Gifts in Impossible Situations

I can walk! For the first time in three and a half months I can walk….little steps…. but what a joy. During this time of being deeply challenged, I have been given so many gifts. A friend sent me a quote: “We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations!” Well, this whole journey with my hip was experienced many times as an impossible situation, but as I stayed with it, moving from reaction to listening, it brought many gifts into my life.

I would say that one of the core gifts I received is a deeper ability to be IN my body, listening to its network of deep wisdom. Our bodies are highly intelligent systems (100 trillion cells all working together without a thought from us!!!) and they are speaking to us at all times, guiding us along the path of life. We can only tap into this intelligence if we are listening, but most of us don’t. We have been trained to see our bodies merely as tools for maneuvering around life. Acting from this perspective, we do things that hurt it – eat unhealthful foods, over-exercise, work it too hard, get insufficient sleep, use drugs and alcohol unskillfully, etc., and then we get mad at it when it doesn’t do what we want it to do. It’s like we all need relationship counseling with our bodies! That’s what this hip thing was for me.

Now I LISTEN, recognizing that I have deepened my relationship with one of the best friends I will ever have – my own body! And as with all healthy relationships, we want to be kind. So the more I listen and the more I treat my body with kindness, the more it glows in this deepening relationship, and I get to experience the bliss of a body that is heard and loved.

I now eat and walk and sit with much more kindness. And I am continually feeling gratitude for the amazing gift of a body. I don’t take even the most basic things for granted. Imagine all of the people on this planet that can’t walk, and yet we who can walk hardly ever give it a thought. Think about all the people who can’t see or hear, or speak, or eat, and yet most of us can! It is truly one of the great joys of life to live in gratitude for these basic and simple things.

Another core gift was to become much more conscious and kind with my own fear. We don’t see that the mind we live in most of the time is run by fear. It oftentimes doesn’t look like fear for it shows up as a subtle but very powerful urge to make life be a particular way. (I need to lose weight, be more successful, not procrastinate or be so shy or so talkative, etc.) If you live in a mind that always wants you and your life to be different, you can’t be here for the joy of being alive right here, right now!

At times this subtle unease amplifies into anxiety and even into full-blown fear. But that is not necessarily a bad thing. When fear is strong, we can learn how to relate to it rather than from it, freeing ourselves up from the deep grip it has on our minds. My seemingly endless sleep-deprived nights, when there was nothing I could do to get away from the pain, flushed out the deeper stories of fear that I carry. Not only could I see them more clearly, but I could touch them more deeply with the healing balm of my own heart. It is an amazing gift from life to learn how to see fear and to meet it in tenderness. And something happens – something very, very healing happens – when we learn to no longer fight what is going on inside of us and, instead, listen to it with kindness.

When we meet our own experience in curiosity and kindness, whatever we are experiencing relaxes because it is being heard. Isn’t this exactly what happens when we are feeling out of sorts and a friend simply listens to us? The same is true for all of our feelings. It doesn’t matter whether what’s arising is a feeling of fear, sadness, anger, confusion, overwhelm, self pity, anxiety or even doubt. They all just want to be acknowledged, listened to and touched with our hearts.

So life is more precious now. And all of this was brought forth through deep pain. Pain made me rethink how to be with my life. As many great myths tell us – the treasure is hidden in the places where the hero (all of us) most doesn’t want to go!! May we all come to know that even the deepest of challenges we experience are for us, helping us to recognize the phenomenal power of meeting our experience with curiosity and compassion.

Be light, Mary