“I am going to die.”
No matter how many times I hear it, that statement startles me into reality.
Over the past ten years working with cancer patients, I’ve heard that phrase many times. Each time I hear it, I become still and wait for an appropriate response.
Often, I share, “You are now acutely aware of the reality that we are all in.”
That response seems to offer a small measure of comfort to the patient anxiously dealing with the sudden realization of her death. Maybe it is because that reply offers some amount of meaning to the situation? Or maybe it is because that response affirms that we all will face the reality of death and are therefore in it together? But, for those patients facing death, understanding it from that perspective seems to offer some glimmer of hope.
Like these cancer patients, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a sudden jolt into reality for all of us collectively. Our illusions of immortality have been wiped away. The sense of security that we once placed in the physical world has been removed. Suddenly our jobs are not secure. Our relationships are not guaranteed. And our food supply is in question. Nothing of the world is a promise and that realization is frightening. That realization evokes tremendous anxiety.
However, just as I share the beauty of this realization with cancer patients, I want to share it with you, too. You are now acutely aware of the reality we’ve always been in. The truth is that nothing of this world is ever secure. The world where we so desire to place our hope is a house of cards that the winds of change can always blow down. The comfort in this pandemic is that nothing in the world is different. The fragility of life has always been reality. The impermanence we are now aware of has always been truth. What changed is our awareness. And that awareness is the doorway into something new. The awareness that the world is insecure offers us the opportunity to place our security elsewhere.
Over a decade ago when I started working around disease and death, I was forced to find security in something not of this world. I realized early into my career that if I was going to be able to stay, I needed to cultivate a connection to internal peace. My yoga practice was the arena that offered me tools to stay and not run from the dis-ease I faced looking into reality each day. Of all the tools offered to me from my yoga practice, my breath became my anchor.
I know that until my last moment on earth, my breath will always be with me. For me, my breath is a doorway into something more.
When I find myself overwhelmed by anxiety, I have trained myself to immediately anchor into my breath, particularly breath retention. In the practice of breath retention, I simply hold my breath in for a moment at the top of the inhale and hold my breath out for a moment at the bottom of the exhale. As I hold my breath in and out, my mind becomes very still. As I increase the space between each successive breath, I increase the space between each successive thought. In the space between my thoughts I am still. In that stillness I know peace completely independent of what is going on around me. In that peace I am connected internally to something so much greater than anything this physical world has to offer.
If I might make a radical suggestion to you: offer up tremendous gratitude for this pandemic, which is an opportunity to shift in our awareness. The illusion that the world is secure has been stripped away. What stands before us is the truth of reality and that truth is the doorway to walk into something so much greater and so much more secure.
Guest post by studio BE mindfulness teacher Michelle Smith.
Michelle Smith is program manager of Geisinger Medical Center’s House of Care, an outpatient home for cancer patients undergoing treatment, and has worked to helped create an Integrative Medicine program for the health system. Michelle has introduced yoga therapy, vibrational sound therapy, and Reiki to many staff, patients, and family members.
In addition to her work at Geisinger Medical Center, Michelle teaches yoga at several studios in Northeast Pennsylvania and several yoga and mindfulness courses at Luzerne County Community College. Michelle also volunteers her time at a local addiction treatment center teaching patients how to use the many tools of Integrative Medicine to find freedom and peace.