In April 2009, my husband almost died from an anaphylactic reaction to a bee sting. As a beekeeper, he had been stung many times in the previous two years. But this was the first time he ever had a severe reaction. So it was quite a shock. It was probably hardest on me because he lost consciousness after the first five
minutes and was unconscious until he woke up in the hospital an hour later. I won’t go into all the terrifying details. It’s enough to say that it was very scary for me and the kids.
However, I don’t necessarily label the entire experience as “bad”. Overall, it was "neutral but intense". If I had to give it a label, I would call it “enlightening”. I kept a journal of my thoughts over the following week, and I want to share a few ideas with you because I think this experience could be seen as a metaphor for personal growth.
The first night, after I came home from staying with my husband in the hospital, I wrote in my journal about the vivid details of what had happened. All I could say about my own emotional state was that I was in shock. I wrote, “It was so horrible! I can’t tell you how horrible it was!” After comforting the children and tucking them into bed, I tried to sleep. But every time I started to drift off, I was hit by a wave of panic that swept through my body like an electric shock. Each wave of panic was preceded by a vivid flashback, a visual image of something I'd seen that day. Fortunately, I had learned a technique for dealing with emotional trauma called EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique). I did a round of EFT for each image as it arose. Eventually, I fell into a deep sleep.
I spent the next day talking to my husband. I told him everything that had happened (since he couldn’t remember anything), and I cried a lot. I went to bed feeling fine, but woke up in the middle of the night with panic attacks. This time, in addition to doing EFT, I also listened to my Holosync meditation cds. By the third day, I had stopped having panic attacks. That was a relief. Years ago, I suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder because of another difficult experience, and it took years to get over it because I didn’t have the benefits of EFT and meditation.
On the third and fourth days, I began to think of how this experience affected our extended family, neighbors and friends, as well as the doctors and nurses at the hospital. At the time of the crisis, everyone seemed to drop their ego shell for a little while and become more real. There was an intense feeling of love that surrounded us, and I felt God's comforting presence.
On the fifth and sixth days, I started to see the experience as a metaphor for the suffering of all mankind. I realized that all suffering is part of the same thing, a concept that could be called Suffering. With this universal realization, I felt a connection to all people, regardless of race, religion, social status, etc. I had a feeling of oneness with all of creation. I've had a similar experience before, so it wasn’t completely new to me. But it was still profound.
At this point, I thought I had reached the peak of my understanding of this experience. I had just gone through several levels of awareness in one week. But on the seventh day, I had a new idea. I realized that there are many different ways to interpret an experience, and different people will interpret situations with the perspective of whichever level of awareness they are currently at. There is no “right” or “wrong” way to interpret an experience. All ways are valid. But some ways of interpreting an experience, like from the individual or ego-centric level, lead to fear and paranoia, while others lead to peace.
On the first day, when the experience seemed very personal, there was a lot of fear. The fear decreased as my awareness expanded outward to include other people and eventually the whole universe. With this "big picture" awareness, I understood how an individual can be both very important and very insignificant. It's like the grain of sand and the whole beach. You can look at the grain of sand, or you can look at the whole beach. It's just a shift in perspective. Neither way of looking at it is "true" or "false". Intellectually, this may seem obvious. But thinking about a concept and actually experiencing it are two different things. If life is a test, as some people say, it's certainly not a multiple-choice test with one correct answer. You can't take the test and say, "Okay, I understand what this is all about. Now get me out of here." You have to experience it.
Since that day, I have been trying to integrate other aspects of my life into the “big picture”. I’ve had a shift in perspective that has changed my interpretation of the world and everything in it, including my relationships with other people. I feel peace in areas of my life that used to be painful. I now think of the levels of awareness as the concentric rings of an onion, expanding outward. And I want the whole onion.
So what does this have to do with gardening? Well, besides the obvious lesson that if someone in your family is allergic to bee stings, you should keep a couple of EpiPens on hand (We had one EpiPen, and it malfunctioned), there are some other things I learned:
First, don’t take everything that happens to you personally. The universe is neutral. The world isn’t out to get you. Paranoia comes from an ego-centric view of the world. Once my awareness expanded beyond the suffering self, I got over the panic attacks. That was remarkable, considering that not long ago, I suffered from chronic anxiety. One thing that helped me get over this problem in the past was gardening. I’m not sure how it helped, but it did. Maybe gardening expanded my awareness and decreased my fear of the “not me” part of the world. Certainly, gardening is a meditative practice. There were days when I only felt peaceful when I was in the garden.
Second, it’s easier to forgive people when you shift your perspective. In fact, it just happens naturally. After all, you don't hate your baby for waking you up in the middle of the night because you know that the baby doesn't have the same level of understanding that you have. So you feel compassion for the baby.
I sometimes get customers who attack me personally. Either their seeds got lost in the mail, or something failed to germinate. So they write me a nasty e-mail, accusing me of “ruining their garden”. It’s always a bit of a shock to me when that happens. You’d think that any logical person would simply state the facts and ask me what can be done about it. But looking at these customers with expanded awareness, I see that they are stuck on the ego-centric level. They must be terribly miserable (not to mention, making everyone around them miserable, too). But I don’t have to be miserable. I have a choice. I can see the whole picture and choose how to think about the situation. That's freedom.
In the weeks following my husband's mishap, I found myself being entertained by the comments of other people. None of them had been present at the time of the crisis, but they were all sure they knew why it happened and what it meant. As a student of psychology, I found this very intriguing. For now, I've chosen not to put any definitive meaning on the experience. I know that any meaning I put on my experiences comes from me, and I can choose any meaning I want. And the meaning will change as my perspective changes over time.
Have you ever noticed how your interpretation of something that happened in the past changes over time? The situation itself does not change. Only your perspective changes. Eventually, you may be able to look at difficult situations in your life and say, “It’s okay.” As Bill Harris says, “Let whatever happens be okay.” This is my favorite mantra. You can't change what is -- what has already happened. You can only change how you think of it. Change your perspective. Change your life.
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