The Tibetans Call It a Bardo

In my early thirties, I attended a Silva Mind Control course to stop smoking. Others were there for weight control, memory training, and self-healing techniques. Over several weeks we were taught relaxation and visualization techniques, including the development of a mental laboratory complete with desk, calendar, files, visual screen, and healing medications. 

We were also told we'd have an experience of extrasensory perception on the last day of the training, which I found intriguing but presumed impossible for me. For that last session we were instructed to bring in three slips of paper, each showing only the name and city of an individual we privately knew to have an illness or physical problem.

To start the morning of the last day, we practiced by placing the body of a friend on our mental screen and scanning for problems of any sort. Following instructions, suddenly I saw and heard a motorcycle hit by a car. The motorcyclist's face wasn't visible, but because the man I was scanning owned a motorcycle, I expressed my alarm to the instructor, who suggested I find the date of the accident and send healing light to my friend. 

I closed my eyes, went to "alpha level" as instructed, visualized the calendar in my mental laboratory, and was astonished to see the pages turning rapidly until they stopped at a date in June. I assumed this to be in the future, as the session took place in February, so I did as the instructor suggested and pictured my friend bathed in white light.

After a break we were assigned partners, and the first one, whom I'd never met and didn't know in advance would be my partner, handed me a piece of paper with a man's name and the city of Seattle written on it. In alpha level, I visualized a man on my mental screen, and saw his whole left side was darker than his right. I didn't know what it meant. 

Using a technique we'd been taught, I imagined putting on this person's head, and was immediately torn by depression, sorrow, and resentment. I could feel my left side was crippled; I had no hearing in my left ear and no sight in my left eye. I knew hearing was intact in my right ear, but vision in my right eye was limited in some way, though I couldn't describe exactly how.  

Afterwards, my partner said this was the son of a dear friend; 21 years old and bitter because he'd been crippled on his left side in a motorcycle accident at an intersection where a car had ignored a stop sign. He had no hearing in his left ear and no sight in his left eye; hearing was normal in his right ear, but he had tunnel vision in his right eye. His recovery was slow, and he was despondent.

As I almost feared when asking her the accident's date, she named the same day in June I'd seen on my mental calendar. The motorcycle crash I'd pictured earlier that morning, before being assigned to this partner, had occurred the previous June!

Interactions with my next two partners were less clear but equally mind-blowing. With one, I pictured her subject with a brain like a walnut, the right side shriveled, then found she'd given me the name of a friend with brain cancer in the right hemisphere. With the other I kept seeing The Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz, focusing especially on the size of his nose. She admitted she didn't know anyone with a critical injury or illness, so had given me the name of a friend with chronic sinusitis.

I was disoriented for several weeks. The world as I perceived it had changed. In The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche refers to a bardo as a juncture "when the possibility of liberation, or enlightenment, is heightened." My experience of this unexpected, new reality opened my mind and heart.

Since then, I've had many instances of knowing something that either had not happened yet, or had happened at a distance, without my direct knowledge, and was later confirmed. At first, I was frustrated by the lack of specificity, but over the years I've learned to relax into what I now believe is a universal flow. 

As a coach this manifested as psychic intuitions. I learned to slip into a meditative state and seek information beyond the obvious. My clients often commented, "I was just thinking that, but wasn't sure I was ready to talk about it," or "How did you know that? I've never told anyone."

My bardo experience left me with a lifelong sense of awe, triggered by the recognition, "If this is possible, then anything is possible."

Cave Drawings

(Published in The Enneagram of Death: Helpful Insights by the 9 Types of People on Grief, Fear, and Dyling, by Elizabeth Wagele.)

Research suggests that trauma survivors can head off long-lasting symptoms by letting friends know what they're going through. Susan Lien Whigham, "The Role of Metaphor in Recovery From Trauma"

I had not thought of my 2010 breast cancer diagnosis and surgery as trauma until I read the transcript of How the Brain Helps Us to Survive Trauma and understood that any life-threatening event can be traumatizing -- war, a terrible car accident, a natural disaster, a heart attack, cancer.

And the measure of how well or quickly we recover, compared to those who might develop post-traumatic stress disorder, is whether or not we can discharge the energy created by the shock. Some of our response to stress is determined by our own emotional resiliency, but much of it depends on whether our caregivers, family, and friends contribute to our feeling helpless or support our gaining a sense of control. We can begin to take charge of our fate when we're able to talk about our feelings, absorb the reality of our circumstances, and move into action.

My strongest urge while convalescing from surgery was simply to be listened to. And yet, I didn't really have the words to express what I was experiencing. Some of my friends interpreted my early quasi-silence as a desire to have my spirit lifted and entertained me with stories. I loved them for this, but I didn't want to hear stories, I wanted to be invited to express what was going on inside of me, needed them to be patient while I searched to find words for what I was experiencing.

So, I was relieved to read how listening for metaphors can help recovery from trauma. I remembered an earlier blog entry where I had tried to express my reaction to others' view of my "bravery": 

It's like driving in a heavy rainstorm late at night. You'd rather be home by a cozy fire, but you're on full alert, every sense attuned to what's happening in your immediate environment. You don't have time to be afraid.  

I didn't feel brave; I felt swept up in a tide of experience. During the two weeks of diagnosis, biopsy, and surgery I was in a kind of trance, floating, as if rocked on the waves of a deep ocean.

Notice the quality of water in these metaphors -- rainstorm, tide, waves, ocean. And notice also how these water metaphors are hard to pin down (another metaphor); how fruitless it would be to try to capture water with a "pin" of any sort. And yet, these watery images helped me embrace a shock too big to encompass with left-brain language.

Breast cancer brought death into my house. Paradoxically, the mastectomy brought a change to my body that meant I could stave off death, probably for many years, so I denied the surgery as trauma. It took almost six months for me to acknowledge that I saw the loss of my breasts as a disfigurement, to notice how I'd been  dressing to hide it from the world, how quickly I covered myself after a shower--when I used to be so happily naked.

I finally let in the loss by following my metaphors, diving in to the ocean, being swept by the tide to a barren shore, finding a flat terrain with strange plants and unknown dangers, dark caves filled with ancient drawings, wondering Who are these others who have been here before me? How can I survive this? 

And I knew I had to find my way through this metaphorical territory, go into the dark caves, experience the fear, learn from the ancient drawings, find guidance from others who had been there for a while. The spirits of these women encircled me as I wept for the loss of my breasts, they chanted with me as I celebrated life's changing seasons and embraced more enduring symbols of womanhood. 

 *   *   *

Seven years later, on April 15, 2017 I faced another loss, the death of my mother. Yes, she lived a long and healthy 104 years, and yes, I was exhausted during the final years of caring for her. But each process of grief has its own territory. As the months passed, I looked at the image above of women in community, and wept as they encircled me once more, reminding me of lifelong love from my Mom, who was also my best girlfriend.