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 naseum. 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.
Ewings Sarcoma. Here we go again. I am poked and prodded ad naseum 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 in to my schoolwork. I get in to 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 her. 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’s. 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, who I can barely relate to . 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 Ph.D 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 me and my students. 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 in
to 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 in to each person
that came in to my energy circle in the hospital as God herself, walking in
to 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.
