Second time: Cancer

When the doctor told me the result of the PET scan I was not surprised… Well… that is what I thought… However, later, I found myself in shock. It lasted about two days. My daughter Julieta was with me as I was going through all the tests that lasted about two months.

The doctor seemed very sad when he told me that I had a primary cancer in the colon and two metastasis in the liver. My mind went back: One year ago my annual tests routine showed no signs of cancer; the cancer markers were lower than ever… Just one year… What happened?

I thought of Hans’s health deteriorating quickly. His two heart failures, his stroke, his general wellbeing going down so rapidly, and his horrible death due to the hospital negligence last January. I thought of his very difficult personality, which made so difficult for me to deal with the whole situation, in and out of hospital. I thought of the loneliness I felt after his death; that terrible and indescribable vacuum left and the cruel reality that I had no one to open up and cry so much pain. I was expected to be and act differently.

And then there was the guilt! So much guilt!  Did I do enough? Why didn’t I stay that night? When I came back next morning he was already dead.

I also thought of other family issues. Those issues that confront you with the fact that you are not what your people expect you to be; you confuse them, you upset them, you are a sort of a two faces, or perhaps even a hypocrite; you are just NO GOOD ENOUGH.

Yes, I have to admit that since July 2015 I didn’t do the diet routine as well as I used to. I stopped having the Vitamin D3, the Selenium, the juices, the Johanna’s Budwig blend; my meditation started to deteriorate and my mind was becoming more imbalanced. I was very often experiencing anger, guilt, and sadness; and I was struggling with the much incongruence of the monastic life, some monastic’s behavior and my place in this institution and in the practice.

My journey as anagarikaa since March 2013 has been a journey of disappointments and disenchantment, with no other option that being on my own and follow my heart.

Now, with this diagnosis in my hands, and the recollection of all that happened since July last year, I have no other explanation that this cancer is no other but the result of non be able to let go of my attachment to this sick sense of “I”;  an “I” that is for ever “NO GOOD ENOUGH”

I thought that I was completely over this ancestral and irrational belief! I thought that in my Buddhist practice I have developed some compassion for myself, or at least some empathy... And may be I did... However, it seems that underneath the apparent new way of being, a toxic something was waiting just for the right environment to awaken, develop and take over the whole organism.

Surely there are many causes to cancer! Surely what we eat and how we live are pivotal to health or sickness, but today, more than ever, I can see that WHAT WE THINK is the root cause of this malady. This is why this new diagnosis for me is more than ever another opportunity, another door to freedom: the freedom just TO BE. 

Written 8-10-2016