I am a Sacred Sanctuary

I want to write about my experience at the doctor’s the other day. I don’t know if it’s the stuff for this blog, but I would like to write about it. And I would also like to know if we’d like to discuss things of a different nature here.

Anyways, disclaimer, on the surface it’s about “women’s issues”. I’d felt a lump in my breast that I wanted to get checked. My doctor said it seemed fine, but my mother wanted a second opinion. The ending of the story is that my breasts are happy and healthy. But during the process of having other people find that out, I felt so emotionally raw, for whatever reason. I believe we all have our lessons to learn in this life.

I was in the arboretum when I agreed to get a second opinion. There were so many nurturing trees around me, so many layers and levels to the landscape. I felt like everything in the snow globe I was standing in was my teacher, and I felt a surprising, eager perspective to go ahead and ask the doctors to guide me in forming a friendship with my breasts. I was ready to approach that hitching of my heart feeling, and the I’m looking for a “problem” feeling I get when I, as a woman, am told to do my monthly breast exam. Too bad my appointment was at the cancer center and too bad I was seeing a breast surgeon. Five people and two machines gave so much lovin’ to my breasts. They systematically mauled me as if they were kneading through dough to find and pull out a ring they had accidentally dropped in there. Their eyes looked persistently worried and determined, their voices unnaturally loud as if to blanket my mirrored worry, and I imagined the disappointment of the surgeon when I told her to let her biopsy scalpel be, that I was willing to risk her uncertainty. The whole time I was practicing relaxation exercises. They’d touch me and my whole body would clench. I’d notice my deep stomach muscles shiver, and my legs and forehead tense, and I closed my eyes and breathed and worked on letting go. I took the time that I spent alone on the bed to breathe warm, loving light within and around me. Going from appointment to ultrasound to appointment to mammogram, feelings gathered within me. With each interaction with the doctors, I felt misunderstood. Not only did I feel angry and think “no way am I sitting in the cancer center, no way is this happening to me this young”, and feel fear of losing myself in a rush of this new river of hospital/chemical experiences that would just rush me along towards a different than what I intended future, but I felt misunderstood. Although the doctors were well-intentioned, I felt minimized. Hello, I’m a boob and a lump.

I remember the first time I felt the dense tissue in my breast I had my mom, a gynecologist, examine it. Not a great idea. I felt so incredibly vulnerable and intensely protective of being violated. I ran away and surprised myself with an impressive, frothy, slamming wave of tears. I curled up in child’s pose and let myself cry in my cave, and slowly images came to my mind. I saw a steel, sterile, deceptively reflective hospital operation room, but I had become the table of stainless steel. I had an image of a factory line, and I was one object among many on the moving band. Simultaneously, I had also become a thin, hard sheet of stainless steel. The thin slices of breast they were going to take of me, I had suddenly become. I had become their sharp knives and their thin ham-sliced creation. And then I got an image of me whole, warmed by the gentle, constant warm heart within me-pulsing, and surrounded with light, in my room at night, and the light was filled with hovering, violet butterflies. And the man I cared for was with me. He was loving my breasts with butterfly kisses, and in his gesture he was paying homage to me, bowing down to me. My breasts now signified a whole me, validation in another person’s loving and apprehension of all of me. And so my tears grieved him too and also accepted the gift of his presence in my life.

Now I’ve learned how not to orient myself to people. In whatever profession, (healing, caring, etc.), I will focus on the spirit of the person before me while juggling the paradox of our transient, short life with all of its remarkable, playful boundaries. How wonderful to focus our loving work on researching and developing healing that takes the whole person into account. So that one day, instead of being told that the radiation from the mammogram I’m about to receive is my yearly dose of Nagasaki, I will lie on a bed in a room filled with plants and potted violets and have my friend, my teacher, my doctor, my co-journeyer pay respect to my spirit and speak a more subtle language of energy and loving healing. Bless me for apprehending our greatness in those grace-filled moments. This insight is now a part of my integrity and my conviction to live this reverence and center on it. My friend, Henryk Skolimowski (read The Participatory Mind), says that we are not machines but sacred sanctuaries. Thankyou, universe, Self, for the moments that I have lived the perspective of this new metaphor.