Grace Under Pressure

In yoga, we are often challenged by life's distractions. Whether it is in a balancing pose on the yoga mat or struggling to meditate in the quietest place you can find. It's hard to find your inner grace and poise in these moments. Frustration easily sets in and, almost immediately, negative energy courses throughout our bodies and suddenly, we are...well, less than yogic.

Recently, I noticed how, just when we need them, life throws little opportunities to find grace. And sometimes, we are faced with tremendous challenges where we have no choice but to find grace and faith to lead us back to balance. I made this discovery when I heard about parents in my neighborhood that have an 18-month old daughter and found out that they both have stage 3 and stage 4 cancer within 10 days of each other. This family can teach us all a lesson about grace.

The Bond Family not only has grace, but they also have more courage, tenacity, faith and love than I have possibly ever seen. To me, it's as if some karmic god gave them the name "Bond" because it would poetically be the medicine to get them through this difficult time. Their Bond of family and love, hope and courage, friendship--friends raising funds to help them cover all their expenses while they cannot work, friends cooking, baking and collecting donated dishes so they don't have to worry about cooking, friends watching their daughter, friends visiting--and community--an entire neighborhood volunteering, donating and scrambling to do whatever they can to help.

This family's story sounds like a Lifetime movie, but THIS IS REAL LIFE. I had a hard time wrapping my head around it at first and when I realized that I actually had crossed paths with the mother, I nearly fell on the floor. I thought, "How could this happen?" "What will they do?"

So what do you do in a situation like this? You keep living your life. You do everything you can to keep living your life, to grow old, take vacations, see your child go to preschool, graduate college, etc. You do! The Bonds do everything they can to rid their bodies of cancer, heal and live.

In the yoga scriptures, one of the yamas is fearlessness or abhaya. When someone has cancer, fear has to be released before the healing can begin. In the summer of 2005, on the same day we found out we were pregnant with our second child, we also found out that my husband, Greg, had Hodgkin's Lymphoma. My world came crashing down, as we had a 15 month old daughter and fear took over and I saw myself caring for two children without my husband. I did not even allow myself to celebrate that I was pregnant. All I could see was dread and wonder why.

My husband, on the other hand, as shocked as he was about the cancer diagnosis, was thrilled that I told him about the pregnancy test before the doctor called, because it gave him hope. As soon as he received the doctor's bad and poorly delivered news, Greg knew he had to stick around for his daughter and unborn child. Fear was not an option. Faith was the only choice and my husband focused on the healing.

2005 and early 2006 are a blur in many ways. I like to think that maybe I've deleted some of the memories from my "hard drive", but it's easy to pull up the archives and remember giving my husband shots in his belly so his body had a fighting chance against dying from a simple cold. The howls he would let out as the injection burned into his bones are there in the archives too. We took very few pregnancy photos for that pregnancy. No cute baby belly hugs: Greg had no hair, no eyebrows and looked gaunt. The worst were the times that my husband had a PET Scan and he couldn't hold my daughter, who adored and still adores her father.

It was a rough time, but once I released the fear and hopped on board with Greg, we believed in his healing and we took each day as a blessing and did what we had to do to make it through. The Universe, God, Walt Disney, whoever your higher power is--and even atheists would find some kind of higher power I would guess--you have to find that grace to carry on.

So when I'm struggling with the day's challenges or feeling angry or fearful, I turn to thoughts of Elisa and Nathan Bond and even back to the time when my own husband was going through cancer and realize that my struggles today are specks in comparison. I take my inspiration from all of them, brush off the fear and carry on with my day, thankful that I have it.

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You can find out more about the Bond Family at http://www.friendsofnathanandelisa.blogspot.com/ You can also donate to them on that site. I'm also taking donations for them so they can do online grocery shopping at FreshDirect. You can donate at http://shantibaby.com/reg.htm

Namaste