Healing is not just physical, it is also mystical. Learn how to have a relationship with the impossible by first learning how to quiet our reasonable mind.
The Need for Hope
The zombie apocalypse is imminent. Or so it seems since we have already had earthquakes, hurricanes, melting ice caps, famine and pestilence and that is just what happened recently!
It appears to be our entire mutual fate to be living during a time of great upheaval and sweeping change. When the story of the world becomes less clear it is the unfolding of the inner life that might provide the best way to proceed. The telling of myths, folk tales and fairy tales became a source in my Scot Irish family as a way to face great obstacles and impossible tasks because the examples of the heroines and heroes and the hope they seemed to always have. In every case, something goes terribly wrong – but something even bigger goes right.
The origin myth of Pandora’s box, written by Hesiod in about 800 B.C., is one of my favorites because it was one way to explain how all the evils came about in the world. Zeus gives a wedding present, a box, to Pandora, the first mortal woman on earth. Zeus does not tell Pandora what is in the box, but gives her strict instructions not to open it. What a set up! Somehow Pandora manages to wait a year, at which point her curiosity gets the best of her, and she opens the box. The lid flies open and all the evils and miseries of the world bolt out: hate, violence, sorrow, ignorance, jealousy, and sadness. Pandora manages to shut the box, leaving only Hope who is hiding under the lid. This old myth teaches us that all the ills and ailments, all the scandals and betrayals and the rampant dishonesty must be faced before the hidden hope of life can be found again. It’s as if things must become hopeless before a deeper sense of hope can return from the depths of the human heart. This level of hope includes a darker knowledge of the world and a sharper insight into one’s own soul.
Hope is found, not by clinging to old dreams or by denying despair, but by surviving it. When life becomes darkest the eye of the soul begins to see. “Hope springs eternal” when people begin to see beyond the parade of facts and the litanies of ideologies and learn to trust the deeper values of individual life as well as the underlying truths of human culture. Great crises are not solved by simply conserving assets, but by finding inner resources that are hidden from sight.
All shamans, mystics, Buddha, yogis and saints have said the same thing: answers to our questions come from looking within and in our stillness we find hope.
Hope is a bright star in a hopelessly dark universe. Through light years of distance, the brightness fills our inner selves. Hope is not just an emotion; it is a promise that smiling and laughter are just around the corner. When the fighter has been laid on the canvas by a well placed right to the jaw, hope is there saying, “Get up. Take a nine count if you must, but be ready to stand, and have the ref dust off your gloves. You’re going to win this match.” Hope is drawn to the person who sees beyond the present defeat, beyond the moment of being cast down, beyond the loss of the job, and beyond the negative words of hopeless voices. There is that voice from the “bright star” telling us to look beyond the darkness – to the bright light of hope.
In the end, Pandora hears a faint voice in the box and when she lifts the lid she finds hope, releasing it into the world. And everywhere evil goes, hope goes too. And all that is touched by evil – so too is touched by hope.
Laughing With Cancer
“Laughter is the tonic, the relief, the surcease for pain,” Charlie Chaplin
Laying on the gurney, hooked up to my IV, I waited for my doctor to call with my pathology report telling me my cancer is gone and clearing me for facial reconstruction surgery. Three surgeries in three days to remove the spreading melanoma on my right cheek had left a huge hole in my in my face which would require a complicated five hour flap surgery to close it up. My son August, with me through surgeries was making me howl with laughter. When I finally got the call, I turned to August and said, “My cancer is gone! Some of my friends may call or text you during my surgery to see how I am doing.” August dryly responded, “Can I tell them you’re dead?” It was just what I needed to send me into surgery laughing. August asked me for any parting words as the anesthesiologist wheeled me down the hall, and I responded, “Can I get you anything while I’m out?”
Cancer isn’t funny. The scar that takes up about 25% of my face, changing the way I look forever isn’t funny. Waiting to hear staging and if the cancer had spread to my lymph nodes wasn’t funny. But I’m funny. And I knew if I was going to make through this journey I had to connect to my core, to show up and just be me, and find the humor surrounding this horrific situation. And I did.
When I witnessed the shock that my friends had when they saw the aftermath of how cancer affected my looks they were speechless. My humor eased the tension, allowing my friends and family to be more encouraging and supportive.
Everywhere I went I took my humor with me. At one point I thought I might have to have a skin graft to cover the gaping hole on my face and I asked the doctor where the skin for the skin graft comes from. He said it might come from the back of my neck or from my hips. When I asked him if I could pay a young nurse to donate skin he looked at me in shock and I busted out laughing.
When I came home with forty stitches on my face I made the decision not to hide out in my home, but to carry on with life especially since my doctors said I could. One morning I got my car washed and when I walked up to tip the young man drying my car he took one look at me and said, “Oh my goodness! Were you in a knife fight? What happened to the other guy?” I handed him his tip and as I got in my car I said, “I don’t know, I just got out of jail.”
Genuine humor works completely from the inside out. It’s a nebulous entity, changing every time you use it. Humor isn’t a noun that you keep in your pocket and take out at parties. It exists in everything we do and it requires us to pay attention in order to spot the opportunity to illuminate it for others.
In whatever form you find it, humor is contagious. A smile begets a smile. A laugh begets a laugh. So, if you know someone with cancer and you want to lift their spirits just start with a smile and laughter won’t be far off. A smile – genuine humor – is such an important gateway to help someone feel better. Laughter can provide a sense of perspective when you are facing challenging circumstances and help release pent –up emotions. Laughter may also help reduce depression and anxiety and increase self-esteem, energy, resilience and hope.
My cancer journey is reminding me that I don’t need to live strong, I just need to live on my own terms and that means discovering the humor in all situations. There may be no proof that laughter can improve your health, but I have no doubt that it can improve your life.
Piano Playing As a Spiritual Practice
Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul. ~ Wassily Kandinsky
I don’t think I can say, yet, that I play the piano, but I’ve been meeting with one everyday for almost a year, just late at night, or first thing in the morning. I’ve been learning to follow its notes up and down the scales and I’ve been going through the short pieces in several exercise books. It’s not long before the left and right hand are asked to work at different rhythms and to make surprising steps and rests. And it’s not clear where to look. If I look too closely at the notes, everything slows down and I’ve lost the meter. If I watch one hand too intently, the other one wanders off. So I try to look on from afar, dispassionately, just enough to discern the patterns on the sheet and the shapes that my fingers make as they nearly strike the correct notes. Using this method, I have managed to get through the first few pieces in my piano books. I’ve played them hundreds of times now, inscribing little minuet memories into my muscles. I try to get out of the way so that they can take over while I listen along. Of course I can hear it when something goes wrong but it’s been interesting to find that the wrong note feels wrong to the finger as well.
When my fingers have woven together a passing musical likeness, I move on to the next piece. Immediately the baroque threads get tangled up. Notes ring out in strange clusters and at such a glacial pace that it reminds me a bit of nails on a chalkboard. Over and over, I retrace my steps, trying to find the path out of this woeful, accidental modernism. At the rate I am going there is little hope that I will ever become a very good pianist but this doesn’t bother me. It’s fun to be a beginner, every day, unsure of when and how the music will come.
Something I didn’t expect from the relationship I have with my piano is that outer music is leading to inner music in me. Playing the piano is turning into a spiritual practice.
Like any spiritual practice I have the help of a guru, my teacher Sebastian Estrada. And like any spiritual practice piano playing requires discipline. After hours and hours of practice I’ve reached a moment when the motion of my fingers across the keyboard is actually pleasurable, regardless of the sound. And then something else happens: there’s the sense that the music is playing me, rather than me playing the music.
Professional musicians must have this sense all the time, the very best concert performers becoming translucent to the music that they play. Perhaps this explains how they play large chunks of music, involving possibly millions of notes, by memory. It’s not that they memorize it bar by bar. Rather, they know the music so well that the notes could not go in any other place.
Is that a spiritual experience? Perhaps in this sense: musicians give themselves, via the discipline, to a communication that is far greater than themselves. The source of the music lies elsewhere – in the mind of the composer. But nonetheless, without the discipline and skill of the musician, the music could not be realized, could not be incarnated.
Piano playing takes you out of yourself too. Therein lies much of its satisfaction. And there’s one final aspect to it as a spiritual practice that occurred to me. It has to do with love.
Love is like playing a piano. First you must learn how to play by the rules, and then you must forget the rules and play from your heart. The same could be said for finding God.
Music and Healing
Music Matters. Last year, depressed about a recent diagnosis of a chronic condition, I decided to distract myself by taking guitar and piano lessons from Sebastian Estrada, a graduate student of music at UTEP. Sebastian is tall and broad-shouldered, with a mop of dark curly hair with solemn brows that offset his boyish grin. His eyes are the color of a dark brown beer bottle and rich soil flecked with dark chocolate all mixed together. A love of guitar has made his fingers rough which looks sometimes odd next to the smoothness of the back of his dark-skinned hands. I’m sure since he was a boy he was recognized as exceptional. After months and months of sitting in front of him strumming the guitar and sitting beside him on a piano bench, I don’t know him. There is a remoteness about him, a part of him is powerful yet unreachable. Music became the perfect diversion I needed and as our slow sweet musical tango began, it successfully blurred my criteria for self-pity.
Using music and sound as a healing tool is deeply rooted in ancient cultures and civilizations. Greeks believed music to be an art capable of healing body and soul. The flute and lyre were used to treat illnesses. Apollo, the Greek God of Medicine was also the God of Music and of healing.
Vocal sounds have been used by indigenous cultures for centuries as an integral part of the healing process. When overcome by illness Native American Shamans use the voice in healing rituals by singing to oneself to facilitate healing.
In India, it is said the universe hangs on sound, not just any ordinary sound, but a cosmic vibration so massive and subtle and all-encompassing that everything is seen and unseen is filled with it. Hindu Ayurveda medicine has used the voice to balance and re-align chakras for thousands of years.
In 2007 during a trip to Peru, I witnessed the extraordinary discovery of Machu Picchu’s Intihuatana Pyramid that was revealed to be a sophisticated harmonic structure not only mirroring positions of the planets and stellar systems but also designed to mimic the chakras and harmonic cavities of the human body. Stone altars are harmonically tuned to a specific frequency or musical tone. The sarcophagus in the center of the Great Pyramid of Egypt is tuned to the frequency of the human heartbeat. Astonishing experiments conducted at the Great Pyramid and other sites in America demonstrate the pyramids to be voice-activated geophysical computers.
The discoveries emerging describe the existence of a worldwide temple system mounted like antennas on the key energy meridians, which were employed by ancient priest-scientists as a musical system to stabilize the tectonic plates of the planet. This ancient system tuned the planet like a giant harmonic bell.
A recent study at Stanford University shows that depressed patients gain self-esteem and their mood improves after music therapy.
Extensive research shows that human blood cells respond to sound frequencies by changing color and shape. Sick or rogue cells can be healed or harmonized with sound.
I recently heard Sebastian’s band Trost House play. The band name was inspired by the aesthetic of his Sunset Heights neighborhood and the home on the corner of Yandell and Hawthrone, a home that architect Henry Trost designed and Sebastian passes every day. Sebastian’s mother is an architect and father a civil engineer so architecture, like his music, has always been an important part of his life. In a dark hot bar, hearing Trost House I found myself transcending. The music touched me deeply and tickled some universal nerves, invoking images and feelings. There is a moment of intimacy that occurs between a musician and an audience, outward energy, like an invisible electromagnetic field.
The music turns you around and pulls you in. It’s a magnet. Once heard, once felt, never forgotten. Music is your essential rhythm in your heartbeat; your essential sound, the breath. And music takes us and heals us in places we couldn’t get to any other way.
Note to note, music laces out of loose ends an extraordinary lattice of assurance and grace – assurance that there is hope for awakening in ourselves a deeper sense of immediacy or purpose amid the slumber of ordinary life, and for moments when we feel like all such hope is lost and that we will never heal, the grace of trusting that we do endure and that our of the wreckage of illness something surprising will rise.
Sebastian is teaching me about the space between the notes, about the measures, where so many juicy moments of life, spirit, and friendship can be found. In music, I am finding miracles, truth, and healing.
When life delivers an illness that leaves you speechless, songs give you lyrics to establish a narrative meaning to life. This is why music is healing because music is meaning.
