Welcome

I started this blog back in 2011 for anyone who, like me has been pitched into a life-altering situation.   Mine started with chronic pain, but the same issues face all of us whose lives have been dramatically changed: how to make sense, find psychic strength and hopefully improve our lot.

Two years ago, a rare cancer diagnosis turned life upside down, forcing me to question my life and meaning.  Pain was the gift that readied me to cope with cancer.  Cancer has been the gift that has forced me to learn lessons that have deeply enriched my life.

Olympic medalist Clara Hughes, when talking of her depression, said she did it “for the one person.”  So this is written, not for me or the many, but hoping that one person may resonate with one post.  That my path may run alongside yours for part of your journey.

Please feel comfortable to contact me if you wish at pathwaythroughpain@gmail.com

 

 

Is it Useful?

“I’ve got a bad case of the 3:00 am guilts – you know, when you lie in bed

awake and replay all those things you didn’t do right? 

Because, as we all know, nothing solves insomnia like 

a nice warm glass of regret, depression and self-loathing.”
― D.D. Barant, Dying Bites

“Is it useful?”  Only last week I read an article (which I now can’t trace!) which asked that very question.  And it stuck.

The writer was referring to those times when we go round and round on a hamster wheel in our heads, getting more miserable.   Of course, it serves no purpose, but that never stops us or helps us.

So I started asking, “Is it useful?”  And found the question is not only useful, but has hidden depths.  On the surface, it sounds utilitarian and selfish, as if I am using people to get what I want – manipulative.  Yes, being pragmatic is good, but I don’t want to live just looking out of my eyes.  What about the greater good?   And isn’t half my waffling precisely because I can see both points of view, which leads to hours of flagellation and anguish?

“Is it useful?” changes the whole question.   First, I have to step away and look at the problem from the outside.  The answer invariably is NO – squirreling never advances me.  Then, like a telephoto lens in reverse, I see the situation in the round.  It shows clearly that I am magnifying one portion and have retreated with it like a squirrel to its den, chewing a tasty nut.

And the answer is obvious and freeing. No, mostly thoughts are not useful or necessary. They don’t advance my or your lives. Asking the question, though allows us to take the overview: what is useful, where do we want to go and who do we want to be? The detritus of rumination falls away, like the rocket carrying a spaceship – and we can sail on fluently to our destiny.

To God – re 2021

“What would you say to God about 2020?”  asked my newspaper.  What indeed?  Fury at waste?  And loss?  And bitter unfairness?  Anyway, God seems not to have been listening.

But in a way they were missing the point – or it was the wrong question?   You see, it isn’t about us; it’s about God.   It isn’t about our small lives; it is about the immensity of goodness.  As long as we look at life from our angle, we will get answers that don’t work.   It’s like a dog trying to make sense of a motorway.  We are too small, too fragmented to understand the hugeness surrounding us.  Rather like a.castaway coffee cup trying to suss out the ocean in which it floats.

All the time, we are looking at either our achievements in trying to harness nature, our entitlement to fairness, or stuff.   That way, we remain focused on the minutiae.  We live as if via a cellphone; we see like a camera.  Our frame is humanly small

Our human eye sees only a limited spectrum.  Out of what we can see, we then choose what to concentrate on, hence the famous experiment where a fake gorilla walked unnoticed through a crowd.  The lookers had been told to watch a ball, which they did.  Meanwhile, missing the gorilla.

We miss a lot of gorillas as we follow our goals, nose to the ground, oblivious.  When our focus is on us, we see our point of view.   We don’t see God’s.

Years ago, I was in hospital in a long Victorian ward.  One of the women’s husband was brought in, dying of a heart attack.  She had just had major surgery and couldn’t be moved to see him.  All night, the ward waited with her.  I reacted like we do over covid, with anger at God; it seemed so unfair.  

Then, suddenly, as if a window opened, I felt God’s anguish.   How painful it is to be God, suffering with us, just as I ache when my toddler falls, hurts herself and tries again.   Yet I had to let her learn or she wouldn’t become the sure-footed, persevering achiever she is today.

God isn’t on a cloud, judging us.  He isn’t doling out retribution and He certainly isn’t angry.   My God, and He is all I can fairly describe, is a huge compassionate intelligence, the life force that flows through us.  Prayer shouldn’t ask for favours.  We can’t force our will on Him.   Prayer is the privilege of sitting at the feet of goodness we can hardly imagine.  

I am small, I am trying to strip away the barriers of selfishness and negativity that separate me from this generosity of spirit.  I am ashamed of my failures, not because of me, but because of the hurt I have wrought on perfection.  So when I look at our tangled, troubled world, I can’t blame or reproach Him.  I hurt for the damage we have done.  And see God’s light shine through the hearts of the helpers.

I would say to God, “I am sorry.”  

“Be Kind to the Unkind”

“When you are kind to the unkind,

You encourage them to be kind like you.”

Bhawna Gautam

Posted on Facebook with comments ranging from heartfelt agreement to cries from the abused.  

So, does it work?   At best, it softens an unkind heart; at worst it opens you to a kick in the guts.  

What are the alternatives?   Fighting back which makes us feel less of a victim or a firm show of strength that you won’t stand for this treatment?  This is so tempting, particularly in family relationships.   In dealing with a vitriolic mother-in-law, my strongest feeling was that I didn’t want to become like her.  To fight back would be to descend to her level.  I paid a high price.  Was it worth it?  Was there another way that could saved me from becoming an angry victim or cutting off completely?

By chance, during my last visit to my mother, I found a way of being that left me whole Both my examples come from family, because escape is so final and jogging along leaves you aching for closure.  A friend one can drop; a parent carries a lifetime of closeness.  And love is hard to turn off.

What did I want on that final trip home?  Not that I knew it was to be the last, cradled in the sunlit Sussex Downs.   Peace and affection, an ending to verbal digs and manipulation – and my reaction.  I couldn’t walk away and live with myself; I disliked who I became when defensive.   How to stand firm and whole, yet without shutting down my heart?

Then, like a voice in my head, the words: “I am nice because that is who I am, not because I am pushed, bullied or manoeuvred.”   And simply that is what I did.  I was pleasant and kind, no longer reacting to barbs, not from fear, but because that’s who I wanted to be.  For the first time, she didn’t diminish me.   The strange thing is that she responded by stopping her games.  We had a good visit, though I hoped my being centred and collected didn’t also make a barrier.  The gush of love, where I left my centre, was missing, replaced with a gentle warmth.

After we got home, she wrote to me saying what a wonderful visit.  “I can’t tell you what you gave to me during your stay.”  And I had been afraid I had given so little. 

Finally, I knew her at her best, as she did me.  Today, I wonder how different things might have been if I had learned this earlier.

.

Gratitude as a Verb

“Thanks are the highest form of thought; and 

gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”

G K Chesterton 

I was always cagey about gratitude.   It is universally recommended, and actually something I do naturally every day.  Saying, “aren’t we lucky” several times a day as we notice each blessing adds richness and humility to our lives.  

So why does gratitude stick in my throat?   What kind of grinch does that make me, especially now when every blessing counts tenfold?

Gratitude assumes someone we are grateful to – and that’s a Pandora’s box.  If we are thankful for each good thing from God or the Universe, do we equally blame them for the bad?   Does it also mean someone can arbitrarily take away our good fortune?  Do we have to deserve our luck?  Does gratitude take away our agency?  Curb our ability to help ourselves?

Agency and choice are essential for mental health.   The first thing I do when faced with a problem, is choose to DO something.  If we can see our situation, even if a bad one, as resulting from an earlier decision, that gives us the chance to change that choice going forward.   Sometimes the decision is to wait and see, but it is MY decision resulting from evaluating the odds, not a helpless shoulder shrug.

Yet, the very act of living, breathing is wonderful.  We are surrounded by beauty, sometimes blazoned across the sunset sky, other times, shyly hiding in woodland.  We are capable of courage, love and creation.  

How do we reconcile the wonder and generosity of life with the ferocity of forest fires?   Can we be thankful for the small mercies, while thousands fight COVID 19?  Can I say, “There, but for the grace of God,” without fearing that grace may be withdrawn and I may be left despairing in the dark? And what about the unlucky ones? Do they lack God’s grace and am I smug for having it?

What about appreciation instead?  It has been defined as a verb compared with gratitude, a noun.  Its strength comes from action.   We notice, respond and give back.  I just read a post by a widow, facing her first Christmas alone.  Yes, she is grieving, but she is asking her friends to remember her husband by doing a kindness in his name.   Gratitude is not reciprocal; appreciation acknowledges the good, acts by thanking – and gives itself.  

When eating fruit, remember the one who planted the tree.”

Vietnamese Proverb

The Wrong Story?

“I am not what I ought to be, I am not what I want to be,

I am not what I hope to be in another world; but still I am not what I once used to be, and by the grace of God I am what I am”

― John Newton

Who am I?   Who are you?   We create an autobiography for ourselves, the story of who we are.  It gives us our identity, how we present ourselves to the world, and possibly more important, to ourselves.   

But are we using the wrong building blocks?   I am often struck by how some of the most “ordinary” people make the most lasting impressions.  Perhaps they are authentic because they can’t hide behind a fancy label.

Recently, reflecting on the value of my life, as you tend to do with cancer, it suddenly struck me that I had been writing the wrong bio.   With society’s lens, my life looked fragmented, with no clear thread; nowhere I could point to a “life’s work.” Lots of activity, but build a cathedral or produce definitive research?  Not a hope.

Then sprinkled along my desultory path were indications of the real me: a values thread.   What I sought was not fame, nor action. All my major decisions had one common theme: I never went against my heart. 

 What did I seek?  Buried within a myriad of daily decisions was one drive: to know God, to understand the mysterious world of human experience.  I collected stories of courage and selflessness like cigarette cards. Man on the moon didn’t inspire; the Dalai Lama did.  

So when we look at the ordinariness of our bio, the mishmash of our mundane chores, do we miss the bigger picture: the qualities that make one teacher memorable or one neighbour light our life?  Our bios shouldn’t be of deeds and academia, of selling the most cars or climbing Everest.  

Instead of plotting our progress through jobs or travel, we should emphasize the story of our growth and understanding as human beings.  We shouldn’t chart our value by our houses, cars and wealth, nor even by a law degree or doctorate. Instead, we should watch our struggle to grow and value our moments of courage and love.  

Look at your life through a spiritual lens.  Watch your key qualities emerge. Celebrate your moments of endurance and courage.   See where love led you, then you will really know who you are. And who people will remember.

Love of Life

I found my purpose in life when I left the church behind.  Sounds crazy. All those Protestant sermons, general confessions and fear of “the unforgivable sin” should have made the way very clear.  Why would no one tell me what was the forgivable sin? I spent my childhood in fear of having unknowingly sentenced myself to hell.

Cancer makes you think.  Hard! Why am I marching grimly along a path of pain – and towards what?    Why?

Then, in deep reflection, I realized that God had been presented as judgemental; life as an obstacle course I would probably fail.   After all, every day in school prayers, I had to declare “we are miserable sinners”! And no one had asked me whether I wanted to compete.   I trudged through, trying to appease a deity I couldn’t understand, but who, I was assured, held my future at His whim.

Because my brother went from an eager, alert child to a speechless, uncomprehending automaton suddenly, with no apparent cause, I was terrified that God was cruel.   Autism, especially that severe, was unknown back in the 1940s. Was this punishment? If so, what could a toddler have done?   

But now I had to rethink.   There’s probably not a lot of time ahead,  I am 80 with incurable cancer. We are, like everyone, locked down under covid.  Each day is juggling activity with chronic pain and, to add to that, I have just developed polymyalgia, which is additionally painful, requiring steroids.  Life is an endurance test. It is hard work making the best, being resolutely cheerful, while trying not to mind that daily another door shuts.

Yet today, I am genuinely cheerful, without effort, and grateful.  So what has made the difference? It all hung on my beliefs on life – and the problem with beliefs is they run like programs in the background.  I had to catch them, question and look them in the face.

At the root was my fear of malign life.  A belief that, for some reason, I was being punished.  As I have been ill much of my life, it has felt like climbing a mountain. I finally had children in spite of PCOS, was diagnosed with celiac disease after 25 years, had major back surgery, which got me out of a wheelchair but left with chronic pain, then multiple myeloma and now polymyalgia.  Yes, it did feel like an obstacle course, set up without consultation. It felt like punishment – and who was I to complain. I am the lucky one, compared to my brother.

What freed me?   I looked religion in the face and found the rules made no sense.  I looked God, as presented, in the face and found I didn’t like Him.  And yet, there was a part, deep inside that yearned for Him. I love goodness; I believe that life should be good.  How to reconcile the two?

After much reflection, I knew that I do believe there is a good presence or intelligence up there.   Teillard de Chardin postulated that mankind is entering the “noosphere”. He thought we had moved through a physical plane; then an emotional one; and now we are in the spiritual plane, where we are creating God.  Sounds a bit uppity. Could I go for that?

Yes, I know, in my bones, that goodness exists. Yes, I accept evolution, but feel that isn’t the whole answer.  It seems much more possible that there is an underlying, instinctive intelligence, rather like the math that underlies the universe.

So then, as de Chardin suggests, we could be building on that connected intelligence, brick by brick, act by act, building God.  This means that instead of facing endless spiritual exams, every unselfish or courageous act is paying into a universal transcendent bank account.  

Life then feels no longer like an exam, but an experience that flows through me, to be cherished and marvelled at.   I am not driven but witness to its beauty. I draw great joy from the privilege of using my life to create a note in a celestial symphony.

PS This may sound grandiose, but in fact it is humble pleasure in experiencing life flowing through me as a gift.  Sure it goes wrong sometimes, but I delight in the power of life. Am inspired by the trees I see clinging to rock faces, but still living determinedly.

Self Help?

“I was encouraged from a young age to put myself last, 

that it is selfish to love ourselves or put ourselves first 

……And then I got cancer.”   

Anna Moorjani

That hit home.  I recognized Anna’s account of giving of herself, of endless efforts to improve herself because “I wasn’t good enough as I am.”  Then she stopped me in my tracks with cancer.

She hit it in one: society holds up a standard.  To be decent people  we put others first, take from ourselves so the other benefits.  We frenziedly try to improve ourselves – look at all the self-help books.  Love oneself?  Not if you want to be a “good” person.

The wider question for us all is: how deep are these teachings – and can they cause our illnesses?  Do they affect the whole way we interact with life?  Do you or I carry a subliminal belief that we don’t deserve goodness?  Does that then predispose us to sickness? 

When did we learn we aren’t good enough, would never be and didn’t deserve space on earth?  How many of us also carry that belief deep inside, below awareness, but colouring our perspective? 

Mine went back very decisively to the age of five.  My mother was sitting on my bed, weeping and thrashing with grief.   She had just had the autism diagnosis on my brother.  She was grieving the loss of her son, who screamed all night, banged his 

head against the wall, never spoke or looked her in the eye.  Where she had known a laughing, inquisitive child, there was now an empty blankness.  Cut off at 15 months.  Back in 1947, there was no treatment that broke through.  

“I wish he were dead,” she cried, knowing the empty life ahead of him.   And I listened – the question forming in my mind, what would she wish for me if I weren’t good enough?p

So we learn along the way that we are faulty.   People talk of kids feeling invincible:  “It won’t happen to me!”   I never had that assurance.   Why not me?   I was waiting for the worst.   Who was I to be fortunate when I saw in my own home the unfairness of life?   And, awful thought, is there only so much health and fortune?  What right had I to take away from someone else?

Reading an author who trains top executives, I was stunned to learn so many suffer from Imposter Syndrome.*  And those are people who the world thinks have succeeded!

Our bodies don’t distinguish reality from imagination.  Think how one’s mouth waters at the thought of a lemon.  Are our bodies translating our inner doubts as illness?  

We know our hidden doubts, but what can we do to heal a broken soul?  I have a picture of my baby self smiling at a daisy and in contrast with a closed strained  face 

six years later. 

But I am not inviting you to a pity party.  (Anyway, it’s also “not good” to be sorry for yourself!).   In fact, most of us aren’t dwelling on our inadequate feelings.  There’s just a shadow underneath when we sometimes glimpse an unseen program running like DOS below our lives.

I want, you want to be open, whole and happy.   The way I finally found peace was to connect, not with the judgemental God of my youth, but with the infinite goodness above.  I learned to live as kindly and lovingly as I can, not out of self love or fear of punishment,  but put of love of goodness itself.  

Changing my understanding of God, by whatever name, has finally silenced my nitpicking, negative alter ego.  Now instead of fearing being cast out or punished, I see the spiritual world as if we are each a note in a celestial concert, a stitch in a universal tapestry.  

So instead of beating myself up, I feel like a singer or artist or golfer.   I try to improve my game.  Not for me, but for the universal good that is so much greater than I.

*Imposter syndrome can be defined as a collection of feelings of inadequacy that persist despite evident success. ‘Imposters’ suffer from chronic self-doubt and a sense of intellectual fraudulence that override any feelings of success or external proof of their competence.  Harvard Business Review.

Start by Loving Yourself First by Anna Moorjani 

Anita Moorjani is the author of the bestselling book Dying to Be Me: My Journey From Cancer to Near Death to True Healing.

Gay Hendricks PhD, said in “The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level, “Each of us has an inner thermostat setting that determines how much love, success, and creativity we allow ourselves to enjoy. When we exceed our inner thermostat setting, we will often do something to sabotage ourselves, causing us to drop back into the old, familiar zone where we feel secure.”

Who’s Who?

Who am I?   Who are you?   We create an autobiography for ourselves, the story of who we are.  It gives us our identity, how we present ourselves to the world, and possibly more important, to ourselves.   

But are we using the wrong building blocks?   I am often struck by how some of the most “ordinary” people make the most lasting impressions.  Perhaps  they are authentic because they can’t hide behind a fancy label.

Recently, reflecting on the value of my life, as you tend to do with cancer, it suddenly struck me that I had been writing the wrong bio.   With society’s lens, my life looked fragmented, with no clear thread; nowhere I could point to a “life’s work.”  Lots of activity, but build a cathedral or produce definitive research?  Not a hope.

Then sprinkled along my desultory path were indications of the real me: a values thread.   What I sought was not fame, nor action.  All my major decisions had one common theme: I never went against my heart. 

 What did I seek?  Buried within a myriad of daily decisions was one drive: to know God, to understand the mysterious world of human experience.  I collected stories of courage and selflessness like cigarette cards.  Man on the moon didn’t inspire; the Dalai Lama did.  

So when we look at the ordinariness of our bio, the mishmash of our mundane chores, do we miss the bigger picture: the qualities that make one teacher memorable or one neighbour light our life?  Our bios shouldn’t be of deeds and academia, of selling the most cars or climbing Everest.  

Instead of plotting our progress through jobs or travel, we should emphasize the story of our growth and understanding as human beings.  We shouldn’t chart our  value by our houses, cars and wealth, nor even by a law degree or doctorate.  Instead, we should watch our struggle to grow and value our moments of courage and love.  

Look at your life through a spiritual lens.  Watch your key qualities emerge.  Celebrate your moments of endurance and courage.   See where love led you, then you will really know who you are.  And who people will remember.

We Shall Overcome

It’s as if we are all holding our breath.  A strange dystopian silence, waiting – for what?  An uneasy step on uncertain soil into an uncertain future.

Those of us old enough to have lived through the aftermath of WWII, are fortunate, even though high risk, to know deep inside that one can rebuild, that life does go on, however changed.

As a child, I played on London bomb sites, the flowers determinedly thrusting through the rubble.  My school bus drove through streets where every third house was gone, small iron fireplaces halfway up ragged walls, flapping wallpaper, open to the sky.   Today, you wouldn’t know how beaten those streets once were.

In 1971, I remember living through the bankruptcy of Rolls Royce Aero Engines.  The whole area went down: cafe’s, shops, every small business; all were feeding Rolls Royce.  All sank without hope. A microcosm of today. 

The very name Rolls Royce stood for quality, reliability, excellence.  We were proud to be part of it. And it vanished, like air out of a balloon.  We were flat, bereft. A parallel to the NHS today.  

No one could move as no one could sell their house and those in social housing were trapped.   To top it all, we had a postal strike which meant not only post but telephone were cut off. The sense of isolation was crippling.

We couldn’t apply for a job by mail.  We couldn’t make a long distance call as they were through the operator.  The phone coin boxes were jammed full and no one emptied them.

No one dared to miss work to job hunt because we didn’t yet know which jobs would be lost (almost all in the end).  Anyway, what jobs?

We saw a run on a bank and suicides.   We didn’t know if pensions were safe.   One man, just about to retire, told he was being kept on and would get his pension, died of a heart attack from relief.

A company came to Derby to interview the pickings – for a single job.   When Mike went for the interview, his whole department was there, glumly lined against the walls.  He was lucky. He got the job, provided he could start on 1 April. Our third child was due on 31 March.

Although the housing market was stagnant, we had one advantage: a period Georgian House.   We had one offer, low but an offer – if we could vacate by 1 April.    

Mike’s new job had offered to lend us a house for 6 months.   So we had to take our good luck and run with it.

I had no doctor or hospital bed where we were moving.  My parents were in Switzerland. Suzy was 5; William 3.    We knew Alexandra was a large baby. I asked if she could be induced, but was refused.   We also had a midwife friend, who said it would be safe to encourage Alexandra.

So Mike put me in the car and drove me up and down a ploughed field, then gave me castor oil, gin and a hot bath. Alex was born the next morning with the cord round her neck: 8 lbs 4 oz.

When she was 10 days old we moved.   As we drove down the motorway, Mike ran a high fever. – 39.4.   I had to see the furniture into the new house the next day. It was freezing cold and we knew no one locally.  So I went round to the minister’s house at 7.00 am and said, “I am desperate. Will you take the baby?” And handed Alexandra and a bottle over to her.

The company house was unbelievable.  The windows were broken, as was the heating.  There were no curtain rails. I used drawing pins and string.  The floors were unfinished boards, the backyard backed onto a main railway line with a broken fence.  

You hit rock bottom, get your breath – and come back up.  As we will come back up when this ends. You aren’t the same.  Maslow talks of a hierarchy of needs, with food and shelter at the bottom, rising through emotional needs to self-actualization at the top. I watched as each level was ripped away till we were left with a broken shelter.   

You do put back the layers, in a daze.  So many of the things we thought we needed turned out to be mirages.   Now we know what really matters and that hard-earned knowledge is still with me today.   As Boris Johnson said on his return from death this week: love.  

More info:  Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Boris Johnson’s speech on leaving hospital

 

Peace be with You

We want peace, yet we get hustle.   And as we tense for the next item on our todo list, what wouldn’t we give for a quick break, a quick way to relax the tension away.

I found this one almost by chance.  Its fast and it works – quite the wrong way to describe it as the result is sleepy and slow.   It is based on using Soft Focus or peripheral vision, which stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system which turns off the stress response and induces relaxation.

Sit back and, without moving your eyes, look to the edges of your vision,   Or shut your eyes and feel the largeness of space around you. You go immediately from sharp to soft focus.  Fast as in tight and hurried; soft as in sunlight.

Normally, we operate in sharp focus, almost like tunnel vision, as we concentrate on what we are doing.  Soft Focus is the opposite: we look at the edges and the centre blur. I almost feel rather than see. I put my awareness around and almost behind me, a larger awareness.  The result is immediate calm. 

This is so easy to do wherever you are, a wonderful tool whenever you feel stressed or before you do something difficult.  It is also pleasant to pause and soft focus before eating or settling into a book.

I also use a slightly longer version, like a mini meditation:

• Deep breathe.  Just slow and easy.  
• Soft focus.  Look at the periphery, feel the space around and behind you. 
• Say the word “peace.”
• Smile as you open your eyes.

Sleep sweetly

If you have difficulty relaxing all over before sleep, try yawning as wide as you can.  You will automatically relax your muscles. So try, 1 2 3: breathe deeply, yawn and let the tension flow off your body.

 

More info:

The technique is an easy way into trance or meditation, that it is extremely helpful for ‘difficult’ situations and public speaking, and that it can be used to depotentialise unpleasant memories and anxiety-provoking imagined situations, perhaps you may want to find out about it too.  Andy Smith, Practical NLP Podcast.

Soft Focus: https://nlppod.com/how-to-use-peripheral-vision-in-therapy/