A sad, cranky, unkempt, fifty-something woman came to see me as her stop smoking coach off and on over several years. She came more for the chocolates I kept on my desk, I suspected, and the contacts I had in local social services than for any wisdom I might inadvertently bestow regarding her addiction. So it goes.
She had reason to be sad and cranky (as do we all, in our way.) She was awaiting a new heart, because her old one only pumped on one or two cylinders. Having a bum heart is enough to make anyone cranky.
This lady was disgusted with her doctors, disgusted with her ex-husband, upset with her kids, mad at the neighbors, ill-tempered with the Food Bank, had absolutely no patience with the political system, the religious traditions, the educational system or the prevailing economic conditions. In our last visit she was complaining how tired she was.
As I had done with her for years, I gently reminded her of the Freedom Exercise and the Peace Practice. “It takes a lot of energy to be cranky,” I said, or more gentle words to that effect.
“I know your heart condition tires you out,” I said, “but how you think— what you hold in consciousness– can also tire you out.”
“My heart is 99.999% of the problem,” she quickly replied.
“I would estimate it’s only 99.998% of the problem,” I countered, with a grin, kidding her, trying to break through.
“No, it’s 99.999%” she insisted. She wouldn’t budge one/one-thousandth on this point. I stopped arguing. (I make a point of not arguing much in general, but most especially with people who need a whole new heart.)
My friend Christian Almayrac, the French physician who first articulated the Freedom Exercise, discovered in his medical practice that patients who adopted the Freedom Exercise as a daily discipline seemed to improve much faster than those who didn’t. It’s taken more than a hundred years, but finally there is a growing recognition among the general medical community that this is the case — people who are brave enough to make their mental happiness a priority heal quicker, go into remission more often, and need less medication.
“I’m a realist,” my cranky friend insisted.
In our times, when someone claims they are a “realist” most often what they mean is that they are a “materialist”— i.e., if they can’t touch it, see it, taste it with their physical senses, that means it’s not “real.” No airy-fairy stuff for them— such as observing how we habitually feel and think — for such a “realist.” There are no inner planes, metaphysical realities, subtle dimensions for such a materialist/realist.
Alas, it also means there is no— dare I say it— heart in our living when we deny these inner “realities.” Our lives are then lived on the surface. It’s all outer skin. And if it’s all outer skin, we soon become cranky, ill-tempered, out of sorts because we are being chaffed all day long!
I suspect this poor women’s heart did in fact find some kind of nourishment in our chats— other than the chocolates — or she wouldn’t have kept coming back so many times. We all really do want to hear that our happiness is important, our peace is important. We want to hear this on a daily basis, even if our ingrained, outer cognitive structures are not yet ready to accept such simple good news.
We do affect each other, even when we aren’t trying, on levels we can’t even guess at. After the lady would leave, my heart felt suspiciously heavy, and it hurt.
Even now, as I write this, my heart goes out to her.
