A small respite. A spiritual journey.
Today is Sunday here, and it is the first day since I have been here that I have not been either exhausted or had treatments all day, or both. I feel like sharing a bit of the what you might call spiritual healing that has been going on for me over the last weeks. From about the beginning of February, I realized that this would be a big spiritual journey – so big I couldn’t even comprehend it. So big that I began spontaneously asking everyone I know for their thoughts and/or prayers. And it has not disappointed. Although it may sound strange, my feeling from the beginning was that the spiritual healing that would come from this trip was the main thing – that any physical healing would be, in a sense, secondary; that I had to try this therapy but that it probably would not be the final healing for me. I was clear however that it was a crucial stepping stone towards healing that would come. Perhaps it will simply take a bit of time for the stem cells to do the healing. I am not sure.
The magnitude of the spiritual importance, however, was clear from the beginning, and several key events have unleashed such a deluge of realizations and healing in me that I have been hard put to it just to keep my head above water. The first such event was one I have already shared with many people. My Dad is here with me and my Mom, and my Dad was able to come because a colleague of a colleague of his (my dad is a professor) is a Chinese man, and just happens to live in the same city in China where this healing facility is located! And my Dad was able to come and visit him for 4 weeks at the same time as my treatment!!!!! Given then number of cities in China where this man could have lived, I don’t think it is too big a stretch to call this a miracle.
I really began feeling the intensity of spiritual transformation about 2 weeks before I left – roughly at the beginning of Lent, Ash Wednesday, as it turned out. I didn’t get much else done after that, and 4 days before we left, my Mom brought me a chapter from a book she had been reading that she wanted to share with me. Our relationship had been very strained for many years and we had both been working very hard on it and ourselves, the fruit of our labours being the fact that we could even consider going on this trip together at all; 5 or even 2 years earlier it wouldn’t have been possible. But the chapter she showed me was something she had found detailing an incredibly deep explanation for my deepest psychological/spiritual issues which were also at the root of the disharmony between us. What it said was that I had made the interpretation very soon after conception, yes in utero, that “I did not have the right to exist” which gave me a lifelong existential terror and rage at the core of my being. This is profound in itself, but the miraculous part is that I WROTE THOSE EXACT WORDS IN MY DIARY IN 1996!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I had already come to the same conclusion during a period of deep, introspective depression. To see the identical words in print in front of me that I had written in my diary almost 15 years ago was a shock of such a profound nature that it is literally beyond description. The fallout from that shock has been the spiritual journey of this trip. I have been brought to tears more than once in gratitude for the gift of the healing that has ensued. I have begun to feel the terror and release it – to allow love to enter and soothe that void in my soul. I have seen deeply into the pains and sufferings of both my parents which my own existential pain had precluded me from understanding before and I have seen that all the agony and blame I felt towards them was simply the projection of my own pain that I could not comprehend and that the only cure is to love both myself and them – to heal by understanding that anything that is not love is merely a lack of love, and thus to move to fill the lack with love. This loving of myself and my parents has been my prayer and my practise in every moment I have been here. Every morning I sit with my Mom and we laugh and joke like we used to when I was a child, and it feels like we are children again, splashing in puddles in a gentle, warm spring rain, poking at the worms. And with my Father, I see his pain and suffering, and that of his father so clearly like I was unable to see before. I see the pain of all men of his generation, how a sensitive, noble soul like his was forced to cut off his feelings in order to survive, and how the fallout that it caused affected me deeply in my existential void. I see it all clearly for the first time, and feel able to finally make changes to heal myself in relationship to him and to love him for the incredible man he is in surviving the sufferings he had to face so successfully. And the best part is that there is no longer any blame – I can love my parents, and I see above all the grace that has brought us all together in the exact way so that we can each help the other heal from our deepest wounds. I am overwhelmed.
The revelations will continue, and work will always be there to do, but love has come back to my life and my gratitude is unfathomable.
5 comments March 29th, 2009
