When Life Spins a Googly

Yesterday I found out that a good friend had an inoperable brain tumour.  My breath stopped for a few moments. Life insists on throwing us the unexpected googly.

For all you non Test Match/Sunday league readers, in cricketing parlance the googly is a weapon of destruction kept in the kitbag of a leg spin bowler. It is used infrequently, because its effectiveness comes mostly from its surprise value.

There can be no doubt that a diagnosis of an inoperable brain tumour would knock out anybody’s stumps.


My own experience of confronting a critical illness over the last five years, which turned my life completely inside out and upside down, took me immediately alongside him. I had a good sense of some of what he would be feeling but unable to language. Such an experience is invariably painful (quite apart from the chemo and radiotherapy treatment) always distressing, and depleting of mental, emotional as well as physical energy. One is left holding a fear that is unarticulated and a sense of quiet isolation.

My friend described in some detail about the drilling of a hole in his head as part of uncovering the tumour and then being told that even if much of the growth was removed, it was not possible to remove the roots. And we all know that roots regrow. Well, my overactive and graphic right brain took me straight to an image of the rhizome….

Wikipedia tells me that a rhizome is a stem of a plant that is usually found underground, often sending out roots and shoots from its nodes. But for me a rhizome has ancestral or tribal power connotations (often dysfunctional and involving group identity and belief patterns). All of that is related – of course it would be – to the root chakra.

In the human energy system, 7 major power centres known as chakras, resonate with the various organs of the body. Every thought, word and deed sends the correspond-ing ‘energetic’ wave through the body and attaches to an organ, bone, tissue or muscle. Every experience in our life is filtered through our chakra database. This is recorded in our very cell tissues and that data is an energetic charge that has psychological, biological, environmental, social, and global consequences. It is in this respect that our "biography becomes our biology".*

 Needless to say, that 'charge' which is also genetically transmitted can be diffused, if we choose. But that is another story entirely.


Quantum theory verifies that, regardless of whether we perceive two distinct entities in the cosmos – matter and non-matter (air and electricity) – only one thing makes up the universe: energy. Hence all disease is a form of distorted energy. 
Allopathic medicine focuses purely on the physical and gives little to no attention to the body-mind axis; we won't even mention the spiritual. Martin Brofman who taught me his famous 'Body-Mind Mirror System' of healing, says Anything Can Be Healed (title of his book). I'm not sure about that. But I do know that anything is possible.  And so part of my friend’s fate, maybe how he approaches this stage in his life, his mental attitude, lies in his own hands.

Having engaged with a process of self-healing myself, I know that living in the moment and being at peace with what is, it is not the easy option. It is an act of personal power that requires immense effort, is a highly individual process demanding self belief, patience, perseverance and courage. And the price of healing is often located in a place we either cannot reach or do not wish to go.

 For some inexplicable reason, even in the face of what appears to be a dire situation, I have a good feeling about my friend; I'm holding on to hope. In the words of Ralph Blum:

Hope is a light that never fails, a flame burning in the darkest night, an elusive feeling that urges you on when, against all reason, you refuse to give up.

 Hope is raised for you my friend.

*See Caroline Myss, Anatomy of the Spirit

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When a President Cried

Image
At a time of year when Christians around the world are commemorating the birth of the Divine Child, some parents in Newtown , Connecticut , USA are mourning the death of their children. There are probably hundreds of children around the world – in under developed countries, in conflict zones – who will die every day up to Christmas and beyond. But right now the focus has been on what one British newspaper described as a massacre of innocents. How horrendous to lose your child in such a manner. Schools should be one of the few places where you expect your children to be safe.   I worked with several of the paramedics who were first on the scene dealing with the carnage on the trains at various metro stations after the 2005 London bombings. Many, especially the younger ones, suffered severe post traumatic stress. Not trained for such horrors, those teachers immediately on the scene at that school in Connecticut will carry the scarring from that day for some time. How many more
Read more

The Economic Migrant and the Bag Lady

Image
Some years ago I was telling someone about my bag lady experience. She looked at me with astonishment and disbelief.  The Bag Lady Many years later this person, who had by then become a friend, also had her own bag lady experience. She had gone from place to place, not quite sleeping on a park bench but near enough, with only the barest essentials – a toothbrush and change of clothes in a bag – not enough to merit a supermarket trolley! The economic migrant and bag lady experience are etched into my DNA. I was born on the Caribbean island of Dominica nestled between Guadeloupe and Martinique , two French colonies. Dominica was itself fought over by the French and British for centuries. The French eventually lost. I could so easily have been a French citizen sitting in Paris writing this. In fact my mother's maiden name is the same as her family's French slaveowners of yester-year. A SNAPSHOT OF HISTORY: In 1635, France claimed Dominica along with all th
Read more

The Trickster as Teacher

Image
I received mail from a reader who was unable to post a message following my comment last week about ‘Myth as Metaphor’ (see The Fool Unmasked). He asked whether I knew any myths which were more relevant to his African culture. Well yes I do….but not a myth as such, more of a folktale. But all myths are relevant to every culture .   Archetypes are generally referred to as "the gods". It is generally claimed that Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist and a founding father of depth psychology, brought knowledge of these innate patterns of human behaviour to the attention of Western psychology. Certainly all my training text books made the point.  Obatala - Father of Humankind Divinity of Light I guess he did do that but long before Jung, West African Orishas were known as multi-dimensional beings representing, not only the forces of nature but certain human attributes. Their characteristics and legend were similar to those used to describe the ancient Greek and Roman go
Read more