Marcia’s Musings: The Heart Under Stress
/Her heart first raced and then pounded. Susan feared that her sweet husband of many years, afflicted with Alzheimer’s and resting on the sofa, would panic into deeper confusion if she said anything. As her ears began to feel muffled, she dialed a mutual neighbor, Vanessa. “I think I’m having a heart attack,” she whispered into her phone. “Can you run to Anthony’s house and ask him to stay with Frank?” Diane sprinted down our tree-lined Florida street and pounded on Anthony’s door. “Come quickly,” she said. He did.
Susan, a retired nurse, nixed calling an ambulance, opting instead for someone to drive her to the ER, only two miles away. She suspected that what she was feeling could also well be a panic attack. Many hours later, the hospital released her after multiple tests. The diagnosis? Stress-related chest pains, likely a result of the complete shutdown of her vagus nerve.
The sources for the stress she bore? Worry for her husband and the enormous decisions she faces as he hits accelerating new normals. The daily grind of caregiving. Grieving for life as they knew it. And the heavy weight of worry for her country, as the scenes unfolded from Minnesota. In her nursing career in Massachusetts, she said, kindness and compassion guided the way. Why, she asked me, do people not believe their own eyes?
A good question. When did we stop trusting our own eyes? Why do we avert our gaze when inhumane actions happen in our own community or any other? Why do we call one thing when it so clearly is another? A five-year-old boy in a winter jacket and a Spider Man backpack whisked to a detention center in Texas? Masked and helmeted federal agents, the newest of whom are receiving only 47 days of training, armed as though they were on the battlefields of the bloodiest, most dangerous wars, ill-prepared for their inexcusable assignment. Average citizens using bells, whistles, shouts, and finally screams to alert the unsuspecting fearful – many of them citizens of our own country – to run, stay in, hide.
And finally, the inflection or tipping point – the still body of another gentle nurse who worked at our own VA hospital – riddled with gunshots, some of them inflicted after he was already dead, a man lauded by his colleagues and patients. His own gun, legally owned and with a permit to carry, never was taken out much less pointed at someone. An ICE agent who discovered it allegedly briskly removed it from the scene, unstopped by those who are supposed to secure it.
The war unfolding on our streets is no longer about politics, the right or the left, Republican or Democrat. It’s no longer about the border to the south, which is in effect closed. It isn’t about immigration strategy or even the rule of law though, surely, we need to have those civil debates, if civility can be recovered.
No. This is about how we are going to choose to treat each other as we deal with all these issues, pure and simple. How are we going to treat the undocumented, the legal immigrant, the Green Card holder, the new naturalized citizen?
In the yoga world, we look to the yamas and niyamas, the 10 core or ethical values for living a meaningful life. The first three, in this order, are non-violence (ahimsa), truth-telling (satya), and non-stealing (asteya). These reflective tools serve as guideposts on how we treat others and ultimately how we treat ourselves, how we learn to know what is true and what is hype, hyperbole, and outright falsehoods. Buddhism extols lovingkindness, compassion, and the awareness is that there is separation among us; in other words, what is done to one of us is done to all of us. And Jesus? He treated the sick, championed the poor, welcomed the stranger, admonished falseness, traveled with and lived with “the other” - the immigrant, the prostitute, the gentile, and so many others. He refused the path of violence, though it took his own life.
Before I founded Green Lotus, my last corporate job was with Minnesota Public Radio and American Public Media Group where I served as on the executive team and as vice president of marketing. Once there, I recruited one Merry Beth Freienmuth to join my team. My first day on the job was three or four days before 9/11. A journalist by training and practicing one the first 12 years of my professional life, I knew the world of reporting and editing from a print perspective. When the Twin Towers went down, I learned about the attack while driving into work. When I arrived, it was a trial by fire. The fast-moving pace of radio, immediate and lightning quick, was on overdrive that week as was I and the entire network.
At that time, a new program recently had been launched called Speaking of Faith, with Krista Tippett and her producer Marge Ostrousko. They asked for a meeting with me that morning and told me of a series on Islam that they had created and was sitting unaired on the shelf. Would I, they asked, help to champion their program internally and provide important content to other public radio stations at a time when understanding Islam was so important? Later, MB and I continued to support Speaking of Faith internally and externally
How perfect, then, that while writing these musings, a dear friend sent me a Substack guest post entitled, “My heart is sore. Your heart is sore” by, who else, Krista Tippett? I cannot say what I want to share better than she, so I quote from it here:
“We can disagree on questions of rights and laws, and those questions have their place. But I’ll say it plain: Whether a human being is a citizen or an immigrant, a neighbor or a stranger, does not have any bearing whatsoever on the moral and spiritual question of whether they are being treated with cruelty or humanity.
There is nothing abstract or mysterious about this notion of humanity I’m invoking. It is carried in the phrase of Abraham Lincoln that has rippled through history because it names something fundamentally real and true: ‘the better angels of our nature.’”
She goes on to say,
“.... It becomes more and more difficult to believe in these meanings and be true to them when a body, or body politic, is living in fear.... At the very same time, this is one of those moments when the strange and beautiful reality of the human condition rises in the face of what would deny it. In Minnesota, where I raised my children and grew this On Being Project, the care and dignity of one human being towards another have flourished within and around all the images coming to us of violence, protest, and despair. There are churches converted to food banks. There are families accompanying other families and neighbors delivering meals and other essentials to individuals who feel vulnerable for multitudes of reasons.... I cannot believe that this beautiful strangeness and complexity reside on one side of our political sides and not the other....”
I call this “living in the world of And.” It is a concept I learned in my study of and training in iRest Yoga Nidra, a form of healing meditation that I wish many more people would study and lead. On one hand, here in our great land, there are those who would oppress in the most inhumane ways, and on the other, there are those who show heroic actions of kindness and compassion in protecting each other often at great risk.
I, too, raised my children in Minnesota (as have MB and Andrea) and lived there most of my adult life. I now spend winters in Florida with people from all over the world. Most of them are pouring energetic love into the North Star state even when they don’t agree with every facet of resistance.
When violence is inflicted on one person by another, much less by an invasion of roving armed troops, both sides suffer. Everyone’s vagus nerve stresses until finally the central nervous system slips into a fight or flight response. The cost of the well-being of people and of the country is high and unsustainable.
And this brings me back to the idea of inflection: With the killing of that gentle nurse, we arrived at the tipping point. Minnesotans' hearts may be sore, and yet they form a beacon in demanding the kindness and compassion extolled in yoga and so many other spiritual paths.
