Lessons of the Heart, Part 1

                I thought I should let everyone know that posting to this blog has been delayed because of a serious personal illness.  About 5 weeks ago I became ill with alternating chills and high fever accompanied by muscular aches.  I thought it was the flu but it became so intense I went to the Emergency Room at the hospital.  They diagnosed it as a bacterial infection that had settled in my blood and in my heart.  The high fever pushed my heart into a 5 day episode of atrial fibrillation(very fast and irregular heartbeat).  

                I was hospitalized for 6 days, given massive doses of antibiotics through a drip in my arm and lost almost 15 pounds.  My heart was electro-shocked back into normal rhythm.  A team of infectious disease experts and cardiologists saved my life.  And, I almost forgot, on the way to the hospital I tore my right Achilles tendon (partial tear) and couldn’t walk on it.

                What I didn’t know is that the kind of infection I had was different.  In the past, I would occasionally get sick with a cold or flu, my body would eventually defeat the invading micro-organisms, and things would go back to the same as they were before getting sick.  Not this time.  The bacterial infection had caused permanent damage to the mitral valve in my heart.  I am now facing the prospect of heart surgery, a very frightening turn of events.

                A well known teacher, whose name I no longer remember, once said “You learn how far you have progressed on the path of enlightenment when you get punched in the stomach.”  It’s relatively easy to be grounded and at peace with the world when things are going well.  The real test of your progress toward wisdom is how you respond when someone punches you in the stomach. The past 5 weeks has been one very large “punch in the stomach” for me!  What were the lessons for me and which of the Buddhist practices I have learned were of help to me? 

                The first 24 hours in the hospital were the most difficult for me.  My body struggled to maintain a proper temperature, but I was always either very cold and unable to get warm, or burning-up hot and unable to cool down.  Every 4 hours I was given antibiotics mixed with cold water because the medicine had to be kept under refrigeration so it would not spoil.  When the antibiotic fluid flowed into the vein in my forearm, it produced an intense pain in my arm for the first 10-20 minutes until the fluid got closer to room temperature. 

                What greatly reduced my suffering during this period was remembering to stay in the present moment:  this meant either not creating scary mental stories about what was happening (“This is too much for me, this is going to get worse and be horrible, I’m going to lose my mind…”) Or, if my mind did start creating the stories, catching myself in the act of doing it and reminding myself that my mental story was only a fictional story (but also potent source of suffering) and then returning to what was real in that moment—some physical sensations that were unpleasant but something I could be ok with.  Everything that was going on was simply physical sensations in the body, sometimes accompanied by a thought stream.  None of it needed to be viewed as a “problem,” it was just what was happening now.

                This happened many times, often with seemingly small events.   I would lay in bed at night breathing comfortably and becoming more relaxed.  At some point I became very relaxed and started to fall asleep.  But the relaxation response caused my breathing to become shallower and/or less frequent.  Because my heart was pumping blood with reduced efficiency, this in turn caused me to not get enough air and that jerked me back to wakefulness. I would then deliberately breath more deeply or rapidly to get “caught up” on oxygen again. 

                This series of events got repeated over and over during the night, and I could feel myself about to tip over into despair, anguish, and suffering.  And then I noticed the mental stories that my mind was running:  “I’m never going to be able to fall asleep, I’ll be tired all the time, my quality of life will be destroyed,” and so on.  Seeing these fictional stories for what they were enabled me to let go of them.  I still couldn’t sleep much, but my suffering was greatly reduced.  The simple truth of the present moment was that I was lying in bed and not sleeping, which really was not so bad.  I wasn’t in any pain, I was in a safe place, and I could still get some bed rest.

                Because the fever was so high, I could not think clearly and the simplest questions—“How are feeling now?”—seemed vastly complicated and unanswerable.  Again, the most useful practice was to just deal with each situation as it arose moment-to-moment, drop the mental stories (“What if I never get my mind back;  I should be able to answer these simple questions…”) and bring my mind back  to what was real in the present moment—I’m sick and my mind is not working the way it usually does right now. 

                Total acceptance of what was happening in each moment was an enormous help.  In the past, there would have been mentally pushing my experience away and rejecting it—“I don’t want this, this shouldn’t be happening, I don’t deserve this…”  This typically causes a lot of unnecessary suffering.  In Buddhism this is called mental resistance—basically denying the reality of the present moment. 

                The alternative to this, as Eckhart Tolle once put it, is to accept the reality of the present moment as if you had wished for it.   A useful practice here is to silently say “Yes” to whatever is the truth of each moment:  “I say yes to pain in forearm, I say yes to pounding heat in the body, I say yes to not being able to answer simple questions…”  and so on.  This practice may sound silly, but when I actually tried it I could feel a wave of relaxation and peace pass through my body and mind.  It’s a practice—something you do—not a theory.       

                It’s important to note here that acceptance and saying yes do not mean that I don’t try to improve my situation.  For example, I can ask the hospital staff if they can allow the bags of antibiotic solution to come up to room temperature before connecting them to the IV in my arm (I did ask and they said they couldn’t do it). It simply means I’ve stopped mentally rejecting the fact that, in this moment, this is the way things are.                                

 

Next post is Lessons from the Heart, Part 2:  Fear and Attachment.