any responsibility that’s up for grabs whether or not we have the time or energy to handle it gracefully. She also offers practical suggestions for reigniting your pilot light.

So here’s the surprise that the book held for me: I don’t have burnout. I cannot tell you how difficult it is for me to acknowledge this. Because as debilitating as burnout is, you can recover from it. I have done and continue to do most if not all of the things Joan suggests and documents as creating recovery from burnout. And I still can’t go out after six in the evening or write for more than two hours a day without ending up in bed unable to even read for days.

Because I don't have burnout- I have CFS/ME (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis outside North America.) And, although I have openly acknowledged that I have had this illness for twenty-seven years, internally I’ve been clinging to the semi-conscious hope/belief that I have burnout.

An MD specializing in CFC/ME once asked me, “So you think you caused this illness by overdoing?” I nodded. She was emphatic. “We may not know half of the factors that cause this illness but we do know that there is at least one pathogen involved and that you do not get it from overdoing.” Softening her tone a little she added, “Oriah, if that was the case, ninety-nine percent of the population would have it. You can make it worse with overdoing now, but that’s not what caused it.”

She was trying to discourage self-blame, but what I heard was: you didn`t cause it so you can`t fix it. This is not in your control.

Reading Fried I was confronted with my denial of what is. Joan even offers a story that explains my denial, telling us of an experiment where a rat is able to push a bar to turn off mild electric shocks. A second rat is similarly effected- shocked when rat #1 is shocked and not shocked when rat #1 presses the bar. Both animals get exactly the same amount of discomfort, but rat #2 has absolutely no control over the shocks. In just a couple of days rat #2 develops bleeding ulcers because “having control rescues you from stress.” Joan continues, “Rising to a challenge- as long as you can overcome it- is a positive experience.”

And that’s why I’ve been semi-consciously clinging to the idea that I have burnout- because we can heal from and learn to avoid burnout, can have some control. With CFS/ME things are more. . . . uncertain. A lot more uncertain.

It occurs to me that the study of the rats tells us how stressful it is to focus on things over which we have little or no control. It also points to why it is hard to not to focus on what is painful even when we have no control over it. I’ve long ago reconciled myself to not travelling around the world and to missing birthday parties or other social gatherings. And I do not give up on trying things that might bring healing. Just this week I’ve researched new treatment protocols and am sitting with whether or not any of them might assist me in being as healthy as possible.

Coming to terms with what is, is a process. We do as much as we can, as we can. And Joan’s book, Fried, just helped me take another step closer to consciously living with what is. And I’m grateful for this. Because joy is accessed through being in the present. But the catch is that there is only one place to be in the present- here: with this body-self, in the conditions of mind-heart-body-spirit that exist right now- not the ones that used to be, not the ones that might be someday (because I have faith in infinite possibilities) but with the ones that are, right now.To pretend that this illness is something other than what it is takes away from being here.

In Fried, Joan writes that all healing is “a deepening into one’s authentic nature.” And while healing may not be a cure, it is what helps us taste the sweetness of life under any conditions.

Finding my way into how the soul’s desires can be fully realized within conditions I may be able to influence but cannot control- that`s the adventure, the challenge and the privilege of being human- it’s what reveals who and what we are.