"Remembering Who I Am"

Diane Bonne - November 2001 Grad

I grew up in the San Francisco suburbs in the sixties and seventies and was raised by parents who were responsible and practical people, and atheists. The beliefs my parents instilled were tough on me in the sense of stoicism and isolation I felt. There was superiority in the way I was taught to view myself in the world. In addition to being void of spiritual context, my family was emotionally distant. At my father’s lead, our territory was the landscape of the mind, and even that was not well tended. Judgment, skepticism and cynicism were commonly used family tools, which cultivated in me deep feelings of inadequacy and hopelessness.
Regrettably, I learned how to view others through the same lens that had so damaged my self-image.

As a result, high school and college were not happy periods of my life. I was socially isolated, emotionally repressed, and intellectually uncertain. My strength, athleticism, led me to major in physical education and mathematics with the goal of becoming a high school coach and teacher. What lay beneath that simple career objective, however, was a stealth search for happiness and meaning, for I had neither. After I earned my teaching credential, I moved 100-miles away from my family, and began to assemble a life.

I was laid-off after my first year as a teacher, found a new job, and soon discovered that every one of my coworkers was Christian. They engaged me about their faith and I began attending church. I became very involved with the Sunday school program, through which my leadership skills were recognized and cultivated. A couple years later, with support from the church, I entered seminary with the goal of becoming a Presbyterian minister. Sadly, seminary was an entirely intellectual experience. I came out with a great understanding of church history, biblical interpretation, and philosophy, but no sense of the spiritual. This outcome was a failing of both the institution and myself: they assuming I already had a context and practice; me assuming the seminary experience would provide it. During my last year of school, and after years of denial and resistance, I came out as lesbian, and quietly left the ordination track. At the time I was not interested in leading a closeted or celibate life. I left the church, too, for what had been a welcoming community, transformed into I place I wasn’t wanted. I left heavy with pain and sorrow, abandoning the spiritual journey I had begun.

I lived with this void for many years until I reached a spiritual crisis around the turn of the millennium. The life I had built held no meaning for me and I began walking away from it. Within a short time span I was abruptly single, unemployed and living in the house of a friend by her good graces. I concluded pretty easily that I was a failure and became depressed and suicidal. Since that time (2000-2001), I have been creating a new life. I found a new job, the main benefit of which was that the agency sent me to attend PES. I’ve been on a fast track to wholeness ever since, determined to save my life. Literally. In quick succession I enrolled in Crossover, Lifeworks and the Wings Internship. I truly could not get enough: insight, reinforcement, and connection. Several moments stand out for me and one in particular prompted me to reassess my spiritual development. By the time the process ended, I decided to enroll in Namaste.

Several months later I found myself sitting in Namaste without expectation and wide open to the moment. In my case, attending Namaste was a spiritual awakening. Aha…I am a spiritual being having a human experience; aha…I am a co-creator with god; aha…we are one. It was one big, powerful, life altering paradigm shift. The thing about paradigm shifts is that once the shift occurs, one cannot go back to the prior view. I can never again see myself as anything less than divine, a statement that for me carries profound accountability, responsibility and freedom all at once. I came away from Namaste with the sense that I was remembering who I truly am.

A couple years ago, in a turn of events I still find a mystery, I was diagnosed with an exceedingly rare form of lymphoma. Being someone who exercises regularly and eats well, I was stunned. Impossible: it took me months to accept the news. Even so, I immediately began chemotherapy to treat the incurable condition. I informed my friends and family and recounted to them in periodic e-mail messages my experience of the diagnosis process, treatment days and hospitalizations, and life with the disease. Soon I began hearing a consistent and somewhat surprising theme back from them: “you are handling this so well.” Even my chiropractor and naturopath offered this feedback. In my mind, I was doing what anyone would do – taking the treatment my doctor advised, holding a positive outlook, focusing on what was working, addressing what wasn’t, and hanging in there despite a few downturns along the way. It took me a while to realize that I had acquired what I’d set out to acquire when I took Namaste: a spiritual context and practice that sustain me. Wow. Perhaps cancer came to demonstrate my newfound spiritual strength. I’ve become a survivor: someone fighting for her life…a long way from the woman who had considered taking her own life only six years earlier.

I’ve been in remission for a year now, and there is no way to know when or whether the lymphoma will recur. While I am hopeful that I’ll remain healthy for many years, I know I’ll be up for the fight if it returns. Until then, and in what I consider to be an amazing full circle of experience, I have recently submitted application to a certificate program in spiritual direction. Given the ups and downs, voids and black holes, twists and turns I’ve experienced in my spiritual wanderings, I believe I can be of help to others by holding their questions, pain, anger, joy, and all else as tenderly as I’ve learned to hold my own…and perhaps help them remember who they are, too.

I honor the place in you in which the entire universe dwells;
I honor the place in you, which is of love, of truth, of light, of peace;
When you are in that place in you and I am in that place in me
We are one.
Namaste.