Look for Helpers

I tried hard to avoid COVID and was successful until I wasn’t. It finally caught up with me a few weeks ago. I don’t know about you but when I’m sick, I get so many visitors and most of them aren’t invited. I’m not talking about family and friends bearing fresh squeezed orange juice and chicken tortilla soup, more like the visitors in Rumi’s poem, The Guest House, “the crowd of sorrows who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture.” There’s something about lying in bed, feeling icky, and staring at the ceiling or the backs of my eyelids, that invites what feels like bad company. I’m a captive audience and there literally is “nothing to do, and nowhere to go.” 

Sharon Salzberg, teacher, author, and co-founder of Insight Meditation Society, has a way of saying things that just cut through to the truth. One of them is, “Sometimes it just hurts.” Being sick hurts. It’s an arrow that pierces our tender parts and often we shrug it off while we internally and silently struggle. I think it’s the silent struggle that brings all the visitors. In my recent illness there were body sensations that made me want to abandon ship and go live in different skin, difficult emotions that floated in like bad weather, and memories that took me to dark places—a different pandemic, HIV/AIDS, and the memory of watching my mom die from COVID complications. These visitors were fodder for a whole quiver of arrows that I self-administered. The Buddhist say the first arrow of suffering is the hard stuff of life that is just part of living but the multitude of arrows that come next are often the one’s we self-inflict. The wounds of our lives become scabs that can be weaponized by our dear, old, overactive, survival brain in a misguided attempt to protect and save us from these resurrected and perceived threats. Often it ends up as some form of self-judgment or self-criticism and so the initial hurt becomes a full-on self-attack. “If I wasn’t so _____, I’d be _____.”
 
Thankfully this isn’t the end of the story. Wellness or well-enough is not a passive process. If we remember to listen, there is an invitation to participate in our own healing with the resources of presence and compassion. It feels like grace because it comes from beyond and yet it’s an inside job. In a moment of grace, there is a pause, a bit of space, that creates possibility. For me this was a moment when the visitor didn’t fill up the full aperture of my awareness, and I was able to see a glimmer of something just over their shoulder, a little light, a soft breeze, a being on the other side looking at me with a warm and caring gaze. And in this awareness was the understanding that the “crowd of sorrows” didn’t travel alone! Just behind grief there was love, accompanying a body in distress was a faithful inhale and exhale, Jesus was holding a scared boy’s hand, and shame was disco dancing with a leprechaun. It wasn’t a cure but there was room for moments of connection and love. Fred Rogers used to tell kids on his television show, Mister Roger’s Neighborhood, “Look for helpers.” What if being sick was about looking for helpers? They just might be behind the visitors we didn’t invite. ​

The Guest House 
Rumi
 
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
 
Jalaluddin Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks (The Essential Rumi)