Future Fears

“No! Not another surgery,” yelled my mind. I was driving home from an appointment with a surgeon who had recommended hip replacement surgery. But I just had spine surgery in February, and it was a very intense and painful process. I didn’t expect such a high level of pain as my first spine surgery in 2014 was easy peasy. I took only two pain pills and was back to work very quickly. But I was on pain pills for over a month with this latest spine surgery for they deeply bruised my nerves while trying to get a cyst out of my spinal column. So, it didn’t surprise me that my mind was upset about this new surgery.

One of my favorite quotes from Stephen Levine is, “We leave ourselves when we most need ourselves.” My mind started creating all sorts of stories about what this surgery was going to be like. My mind would go back to the intense pain of the last surgery and then hurl itself into the future, creating scary and upsetting scenarios about the new surgery. In other words, I had completely left myself when I really needed myself for I was caught exclusively in my mind, a mind that was afraid and upset.

Most of the time I have space around the stories in my head and can enfold them in my heart. But in this instance my mind was like a raging windstorm and my heart like a dry and dusty desert. It wasn’t just the pain it was upset about. It was also the limitations that go along with surgery, coupled with feeling like sh*t for a long time!

Partway on the drive home, I was able to see that my mind was taking the past and laying it over the future, generating a lot of fear. Coupled with some long slow out breaths, I simply began to acknowledge what my mind was doing by saying future. This allowed me to step out of the whirlwind, so I could relate to what my mind was talking about rather than being lost in its world. Being present for what I was experiencing, the stories began to calm down.

Our minds are wonderful tools for maneuvering through reality but when we are caught in our minds, like most people are most the time, we suffer a lot. Freedom comes when we learn how to use our minds rather than being lost in them. How do we do that? By first becoming curious about the stories your mind is generating, like I did on my drive home. The more you can do this, the more you can see they are just stories, which most have very little grounding in reality. Or, as Samuel Clemens, the author of Mark Twain once said, “I have lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”

But coupled with my mind’s resistance to another surgery, along with the intense pain I had been living with, which disturbs my sleep, my mind needed more than being seen…….

It needed my heart.

All true lasting healing happens in our hearts, and what we are just beginning to see is that our minds want the same thing we want. They want to be acknowledged, respected and heard.  And they want to be touched with compassion, kindness and understanding.

After getting a little space from my mind by saying future, I could begin to see how scared it was, and my heart began to open. I said to my mind, “Of course you’re scared but your stories about the future surgery are just stories. We don’t know what is going to happen with this surgery and the most important thing we can do right now is ground right here.”

My surgery is this Wednesday, August 14^th. Of course, my mind is still unsettled about this major happening that is coming very soon. But simply saying future allows me to unhook from its world and then saying, “I see you,” to whatever story my mind is running, allows it to calm down.

The strange and wondrous thing is that these deep fears have grounded me more in this moment, the only moment that matters. As I am washing the dishes and my mind goes into the future about the surgery and I say future, then all that is happening is just the washing of dishes. As I am brushing my teeth, waiting at a stoplight, showering, listening to someone, watering the garden, the stories of fear wake me up out of being caught in my mind and then all that is happening is life!

I’ve been awakening long enough to know now that the more I am here now, the more I will be here in the day before the surgery, the morning of the surgery and during the intense weeks of healing. The more I’m here, the more I won’t need to leave myself when the going gets rough.

So be willing to spend today simply recognizing your mind telling you stories about the past and about the future.  And when you catch this (and you may only catch this once all day long for the mind’s stories are so very seductive), simply say past if the stories are about the past and future if they are about the future.

The more you do this, the more it will allow you to recognize that who you really are is that which can see the stories in your head, rather than the stories themselves. And that is freedom!!

If this calls to you, we invite you to become a part of Mary’s interactive online course, What’s in Your Way is the Way beginning on September 25th. The price is marked down $100 until Sept. 16th. For more information about the course, Click Here