Anniveraries can hit hard...

I almost forgot - at least on a conscious level - that Wednesday August 3 was my 3-year anniversary of the day I found my lump. I use that as my anniversary, rather than the day I was officially diagnosed (a couple of weeks later) because the day I felt the lump was the day I KNEW I had cancer.

My hand slid over the lump as I was exfoliating in the shower, preparing for something completely vain and mindless - applying self-tanner. In that instant, I suddenly remembered a dream that I had had the night before - a frightening dream in which I found multiple tumors in that same breast. As it turned out, I did have multiple tumors in that breast - three.

It's not like I am psychic - I just think sometimes the body is aware of what the mind is not. So, just as I dreamed about the cancer my body already knew I had, today and for much of this week, I have been feeling the low hum of anxiety that goes with my subconscious mind remembering exactly what this time of year will forever represent for me. Even if I want to make up new associations with early August, the "chittra vrittis" of sleep and memory, the subconscious, are still there, nagging me until I acknowledge them.

Patanjali enumerates in the Yoga Sutras five causes of the vrittis causing suffering: ignorance, ego, attachment, aversion and fear of death. In his seminal book, Light on Yoga, which some yogis (generally, not Ashtangis) regard as the "bible" for yoga, B.K.S. Iyengar likens these causes of suffering to "icebergs barely showing their heads in the polar seas." He goes on to instruct that they must be studiously controlled and eradicated for the sadhaka (the seeker - the student) to find peace. Peace is when one learns to not struggle with the past or worry about the present, instead, dwelling in the now. Well, alrighty then...I do have my work cut out for me....

YC