This essay originally appeared on Susan Dugan’s blog on Jan. 19, 2017.
Did I mention I am just recovering from a hip fracture? There is a story; of course, in the ego’s world there is always a story. Practicing A Course in Miracles we begin to understand that our story that looks so uniquely tragic or hopeful nonetheless springs from the same old story. In the original fiction we have bought the idea that we have run away from the source of our wholeness, at large in our bodies in a world the ego mind created to both reflect and protect us from God’s punishment for the crime of separation. In our effort to prove we have pulled off the impossible sin of individuality while avoiding retribution, we project our repressed guilt onto other bodies or, sometimes, our own.
This particular special story began on New Years morning 2009 in the idyllic little Victorian town of Crested Butte, Colorado, mid-way through a ski vacation with family and friends. I had skied for four days on a pair of sweet new K-2s and even though I had reverted to Eastern Standard Time to ring in the New Year the night before to accommodate my lark (over night-owl) tendencies, I was tired. As my family and friends headed out to the mountain under a milky sky to a day that promised the kind of icy conditions and flat light I found especially challenging, I begged off. I had been interacting with other people non-stop for five days. A self-declared introvert, I need chunks of time alone to replenish the energy spending long periods of uninterrupted time with others tends to deplete. That, too, is part of the story of Susan, a story I was about to illuminate in a new way with help from my inner teacher.
Here’s the bottom line. I believed I could only find my inner teacher, my connection with the divine, the voice for love, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, my right mind, whatever you want to call it, alone. This is particularly amusing given the fact that I had been studying A Course in Miracles for five years, reading the text, doing the workbook lessons designed to help us apply its principles in our lives, attending and teaching classes, and still somehow managed to miss the entire point!
Unlike many worthy spiritual paths that also lead to awakening but had not worked for me, this path urges us to heal the belief in autonomy at the root of our suffering through our relationships. We don’t do that by sitting on a mountaintop cross-legged with our eyes closed and our fingers pressed together. The silence we are asked to enter within has nothing to do with what appears without. We are asked to enter the silent part of our mind that remembers that the person sitting across the dinner table or chatting on the ski lift is actually the outlet provided to reestablish the divine connection I believe I severed. I heal my mind by seeing that the teenager glaring up at me as I set a glass of juice before her is not the problem, my belief in the original story of separation is the problem, but I can choose again with the help of my teacher to remember that we are one.
But that morning I apparently needed a little review. I bid my friends and family farewell and decided to go ice-skating; one of the solitary pursuits I believed had helped me connect with the divine in the past. Walking over to the public outdoor rink through the hushed streets I indulged in the sensation of Jesus walking beside me. But once I put on the ill-fitting rental skates, Jesus made a run for it. I had worn my lightweight ski socks and my bony ankles chafed against the cheap leather.
Time and time again I came off the ice to re-lace the skates, stuffing tissues over the hot spots, then forging out once more to see if I could flag Jesus down. Some local tweens playing hockey with someone’s glove nearly toppled me several times. Still, I persevered for almost an hour, striving to reestablish my connection, distracted by the throbbing in my ankles and the annoyance of dodging ill-mannered children whose hung over parents sat in the bleachers cheering them on. But the blurry sense of Jesus in my peripheral vision never materialized. Defeated, I returned the skates and headed down the icy, still largely deserted streets to the grocery store hoping to find some over-the-counter sinus medication to ease the pressure settling in under my eyes. I would go snow shoeing maybe; that always helped me connect.
The local grocery store looked like it had been looted following a summer blackout in Manhattan, its shelves largely empty and ransacked, drifts of confetti swept into a corner of the linoleum floor. A boy with stringy hair and blood-shot eyes—a snow boarder, or “shredder,” as we not so fondly called them–said he had no idea when fresh supplies might arrive over Monarch Pass. “Hey, we’re lucky I showed up,” he said. “It’s New Year’s, man.”
I hurried outside, and had gone maybe 200 yards when I wiped out, my legs thrown in one direction, the rest of me catapulted in the other. I landed hard on my hip, and bounced. I don’t know if I had ever felt so alone. In that instant of a pain so excruciating I could not pull air into my lungs, a terror gripped me, almost immediately followed by outrage. I glanced over my shoulder, half expecting to find the person who had surely pushed me, the shredder, maybe, or one of his kind. I didn’t see anyone, of course. But I did feel the presence of my inner teacher I had been seeking all morning, the clear-eyed gentleness of Jesus. In that moment of complete surrender I could almost see him holding up his hands as if to say; it wasn’t me. As if to remind me who had chosen this; and to promise me he would help me see why if I would allow him.
A stricken-looking woman in an SUV stopped and rolled down her window. “Don’t move,” she said. “I’ll be right there.” Several good Samaritans stood fretting over me. Did I need the EMT’s? No. If I could just get up, walk on it; I would be all right, I said. They helped me up, offered me a ride. I refused. I sat for a while on a metal chair beside an old, yellow dog that rested his muzzle on my knee. After a while I dragged myself several blocks back to Elk Avenue, taking baby steps on the slick sidewalks, through tunnels of plowed and shoveled snow, my mittened hands pressed against the glass of store fronts selling books and high-end pottery, jewelry, and kitchenware, for balance, my favorite little prayer playing in my head: “help me, help me, help me.”
Eight blocks later, back at the rental, I peeled off my ski pants, filled a plastic bag with ice, popped some ibuprofen, and grabbed the Course, asking Jesus to show me what I needed to know. I opened the book to Chapter 21, The Responsibility for Sight:
This is the only thing you need do for vision, happiness, release from pain and complete escape from sin, all to be given you. Say only this, but mean it with no reservations, for here the power of salvation lies:
I am responsible for what I see.
I choose the feelings I experience, and I decide
Upon the goal I would achieve
And everything that seems to happen to me
I ask for, and receive as I have asked.
Deceive yourself no longer that you are helpless in the face of what is done to you. Acknowledge but that you have been mistaken and all effects of your mistakes will disappear. (Text Chapter 21 II., paragraph 2)
As in the instant when my body hit the ground I saw that I had created this, that I had already been feeling unfairly treated, my peace somehow jeopardized by these others. The fall merely reflected my inner belief in my victimization. Although my ego mind raced forward wondering what would happen if I had really damaged this body, how I would make it to scheduled client meetings, get my daughter to all her activities, rewrite my novel, launch this blog; the presence of my inner teacher helped me accept responsibility for my mistaken projection. As I did, I understood that this was all in my best interest. However it played out, I would be OK. The truth in me could not be threatened, broken, or destroyed. And as I picked up the phone to call my husband, a part of me had to smile because I had finally gotten the quality time with Jesus I craved.
That connection has not gone away. In the weeks that followed, confined to crutches or a walker, my husband and daughter and friends stepped up to care for me in ways I never would have otherwise allowed, and a funny thing happened. As my relationship with them became less identified with the rigid roles I had scripted for us and I allowed myself to receive their love in whatever ways they offered it, my connection with my inner teacher continued to strengthen. It did not go away when my husband entered my office and began talking to me while I was writing or on the phone. It did not go away when my daughter lay on the couch watching a reality TV program involving wealthy, potty-mouthed teenagers I sometimes longed to kidnap and reform. It did not go away when clients changed their mind about what they wanted from me several times an hour. It did not go away when I studied the crumbs and dust accumulating on the hardwood floors that I could not sweep up one-handed.
It did not go away because it can’t go away. It can’t go away because it never left me. It never left me because I never left it. I learned from my hip fracture that I really don’t want to be alone ever again, even though I might sometimes need to close my office door to finish a project, or take a yoga class, or meditate to clear my busy mind. I want to be in constant relationship with my inner teacher, the only real relationship available. When I forget it is there, I find it again by listening to the terrible loneliness of my belief in separation, the loneliness I begin to recognize and heal when I truly and with complete attention, begin to listen to you.
(Note: Here are a few additional, unpublished thoughts about the experience from my blog post back then. :))
Unexpected bonuses from my hip fracture:
I got to be right. I knew something was broken, despite the E.R. doc in Crested Butte’s X-Ray, X-Rays at Kaiser, and the orthopedist and physician assistant who advised me I could resume my regular activity. Which caused me to work out on the Nordic track and take a few excruciating spins on stationery bicycles for three weeks on a broken hip for crying out loud. But eventually I got to be right, because later, additional X-Rays revealed that my hip really was broken! Better right than happy, my ego always says. Yeah, well …
Crutches with crampons. I am not making this up. I got these crutches in Crested Butte and they came with some serious machismo: crampons! You know, in case you get the urge to climb a fourteener on your broken hip or feel like slipping off the A Course in Miracles wagon for the duration of your recovery and whacking somebody who has just taken the last close-in parking space at the grocery store parking lot following another snowstorm upside the head. (Of course, your doctor has given you a form to apply for handicapped parking but you have to show up in person at Motor Vehicles on crutches to get it, which must be listed somewhere in the Divine Comedy as a separate circle of hell!)
Husbands and children remember how to cook. When the doctors at Kaiser finally discovered I had a fracture three weeks into this little journey in forgiving my belief in the body and told me I had to stay completely off my leg or undergo emergency surgery my husband and daughter threw a little impromptu fondue party. They trashed the kitchen, used every dish in the cupboards, and then performed what passes for cleanup on the planet from which they hail, that does not include wiping or sweeping up spills and crumbs. But since I’m not seeing that well these days either, what the heck. As long as I keep my socks on, I’m chill. (My daughter hates it when I say things like that.)
Racing around on hardwood floors in your walker. This is actually a lot more fun than you might think. I go from my office to the kitchen to the foyer and back again hundreds of times a day. I call the hall between my office and the kitchen the Panama Canal because of the tight fit. The walker has a little drawer in case you want to pack a lunch or something, and a seat in case you’re felled by sudden-onset depression. It has brakes; too, should you get going too fast or decide to take it down a big hill. I took it outside once but the wheels are puny. (I wonder if you can get mountain-bike tires?) So I just keep racing around inside. I dream of one day making it to the living room and that television set but that step down continues to thwart me. Anyway, that’s why God made crutches. OK, maybe not God. Who did invent crutches anyway? Couldn’t they come up with something better after all these years?
The bozo horn on my cane. I’m not sure you call it a cane. I’m not sure what to call it. My husband came home with this device that has a four-pronged base and a curved handle. His employees gave it to him for his 50th birthday. It has a little Bozo-the-Clown horn to cheer you up or frighten small children. It reminds me of something the dirty old man in the old Laugh-In show might carry. I am dating myself. Really, I was just a little kid when that show came out. I am not even close to being ready for something like this. OK, maybe the horn. Ugh–just forget about it!
Someone else gets to take out the garbage and recycling. My family members look at me the way some Course students look at the Holy Spirit, as some kind of stinking Fairy Godmother; in our case, a trash fairy who comes in the middle of the night and rids the house of unsightly debris. Well, listen up: Fairy’s on vacation, people! Suck it up and do your part.
People carrying things for you. When I am with my friends and family, they carry things for me such as my purse, my books, and my shopping bags. This may be the closest I will ever come to tasting the life of the royals. I could get used to it, really.
Small children think you’re a robot. I was in Starbucks on my macho crutches the other day and these two little kids were absolutely taken with my hardware. I made robot faces at them and they hid behind their mother’s legs.
Susan Dugan’s books – Extraordinary Ordinary Forgiveness, Forgiveness Offers Everything I Want, and Forgiveness: The Key to Happiness – are available at RMMC and on Amazon. She writes about ACIM based on Ken Wapnick’s teachings at ForaysInForgiveness.com and teaches online via Zoom on Tuesday nights.