Fourth Form of Madness

I have always struggled with attachment to money.  Growing up when I  suffered from a low opinion of myself, I guess I began to equate money with worth, a common mistake.  It seems ugly and almost ludicrous when you write it down in front of you, but I think I actually thought that if you had more money you were worth more, your opinions were worth more, your beliefs, your jokes were funnier – you get the picture.  I’m sure I just didn’t invent this belief system by myself, I am sure, like many of us, I thought this way as a result of the social that I, and all of us, have been emerged in on a day to day basis.  The social where “What do you do for a living?” is more often said and meant than “How are you, are you well?”.

Somewhere along the line, and I have no idea how this works, the practice of  yoga dissolved this belief system within myself, without me even realising it.  There have been many things that yoga has “magically” dissolved from within me.  I use the word magically here because to me it is sheer magic and a mystery how yoga works and whilst I may never understand or know it’s inner mysteries, I can’t deny the experience of it working in mine and many other lives.  Perhaps the best example of yoga’s dissolving powers is with my fear of death.  I had not your average fear of death.  Literally, all jokes aside, I could make myself hyperventilate at the very thought of dying, either dying myself or my loved ones.  For many years my husband used to say to me, “You really need to get over this fear of death, it’s preventing you from living”.  Not so easy when you are breathing into a brown paper bag just over the mere mention of the word.

Then I started practising yoga, regularly and steadily.  With passion and a love so deep.  Just practising, just showing up and breathing.  Eventually any agenda that i may have had, like to do a achieve a hand stand, to stretch further etc etc dissolved away.  Without any effort.  But what I didn’t notice was a lot of the other things that were also dissolving, practising out of me :-).  Until called upon, I never really realised how much yoga had changed my way of viewing the world, people, my place and the big events like dying.

Last year my father passed away from an aggressive cancer that left him bedridden the last five months of his life.  My mother, brother and I had a roster that we followed so that every day he would have someone sit with him, to just be there with him.  To almost everyone else Dad played the “Yep I am going to beat this cancer” card, with me he was honest.  He knew he was dying and was afraid and for some reason, the first time in my life, I wasn’t afraid to talk death or to listen and hear my father working through his thoughts and fears of his fate.  To allow him this space, to be accepting of this part of his life and to live it with dignity and a respect for life rather than in a constant state of denial that the modern medical system sometimes seems to demand of the patient, was some of the most inmate moments of life and I feel blessed I got to share those moments with my father.

Our sessions on “dying” started very simply one day, after he had ripped a feeding tube from his nose and sent the nurses scurrying from the room with his cries of despair.  Not knowing what to do, I simply laid my hands on his face to bring him the comfort of touch. Touch has now become one of my favourite senses, (and yet only about a year ago I didn’t really like to touch people).  I wasn’t sure if my father was going to like my hands on his face, he never been one for actions like this but within minutes he asked me not to stop whatever I was doing and so I continued and gave him an hours worth of this simple hands on session.  Half way through he was sleeping so soundly and peacefully and the feeling in the room had changed from one of despair and angst to peace and serenity.

From then on each visit with my father started with this simple session of hands on therapy at his request.  I brought some music and we would often sit there for long periods.  However, one day during the gentle hands on therapy, my father made a simple request – “Talk to me of yoga”.  I was a little confused at first.  He had always made a little fun of my yoga practice and me for doing it.  He used to call me swarmi which he knew annoyed me to no end , which is why he probably kept calling me that.  Then I got it, he wasn’t talking about asanas, or breathing or any of the practices of yoga, he was talking about union, union of opposites such as life and death.

How does one even begin to talk about these unknowns and does anyone ever get the authority to talk of such things?  So I pre-empted these discussions   with the statement “I can’t tell you what I know, because do we ever really know anything, but I can share with you only the very limited experience I have had”.  And so we began our sessions of life, death and other things.  Out of them my father developed his own mantra, just the simple word “energy”.  He used to whispher it to me at the beginnings of our periods of sitting together and I saw the comfort and serenity he created for himself just with this simple mantra and I would whisper it back and squeeze his hand and together we would sit as life rolled on, through and between us.