Dearest Readers,
On September 21st, I nearly fainted at the long-term care home where I provide spiritual care. I was in the middle of delivering a sermon for the residents during our homemade church service and the world started to go black.
I pulled up a stool and carried on, acting as if I was okay when I wasn’t. I didn’t want people to worry. But after the room cleared, I got help from the nurse and called for a ride home.
Because I had spent part of the previous weekend with a family who’d had “the gastro,” and because I was in bed for the next two days with nausea and a weak stomach, the sickness was chalked up to gastroenteritis.
The family who’d given me the bug got better in two days. Ten weeks later I am still sick.
What I want to write to you about is not the details of my illness but the practice of surrender. Because one has led to the other.
Twenty-plus years ago, when I got on the Healing Journey and began to seriously attend to my spiritual life, I unwittingly got on the Fixing Journey, too.
Give me a problem and I will give you the solution. You’re sick? Say affirmations. You’re sad? Be positive! You’re depressed? Change!
Apparently, I’m not the only one. There is actually an Instagram account called “Healing from Healing.” It can be a bit crass but the account holder is ultimately trying to illustrate the wider healing community’s compulsion to fix: if you’re not happy/healthy/whole you must be doing something wrong!
It’s taken me a long time to learn that healing doesn’t mean fixing and controlling. It means letting go, releasing, accepting, surrendering. And believe me, I haven’t finished learning the lesson.
Since getting sick, friends have offered me silent faith sessions, tried to perform distance healing practices on my body, and recommended shamans and psychics.
You would think I would be grateful for all of this support but my reaction has sort of been, hmm, how shall I say it? Irritation.
“Stop trying to fix me! Just let me be sick!”
Now, because I analyze everything, I realize that this part of me, let’s call her Resistance, might be the part of me that doesn’t want to heal. Maybe she likes being sick because she gets to check out of life.
Maybe.
Maybe not.
Maybe there is another part of me, let’s call her Wisdom, that knows that this illness is actually teaching me something important and a miraculous cure would only eradicate the lesson.
So what’s the lesson?
There are a few:
Since becoming ill, I have had to say “no” a lot. Saying “no” is not one of my strong points.
Since becoming ill, I have had to let go of my fear of being judged. I imagine that people are going to see me as “less than” because I’m not working, I’m weak, I’m cancelling appointments, I’m falling behind. I have had to let these imaginary people think what they are going to think.
Since becoming ill, I have had to accept that my body is not able to do what it could do ten weeks ago. But I’m a yoga teacher! Too bad.
Since becoming ill, I’ve had to surrender to the fact that life has thrown me a curve ball and I can’t reach my arm out to catch it because the lymph nodes in my armpit are swollen and it hurts to much to stretch.
These are big lessons. Vital lessons, no? Why try to fix and control them away? They are teaching me well.
Yes, I would like to heal. Yes, I would like to have my energy back. And, what if it was okay to be sick? What if this sickness is actually healing me, one small surrender at a time?
If I was to be suddenly, miraculously healed by a prayer, a shaman or a psychic, would I not just go right back to saying “yes” when I need to say “no”? Would I not immediately return to over-giving my time and energy? To doing more than my body can handle so that I would finally be enough?
It’s highly likely.
In the first few weeks, when I was still fighting this thing and struggling to accept what my body was saying, I taught a couple of online yoga classes. Cancelling was unthinkable.
Then I remembered how I am always telling my students to “listen to your body.”
How could I teach this kind of wisdom and not practice it myself?
So, I cancelled. And the next week, I cancelled again. And the next week, again.
Ugh.
The only consolation was that I was living my teachings.
Listen, let go, accept, surrender.
That’ll fix it.
From the fires of love,
Celia
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No Fixing Required
What’s the Point?
Dearest Readers,
The tough times continue. We are still grappling with the pandemic. Climate change seems to be worsening. In Canada we are coming to grips with a genocide. Racism and general xenophobia are frighteningly widespread.
Despite a whole lot of good work being done to transform our world, the current situation can feel overwhelming. When the overwhelm hits hard and things feel utterly hopeless, apathy arises. ‘What’s the point?’ is a question I ask, and get asked, often.
Not everyone feels this kind of despair but I’m pretty sure all of us are looking for meaning. What, exactly, is the point of all of this?
Lately, when this deep question of ‘purpose’ comes up, I have been thinking of Oliver Šteins.
I interviewed Oliver for Communion in 2016 after he told me he was ‘a militant atheist and a very spiritual person’. He was adamant that human life did not have any great purpose but he was nevertheless excited by the profound mystery of the human journey:
“Live for the moment,” he says in the interview, “It’s much more exciting. What’s happening now. Concentrate on what’s happening now and enjoy it because tomorrow it could be all over, right?”
Oliver was diagnosed with ALS a couple of years after our conversation and he died in March of this year. The thoughts he shared during the interview now seem incredibly prescient. He talked about his death and how he wanted to ‘go’ and, despite his anti-religious feeling, he felt deeply connected to an Eternal Energy:
“Where did it all come from?” he asks. “How did this all come about?” Then he answers his own question: “I don’t know. But I’ll keep asking and that’s what keeps me motivated, that’s what keeps me interested in life.”
Oliver found his purpose by asking the Big Questions. He didn’t need certainty to feel that Life had meaning. It was the uncertainty that inspired him. (I am a recovering controller and I find this incredibly brave.)
There is a poignant moment in the interview when Oliver is talking about the awesome Ogilvie Mountains on the Yukon’s Dempster Highway:
“Seeing just how elated I was, how all-inspiring, the hope… that I was this little speck on this planet and amongst all this… there’s nobody around… the sun’s beaming and there’s a cloud moving in and the wind, and… I just felt very moved, very spiritual at that point. I had that connection.”
That connection. When I find myself in what’s-the-point territory I know it’s time to make That Connection. I need to look at the Big Picture and orient myself within it. I don’t necessarily need to know that Life has a Purpose but I need to find purpose for my own life.
Oliver then goes on to say, “I’m insignificant, I really am. I’m not depressed about it. I’m very elated.”
For Oliver, being an insignificant ‘little speck’ in the Universe gave him a feeling of elation. That Connection. Watching shows about the Cosmos and reading books about astrophysics and cosmology are elating for me, too. We are not separate from That Vastness. The reason we feel that connection is because we are Inextricably Connected to Everything.
Oliver resisted the idea that God was a being but he embraced Being with passion and determination. Without knowing he would be dead in five years, he says, “When the time comes of my passing… I wanna go [back to those mountains]. That would be my final stop. Get in a lawn chair and just look over that. I would like to exit that way.”
Oliver died in Cobourg, Ontario. He didn’t get to set up that lawn chair on the Dempster Highway. But, amazingly, wondrously, purposefully, and very much with-a-point, his life is continuing to speak:
“Concentrate on what’s happening now and enjoy it because tomorrow it could be all over, right?”
From the fires of love,
Celia
(Watch the 10-minute Communion episode with Oliver on YouTube.)
Have Faith?
Dearest Readers,
A number of years ago, when I was just at the beginning of what I would now call the conscious spiritual journey, a friend said to me, “Have faith,” after I bombarded her with a fearful tirade of controlling remarks.
Have faith.
Her words had the right effect. I calmed down and took a breath. I knew I had to let go of whatever was causing me anxiety in that fraught moment and this little phrase helped me to do that.
‘Have faith’ can mean anything to anyone, really. It can mean believing in God but it can also mean trusting in the human spirit.
I work with a lot of people who have either lost their faith or simply don’t have any to begin with. Some of them once believed in a God that was ‘good’ but because they see so much ‘bad’ they no longer do. This makes sense. ‘Belief’ is fickle. It can be too easily eroded by the ‘thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.’ (That’s Hamlet.)
Having faith requires trust and trusting is different than believing. In what do I trust?
I trust that I am not the Power Making the Planets Spin.
I trust that the Spirit of Goodness will prevail. It may take a week, a month, a year, century or a millennium but eventually things work out. This quote sums it up: ‘If it ends, it ends well. If it doesn’t end well, it’s not over yet.’
I trust that the Universe knows what It is doing. When looks like the world is going to hell in a hand basket I remember that a heck of a lot has happened before now and a heck of a lot is going to happen after now. We are still evolving. I trust that.
Have faith.
It’s easy to say. I could have had a different reaction all those years ago when my friend said those words to me (f*ck off comes to mind). But she wasn’t being flippant. She was reassuring me. And because I do have faith, not blind-everything-happens-for-a-reason-spiritual-bypassing-faith, but faith in the stars and the sun and the moon, in the galaxies and the entire cosmic dance, in the grass growing and the trees blowing and the unfolding of history and the miraculous present and the uncertain future. I have faith in the steadfast spirit of the animals, in the perseverance of people who continue to fight for justice and equality despite staggering injustices and inequality, in the kindness of strangers and the generosity of neighbours and, finally, in the Transformative, Radical, Unconditional Love that seems to permeate Everything and defies logic and intellectual understanding.
Have faith, she said. I listened. And I let go.
And I’m still listening and I’m still letting go. Because I still like to hold on. And I doubt and I question and I fear and I rage. And I have faith.
May we all have faith right now. Not faith that ‘everything will be okay’. But that everything will be. Because it is.
From the fires of love,
Celia