Tell-tale
Heart
Recently, I was introduced to heart
rhythm meditation—a meditation practice in which you learn to listen for your heartbeat,
and then bring your breathing into rhythm with it. I am finding that it suits me: there is an effort and attention to it. Rather than fighting the ten thousand
thoughts that race across my mind, I find I simply block them out in listening
for the rhythm of that beating in my chest, and counting it across my
breath.
I think perhaps it is also well suited
for me because I feel a particular resonance regarding matters of the
heart. I come from a long line of the
broken-hearted: last week, I met with a
new physician, and even she gave a whistle as we moved through my family
history: heart attack, heart failure,
heart attack, etc. Most of my ancestors
have died from their hearts, most recently, my father. We never know what turns our life will take,
and there are busses, train wrecks, space debris aplenty to catch all out by
surprise. But I figure that the odds,
for me, are set against my heart.
I’ve also had my own encounter. About ten years ago, my heart picked up its
pace, started beating at least 100 times each minute, most every minute of the
day. That rate melted 15 pounds off in
the course of several weeks, made me feel weirdly frantic, gave me essentially
a constant heat flash, and sapped what strength I had. I felt like a hung-over, over-heated gerbil
for a stretch of months. I tried
exercise, and nearly drowned myself while doing laps; I started looking for a
doctor after falling off a push-up (embarrassing and scary, to have your arms
collapse beneath you, and hit your face against the floor).
After several non-Western diagnoses and
treatments (including—I’m not kidding—digestive enzymes from the gut of
bushmen, and Chinese herbs that made me fart with a virulence that emptied
rooms), a nurse practitioner suggested thyroid storm. And here’s where Western medicine shows up a
little short: there’s no good treatment
for an over-active thyroid (which I had), but there are replacement hormones,
for those whose thyroids go too slow. So
here’s what I consented to: killing my
own organ, by swallowing a radioactive pill.
I had never before identified so
strongly with
The nurse put on a leaded apron, reached
behind a thick glass screen, drew a test-tube marked with that same
yellow-and-black danger sign from out of its lead case, tipped a pill out of
the test-tube into a paper cup she held in a gloved hand, and handed it to
me. “Take this,” she said, and so I
swallowed it.
I used to think that it was possible to
live without regrets; now I think I was just lucky and naïve. I am astounded, still, that a decision of a
single moment—or even of a season—can reverberate throughout our lives. I’ll be paying off my student loan with my
social security income; because I once though self-protection antithetical to
love, I’ll be reminded of a certain love affair forever, every time a cold sore
erupts upon my mouth. And I am now
dependent, utterly, on medication. I
won’t go into a coma, like a diabetic, right away—but I am changed, and
sickened, if I miss my medication. And
if I miss it long enough, my heart would tick down like an unwound watch, and
I’d die. And all of
this, forever—or at least for as much of forever as I will ever know.
I’m still a little bit surprised that
these things are what most profoundly mark me as myself. I could leave my lover, never write again,
denounce my family, change my name or gender—but what cannot be shaken from me
includes: a student loan, those blasted
fever blisters, and this, dependent heart.
And so these days, I listen in. I usually find my pulse first in my wrist and
count my breath against it until I feel and almost hear the movement in my
chest. Most days, a
new affection rises up in answer to that steady, strong—if medicated—thumping
deep within. That affection that
I feel—a mix of love and tenderness and gratitude—starts out with wonder at my
own internal metronome, which keeps on keeping on, no matter what I’ve done to
it. Then the affection stretches, to its
kin—to all the weak and weary hearts to whom I am related. Each one of them, they gave their all. The promoters of this meditation say
eventually I just might stretch to feel a part of everything, to recognize the
deep connection beating between us all.
Right now, it feels like enough, in
this—my year of prayer and exploration—simply to begin to listen to my heart.
[For more on
heart rhythm meditation, see iamheart.org]
©
2008 Melissa Capers