Moving through the experience

I'm moving through the experience of being a patient. Or the experience is moving through me - of learning how to be patient. Not learning just how to be A patient, as in "a human being who has to go to doctors and do stuff that the doctors say," but, rather, I am learning the essence of patience. I am having to learn this whether I like it or not, because the nature of what's happening to me has been so very out-of-control and so very slow.

Somehow or somewhere or someone has goofed up my plans for radiation. Someone has planned my radiation of goof ups. Some goof has upped my radiation for plans. Somewhere has plans for my goofing up been radiated. Things got a bit fucked up in the planning department. Yet. It will be ok.

Still, I have not been summoned to a table to have radiation shot through  my breast. Phone calls have been made, emails have been sent, phone calls have been received, mistakes have been made, notes have been unread. For reasons unknown, my doctors have not communicated with each other enough, and my case started to fall through the cracks. No one was calling to set up radiation. I have cranked the show back up and I'm about to go onstage soon now, I think. Everyone around me is angry about this, but I don't see much use in the anger, and I am patient.

I've been lingering in the hallway of my cancerous season. I've been waiting. I've been attending free yoga classes for breast cancer patients given by very kind and amazingly calm woman. She wears long white flowing shirts, and loose pants. Around her neck is a beautiful long necklace that sways down to her stomach with a long bright red fringe at the end. It is made of beautiful red beads with blue and yellow beads also. It is reminiscent of a catholic rosary in its weight and swing.

The class is kundalini yoga, which is very different from any yoga I've ever dabbled in, and dabble is a bit of an exaggeration. It is not the yoga of fierce fashiony stretchy sexy warrior poses featured in Athleta catalogs where thin coltish blond beautiful women in bikinis stand pretzeled and backwards curled on beaches in Hawaii. 

The word kundalini means awareness, and this form of yoga focuses on energy, awareness, and mantras that awaken your own inner strength and energy. At least that's what they say. It involves the breath and something called breath of fire, which is akin to snorting in and out as loudly as you can, like a serious pig. Of course the eighth grader in me finds this funny, but then the gravitas of who is in the room tamps that right back down.

Each set of poses or sequence is called a kriya. In one kriya today we sat with legs crossed and then reached forward with our arms and grabbed at the air rather violently. We were instructed to open our hands as widely as we could, fingers splayed,  and to fiercely grab prana (I think this is some sort of positive energy of the universe or something) and then jerk our arms backwards into our chests as quickly as we could to bring it in to our selves. To do this while sticking out our tongues and yelling out a painful groan as loudly as we could -on the exhale. To do this over and over again frenetically, yet calmly. Lamaze-like. We were moaning outward, sort of like screaming out the grief of cancer. With tongues out like Maori warriors. If you think this sounds very strange and awkward you are right. However it was also very calm and normal. A bunch of grown ordinary seeming women and a few suburbany men sprinkled in did this quietly but loudly, calmly but violently. There are no pretensions at all in this yoga class. The woman next to me was wearing khaki Capri pants and a regular black nice work shirt, and in fact, she was going right back to her job after this class. People wear jeans or maybe even a business suit. You could, no kidding, wear pantyhose and a skirt in there and no one would give it a second thought. No one cares anything at all about yoga culture in this class. 

If at any time during the class you don't feel up to doing the particular kriya that is going down at that time, many of which are not very strenuous as most of them are done sitting down, you're invited, in fact invited politely and encouraged, to simply lay down or stand still or sit. It would be perfectly fine for me to go to class one day and say, "I don't feel very well, I'm going to lay here on my mat in the middle of the room on my back with a Mexican blanket over my body, and my head on the pillow, and just watch the class from the ground." Or, I wouldn't even have to say it, I could just dream it, and the other people could understand my dream through the air.  Everyone would smile solemnly at me and say "yes, that is good, we are glad you are here." Or, they would dream it back to me, beam it back to me. The class is free and open to our special club, and it meets forever, every Wednesday from here until eternity.

When I went to the first class about a month ago, a very friendly woman named Cristina, smiled to me after class and we talked of juice. At the second class she brought me a beautiful glass bottle with a rubber stopper full of a special juice she had made just for me with apples and ginger and kale and spinach and broccoli. She also gave me xeroxes of the covers of some of the best books that she has read about cancer, and a recipe for the juice she was giving me. She pressed these into my hands with a warm smile and said "Yes, yes, yes! Drink this! You keep the bottle! It's for you!" I drank it up straight in the car. It was crisp, green, and 1000 times better than anything at Whole Foods or Juiceland. 

I'm moving through this experience, this crowd of women, The wall of surgery, the curtain of radiation which I have yet to pass through. The chemicals are still moving through my body from chemotherapy. These mornings when I wake up I can barely walk, I feel like my joints are made out of rubber that is then pumped full of liquid cement. My skeleton hurts. My knees and hips hurt, my hands hurt. Stairs feel bad. I don't know if I'm getting arthritis, or if chemotherapy has affected my joints somehow. Again, I cannot get a clear answer on this. It could just be coincidental timing, it's just yet another thing that I don't know. Hobble hobble, rock, rock rock, rock. I rock back-and-forth in my walk, my gait is stiff, but it sort of works out after I walk around for a while. 

Right now I'm killing time 

Or living life?

I don't know where I'll be tomorrow.

That reminds me of Journey.