Mary O’Malley – I want to share a story with you where we will have to slog through the weeds before we get to a spacious and healing view, for this is a story about my hip replacement surgery.  When I told some people about the surgery, several of them said they had heard this was an easy surgery.

I felt relief because the spine surgery I had in February was very intense. But the first inkling that maybe this wasn’t true came when I met with the surgeon for my pre-op appointment.  He said that I would wish I hadn’t had surgery for the first three weeks. But I still imagined that this would be less painful than the spine surgery.

At my post-op appointment two weeks after the surgery, the x-ray technician asked me how I was doing. When I said I was slowly progressing, he responded that when he is present for this surgery (they take x-rays all throughout the surgery) he was amazed that people would heal at all because the surgery was so brutal.

The trauma the body experiences from this surgery disrupts the normal functioning of the leg and that is why you can’t drive for 6 to 8 weeks, for your leg has to remember how to be a leg. And because I had been unable to walk much for the year before the surgery, my leg has more remembering to do than most.

So needless to say, it hasn’t been a lot of fun. It is like living in a category one hurricane with strong winds blowing all the time – the winds of recovering from not only the surgery but the anesthesia and the IV antibiotics, the winds of really intense pain, the winds of pain medication, the winds of my world narrowed down to a bedroom and limited steps and, my favorite, the winds of the blood thinner that I have to take for 35 days, which makes me feel like I have the flu.

As Stephen Levine once said, “Can you keep your heart open in hell?” For the first two weeks it was hard to keep my heart open because our minds truly dislike discomfort, especially this level of discomfort. But I kept on coming back to my heart for a few minutes or so. It was like like resting in the eye of the hurricane before the winds would suck me back into resistance and struggle.

During this recovery time, my son set up an old VCR and gathered all the videotapes I had saved from my children’s growing up years and even some from my early teaching. When he was figuring out how to get the VCR to communicate with my smart TV, he popped in a video and it was of a class I gave, probably the late 80s. It was so unexpected as I have no memory of this class being recorded.

As he was busy getting the signal to be clearer, I watched myself share a story that helped me come out of the winds. The story comes from Joseph Goldstein, one of the three people who brought Insight Meditation to the U.S. At a time in his life, he sat in meditation for a year in Burma and experienced what he called his light body. I call it the still, clear place that is right outside the struggling mind.

Then his visa ran out and he had to come back to the United States. When he got cleared to go to Burma again, he totally expected to sit in his light body again. Instead, he sat in what he calls a concrete body because, wanting to experience what he had experienced before, he was caught in endless struggle.

He said it took him two years to finally show up for what was actually happening. As soon as he stopped trying to be someplace else and accepted that this was where he was, he was again able to access his light body.

That story reminded me of the power of saying yes to whatever life is offering. From watching this story, I had a much greater access to the willingness to actually be present for this very uncomfortable process and the joy from that is indescribable.

More and more I can be present for the pain, for the flulike feelings and for the feeling of being trapped. As I have said many times before, this is absolute magic. Rather than falling into all the discomfort or desperately trying to get away from it, I could now give it the healing of my accepting attention for more than a few minutes.

It’s much like what you experience when you share a difficult experience with a friend and they don’t judge you, fix you, or reject you, and in that pure listening things open up. I was finally listening to my very uncomfortable experiences and they were opening up.

There has still been great discomfort, for my leg is having a hard time functioning. Do I still get caught in the winds? Yes! This is still damn uncomfortable. But when my mind gets upset it reminds me to soften my belly and breathe into some long slow out breaths. This allows me to come out of the mind’s stories about what is going on and to instead, give the healing balm of my own attention to my upset mind and beleaguered body.

It takes a while to learn how to do this because we have been trained to not experience what we are experiencing. So we live in constantly becoming rather than the joy of simply being. The key is to begin to strengthen the muscle of your natural curiosity.  This is not the kind of curiosity that tries to figure something out. It is being curious about what you are experiencing right now.

One of the ways you can do this is to ask yourself, “What am I experiencing right now?” And then bring your attention into your body and find a specific sensation like a tickle in your throat or a headache or an itch on your thigh and then describe it to yourself. (Don’t try this at the beginning with big sensations like a splitting headache or intense menstrual cramps.)

Every time you do this you are training your mind to be present for life rather than always trying to make it be different than what it is. And whether it makes sense to you or not, this is what you most deeply long for in your life, the ability to have your mind, your body and your heart all together right now.

I leave you with a favorite quote from Jeff Foster:

True relief was eventually found…through a giant YES to life; not by transforming into something I ‘should’ be, but through a deep acceptance of myself as I actually was.

SF Source Mary O’Malley Sep 2019