Minding our Minds

A dozen years ago, I learned that I had cancer. One of the first people I told was my mindfulness teacher and mentor, who was living joyfully and generously with metastatic cancer. She told me this about her practice:

“I have to watch where I put my mind.”

She reminded me that in every moment I had a choice about my thoughts. Of course I knew this, sort of, as a practitioner. Conditions now invited a deeper exploration. I began to focus my practice to monitor my thinking, during formal sits and through the day. My intention was to notice my uninvited stream of thoughts and determine which were helpful, neutral or potentially unwholesome. Of course, the full range of thoughts, at first dominated by the scary ones, still visited. It was not possible to stop thoughts from arising. But I trusted my practice. I believed that with mindfulness I could train my mind to notice and decide whether to engage with arising thoughts or let them go. I also began what I think of as proactive mindfulness practice. I would decide how I wanted to interpret and describe my overall experience, not just to deal with individual thoughts. This orientation related to that same wise mentor’s question about how we choose to respond to life:

“Do I want to be a student or a victim?”

As a student, I wondered what this experience had to teach me, and how I might grow. I intentionally reflected on and chose wholesome ways of thinking about my new cancer experience. I noted many good conditions in my life and reviewed them regularly in my mind:

I had financial and family stability, excellent health insurance, and local access to cancer specialists. My daughters were capable young adults; I had been able to parent them through childhood and adolescence and give them a good foundation. I had a daily mindfulness practice and a circle of wise and wonderful family and friends, a number of whom also practiced mindfulness. I rehearsed these thoughts and strengthened the neural paths by sharing this thinking in conversations with others, namely adult friends and family as they responded to my news.

I was not in denial and was very much grounded in reality. It was possible I might die. In fact, I had received my diagnosis on the very day we buried my brother whose cancer had killed him. But it was also possible that I might heal. I practiced to try not to cling to or resist either possibility; to let them be. My same beautiful teacher (Joanne), called this practice, “Don’t know mind.” The mind wants to know. It wants certainty. My practice was to be with uncertainty as best I could. The time I gave away to worry about unknowns meant I was missing my very real life in this moment, and this one…

Then there was the fact that I had to tell my daughters my news. I spent a little time sitting with how I might do this mindfully, well aware that their experience with their uncle’s death was very fresh. An insight arose that my cancer was yet another opportunity to parent my daughters and offer an important life lesson. Who could possibly be better than me, their mother, to help them consider how to respond to life when unexpected and frightening conditions come at us? I knew that their future lives would include not only joys but sometimes great difficulties, deep sorrows and losses. We had a chance to go through this process together, with me as a guide, offering ways of thinking about this and responding intentionally, as best we could. My intention was to support them, and also to offer an experience they might draw upon in the future for interpreting and responding to life’s inevitable challenges. Here’s some of what I shared with them initially, calmly, with pauses.

I have cancer. (facts)

This is not a crisis.

This too is life.

We are very lucky that we have many good conditions (e.g., health insurance, great doctors nearby, family and friends…). There are single moms with small kids working part time jobs with no health insurance experiencing this. Horrible. Those are not our conditions.

You can tell anyone about my cancer. It’s not a secret. Talk to your friends. Let your friends be there for you. (They had some friends whose parents had gone through cancer who were sworn to secrecy.)

And,

We are all going to be afraid sometimes. But it is possible for us to get through this without falling apart. You might think of it this way.

Fear will be on bus as we go forward. We can’t and don’t need to try to control fear or get rid of it. Your job is this: to never let fear drive the bus.

I didn’t say this at the time, but I think today I would add that we should be sure to invite lots of supportive passengers to fill up the bus everyday. Passengers like laughter, gratitude, nature, music, art and friends. The more seats we fill with these friends, the better the collective energy on the bus to steady us, and the harder it is for fear to work its way up toward the driver’s seat.

It was a ride, for me as well as my family. Mindfulness did not make it all smooth sailing, but my practice helped me to experience many moments of happiness, contentment and gratitude, and to notice anxiety and return to a place of stability again and again. Viewing this as a parental offering strengthened my commitment to my practice. I could not make my offering to my daughters if I was going to pieces. That doesn’t mean that I was armored. They had access to seeing me in my vulnerability. I shared information and plans along the way. They sat with me before the surgery and honored my need for quiet. They waited through it and visited my not so coherent fragile looking self afterwards. They stayed with me for a few days post op until they had to return to their university lives.

The learning was real; my practice deepened. I think of this vulnerable time as a period of intense training in mindfulness preparing me to respond to challenges that followed and challenges to come.

Just as importantly, my practice cultivated conditions for immense joy and appreciation - throughout and since that leg of the journey.