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Women of Spirit

Stories of Courage from the Women Who Lived Them

New World Library

Inspired to Do the UNEXPECTED

Jon Borysenko

"My children were suffering, my marriage was suffering. And, once again, my inside wasn't matching my outside.... Yet I couldn't get myself to leave. If I jumped ship at age forty-two, that was it for me. I'd never get back into an academic environment. And I'd have given up over twenty years of fussing and scraping and competing in order to do what I wanted.... If I left [Harvard], no one would ever listen to me again. I'd wither up in the suburbs, all alone and with nobody listening."

Joan Borysenko, Ph.D., is one of the most prominent figures on the mind- body landscape, blending science, medicine, psychology, and spirituality in the service of healing. At one time a cancer researcher, she holds three postdoctoral fellowships from Harvard and cofounded the mind-body clinical program at Beth Israel/Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

It's hard for me to look though the threads of my life for a courageous moment. What on earth would that be?

I was a pathologically shy child, practically crippled with fear. I had to rehearse speaking to people, going over and over a simple statement before I could make it. I never ate in front of people — that would have been much too embarrassing. And I've always feared doing the wrong thing, making the wrong choice, disappointing people. My life has been marked by things that I felt called to do, even though I was in some terrible state of fear. So mine is a wimpy story. To this day, I am painfully introverted, a rather odd thing for a person who travels the world two hundred days a year lecturing to thousands of people, looking for ways to build bridges and to inspire people to reach deep inside themselves for what is meaningful and kind and good in their lives. I'm a much better candidate for what I did in the earlier part of my career, which was being locked up in a laboratory with my microscope.

I started on the path to that microscope when I was ten.

In the fifth grade, I had a terrifying nightmare in which my family and I were in a jungle with headhunters chasing us and booby traps, snakes, and scorpions all around. When I awoke, I was literally in a psychotic state; I couldn't tell the dream from real life. I was absolutely sure that headhunters were chasing my family and would kill us all. I shook out my shoes, thinking scorpions were in them. Within days, I developed a second mental illness as a way of trying to cope with the first: obsessive-compulsive disorder. Excessive hand washing was just the beginning. During the next few months, I developed a dozen different ritual behaviors, such as reading upside down, backwards, and three times in a row. If I were interrupted in any of my rituals, I had to start over, because the rituals kept my family safe from horrors that only I could see, horrors that existed behind a thin veil in the unmanifest world. This was pretty potent stuff. I can't even begin to access the terror that I lived with during that time.

My parents were so distressed that they would cry themselves to sleep at night. I could hear them and began trying to hide my behavior, because now I needed to protect them not only from the headhunters, snakes, and scorpions but also from the pain of not being able to help me. In spite of my efforts, I'd often get sent home from school — like the time I hallucinated that headhunters were running down the hall, throwing poison darts at me, which, through the extraordinary power of the mind, actually produced red marks on my arms. Believe me, when you go to the school nurse with red marks on your arms and say, "I've been hit by poison darts," they send you home fast!

My parents took me to a psychiatrist who ran tests, but he didn't really know how to treat me. The odd thing about my behavior was that it seemed random. I had a beautiful childhood in Brookline, Massachusetts. My parents were very loving. I wasn't traumatized, molested, or bothered by anything in particular. I had it easy. The only upsetting thing in my very normal childhood was that we'd moved across town; that tells you something about how fragile I was in those days.

Inside the illness, however, was a gift: it drove me to do something I might never have done. I sat to pray. I did not come from a prayerful family. I came from an agnostic, culturally Jewish family. But when push comes to shove, it's a human tendency to pray, and those prayers are focused and deep. They gave me a definite sense that I could recover but that it would take an enormous act of will: I could never, ever do another one of those ritual behaviors, like reading upside down. And I knew, as surely as I knew my name, that if I ever did, I would stay stuck in that mental illness forever. As I prayed, a state of peace came over me, and a poem went through my head. In a funny way, it was a poem about courage. If I repeated the poem, instead of doing the rituals, maybe I'd be okay:

Somewhere in the darkest night
There always shines a little light
This light up in the heavens shines
To help our God watch over us
When a small child is born
The light, her soul, does adorn
But when our only human eyes
Look up in the lightless skies
We always know
Even though we can't quite see
That a little light burns far into the night
To help our God watch over us.

It was only a matter of days before I came back into my right mind. The nightmares stopped. The hallucinations stopped. I simply returned to normal. And nobody ever asked, "What happened?" I'm sure they were too terrified and thought, "My God, she seems okay, let's not rock the boat." My illness remained one of those deep, dark family secrets.

Throughout my life, when I feel overwhelmed, I repeat that poem. And it calms me.

Three things became clear to me as a result of that childhood experience: I wanted to understand the human mind and psychology; I wanted to understand the physical functions of the human brain, to know how it was possible that somebody could become crazy instantly and recover instantly; and I wanted to know more about God, spirituality, and inner knowing. I felt that my recovery was an answer to a prayer and that, somehow, I'd seen the face of God. My whole life would become a braid of these three strands: psychology, biology, and spirituality. That's where it started.

I thought I was on course when I went to Bryn Mawr College, to Harvard Medical School for a Ph.D. in medical sciences, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship there, and then to Tufts Medical School, climbing the academic ladder, starting as an assistant professor of anatomy and cell biology and eventually doing cancer research. I was bringing together the biology and the psychology. It was intellectually interesting. But the spark was missing — and that spark was spirituality.

I'd married at twenty-one, right out of college. I'd had a child in the second year of medical school. Now my marriage was failing. Stress was everywhere. I turned to meditation and yoga, and I began a spiritual search, which seemed so disparate from the cancer research.

My external life wasn't reflecting my internal life.

At that time, Herbert Benson was doing some of the first research that looked at the autonomic nervous system, at how behavior could regulate blood pressure. I had worked with him over the summer following my graduation from Bryn Mawr. Eventually, he would research meditation and what he called the "relaxation response" and I suddenly realized — Aha! this is the kind of research I want to do.

People thought I was absolutely nuts to consider working with Benson. I was about to be tenured at Tufts. I was doing important cancer research. I had lots of grant money and a great teaching record. I'd be leaving all this for a soft-money position, meaning that I'd have to write my own grants, I'd have no guarantee of a position beyond the one-year hire, and I'd be demoted to instructor rather than promoted to professor. It would be my second postdoctoral fellowship. Just to study meditation.

As I was contemplating this irrational decision, my father developed chronic lymphocytic leukemia. His case was virulent, and they put him on high doses of cortisone. Unfortunately, he was one of the unlucky few who suffer a side effect known as "manic psychosis." Having been the world's most patient, loving, listening, compassionate person, he became like a stranger inhabiting his own body with pressure of speech and flights of ideas, making it impossible to talk to him. It was excruciating to watch this drug disappear him. His body was alive, but his soul was dead.

My mother and I kept speaking to the doctors, trying to find an alternative way to deal with the cancer. They'd say, "Look, if we take him off the drug, the cancer cells will proliferate, and he'll die." So we became stuck in that bind of quality of life versus quantity of life. When someone isn't in their right mind, the family has to choose for them. And that's a terrible burden, a terrible responsibility.

While we were dealing with this decision, my father had to have surgery to remove his spleen and was taken off the cortisone. Briefly, he came into his right mind. By this time, my parents had made the migration that Jews make from Boston to Florida, and I flew down for his spleenectomy. I found my father lucid and loving and thought, Thank God, he has some good time left. Two days after I returned home, I got a call at 6:00 in the morning. The following evening, my father had waited for my mother to fall asleep, put a chair underneath the window, and jumped. They were some thirty floors up. Apparently, it was his way of saving the family from further suffering.

Because I was the medical one in the family, I felt responsible for his death. I was a cancer-cell biologist and yet I had been of no use whatsoever. This haunted me, and I decided that doing research with cancer cells wasn't my calling. More important to me were the people with the cancer. If I could help even one family, then I would find some meaning in my father's terrible death.

As good fortune would have it, Benson had gotten his very first grant in a brand-new field called behavioral medicine. And I left my painfully secure tenure track at Tufts. By now I had divorced and remarried and had had another child. Going from a professor's salary to postdoctoral status was difficult. But it put me on track with my vision.

I was at Harvard from 1978 to 1988, and during that time, I won the Medical Foundation Fellowship for what amounted to a third postdoctoral fellowship in a field called psychoneuroimmunology. I also managed to get licensed as a clinical psychologist and, by 1980, to start a mind-body clinic with Benson and an Israeli psychiatrist named Ilan Kutz. This practice became the biggest part of my personal growth. Every week, I worked with three or four different groups of people with various illnesses, starting with cancer but eventually including AIDS and other stress-related disorders.

Talk about courage. The people in those groups had it big time. Like the twenty-seven-year-old woman with stage-four Hodgkin's disease who had two young children and was so sick with chemotherapy that the only way she could manage was to put the two kids in the bathtub so she'd be next to the toilet to vomit. From these people, I learned a lot — how people make meaning out of their lives, how they find good things in bad circumstances, and how important we are to one another. What one person can't do alone can be done when several people come together, just from the goodness of their hearts and their desire to help.

People with serious illnesses tend to reflect on the big questions, the existential ones. "Am I just this body or, when I die, will there be something else?" And "If there's something else, what am I doing here on planet earth anyhow? What's the point of this? Is it to learn, is it a test, is there a heaven, is there a hell?" People start to wonder, "Was my life a success? Are there any loose ends?" Forgiveness becomes critical, not only of yourself but of other people, to making peace. In a certain way, I became, de facto, a pastoral counselor. Being with those groups was a blessed part of my life.

The other side of the story, however, was that I worked excessively and commuted an hour or two each way from the south shore into the center of the city. As associate director of the division of Behavioral Medicine, I was doing research, seeing individual patients, and running as many as five groups a week, sometimes into the evening. Each group was made up of twenty patients, and I had to know them all intimately, be keenly aware of their progress, and listen to their stories.

I was absolutely exhausted.

I had no life of my own, none whatsoever. My children were suffering. My marriage was suffering. And, once again, my inside wasn't matching my outside, because what interested me the most was the spiritual dimension of the work and for me to be explicit about that dimension wasn't appropriate in that medical environment.

Yet I couldn't get myself to leave. If I jumped ship at age forty-two, that was it for me. I'd never get back into an academic environment. And I'd have given up more than twenty years of fussing and scraping and competing to do what I wanted. How many people would have loved to be in my position at Harvard, even though I was only a lowly instructor in medicine? I could have stayed in that position indefinitely, gotten grants, run clinics. Who was I to throw it all up in the air saying, "Well it's not quite what I want to do; I'd rather be talking with people about meditation and spirituality"? My brother was flabbergasted: "You'd give up a real career to do that? How flaky! What a terrible risk!" And the egotistical, narcissistic part of my fear warned, "The only reason people listen to you is because you're at Harvard." I'd written a book, Minding the Body, Mending the Mind, which was based on our clinical program at Harvard. Unexpectedly, it became a best-seller and I was sure that it sold so well only because I was at Harvard. If I left, no one would ever listen to me again. I'd wither up in the suburbs, all alone and with nobody listening.

That was my state of mind when, one night during an evening program for AIDS patients, I said, "This might seem like a cheap shot, because you have something from which you could die soon and I'm healthy, but the truth is, none of us knows the moment of our death. It's one of those mysteries and surprises. We need to live every moment as if it could be our last and not be lulled into a sense of complacency that we have forever." By way of example, I said, "I could be in an accident on my way home tonight and die before you."

On my way home that night, I was in a head-on collision.

Fortunately, it wasn't at high speed and the other person suffered very minor injuries. I would have been fine, but the shoulder harness on my seat-belt didn't catch and my face slammed against the steering wheel. My nose opened up like the hood of a car and just about lifted off my face. I ended up in the hospital for five days for reconstructive surgery, and as I was lying there with my nose in a sling, I reflected on the fact that I'd just been given one big, fat cosmic punch in the nose — literally. If God had appeared in a burning bush, it couldn't have been more obvious. I could listen to my fear and perish — because I would surely die early doing my Harvard job. Or I could jump into the abyss, even though I had no other job lined up, even though I didn't know what would happen next.

I called from the hospital and gave my resignation.

Later, when I was researching A Woman's Book of Life, I discovered that what I went through was right on target for a woman in her forties. It's a time when we experience a movement toward integrity, toward authenticity. We're not young anymore, but we're not old either. And we start looking backward and looking forward, trying to make meaning out of where we've been and putting into perspective where we want to go. By then we know our weak points and our strengths, we know what gives us joy and what makes us dry up. And we know something about what we've been given to do in terms of service. I believe strongly that we all have some unique gift that we give to the world. It may not be a big thing. It may be the most ordinary thing. This is a time when we begin to reflect on how we give life to the world. What are our dreams and visions? What does life look like now? If we find that life is smaller than our vision, if the way we've arranged our lives blocks us from offering our gift, then we suffer enormous stress. I've heard it time and again from women who say things like, "I just knew if I didn't leave this job, I was going to die!" Or "If I stayed in this relationship, it would kill me!" It's remarkably visceral for women. "If I continue down this path, I'm going to lose tissue." And that's what was alive in me.

I have never been graceful about these kinds of changes. I have never said, "It's really clear that this is what I need to do next." I go kicking and screaming, which is another thing I discovered to be common among women. I often ask groups of women, "How many of you have stayed in a situation much longer than you should have because you were afraid? You knew it was time to leave, you were called to do something else, but you just couldn't mobilize." Almost every hand goes up. We stay too long. We stay out of compassion. We stay out of fear. We stay out of a hundred different motivations. We don't follow our hearts. And, in a way, you can say that courage — from the French root coeur, which means "heart" — is in following our hearts.

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Excerpted from Women of Spirit by Katherine Martin. Copyright © 2001 Katherine Martin. Excerpted by permission of New World Library.
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