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Letting Go of the Fight
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by Marsha T Metzger, M.ed, RYT, KYTA
The sun was streaming through the glass window. There was a circle of love standing around my bed--parents, grandparents, priests, a nun. I ate the tiny wafer of bread that the priest gave to me, placing it gently on my tongue with his trembling fragile fingers. “This is the body of Christ,” he whispered. As I ate it, the sun felt warmer, and I said to myself, “I am eating Jesus, so I know I will be all right.” I was five years old. I had just been diagnosed with Ewing’s Sarcoma, a deadly form of bone cancer. I had been poked and prodded ad nauseum. It was 1969. I had just been given my last rites. Of course, I did not know that. I knew only about the warm feeling inside, and this incredible feeling of being carried.
I am sitting at the white piano, just staring at the ivory keys. My fingers hurt. My mother is nodding her head as she talks to my doctor on the phone in the other room. It is 1976. I am thirteen years old.
Ewing’s Sarcoma. Here we go again. I am poked and prodded ad nauseum for four more years. I barely listen to the doctors. They, and the cancer, are my enemies and I need to spend as little time as possible in the hospital. I get through it, but I am changed forever. I am now missing my left leg. And I am a teenager. I dive into my schoolwork. I get into a great college. I leave home to live in a dorm, my body basically intact. My hair has come back. I can walk without a cane. No more stomach upsets. It’s over! I can move on.
It is 1982. I am a sophomore at Mt. Holyoke College. I love it here. I study hard, but I have few friends. How can I explain these experiences of cancer, which were so new, to my peers? I still have the needle tracks on my arms. I don’t know how to shake this “feeling” that something is about to go very wrong. I see the sun stream through my window in my dorm room. I remember the promise of forgiveness, God’s everlasting love and I hold on tight to that belief. I’m going to need it. Pain in my lower back leads to fever, nausea, chills. I can’t even walk across the lawn to go to class. I finally go to the doctor. My bladder has stopped functioning properly, thanks to the years of chemotherapy and radiation. It has affected my kidneys. I am rushed off to surgery to rework my whole urinary system. I have a dream that Christ is carrying me between a row of nuns and I feel completely loved and safe.
I change colleges, to be closer to home. I study hard. I live off campus with some career women, away from my peers, to whom I can barely relate. I do well in school, but I try to hide my flaws, my scars, my past. This requires tremendous work on my part--not telling. No one can know about my leg, or the cancer, or any sadness I might have. I will just keep achieving good things, win approval from family and friends, set out to accomplish my goals, look put together. Keep going.
I graduate. And from there it is achievement after achievement. I open my own design business in California. I get a Masters from Harvard. I travel to France, teach and study there, become fluent in French. I work at the UN. I study towards a PhD at Columbia. I am not saying I am not proud of these achievements, but I feel they came because I was fighting to be here, fighting to stay alive, fighting to give my life meaning, fighting also with God. It was never about “Why me?” It was always just “Why?”
It was after my internship at the UN in Geneva working on the rights of disabled children that I got the news from a doctor in Switzerland, where I was working. It was August 1995. My kidneys had failed and I now had to return to the US because my insurance would not cover treatment abroad. By this time, I had spent countless hours on my knees, trying to come to some kind of understanding about divine purpose in all of this suffering. I was so deeply in love with God, but I could not get “THIS.” There are lots of different theories: Believe me, I have tried them all. And I tried every kind of alternative therapy there was. (Needless to say, I am very open-minded and see all these modalities as incredible helps along the way.)
And so has begun the most incredible and trying part of my life--living with kidney failure. I go to dialysis three times per week. It is draining on every level, but most of all, for me, emotionally. And I have finally understood why. It is the fight. The fight to stay above ground, normalized, strong, healthy, unafraid, at peace in the midst of the storm, live in equanimity and balance and most importantly, with joy for the sheer gift of life.
In 1998, as part of this incredible inner journey of transformation, I became both a Kripalu DansKinetics instructor and a Kripalu yoga teacher. Bringing some sense to my body story and making it into a career path has brought me full circle. I am so much freer, with nothing to hide. My presence in the classroom--just showing up--is so healing for my students and me. I am also grateful not to be alone in my kidney challenges: Yogi Bhajan, who brought Kundalini Yoga to the west, just received a kidney transplant last year!
This past October, I had to be hospitalized because of some complications with dialysis. I had been very stable since 1995, with few problems, really, but I knew that there could be problems. And here I was yet again, in the hospital, with potentially dangerous situations at hand. Yet, this time, there was this overwhelming sense of grace and love and peace. I couldn’t shake it, even if I tried. In fact, I tried to attach myself to freaking out, but I simply couldn’t access it. My yoga practice had conditioned me tap into those places where I know there is peace, joy, love, serenity and, most of all, God’s grace. It was so easy, so much at my fingertips, right at the surface, within my grasp; I believe I had re-awakened my body to this memory of what came before my fight began. I found myself looking into each person that came into my energy circle in the hospital as God herself, walking into my room, caring for me, watching out for me. This time, I realized that this too was God and, therefore, I could relax. I could let go of the fight.
I was so clear with my needs, so at home with my voice, confident that I would be heard. And although I was still being poked and prodded, there was peace in every cell, which served as a sponge for all the pain.
It says in Ecclesiastes that there is a time to take up arms and a time to lay them down. I believe this is a time in my life when I can lay down my weapons and bask in the grace of God. I am not so sure that will ever change. If I am coming from the very truth of who I am, which is definitely a gift of yoga, I am always in Divine will and therefore there is nothing to fight anymore. I am so grateful that this warrior has done her service and can now retire her weapons. Perhaps you’d like to join me. Sat Nam.
Marsha T Metzger, director of Endless Possibilities Yoga & Dance and creator of Color Me Yoga for Children and Teacher Training, teaches classes and workshops and works privately doing healing work.
www.yogaom.com
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