Suffering as Grace

It’s been a while since I've written anything, and that has been a source of anguish for me because I am truly trying my best right now to show up for all of my peops — my parents (who by the grace of God are doing well other than their TV being on the fritz), loved ones and friends who reciprocate in kind, my small band of followers here, the young people in my care, and…me.

I’m really trying to be there for me right now.

A couple of weeks ago, an autoimmune eye condition I was diagnosed with in 2009 flared up, casting a veil over my right eye and making it extremely photosensitive. I should have known it was around the bend because all the signs that it was impending were there. I experienced a couple of unusually bad migraines, and food was not falling into my stomach with grace.

Diseases like this are mysterious. When I was first diagnosed, I was paranoid about everything I ingested or touched and wondered — Is this why? My doctors could identify no cause or trigger other than stress, and I was in my 20s, that forthright age of wanting to know and control everything.

Something I’m really grateful for, which having this condition taught me, is that when your body sends a distress signal, you need to stop and slow down against all conditioning. Fortunately or unfortunately, this is hardwired into my cells.

Going against the grain of conditioning means saying yes to your body, yes to rest, and no to everything that falls outside of your essential responsibilities. This is called surrendering. It’s very different from giving up, something surrendering gets conflated with in our toxic, hyper-masculine culture.

In the context of this kind of suffering, surrendering means creating space with my breath in the inner sanctum of my chest to accommodate healing. For me, that looks like honoring my food by being more present with my plate and off the phone. It means only consuming media, mostly writing, that nourishes peace in my mind. This has been supremely challenging as an American as of late.

Surrendering also means having boundaries with work and not carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. This is also very challenging when you are an educator and caregiver to any degree in any capacity.

When I was first diagnosed with this mysterious eye thing, I was angry and stayed that way for years. I blamed everything under the sun for predisposing me to a high cortisol level, including a stressful childhood growing up in a business family where rest and peace were unheard of, especially during the holiday season when we were at our busiest.

I felt severely limited and trapped by my fear of a disease that had a will of its own, damaging perhaps the most perceptibly fragile part of my body.

This fomenting rage only exacerbated my condition, and it reared its head often, hobbling me whenever I was in pursuit of a big goal, be it grad school or a new project that required intense focus. I treated it as an enemy, and thus it became. I never thought that cycle would end.

As time marched on, though, and I became intimately familiar with the slightest of sensations I felt in these orbs of light, joy, hope, and fury embedded in my skull, I began to understand it differently.

I realized my condition wasn’t going anywhere — that it would appear from time to time, and the only thing I could do was stop when it did and give it care. I realized that my condition was me, not something alien, separate, or external. It was part of my wholly unique makeup, a signal that my body, the most vital and neglected part of me at the time, was sending as a reminder.

In the words of the great Parker J. Palmer, my life was speaking to me.

Fifteen years ago, I never thought I would arrive at a place in my life where I was grateful to have this problem, but I am. It forces me to stop, to shut everything down, and to lie flat so that I can squeeze drops from bottles into my head eggs.

I lie there, ten minutes or more sometimes, staring at the heavens, liquid clouds swirling my vision, my breath slowing, my meditation sometimes turning to sleep.

I am most delighted, ecstatic, and fully immersed in grace when life surprises me. And I’m so surprised and proud that I’ve reached this place where I know for certain that suffering truly is grace — an opportunity to grow into challenges and realize their divine usefulness, their intention for us.

Be here now.