by Karen Saura
Copyright 2005 all rights reserved
One evening while attending a discussion group focusing on issues and situations encountered by holistic health practionners, our facilitator, Mike, posed a series of questions for us to reflect upon. In hindsight, these questions might be better described as koans, Buddhist "...stories and verses that present fundamental perspectives on life and no-life, the nature of the self, the relationship of the self to the earth - and how these interweave… their study is the process of realizing their truths" (Ciolek, 2005).
Mike asked us, “What is holistic health?” “How do we hold the energy of integration?” “What does it look like?” “What does it feel like?” “What is it that we wish to integrate?” “How do we integrate conventional and alternative medicine? Mind and body? Body and soul?” “What is the role of holistic health education in this integration?”
I have frequently grappled with these questions. The only absolute I can come up with is a resistant acceptance that there is no absolute answer. The experience of wholeness must exist somewhere, precariously balancing in that ever shifting place of relationship between an individual and all the ever shifting facets of one’s life experience.
Life comes at us like it or not. Just when we feel like we’re on top of our game, we get a curve ball. The metaphors are abundant: “to have the rug pulled out from under you,” and “the shit hit the fan,” or “I hit the wall.” These phrases struggle to give voice to a universal experience of the shock felt when hit with an unexpected challenge which “stops us in our tracks.” These dramatic experiences can either shift our perception of reality, broadening our sense of self or send us careening into an abyss of destruction and fragmentation. Our individual challenge is to remain in relationship with life’s unexpected challenges, in spite of the difficulties presented by the circumstances, and strive to allow these experiences to expand our sense of self and to go back and pick of the pieces if we fall. A holistic approach struggles to embrace these life challenges with a sense of assimilation and integration.
As I see it, we are living a dance driven by two opposing energetic forces – disintegration and integration. Disintegration is a force of separation and destruction. Integration is a process of healing and bringing things back into integrity and wholeness. We live in a vortex at the center of this dynamic dance of polarities, experiencing periods of destruction, purging, and release with alternating periods of integration, growth, and healing. Nature mirrors these truths back to us. After the forest fire we see the new growth nourished by the ash from the burn. Floods bring destruction and wash away the debris leaving new soil behind to nourish the next season’s crops. An integrative approach recognizes and emphasizes the cyclic nature of the human journey and strives to embrace these opposite forces allowing for a middle path to be revealed.
The challenge of the holistic practioner is to learn to work with change, with the elements beyond our control and to hold this space of integration and openness within ourselves. Resistance to change brings rigidness and rigidity can lead to fragmentation. Fragmentation is the opposite polarity to integration. Although I believe that fragments can ultimately be recovered, re-integrated, healed and transformed, the challenge for the holistic health practioner is to work within the context of these dynamic forces and hold a fluid space for transformation without fragmentation in a way that can embrace integrity and wholeness.
I’m going to share with you a haiku and a story which I feel speaks to many of these questions.
the End Begins
Desperate hand grips pen:
Memory fractures, fragments, drifts…
Fight with scribbled lines.
by Karen Saura
Dad and I sat in his hospital room sharing precious moments reminiscing on his childhood memories and watching Saturday Night Live as he drifted in the morphine cloud. The nurse came in with his sleeping pill. He swallowed it. I bent over and kissed him good night before I left for a little walk through the long, empty hospital corridors. I was there to share his precious last days as his battle with leukemia came to a close. As I left the room that night, little did I know that this was to be the beginning of the end.
I took my walk and called home to check on my family, half a continent away. 20 minutes later I returned to dad’s room, weary, ready to retire to my fold-out chair-bed for the night.
I remember the door. The long, cold, metal handle. My hand holding it, pushing down, pushing open the door. Something was wrong. I entered. The light was on. I felt danger, terror. Dad was not peacefully sleeping his drug induced sleep. He was sitting straight up in bed, wild eyed and panicked, looking around the room as if for the first time. His eyes were different - they had the look of a trapped, caged wild animal. I entered the room, went over to him and asked what was wrong. He stared at me wildly, blankly. “Who are you?!? Where am I?!?” In his disorientation he was terrified and terrifying.
My dad was a man who always held tremendous control over himself, his kingdom, and his environment. This instinct to control suddenly could find no ground to stand on. He was terrified, and dangerous. Although I try to pull my memories of this event together in my mind, they fly around in bits and pieces, fragmented. I remember him grabbing my arm, tightly, both a drowning man clutching for a buoy and a man feeling his very life threatened and not knowing from whence the threat came. He knew me no more. He could have killed me there on the spot - not in malice, but in instinctual self-defense. I felt the threat in every cell of my body.
Somehow I calmed him and slipped back out the door. Calmly, desperately, I found the night nurse and tried to explain what was happening in the room. The next moments recede into my fragmented memory… its continuity returns with dad in restraints in a wheelchair.
My brother and I wheeled him around all day. In the solidarity of fraternal understanding we were able to ward off our personal horror and find humor and some sense of quality time with dad as we watched dementia dismantle him at warp-speed. By that evening he had lost most coherent memory fragments and was left with desperate instinctual needs for the familiar objects of his daily life. Keys, over and over he asked for keys. He was probably looking to make a get-away, to no avail. Briefcase, pen and paper, the objects with which he had ordered his world and captured his thought. He clutched his briefcase, using it as a surface upon which to write, continuous, copious writing with great intensity and concentration with his familiar gold pen. With these weapons he was bravely warding off the inevitable, tightly holding to the fleeting remnants of the man he had been. Hopelessly he mimicked the motions of his days of power, authority, and control.
When I later pulled out these precious last writings, my heart broke as I saw his familiar script grasping at words, finding letters and movements, then diminishing into scribbles and lines. Line after line of scribbles and lines. His final desperate attempt to hold onto the shadowy fragments of reality and mental control.
What felt like an eternity of compressed time, thoughts, experience, and emotions actually must have passed by in a mere day or two. The doctors never addressed what had happened that night. I suspect it was a drug interaction that caused a mini-stroke in the brain. Probably the left brain considering the loss of linear functioning and conscious memory, yet retention of instinctual, habitual actions. But that is my personal speculation, my desperate attempt to hide my personal horror and grief in a rational scientific explanation. He was there to die. The body was finished. I had hoped for dad a death with dignity. In my naivety I felt that we could facilitate an ideal death transition for him. I had not considered the possibility of a death which careened out of control, fragmenting, disintegrating in front of me, and I helpless to intercede.
After that fateful night, it took exactly 1 week for the process to run its course. I was there when dad finally “died”. When his heart stopped and his final exhale was exhausted. But when did he begin to die? On a random day when some genetic program triggered? Or one moment when he was exposed to just too much of something resulting in the birth of leukemia in his bones? Did dying begin 3 years before when he was diagnosed? Perhaps it began that fateful night when his neurons were shattered in a chemical war in his brain shooting pieces of memory and self out into the universe - gone forever. Maybe it came the night he was finally forced from his body by its inability to take in the next breath. The Tibetans believe that dying continues on for several days after the final breath for the spirit needs time to completely withdraw from the organs and cells, before finally, absolutely leaving the body behind.
I’ll probably never have a satisfactory answer to these questions. My best hope is to find some resolution and from there put it aside. Not away, but aside, in a special place to be pulled out and contemplated from time to time. Perhaps that’s the best anyone can hope for. A dance with Death which allows for personal peace, room to live. A relationship that respects and honors Death when it comes to call, then sends it on its way. A stand which defies Death through a Life well lived.
CarpieDium!
I was my dad’s holistic health practioner. When we discovered he was ill, I began my formal herbal studies earnest, knowing that nutritional and herbal support can play an integral role in battling illness. Dad was blessed and cursed with an interesting variety of leukemia. MD Anderson Cancer Center took him on in an experimental research program. They offered him cutting edge drugs and treatments, magic bullets, and life saving procedures. He was very ill when he embarked upon this journey. The treatment provided by MD Anderson no doubt prolonged his life by three years. Although one might open the topic of quality of life during these three years, but then who’s to judge another’s journey. In spite of the progressively diminishing capacity he experienced as he became increasingly reliant on the medical intervention, I saw that these three years provided him with a unique opportunity to reevaluate his relationships and many other aspects of his life. These topics fall into the category of not knowing. They merit recognition, then release.
What I do know as a health practioner is that many of these treatments brought with them nasty side effects which, because they did not deal directly with the condition being studied were treated casually by his physicians with lesser medications or dismissed as psychosomatic.
The most dramatic side effect was systemic itching as a side effect of the chemotherapy drug treatment. In my herbal studies I discovered that most skin conditions occur as a result of the liver being overloaded. The skin is a second organ of elimination for the body. Therefore, itching can be a symptom of an overloaded liver. If you cleanse and nourish the liver and it is relieved of its toxic overload, then the itching should diminish and ultimately cease to be an issue.
I found a powerful liver cleansing program for dad and coupled it with nutritional superfoods to support his liver and keep his blood counts up. He followed the program precisely. After five days he called me to tell me not to hail victory yet, but he could actually shower for the first time in weeks without taking valium with a glass of wine to endure the itching to come. After seven days he reported that the unbearable itching was gone. When he reported this amazing success story back to his physician it was met with a defensive and dismissive attitude. “It must have been a coincidence” and “You must be careful with those herbs and pills – they are not sterile and could cause problems.”
Well, dad learned the first lesson of integrative health in your typical medical environment – keep your alternative practices to yourself. We kept the itching at bay with the liver flush, kept the blood counts up with green drinks, super foods and daily shots of what he called Whole Food’s Market’s “motor oil” – a blend of wheat grass, beet, and other vegetable juices. We managed these conditions holistically with great success, much to the chagrin of his doctors. What we did was outside the realm of their studies and skewed their research. Our biggest challenge was to keep him on the nutritional supplements while in the hospital during one of the many times he “dodged the bullet” as he put it.
Dad’s battle with cancer probably mirrors many others. His journey began through the doors of the hospital and the conventional treatment approach. He brought in alternative support, explored exotic options too numerous to go into at this time, and eventually turned to soliciting prayer circles and joining a church. He fought it out to the bitter end.
My role as his holistic health educator was to bring him information, give him support, and to hold a space of possibility and transformation open for him as he ultimately made his own choices and lived his own life journey.
Although, through my eyes, his final life experience was one of fragmentation, I watched him go through and incredible transformative journey in the three years prior to his final week. I learned that my biggest challenge as a holistic practioner is to find in myself that place of acceptance and of not knowing. To trust that reality is constantly and spontaneously emerging and to remain open and available to the ever present possibility of the miracle of transformation.
Author's Bio:
Karen Saura MEd, MH, is a master herbalist, science teacher, and holistic nutritional counselor. She emphasizes the use of whole, organic foods, nutritive herbs and supplements to promote optimal health, prevent disease, manage chronic illness and to rediscover the joy of healthy eating. Phone consultations are available.e-mail: ksaura@gmail.com .
References
Ciolek, T. (2005). Zen Buddhism Koan Study Pages. East Anglia, UK: World Wide Web Virtual Library. Retrieved March 21, 2005, from http://www.ciolek.com/WWWVLPages/ZenPages/KoanStudy.html.
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