Chapter 10: A Sense of Humor and a Sense of Perspective

I Am Not My Arm

I recently read a Facebook post by a friend who has been going through agonizing  cancer treatment. Despite the brutal treatments that have turned his life upside down, he has been able to express difficult feelings with a great sense of humor.

After reading my friend’s post, I realized that I have taken been taking myself far too seriously during this journey through calamity. I have let my broken arm become my identity, and tend to forget that I am so much more. Although it will take energy and attention to recover and heal from my injury,  there’s a lot more to my life than my arm.  Maintaining my sense of humor will be a big help as I continue to heal. 

A sense of humor can bring perspective to the most dire situations and enhance our compassion and self-compassion.  For example, the hospice team meetings I attended in my work as a hospice bereavement counselor were sometimes filled with laughter. We sometimes found it really funny, for example,  that so many of our conversations were about our patients’ poop. Our shared sense of humor and perspective created greater appreciation for our work and for our patients as being so much more than their illnesses and diagnoses. 

Maintaining a sense of humor has enriched my appreciation for everything around me and has opened my heart to feeling both joy and sadness, The direct experience of joy and sadness, without the overlay of concepts, makes me feel alive and connected to others, and the sense of perspective that accompanies those emotions prevents me from sinking into isolation, despair and self-pity. 

A guided pain meditation I recently discovered by Deepak Chopra has helped me keep my sense of humor and perspective.  In this meditation, Chopra instructs us to first bring our attention to an area of painful sensation in the body, and then bring our attention to the rest of the body.  Chopra calls the painful sensations an island, and the rest of the body is the ocean of awareness. The more that we let ourselves be with our ocean of awareness, the island of sensation grows smaller and less significant.

This will continue to be a perfect visualization as I continue to heal.  I am the ocean of awareness, and my painful sensations, emotions and thoughts are like ships sailing through that ocean. They come and go and are not who I truly am. I am not my arm.