Fatigue, Fault and the Impossible

reflections on hidden meanings in the body/mind

dream of the god and goddess

Part of the reason that I have been posting less frequently lately is because my reflections have turned away from art, and toward the mysteries of health. I also succumbed to Covid for the first time, which wasn’t too bad, but did disrupt my patterns for a few weeks. So rather than fail to post, I am sharing some of these thoughts. I am sure that my paintings mirror these meanderings, so I will share some of them as well.

For much of my life I suffered from fatigue. I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia (which I neither argue for nor against since I am not a medical person) and experienced disabling fatigue. It is unclear whether my insomnia created the illness or the illness created my insomnia. I had many years of 1/2 days. My energy flagged midday, to resume somewhat late in the day. There were times when I had to choose between washing the dishes and doing some other task since my “energy budget” was fixed, and more or less predictable. Activities, especially physical ones, were limited. Once, after attempting a Bikram yoga class, I was in bed for three days. At its worst, I had 20 minutes of exercise in me.

Like many people with health problems, I battled with internal discussions of fault; self-blame, blame of circumstance, and wondering if I were being punished somehow. As a therapist I have always been amazed by the primitive strata within us all that emerges under duress. A mother wonders if she committed some crime in some previous life such that her child is born with a disability. An athlete curses the risks that he took in his youthful exuberance, and wonders how he could have thought he was so immortal.

In my mid forties I persevered with dietary explorations more vigorously than I ever had. The results of eliminating all the usual culprits: sugar, refined carbs, processed foods yielded maybe a 15% improvement. I was prepared to resign myself to my 1/2 days, with the morning time being the most precious, when a medical friend said casually, “Maybe it’s lectins.”

Out of my diet went beans, lentils, legumes. Over several months I reached an improvement of 80%. I was elated with a joy that was tempered only by my grief that I had not discovered my difficulty with lectins earlier. But it was insight that brought me home to full health.

I had studied my fatigue. I examined the role health played in relationship dynamics. I paid especially close attention to the the phenomena of my fatigue. What I noticed was that my fatigue often hit me suddenly, as if I had walked into a Mack truck. Not at all subtle, the wave of tiredness was immediate and draining. I looked more closely. In the millisecond before the drain of energy was a perception which went something like this, it’s impossible.

The next step in my inquiry was to ask, what is impossible? Since my work as a psychotherapist allows me to reflect deeply, I was able to see that the impossible I perceived was the impossible of contradiction. If my client was nurturing some form of false hope, and had his or her energies tied up in that hope, my perception of the invariable outcome the person would face hit me with a wave of fatigue. Traveling with the person down the path to an obstacle which I foresaw but he did not produced such a heaviness in me. How do I turn his gaze without sapping him of the energy he has tied up in his vision? Likewise, if I noticed my own false hope, or rather my effort which at some level I knew to be endless (like the pursuit of perfection) and would never yield the result I craved, I would be hit with the heaviness of fatigue.

So it was clear. My fatigue was precipitated by the unremitting perception of the impossibility of being.

Having found my enemy, I knew that if freedom could be found, it would only be in not turning away. Truth is like that. Even if you close your eyes, it is still there. I did not pose my observation to myself in this way at the time. These words and this clarity is retrospective. At the time, I was shocked, and wordless at the foot of a mountain range. What I discovered, or rather what discovered me, was the consciousness that dropping the project to be (the insistence on seeking fulfillment on my own terms) is key. The result was the resolution of my fatigue problems, and indeed, of many other problems as well.

It is hard to explain the magnitude of the reversal I experienced. There is much to say here, and maybe, in some ways, nothing at all to say. Many mystical paths point to this same truth. Insisting that life accord with one’s own wishes will only lead to misery. Hakuin (a Buddhist and artist who lived in the early 1700’s) advised his students to die before you die. What did he mean? In modern language you might say, let go the orient of wanting the good without the bad, or, ala Byron Katie (a modern mystic) don’t have an argument with reality.

We are oriented to attain happiness in accord with our own personal visions. You might say we want to shrink the world to meet our own criteria. What if instead we went the other way? What if we let go our criteria and allowed ourselves to drop into the expansiveness of non-perspectival awareness? Is it possible?

Many people feel a sense of fear when they intuit that there is an edge to themselves. Like finding the outskirts of one’s own milky way, the edge of ourselves is the beginning of vastness. How terrifying and how wonderful! There is a simple but oh so fearsome price to pay for this freedom. But if it happens to you, you too will be amazed.

Namaste,

Leslie

feisty sweethearts