Polyvalance

"I thought I was handling it well--then boils started showing up on my hands and arms. You have to take care of yourself. It will get to you."

I have the fortune and privilege of teaching at the high school I graduated from. My former high school counselor still works at the school, and so when I found out that my mother was dying and that I would need to leave town earlier than expected to spend the summer helping tend to her, I showed up in my old counselor's office. She had lost her mother earlier that year. "It just sucks," she said when I asked what it was like, what I should prepare for, "no matter how old you are, it just sucks." Then, right before I left, she chased me down in the parking lot to give me the above advice, the warning, that no matter how strong we are, the death of a parent is a gut wrenching, hard hitting thing to deal with.

I haven't had any boils, but the night before last night I woke up at 5am as my body shook and what felt like boiling blood raced down the sides of my neck and my abdomen. It was almost like I was a space rocket struggling to take off. My mind was suddenly distant from my physical self and I felt like my soul might flee my body. I felt like I was dying--in fact, I remember thinking that. I remember thinking "So this is what it feels like to die...". It ended almost as quickly as it began.  Then my chest tightened and my stomach heaved. A moment later, my arms went numb and tingly.

I seriously considered the possibility that I had just had a heart attack (I'm very overweight, and I have heart disease in my family, so that's the first thing that came to mind) and I nearly stumbled into my parent's bedroom to ask someone to call 911. But the feeling of impending doom started to fade and I didn't feel like I was in immediate danger of dying so I decided to look up my symptoms online. To my surprise, the Web MD symptom checker didn't kick back heart attack but something I had never considered myself at risk for: Panic Attack.

I was always under the impression that panic attacks involved some sort of panicky feeling and irrational fears--something completely psychological. That's not really true, apparently. Panic attacks are physical events. It's the brain flipping on the body's fight or flight response system at a time when that kind of drastic physical survival mode is not really needed or desired. About 5% of people have at least one during their lifetimes. They aren't usually dangerous, but they are terrifying.

So...mystery solved right? My suppressed fear of my mother's imminent death, and my anxiety over exactly  when it will occur and how I will react, got released in the middle of the night as my brain struggled to cope with a volatile combination of ridiculous levels of stress and sleep deprivation. Just like my counselor experienced boils showing up on her arms. A physical manifestation of a difficult emotional situation.

But...

There was a dream. I was trying to get onto the right bus (not quite the boat from mythology, but the analogy is the same in either case) to travel to the duat. But I couldn't find the right one. I remember that clearly. I remember the shaking started right after one of the attendants told me it was time to leave anyway and we started moving. That's why I woke up thinking I was dying, and why I wasn't entirely surprised until I realized I was awake and that dying in real life hadn't been part of the plan...

There was a reading I did the day before with the "kemetic-oracle-cards-in-progress" deck that I made earlier this month. It had the duat card and akhu card in prominent places. It said I had issues to work through with both of them.

There was the dream later that evening when I tried to nap after I calmed down a bit. A dream where I was in the duat among the dead and speaking with an ancestor who came to me in the form of an old man/tiger who was a father in his life and who said he was desperate for offerings so he could go forth by day with his family, because he was separated from his wife and children somehow--an ancestor who just might be my great-grandfather (the black sheep of our family)...

There was a dream my mother tried to tell me about from the same night--but she couldn't make her brain work long enough to get the story out fully-- it involved being unable to "connect" and not having some kind of "engine" working--which faintly resembles my bus dilemma from my dream just before I started to "die"...

I was raised atheist. Science is king in our household. Science says I had a panic attack, but my spiritual instinct tells me there was more to it than that. What do I believe?

My mind was wrapped around that question as I went to bed. I was worried, because everything I've read says people can develop a panic disorder if they start to fear having an attack, and in turn, cause more of them with that fear--even if the initial trigger was something else. Science told me I should be worried about that. And I was worried, because I was scared. But my spirit told me that my "day-trip" to the city of the dead was what caused all of it, that there was no reason to be afraid, that I just had things to deal with in the unseen. That I could go back to the normal dreamscape I was used to now that the message had been received.

And I thought again...what do I believe in? Which do I put my faith in? Science or Spirit?

I keep forgetting that I don't have to choose. Just as there are double (triple, quadruple, many) truths inside my faith, so are there many truths in the world. Polyvalance. The mechanics of something do not have to define it solely and completely. Just because what I experienced would be labeled by science as a panic attack does not mean that the mechanism of a "panic attack" was not also being used for a specific spiritual purpose. Could this be my psychological/physical reaction to my mother's condition, the endless waiting for death, and my stress boiling over literally in the fell hours of  the night? Of course. And it is that. But it is also more than that. It is also an encounter with the unseen, breaking through in a moment when I was receptive to it. It is all bound up together. There are strands weaving in from both realities. Because one thing can be many things--and in any case, the result is ultimately the same. And the solution to my problem, to the fear choking me and keeping me from sleep, was the same no matter which truth I sided with in that moment...

I pulled my prayer book off the bedside table and I read from it. I read until I felt a sense of peace, of comfort, of acceptance of what would be. Then I turned out the light and went to sleep.

It was a normal night.