I Was Intrigued When at a Servicespace Gathering One Evening When Pavi Mehta Took Me Aside and Told Me

Meg Leuker:  Talk a little about your yoga practice.  

Grace:  Well, Susy is my wonderful yoga teacher. It's not so easy for me to get into the asanas, and it definitely wasn't so easy for Susy alone to get me into the asanas. She kept saying we've got to go see Manuso, who is an Iyengar teacher; he's one of the premiere Iyengar teachers, not in India, but in the rest of the world. So Susy picks me up every Tuesday and we go to the Iyengar studio. Manuso has six assistants that he gives to me very generously for each class and they contort my body in the most wonderful ways.

     You know, actually, I was standing up straight for one of the first times since the accident and I just started laughing. It was two weeks ago. I was just grinning from ear to ear it felt so great. Somebody was pulling on one thigh and somebody was pulling on another and they had ropes around me everywhere. I kept thinking, if anybody sees this they're going to think that I'm part of an S&M group. And they're all so wonderful. I believe they are getting as much out of it as I am most of the time.  

RW:  Bringing up yoga it makes me think of the importance of our relationship with the sensation of the body. Do you agree that this is a major…  

Grace:  I do agree.  

RW:  And the culture doesn't teach us anything about it.  

Grace:  Sitting, again. Thank God I’d had a sitting practice before I'd had this accident. Therefore I had a touchstone. I've got parts of my body that are completely numb and I long for that renewed sensation, and it's not going to come in certain places— but it is coming in other places. In my case, I've got a kind of push-pull, internally, about how aware I want to be of my own sensation because that sensation is a lot about discomfort. A lot of what we try and do in the pain clinic is try to increase the use of other sensations like smell and sound—and not touch, not internal proprioception, because those might be an avenue for pain. But we are trying to balance the senses. So it's more complicated than simply having the awareness of sensation.  

Susy:  And with yoga it's using the breath to bring the mind, to keep the mind focused on the breath to stay out of the pain. Sometimes they can do anesthesia with just the breath for an operation—pretty extraordinary.  

Grace:  That's also what meditation is. We do a lot of that in the pain clinic. Teaching patients to breathe. And using smell and taste and touch.  

RW:  What role does that play for you here in this beautiful place?  

Grace:  I mean look at how beautiful it is! I wake up and think—as my teacher said, you've been trying to be a priest for years, but you've always been too busy to actually do it. He finally said you can't be so busy. I can be busy, but finally you don't have so many options. It’s true that I’ve gotten to be centered in nature much more because I've walked this path for 23 years and therefore I know when every plant blooms in this valley.

     I used to walk out of zazen at 6 o’clock in the morning; the world would look totally bright, totally new; then I would forget about it. Now I actually get to roll down to the office. It takes much longer to get to work and I don't have quite the same vividness of first response, but it's more sustained.  

Audrey:  What brought you here?  

Grace:  I wandered in here one day and I got so freaked out that I left immediately. I thought everybody was very weird! [Laughter] But then I came back one month later. I was on vacation in medical school so I thought I was only coming for a night and I ended up staying for a month. By that point, I'd been bitten by the bug of Zen. I’m not sure people find Zen. I think Zen finds them. I don't know about other spiritual traditions, but I do feel like I was grabbed and swallowed by the dragon. It's called Green Dragon Temple. I feel like it was kind of choiceless.  

RW:  What does that mean “swallowed by the dragon”? And why do they call it a dragon? Do you have any idea?  

Grace:  I have no idea. I think what it’s referring to is this plummeting into the human psyche that sitting is all about. Meaning you just have a chance to look at your own mind; you don't study anything except the contents of your own mind and if you do that long enough you learn the true cause of suffering. You learn the relief of suffering and you learn the medicine for suffering and you become committed to the medicine to relieve suffering. That's what I mean by being swallowed. I don't think it’s choiceful that I'm in the cave of the green dragon. I think that that's what I'm going to teach.  

Pavi Mehta:  What does studying to become a priest involve?   

Grace:  Well, it involves doing practice periods; it involves getting the approval of your teacher and the community and the Abbot’s Groups, and it involves doing two practice periods. This is my hang up—two practice periods at Tassajara, which isn't exactly wheelchair accessible. So I can't do my second practice period yet. And also, this is a very formal practice. I love the form of it, and have never seen someone as disabled as I am practice the forms. For example, eating oryoki, which itself is a ritual requiring a great deal of manual dexterity. I don't think they've ever tried to ordain somebody who is as otherly-able-bodied as I am.

     No one is saying to me: “We won’t ordain you because you can’t do X.”  It’s all going on in my head. So I've got hang ups. I never thought I would get ordained if I couldn't walk—and I'm still thinking that I'm going to walk. So I'm kind of putting off my part of the decision about getting ordained until I start walking. But I'm sewing my robes right now, which is all part of the process. I should be done in about another year. We sew our own robes. I always thought it was 100,000 stitches, but in fact, it is more like ten to twelve thousand stitches.

     So that's been really interesting because my hand shakes so much. We've figured out all kinds of ways so I can sew, and I'm actually almost done with the 10,000 stitches. So I feel great! That's a commitment I made to myself when I first became conscious; I said, okay now I'm going to sew an okesa. And my arms were in braces...  

RW:  That's amazing. That's a tremendous discipline to do something like that.  

Grace:  You know, it doesn't feel like discipline, because it's been really clear I want to do it. I want to do it! So it's not a discipline. It's just hard. [Laughter]  

Pavi:  One of the things, just listening to you—the standards that you set for your life and the way you live are, for most of us, they’re hard to fathom. When you were describing yourself earlier you used the phrase “party girl.” Then just that image of you committed to stitching your own robe—those seeds were in you, it sounds like, from the beginning, whether you were serving the AIDs community or whether you were sitting on the cushion or whether you were going through rehab. And where did that come from? That inner fiber that you have?  

Grace:  I don't know, but I am very grateful. As long as I can remember that’s been part of who I am. And I got a wonderful wonderful education with a wonderful set of parents, so I'm very grateful for that. For example, I went to a Quaker school that really taught me to meditate, to be quiet, and my family was always one of service.  

RW:  I’m reminded of a question that has slowly opened for me having to do with how much has been given that I automatically give the name of ‘I’ to. Not rightfully. The older I get, the more I feel that so much of what I feel is “me” isn’t really mine the way I assume it is.  

Grace:  That's exactly the way I feel about all of it. I mean, my family was always about service. The fact that I'm alive was about everybody giving energy—you know doctors not making typical mistakes, the community really loving me for whatever reason. It doesn’t have anything to do with me.

     But my body survived and therefore I have an obligation as a result of that to put forth. How can I do that? That's always the question. How? Not why, or what, but how can I do what I need to do? And what is it that's being asked of me?  

Susy:  Grace, could you talk a little bit about how you overcame the post-traumatic stress and how you got your brain back—because it wasn't quite right at first. How did you work with that after the accident?  

Grace:  Well I'm still getting my brain back [laughter]. I'm back in neurocognitive rehab, and everybody should get neurocognitive rehab. It's all about Stop. Refresh. Relax. Refocus. How often do we hear that? Stop. Refresh. Relax. Refocus.     

So I spend a lot of time in rehab, gratefully. I also play Luminosity games on the computer, and I did the brain rehab program that KQED mentioned—Brain Gym. Any one of those is helpful.  

RW:  I heard a story recently of a person who had some brain damage and memory loss. He had this moment riding a bus. He was full of joy because he knew it was the right bus and he knew he'd remembered that. Coming back from brain damage do you have any thoughts around that?  

Grace:  I think I was kind of lucky. You know when I first woke up they gave me all kinds of tests. So I was looking the other day at the results, which aren't so different from what they are today. So however it happened, when I woke up I really woke up. I've still got some cognitive delay, but it's what I had when I first woke up.

     Only recently, for example, have I come to realize that I am disabled. My big aha! experience—and when I knew that I was really coming back to my true cognitive self—was when I realized that I should factor in the fact that it takes me twenty minutes to get from point A to point B because I use a chair. I didn't have that self-perception. That's not feeling sorry for myself; that's just dealing with what is. Somehow my cognitive lapse, actually, was so positive. I mean, I had wonderful, wonderful experiences, like the shower, that went on for hours. I spent days in that kind of awareness—two years, probably.

     So coming back from that I'm not sure has been so wonderful. I feel like I'm losing that kind of bliss state. But on the other hand, I am more normal. I mean people would come to me because they were expecting to hear the word of a transfigured human being. They would come and see me and I would get really bored with talking about myself. So I would ask them, “How is your relationship? How is your work?” Everybody would talk about all of those things, and if they were not happy in their relationship, I would say, “Just get out. Either get married, or get out. You don't like your job? Stop doing it! Find something you love doing.” So I had a long list of people who would regularly come and sit at the feet of the Brain Damaged One. [laughter].  

RW:  Truth telling!  

Grace:  Truth telling.

Dr. Lueker:  Would you talk about “stop, refresh, relax, refocus”? That sounds like something we could all use.  

Grace:  It's actually this program that they are doing with me that was designed for brain-damaged people. It's supposed to increase executive function. That's one of the things that goes promptly with brain damage, our ability to make good decisions that are self-monitoring, that take into account both our gifts and our foibles.

     You know how a hyperactive child will often run out into the street without looking both ways? That's the thing we want to avoid. So we're trying to learn techniques to stop doing that. As they age, most people get overwhelmed with multi-tasking—meaning thinking about patient A, trying to remember the labs on patient B, trying to remember to call the doctor for patient C—you know.

     So at that point, what you do is you stop. You say, “I'm flooded.” You stop. You breathe. You don't proceed without relaxing first. Then you try to refocus. It's a no-brainer—unless you get lost in your feelings, lost in the anxiety of not being able to do it. Which is what happens to most of us.

Sam Bower:  First of all thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and for the chance to be witness to this. I’ve really been struck by what it must have been like for you to have so many patients during the AIDS crisis when it first came out. It seems like at best you could offer them your presence.  

Grace:  Exactly.

Sam: And it struck me that after your accident you had essentially the same type of experience. These were losses and many things you had very little control over. You could just witness them and, with your determination, decide to continue. But there seems to be a parallel for me just in your inability, because of the severity of the accident, to do a whole bunch of things. Yet there is the intensity of the experience at the same time.  

Grace:  I've never thought about it that way, but that's actually a wonderful analogy. We would always say that it was such great work— even though we couldn’t do anything. We got to just be with people. I mean, we tried to do stuff, definitely we tried; we didn't know who was going to survive and who wasn’t. I just saw one of the people, one of the last patients that I admitted to that ward. He was in end stage and dying when I admitted him thirteen years ago, and now he's vibrant! We just don't know. 

Learn more about the film about Grace's dramatic life after her accident.