True Refuges

"Your lost Joseph will return to Canaan, do not grieve
This house of sorrows will become a garden, do not grieve

Oh grieving heart, you will mend do not despair
This frenzied mind will return to calm, do not grieve

When the spring of life sets again in the meadows
A crown of flowers you will bear, singing bird, do not grieve

If these turning epochs do not move with our will today
The spheres of time are not constant, do not grieve

Don’t lose hope, for awareness cannot perceive the concealed
Behind the curtains hidden scenes play, do not grieve."  -- Hafez, "The Lost Joseph" (full poem here)


"I'm here without you baby, but you're still on my lonely mind
I think about you baby, and I dream about you all the time." - Three Doors Down, "Here Without You"



I don't know how much more I have to say about the horrors of miscarriage, except to say that they seem to get exponentially worse. With one miscarriage, it's like, "Well, this sucks, but 25 percent of all pregnancies end this way, so we'll grieve, hope and proceed forward." With two in a row, it's like, "Uh-oh, I hope this doesn't indicate a trend. Just bad luck." With three in a row, you become a "serial miscarrier" and the stakes change. Our most recent miscarriage is like a gigantic hole in my heart. It feels like more of a profound loss, in part because it's our third blow of this kind in a year, and I think in part because we felt some relief that we heard and saw our baby's heart beat. Even though I still worried, that gave me some hope that things could be ok. Nevertheless, it turns out our daughter had an extra thirteenth chromosome, which is incompatible with life. Knowing this was a little girl, and not an anonymous "it" makes this even more personal and painful.

One thing this year-long curriculum in grief has taught me is how much of a precious gift it would be for all of us to give each other the gift of mindful listening. In our culture, "help" has become synonymous with "fix": people see David and me hurting and want to relieve us of our suffering, so they make offers of "help" from the reasonable to the sublime to the ridiculous. The people who have been the greatest help to me have been those who say, "This sucks. You are in the middle of something awful and unfair, and I am so sorry for you." Bless you. One of the reasons that you don't say anything when you enter a Jewish house of mourning is that there is nothing to say. Loss is ineffable.

All of my old complaints about the hurtful things people say and do in their attempts to "help" still stand, though I have some new complaints too. The primary one is women offering me advice for their fertility problems, which are not our fertility problems. There are many stages where reproduction can fail, and I find myself exasperated with advice (again, well-meant) from people who have a totally different problem we do. They don't realize that their suggestions are equivalent to suggesting Lupron, a prostate cancer drug, for a breast cancer patient. But hey, they're both cancer! To all you progesterone pushers: all the hormones in the world would not have negated an extra chromosome, but that will be a later post. I am not immune to this desire to "help"; God help you if you ask me about Lyme Disease, because you will get an hour lecture full of strong opinions! Then again, in my defense, Lyme and co-infections have one cause, though many presentations of the diseases. Infertility is quite a bit more complex since it can have different causes, many causes, or be completely idiopathic.

I am all about care right now for David and me. Frankly, right now, other people's needs come significantly below ours. In trying to determine how to best care for myself, I keep asking myself, "What and who are true refuges for me?" This has guided how I am spending my time and who I am spending it with. No refuge for Sarah, no Sarah. This means a lot of calls to me are not being returned, and that's totally as it should be.

To my great surprise, one of my most helpful refuges has been meditation. It is surprising because my meditation cushion is kinda the loudest place in the house nowadays. You wake up to what is when you meditate, and if what you're waking up to sucks, it really hurts! I listened to a dharma talk today by Sylvia Boorstein titled "May I Meet This Moment Fully, May I Meet It As A Friend." I've been repeating that throughout the day. Some days, like this morning, I was able to compassionately touch my grief in my meditation; other days, it is too intense, and I return to the traditional metta (loving-kindness/blessing) practice.

Loving, compassionate, close friends and family members have also been a true refuge, as have both of my spiritual communities: my Jewish one and my meditation one. I found out last Wednesday that our baby died, yet I couldn't imagine being anywhere other than with my sangha (meditation community). I was hugged by so many people, and got kind follow-up emails from people sending me metta and checking on me.

Little Kacy, our dog, is a true refuge, as always. And on a different wavelength, good TV, in moderation, provides much-needed distraction. What are your true refuges?

Real But Not True

"They say it's never too late
To stop being afraid
And there is no one else here
So why should I wait?
And in the blink of an eye the past begins to fade

So have you ever been caught in a sea of despair?
And your moment of truth
Is the day that you say 'I'm not scared'

Put your hands in the air
If you hear me out there
I've been looking for you day and night
Shine a light in the dark
Let me see where you are
'Cause I'm not gonna leave you behind

If I told you that you're not alone
And I show you this is where you belong
Put your hands in the air
One more time..." -- "Unity" by Shinedown


I feel like I've been selling our baby short. Every time someone congratulates me on our pregnancy, I have to somehow negate it with, "Yeah, but, this is my third pregnancy in a year, so we'll see..." I realize I'm saying this for me, not them, but it has been bothering me: I feel like I've been selling our baby short. Again, we encounter the brain's weak attempt to protect me from something that isn't happening. Thank you, brain.

I heard Tsoknyi Rinpoche speak recently (you can listen to his inspiring, funny talk here), and am currently reading his book "Open Heart, Open Mind." One of the most powerful concepts he presents is "real but not true." That is, something can be very real for you, but not actually factually correct. In my case, my fear of losing this pregnancy is very real, and not to be minimized. At the same time, for today, it is not true that I am losing the baby I am carrying. I am very tempted to write "real but not true" on an index card and keep it in my purse. My very real feelings and stories about pregnancy loss are based on my history, my brain's attempt to make sense of it, and my physical body's -- and subtle body's, i.e. energetic field, emotions, etc. -- interpretations of these experiences. For today, which is all any of us has, it is not true that I'm losing this pregnancy. Therefore, it's not fair for me to sell our little one short by qualifying news of our pregnancy with reports of my miscarriages.

I was driving home yesterday from a half-day mindfulness retreat for my Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction class I'm enrolled in. I normally don't listen to the radio when re-entering the real world after a retreat, but I was so exhausted, I feared falling asleep if I drove home in silence. So, I put on Shinedown's amazing new album, "Amaryllis." Their song "Unity," quoted above, is powerful even if you are not moody and pregnant, and I highly recommend a listen.  However, since I am especially sensitive and emotional right now, it really hit me. Tears started streaming down my face, to the point I considered pulling over. Particularly, the idea that "I'm not gonna leave you behind," and the idea that this baby is NOT alone, and that if God wills it, she or he belongs with David and me -- all concepts related clearly in "Unity." I want to set the intention of encouraging him or her, not prematurely giving up became of my fears based on the past. Grow little one, grow and thrive!

The Power of Positive Thinking

I am coming up on five years of back-to-back abstinence in OA-HOW, a structured way of working the Overeaters Anonymous (OA) program, a Twelve Step program for people wrestling with any food-related compulsion. In OA, abstinence means "refraining from compulsive overeating" or other compulsive food behavior like anorexia or bulimia. In HOW, we put a lot of emphasis on abstaining from negative thinking, which is really hard for me. I am by nature, negative, and the brain does a lot to try to protect us from future heartache; one of its main ways of doing this is by anticipating the worst to "inoculate" us from bad things happening in the future. Of course, this is erroneous, because we just end up suffering twice: in the anticipation of the bad event, and then, if/when the bad event happens.

Pesach (Passover) has always been a miserable holiday for me. It is hard for any observant Jew: imagine preparing for Christmas and moving at the same time. There is a tremendous amount of work to prepare for the holiday, some of it very labor intensive. Even though my husband David carries most of the heavy lifting, I still do my fair share, and the necessities of the holiday preparation -- cleaning, shopping, cooking, entertaining, and staying up late -- really pushes all of my buttons. It activates my chronic pain in a bad way. All of this means that I usually approach the holiday with a lot of dread and negativity. This makes me miserable, but worse, it also erodes David's enjoyment of the holiday.

I have been getting deeper into my mindfulness practice, and I think I am growing weary of the suffering I cause myself. Pain in life is inevitable, but more and more I am clearly seeing that I am the source of most of my suffering. Stress happens, of course, but the stories I construct about what I am experiencing are truly the cause of my misery. There is a massive difference between pain and suffering. So, in an attempt to cut down on my suffering, I decided to try something different for Pesach this year: abstaining from negative thinking, just like my Twelve Step program advises me to do.

I wasn't sure I could successfully keep a positive attitude, but I was determined to try one day at a time. To my surprise, I was quite successful. To my amazement, it made a tremendous difference to the quality of my holiday. Yes, I am still exhausted. Yes, I am still in pain bad enough that it requires narcotics to manage it, which I hate taking. But I have enjoyed this holiday more than any in the past. I was more productive. David said, "You have gotten more done, with less pain to yourself, than you ever have in the time I've known you." My OA sponsor said, "I can tell how much calmer you are." Even my body bears the fruits of my efforts: this is the first time in a decade I haven't had my telltale Pesach cold sore, which is a stress response.

This has made for an infinitely sweeter holiday. It is is profoundly meaningful for my faith -- it is the story of God rescuing the Jews from brutal slavery in Egypt, ultimately leading to our redemption and giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. This year, freed from the excessive negativity and crap stories I tell myself, I was able to relax and enjoy the holiday, both for what Hashem (God) did for the Jewish people, but also what Hashem did for me: leading me out of food addiction to a saner, freer existence. I used to dread Pesach because I was so driven by the compulsion to eat, I couldn't stay away from non-kosher food, or chametz, leavened food prohibited on the holiday, for even eight days. It was torture. This was a problem for me since adolescence.

To an outsider, it seems like I do a lot of extreme things for my recovery program: I weigh and measure all my food, yes, even in public, even when it's embarrassing. I make at least four telephone calls per day to other fellows in recovery. I do a daily reading and writing assignment. Most importantly, I work the Twelve Steps, which are simple but never easy. Yes, all of this takes time, and I do not always enjoy it, to say the least! However, when I reflect on my greatest blessings of recovery, it becomes clear why this is so worth it. Yes, losing so much weight is amazing. But living with integrity is priceless. Knowing that I won't have to go binge on non-kosher foods during Pesach, or the other 51 weeks of the year -- and end up hating myself for it -- is the biggest blessing. Recovery has given me integrity: my insides match my outsides. No more outwardly living an Orthodox lifestyle, while binging at Burger King, praying no one sees me (and again, hating myself for my "lack of self control" -- I know now that this was the cunning, baffling, and powerful disease of addiction, as the book "Alcoholic Anonymous" describes it). Living my values, having God redeem me from slavery to food addiction is truly priceless. Is my daily OA work worth it? Hell yes!