Next Question

Now what? Life After cancer treatment.

Just in time, for me, comes this extraordinary article by Mary Elizabeth Williams in today’s Salon.

In it, she quotes Martha, a therapist and cancer survivor:

“A lot of people go into depression when treatment is over,” says Martha. “I felt a little bit lost after treatment. People shore themselves up to get through it. It takes everything in you to cross that finish line. But I had had a lot of good things that had come up from treatment — I’d started writing music, and found I had a gift for it. There was a lot of hope then. It’s taken time to really learn how to take care of myself in a new way and live again.”

That’s why it’s bittersweet to move on to the next part. “I think there’s a huge rush of the tide to get you back as though nothing happened. To reassemble the picture that you had before,” says Anne. “People think that must be what you want, you must want to forget this. The big mistake is that it’s forgettable. Or that there’s an end to it. There’s no end to it.” And as Martha says, “The doctors will say, ‘Oh, you’re good. Go enjoy your life.’ But you don’t stop having had cancer once treatment is over.”

I continue to reflect on why I should be so depressed when I have been released by a death sentence. There is a confused feeling–almost as if my cancer has abandoned me.

Does the sudden absence of anything, even something bad, require a period of mourning?

Re-Frame

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered. ~Nelson Mandela

In the week since I have been back home in San Miguel de Allende, I have felt an unsettled, almost manic attitude among those I left behind six months ago when I embarked on the strange journey called cancer treatment.

Who are you? they seem to ask behind their smiles, genuine and well-wishing. Who are you…now? How are we to take you? How shall we position you in our minds? As a retreat leader, a spiritual counselor, a dream-worker, a writer of books, a gay man with a young lover? A cancer survivor? What do we make of you, who left us for half a year (a friend used to say to me, ‘In six months, the whole world changes…’) and now are back among us.

There is a nervousness I pick up in them when they meet my eyes. Do they think I have returned in some transformed state and am now essentially someone else? Has the chemotherapy altered my character? Am I someone they don’t really know, a stranger they will need to meet all over again and befriend, or not, all over again? Will this new me be kind, resentful, aloof, forgiving, compassionate, angry, eccentric?

For myself, I take the day to stop and reflect. ‘The self is not something one finds, it is something one creates’ (Thomas Szasz). If I want to end all the interrogations–stated or unstated, spoken or asked behind anxious eyes–I will need to decide for myself how I am to be framed.

Ancient Chinese proverb: ‘The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.’ This may be my work now. This may be my only work.

Sacred Sceptic

Beliefnet is featuring an excerpt from my book, “God On Your Own” … I am passing it on to you.

______________________________

Excerpted and adapted from God On Your Own: Finding a Spiritual Path Outside Religion  (Jossey-Bass, Wiley), with permission.

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. René Descartes, Discours de la Méthode

My hand quivered as I prepared to open the envelope. The documents had arrived in the mail at my new address two days earlier, but I waited until now, with my mind clear and my courage plucked up, to open the large white envelope with regal Vatican postal stamps in the upper right corner and the crest of the Holy See in the upper left. From other brothers who had left the order, I had heard about the declaration of dispensation and the impact it was likely to have on me.

By that time, six months after informing my religious superiors that I wanted to petition a release from my vows, I was living back “in the world,” in a small rented apartment a thousand miles from my monastery. I lingered there in a kind of suspended animation. Although I had left monastic life, until an official dispensation arrived I was still living under the obligations of my vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

As you can imagine, it was a peculiar time for me. I had left my community, which is all I had known for eight years, and was living by myself. I felt uprooted, dislocated, and utterly alone. In addition to leaving my religious order and my solemn vows, I had also given up my religion. In my mind at the time, the two were the same. I could not continue in conscience practicing my religion because my misgivings about it were what led me to renounce my monastic calling.

“Insofar as we are able . . .” the letter began. The words sent a chill through me. As I explained earlier, I had made my perpetual vows directly to God, not to the Catholic Church or my religious order. Here was the church saying that, as far as it was concerned, I had no further obligation to live the vows. But the implication was that unfinished business remained between God and me over the sacred promises. I did not know it at the time, but it would take years for me to come to terms with the first line of my formal dispensation.

The document, emblazoned with the impressive papal coat of arms, marked the end of one phase of my spiritual journey and the beginning of another. Slowly, I would pick up the pieces of my life and start the process of trying to build a personal spirituality on the ashes of my experience in monasticism—and in religion. I had known since I was a child that I had a calling to seek my creative Source. Now, with a painful but rich and powerful spiritual experience behind me, I was about to continue my search.

***

The Seeker questions everything. A skeptical viewpoint is the best resource for starting to create a personal spiritual way of life. You may find this radical approach difficult to contemplate, and even more difficult to activate in yourself. You may also consider it somehow disloyal or dishonest. Would-be seekers, shrinking from this important spiritual task, may take cover in the paradoxical notion that by seeking they are being sinful—as if sin were not a fabricated idea and part of the very system they are fleeing for spiritual freedom.

Fortunately, we have numerous role models for seeking at this important time in history when we are leaving the limitations of religion and beginning to explore spirituality in different ways. Seekers have always been with us, inspiring us to go out on our own and look for spiritual truth. Recently, in response to the yearning that so many of us are feeling to chart our own spiritual course outside the traditional routes, many writers and thinkers have been appearing to help us in our search.

You are already aware of these seekers. They range from scientists such as the late Carl Sagan to medical doctors such as Deepak Chopra, Larry Dossey, and Andrew Weil, from social commentator Marianne Williamson and psychologist Wayne Dyer to theologian Matthew Fox and spiritual teacher Ram Dass.

Over the years of my own seeking, I have admired these charismatic seekers and their work; occasionally I have had the opportunity to meet some of them and discuss their vision. One of the most impressive was Shirley MacLaine. The first time I met her, she and I were out in the country near Santa Fe attending a private workshop on the subject of faith healing. A Philippine healer was demonstrating how he dug his fingers directly into the stomach of a sick person to pull out cancerous tumors and other harmful tissue. Later that day, we would receive one of these “faith operations” from him.

During a break, I sat under a tree with MacLaine and we spoke about the process of spiritual seeking. Although she had been an internationally famous movie star for more than thirty years, she was just beginning to come into public awareness as a spiritual seeker. Her first book, Out on a Limb, about her explorations of out-of-body travel and reincarnation, had been published a few months earlier.

At that time, it seemed incongruous, to say the least, that a movie star would be writing about spiritual seeking. She was risking the credibility of her long and extraordinary career by revealing her interest in nonmainstream spiritual thinking and encouraging others to undertake their own spiritual investigation. But when I asked her about it, she reminded me that part of being a spiritual seeker is not being ashamed or afraid to tell what you are discovering. Besides, so much is at stake now.

“I like to think of it this way,” she said, sipping on the allowed green tea during our strict fast, “God may have made me famous so he could use me to get new spiritual information to large numbers of people quickly.”

In her spiritual search, MacLaine was evolving a truth for herself that she could share with millions of others. After her innumerable trips back in time to past lives, her visits to the sacred sites of Machu Picchu, Stonehenge, and Santiago de Compostela, and her many autobiographical writings, she was able to report: “Maybe the tragedy of the human race was that we had forgotten that we are each divine.”

These seekers and many others like them are not suggesting that you and I follow their path. In fact, the whole point of being a Seeker is to pursue one’s own way and find one’s own spiritual truth. However, they are splendid exemplars, reminding us that seeking is what we are here to do—and that sacred skepticism, which they encourage, can help us create our own special path.

***

After I left monastic life and my Catholic religion, I spent several years wandering on a directionless inner journey. I experimented with psychotropic substances such as magic mushrooms, peyote, and LSD but did not find them to be helpful in my spiritual growth. Drugs are often touted as a shortcut to the Source, but there really are no shortcuts. My experience has been that drugs do not take you to the face of God. They only delay the process of high spiritual awareness.

I tried a number of therapies as well, including an anger-based method that had me punching pillows for hours on end as a facilitator shouted at me. That was interesting and exhausting but did not seem to lead anywhere. Individual talk counseling with a sympathetic former nun did little at the time to advance my search.

For a long time, I attended all the latest workshops and lectures of a spiritual nature. I learned about Findhorn in Scotland, where people were growing cabbages in the sand with spiritual energy and a spoonful of compost. I became familiar with esoteric astrology and the mysteries of the Tarot. I showed up at EST. I studied and comprehended most of what I read of the new quantum physics, which was bringing the physical universe ever closer to the spiritual vision I glimpsed reading Teilhard de Chardin.

I delved into the works of several contemporary gurus, including the great Swami Muktananda, and later his radiant successor, Gurumayi Chidvilasananda. As much as I was drawn to their wonderful philosophy of love and compassion, I encountered the same fundamental dilemma that had haunted my years in the Catholic religion: I was being asked to adopt someone else’s spiritual truth. Moreover, the chants, homilies, meditation practices, and flowers-and-incense rituals were too reminiscent of the religious trappings from which I had so recently walked away.

Some of my wandering must have seemed rather pointless at the time, but now I understand that everything was preparation for the next step up in my spiritual awareness. From the perspective of the present, it appears the Seeker archetype was working powerfully in me and for me.

Read the rest of the excerpt here…

http://www.beliefnet.com/Wellness/2007/02/Sacred-Skeptic.aspx?p=3

Man Interrupted

Not everything that is faced can be changed,
but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
James Baldwin

Last June, I was interviewed by a journalist at O, The Oprah Magazine for an article she was writing about how our lives can be transformed by a single unexpected experience, marking a ‘spiritual’ turning-point.

I had no idea at the time that two months later—six months before the piece actually appeared in the December 2011 issue of O—that my own life was about to be transformed by the diagnosis of Stage IV Lymphatic Cancer, causing me to move to the States for several months, and turning my life upside-down.

Here is a quote from the article, eerily prescient.

“Maybe it’s a health scare, or the loss of a loved one,” says Joseph Dispenza, cofounder of the LifePath Retreat Center in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, “It’s as if you’d lived one way for a long time, and now, because of this crisis, you’re about to live a totally different way…. We become seekers for a while, trying to figure out how we’ll go forward. It makes sense that we’re more open to possibilities at moments when the ground shifts under us and we feel both the terror and the joy of living fully alive.”

When the magazine appeared on newsstands in November, I picked up a copy and was dumbstruck. By that time, I had been a cancer patient for three months and had received four grueling chemotherapy treatments. Although I had studied natural healing modalities all my life and written a book on the subject—Live Better Longer (1997)—and although my partner is a naturopathic doctor, because the cancer was so advanced and so aggressive, I opted for a for a complimentary medical approach, using conventional oncological methods combined with a strict regime of diet, supplements, brews, teas, and detoxifications.

Reading the article, I went back in my mind to that idyllic early summer day in beautiful San Miguel, sitting at my desk speaking on the phone with the magazine writer, looking out on one of the exquisite courtyards in the 300-year-old Spanish Colonial hacienda that now houses LifePath Center. Life was heaven-on-earth.

Did I know then, spouting those words, that something big was about to happen to me? Had I suddenly become psychic, foretelling my own future? Was the ‘health scare’ I mentioned as a spiritual wake-up call something I had pulled out of the air, or was it a truth hovering just below the surface of my consciousness, waiting in line to express itself in a shockingly concrete way?

From this vantage point, it doesn’t much matter. Nor does the mysterious origin of the illness seem to matter, whether it was a defect that had been written into my genetic code, or a calamity I could have prevented, or a judgment from God—whether all of those or none of those. At this writing, I seem to be out of the woods with the cancer; analyzing its sudden appearance and, mercifully, just as sudden disappearance may come later…or not.

But my life was interrupted and shaken from the foundation. And that is what I discovered I needed to look at: what the bout with cancer accomplished, finally.

I believe it was an invitation for me ‘to live a totally different way,’ quoting myself two months before the invitation was issued. The time I have spent healing is encouraging me to reconsider how, where, with whom, and most important why I am living. So far, no answers have presented themselves, only the questions. And a myriad of exhilarating possibilities, none of which I would have entertained seriously before the ‘interruption.’

Maybe, when life gets too comfortable, too easy, even too boring, something in us wants to awaken us to a glorious dawn of magnificent new options. It shouldn’t require a health crisis to rouse us from the sleep of every-day-the-same, but apparently, at least for some of us, it does.

The challenge for me now is to see what unfolded for me last year not as an interruption, but an opportunity.

In Tulum

In Tulum, instead of looking closely at the ruins, I am looking closely at the people looking at the ruins. My confinement with cancer over the past six months, walking from bedroom to bathroom to computer room to the small outdoor patio and back to the bedroom…has made my world small. And so I look at these people, as if searching for ways to stretch myself back into the larger world out there by absorbing them with my eyes.

What is worth more…a thousand years or a beautiful face?

Dr. Scales

On Friday, winding up my healing from cancer, then from eye surgery, the eye doctor says I need to see a specialist. I had thought that he was a specialist, and of course he is, but as he explained it, ‘I deal with only the front of the eye…the specialist I want you to see (see!) specializes in the back of the eye.’

At first I think he is kidding me, but I have learned over the past six months of dealing with the cancer system up here in the States that doctors don’t kid, even as they prescribe a blood test that will cost just over $22,000. I had thought I would be entirely done with doctors, but there is one more to see…’see’ – that word again – before we resume our lives.

The specialist is Dr. Scales. Immediately, my mind goes Biblical and I remember the incident in the New Testament where Jesus removes the scales from the eyes of a poor man (do I have that right?). I also think of the scales of justice that are constantly weighing pro and con to come to a wise decision. Dr. Scales may be someone who balances eyes in that way, the right and the left to make perfect vision. A Solomon of eye doctors.

It is late Friday afternoon, and I feel that I am holding up the start of their weekend: Demetrius (no kidding) the Numidian, who rushes me through an eye-pressure test; the Raul, the Latino technician, who Mike thinks is cute; the Asian girl who tells us she’s been diagnosed with liver cancer and is on the list for a transplant (her story is enough to get me out of my head and I suddenly cease worrying about what the good Dr. Scales will tell me). The office is a virtual United Nations.

Dr. Scales has short hair in a brush-cut, is 50-ish, and the picture of efficiency. I have a lazy membrane at the back of the eye — ‘No hole, thank goodness.’ I nod, as if I understand what that would be. Lazy? I will handle that. I will send the membrane into training, like Rocky. Instead of resting my eyes more, I will do the eye version of jumping-jacks and sit-ups and push-up.

In my little town when I was growing up, there was a doctor named Dr. Payne. No one thought to question his name, apparently. They said to one another, simply, I’m going to see Dr. Payne tomorrow…about this pain. With Dr. Scales, there will be balance, justice, and my lethargic eyes will surely get back in shape.

Scan

In the morning, early, I go in for a PET Scan to see if the cancer has indeed gone. I have been feeling better every day, except for the fatigue. But even that is lessening. Still, I am a bundle of nerves.

A few years ago, I spent a day with Dr. Ken Sayler, the pioneer craniofacial surgeon who led the team that separated the Egyptian twin boys who were born conjoined at the top of the head. As a young doctor in Dallas, he had also been one of the three medical attendants in the operating room to which President John Kennedy was rushed after he was shot in the head.

Ken described the process of literally taking apart the heads of people, placing the various pieces on a tray as he made repairs to other pieces, then putting everything together at the end. “During the operation, I used to ask myself: where is the person?” he said.

Tomorrow I will lie on a table that will convey me, like an auto body part on a conveyor-belt in a factory, into a tube where I will be photographed and analysed. Not “I” but the body that I am, because the imaging will not record my terrifying thought that the cancer may still be there, nor will it pick up the sinking feeling of someday having to leave behind the man I love, nor the prayers I send up to St. Anthony and St. Michael–though I never pray that way on a normal day.

The pictures, when they are sent to the oncologist, will not show my dreams for the future, my plans for spending my days, for sitting in the sun reading, for playing with the dogs, for holding Mike tight to this too fragile heart.

Cabaletta

The cabeletta is much on our minds these days. We have come through the cancer, it seems — I have to do another scan next week, and then what I hope will be the final exam by the oncologist. There is also one more appointment with the eye doctor to check on my vision, mercifully restored by cataract surgery this month. And then, like Violetta in La Traviata, we will dream in earnest of being “Sempre Libera,” always free.

In opera, the cabeletta is a hopeful shout at the end of a weighty, dramatic aria. One of the most famous is the cabeletta in Verdi’s Traviata, at the end of the mournful, questioning ”Ah, fors’è lui”–Violetta asking herself if the new young man she’s just met is the one who will finally relieve her of the misery of loneliness. Here is Maria Callas singing it, with Italian and English subtitles.

Hopeful, yes, but in that hope is there a hint of some final tragedy? We are hopeful of spending the next few years in each other’s arms…and when we are lying in bed at night, just before sleep overtakes us, we seem to be both experiencing our love and remembering it at the same time. “I will never leave you,” I say to Mike, knowing–as he also knows–that no one escapes alive from these operas that are our lifetimes. “Always free…” but how long is always?

Still, having walked day by day, side by side, through the dark thicket of lymphatic cancer, we are wanting to enjoy the light that we have begun to see at the clearing in the woods. For us, it is the cabeletta at the end of a scary aria.

Sight and vision

This morning, out of the rushing Twitter river, I fish out a post from Soulseeds that speaks about eyes, vision, seeing. On Tuesday, I had my second eye surgery, removing a cataract from the right eye. Two weeks ago, the left eye. Mike patiently takes me to my appointments with the eye doctor and to the surgeries, which take place at 6 AM. These days, we are both reflecting on what we see for the future…and how we see things in general…and how things have changed in the way we see our lives.

The only thing worse than being blind

is having sight but

no vision

Two thoughts for us to take away from the Twitter post as seeds on contemplation. The one above, from the venerable and indefatigable Helen Keller, the one below from Petrus Bonus, the 14th Century philosopher (Peter the Good?)

To look with the eyes

and see with the heart

is the secret of the Philosopher’s Stone

We are reaching the end of our post-cancer adventure, wondering how the future will unfold. What will it look like? What will we look like?

Lost

12 January 2012. We are still in San Antonio, Texas, where my healing from cancer continues. Meanwhile, I am also having cataract surgery…had the left eye done on Tuesday, and will have the right eye done in two weeks.

I joked with Mike that I might have to divorce him now that I can actually SEE him. Mike has to put up with all this — including new blood work next week and another PET scan at the end of January. But we can see the light at the end of the tunnel…and we are starting to plan our return to San Miguel de Allende. I have been away for six months now, half a year. He has been back twice. We both miss it terribly.

This time has been one of healing, but also a parenthesis in our lives that has left us wondering where we go from here. Sometimes we are deliriously happy with the options, at other times overwhelmed and feeling immobilized.

We are watching every night, thanks to Netflix, all the episodes of “Lost” and it is connecting with us in a deep way. We are also lost at the moment. But like the survivors in the series, hopeful of a bright future.

 Purchase Older Man/Younger Man on Amazon