Author Archives: Margaret Dubay Mikus

So Much Is Better, But…

Over the years, I’ve healed from a lot of medical stuff including eczema, MS, depression, breast cancer, heart arrhythmia, etc. I am now dealing with an umbilical (belly button) hernia. Twice it was repaired surgically. The repairs held, but then another area weakened with a hole larger than the previous one. Not good.

My approach to healing body-mind-emotions-spirit (all as one) is multi-faceted and practical. I have successfully done this kind of healing work for 15 years. In this case, I used healing energy (Reiki), acupressure, and affirmations from Louise Hay (Heal Your Body). For hernia: “My mind is gentle and harmonious. I love and approve of myself. I am free to be me.” Lovely and calming to say out loud, don’t you think?

I looked back to examine possible contributing factors, to root out the source of the problem, not just eliminate symptoms. As usual, I researched, meditated, consulted my inner wisdom, read, and found healing partners to help me. I consulted with Renee B., a digestive specialist recommended by three different people in one week. The Universe was speaking and finally I paid attention. Under the guidance of the very talented Dr. Lisa, (recommended by a friend) I took herbal and homeopathic supplements. I made changes in food, exercise, breathing, and attitude. I listened to guided imagery CDs by Belleruth Naparstek for heart and digestion. I monitored my blood pressure and worked on getting to bed earlier, my special bugaboo.

This was a lot to do; I was highly motivated. But a few days ago, an “Ah ha” moment. All this healing work is good. And now I need to be where I am, and stop looking backwards. To find the answer and the healing I seek, I need to flow with “The River.” In other words, let go and go forward.

In some sense, what this hernia feels like to me is being pregnant. So here is the poem (and the hope) that came out of that image.

2/11/09

Expecting

What am I pregnant with,
what is gestating obviously,
awaiting delivery or expression?

What metaphor allows the body
to be released from the bump,
the half bowling ball,

stuck out from my middle?
I refuse to believe
or even to entertain the possibility

that there is no meaning,
that peeling the onion layers
results in tears and release

but not healing.
All things are possible even if
not reasonable, not probable.

Over and over darkness
has come to and through me,
not like inevitable night follows day,

but dark like an eclipse of the sun,
dark like ash from a volcano
obliterating summer from the planet,

dark like an expanding black hole
that sucks in all light.
And to even remember sunrise

takes extreme effort of will
or patience or trust or faith.
And yet…every time

darkness lifts when
mysteriously the time is right,
and this miracle, this golden

egg is laid at my feet.

Margaret Dubay Mikus
© 2009

I Am Willing

Sometimes I get discouraged; I work hard and don’t see any progress. What is success, anyway? A few years ago, I did a Google search of my full name (which is unique). I found that big parts of my work-life were online, unbeknownst to me a lot was happening. An article I wrote for The Reiki News on Reiki and breast cancer was at www.Reiki.org and had also been translated into Spanish. A Massachusetts man I did not know listed me as a poetry mentor. My graduate research paper in the journal, Genetics, was online and had been cited recently, and my book, As Easy as Breathing, was in a library in Oregon, etc.

A woman looking for a Lenten reflection, searched online for “I am willing” and picked up my poem, “I Am Willing” from my website. She resonated with it and put it on her spiritual blog. Amazing! Since that time the poem has traveled all over the world, including blogs in Germany, Italy, UK and USA. Another woman used each of the lines of the poem as writing prompts—an exercise to enhance self-awareness and personal growth. How cool is that! I can write something that helps people I never even meet.

Sometimes changes have been introduced into the poem. One version repeats lines from the beginning right before the closing line. Sometimes the original order of lines is preserved, but with fewer line breaks. Here is the original form of the poem, from my book, As Easy as Breathing: Reclaiming Power for Healing and Transformation—Poems, Letters and Inner Listening (revised in 2005).

I got an email from a woman in Hong Kong whose husband had MS asking if I had any advice for them. She had read about me in The South China Morning Post, a major Hong Kong newspaper! She sent me the article (which is now on www.FullBlooming.com). It turned out that I was the lead portion of an article on alternative healing! I have no idea how that came about. But it is another sweet reminder that things are happening even if I don’t know about them. And to keep on…

For me, the poem is most potent if read aloud. Try it and let me know.

6/26/96

I Am Willing

I am willing
to change what doesn’t work
for me in my life.

I am willing to listen
with an open heart,
without judging.

I am willing to plant seeds
that take a long time,
if ever, to grow.

I am willing to feel
and let go.

I am willing to make mistakes
and learn from them.

I am willing
to live in the present.

I am willing to forgive
and forget in my heart.

I am willing to love as much
as my endless spirit will allow.

I am willing to be seen
in all my radiance.

I am willing to be fearless.

I am willing to be powerful.

I am willing to be peaceful.

I am willing to stand tall
and walk gracefully.

I am willing to sing with my stunning, full voice.

I am willing to allow.

I am willing to let go.

I am willing to change.

I am willing to see
and be seen.

I am willing to hear
and be heard.

I am willing to feel
and be felt.

I am willing to heal
and be healed.

I am willing to love
and be loved.

I am willing
to be fully human.

Margaret Dubay Mikus
© 1996

This poem was also included in Layers of Possibility: Healing Poetry from National Association for Poetry Therapy Members (2007), edited by Margot Van Sluytman.

Space of Grace

After several years of working with health professionals, I healed from multiple sclerosis in spring of 1995. The body is amazing; it will do its best to adapt to any circumstance. It took years of additional rehab to undo all the adaptations in my body, to enable smooth, fluid walking for example, muscles and nerves coordinated and in balance. I learned a lot about how complex and interwoven these ordinary tasks are. And I had a renewed appreciation for the hard work of babies to learn to walk in the first place.

I did not set out to heal from MS, which I had been told was not possible. I set out to deal with depression as my physical symptoms increased and the life path that stretched out before me diminished. I am careful when I say that I healed from MS, and there is solid evidence that this is so. This is not the day I want to talk about that healing process, nor what I learned. What I do want to say is that healing from MS cracked me open creatively speaking.

Most of my life I had the impression I was not a creative person. In looking back, I can see some of how that misunderstanding took root. It seems ludicrous now that I have found my home in creating beauty, in poetry, photography, music, etc. For me it took MS to bring me home to my creative self. The symptoms most often affected my left side, controlled by the right hemisphere of the brain, the creative center. In some unconscious way, I had cut myself off from my creative side. This is obviously simplistic, but has truth in it. Once the MS was gone, I had a creative awakening, with ideas bursting out of me as if they had been waiting my whole life for me to notice. I continued working on healing. I began a poetic journal, which has now been going for almost fourteen years.

Within a year (1996) I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Two tumors, one in each breast, picked up on a routine mammogram, followed by further testing. I was 44 years old with a husband and two young children. It is not stretch to say that writing the poems saved my life. It was an integral part of my healing from cancer. Writing allowed me to express what was happening to me, to understand, and to share. It turned out that others were also helped by these poems.

Early on in my writing, I noticed that certain people seemed to stimulate my creativity. When I was going to my voice lessons or having a massage, for example. I started calling these times, my space of grace. A time when I could more easily draw from the universal creative well. I am sure you have these times and people in your life as well. What people or places or events open a space of grace in your life?

3/17/06

Space of Grace

There are some times, some places, some people
which evoke in the space before and after
like a cushion of rarified air—

a space of grace during which anything
can happen: insight, inspiration, healing, clarity,
answers to thorny questions asked, joy, levity, harmony.

This grace is unearned, unmeasured, unpaid for,
unencumbered by elegant expectation.

This grace is a miracle or
the environment for miracles to happen—
a little bit of heaven,

casually interwoven with
the apparent ordinary.

Margaret Dubay Mikus
© 2006

Parallels and Coming Full Circle

When the last election primaries began, I felt it was way past time for a woman president and that Hillary was the best chance. As things went on with politics as usual, I wavered. My daughter was an Obama supporter from the start. My husband had met Obama years before and was very impressed with his straight-talking and connection to people. When I read Barack Obama’s speech on race in The Chicago Tribune, I was blown away by his articulate sensitivity to such a complex and emotionally charged issue and that was that for me. I was won over.

My husband and I moved from Ann Arbor, Michigan to Chicago in 1976. He was just out of law school, with a new job in a law firm downtown. Chicago seemed like a place of great opportunities for both of us. We rented a small apartment in Lincoln Park, with a view of the Lincoln Park Zoo and our own sliver of Lake Michigan.

Lincoln Park in those days was an area in transition, with vacant buildings and dark, dank bars lining Clark Street, side streets of beautiful, old houses, and a few modern high-rises. Once or twice we found a drunk passed out on our front curb. The first time I went out by myself for an afternoon jog in the park, I was accosted by a young man with his pants down, wanting or offering sex. I was creeped out. The University of Michigan campus had not been such an innocent place in the early ‘70s, but I felt more intimidated and vulnerable in the big city. I learned to be wary and to wear my “city face.”

There were wonderful, cheap ethnic restaurants in walking distance. We often ate at a great Mexican dive (which was also a bowling alley) just north on Clark Street. I loved going to a place where the waiter asked if we wanted “the usual.” We could get anywhere in the city by bus, el, or walking. We parked our Ford Pinto on the street and rarely drove. It was a big, juicy, new world to explore. (Our first time walking down Broadway turned out to be the day of the Chicago Gay Pride Parade!)

I got a job right away in the immunology lab at Children’s Memorial Hospital. After a year, I applied to grad schools. The microbiology Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago offered me full tuition and a stipend. I accepted! I tried commuting from north to south Chicago. As it turned out, that year had record snow. One time in a blizzard, I was the last car allowed through before Lake Shore Drive was closed. My second year, we moved down into married student housing in Hyde Park, eventually buying a condo in a formerly elegant, corner building built in 1925 at 52nd and Greenwood that was being renovated after a fire.Along with our new neighbors we put a lot of sweat equity into that old building, creating our own community. It turns out that our former condo is a block down Greenwood Ave. from the Obama’s house, just the other side of Hyde Park Blvd. (We moved out before they moved in.) What a small world! Certainly there are many differences, but can you find all the parallels between Barack Obama and me?

Two poems to share today: one written before the election when the outcome was not certain, looking ahead. The other poem was written the morning after election day.

8/29/08

Post Election

When it is all done,
the excruciatingly long run,

when the votes are more or less counted,
everyone will say the outcome

was inevitable and talk
of momentum and this or that

mistake or shift or mis-quote
that turned the tide,

and no one will look to the stars
or karma or alignment of planets

to explain how the once unimaginable
happened to heal or to wound yet again.

Margaret Dubay Mikus
© 2008

11/5/08

Post-Election Recounting:

Portrait of Barack Obama

The stars aligned
and all the planets
to make something possible
that had not been.

A courageous man stepped forward
as the chosen one.
He could move hearts
and erase doubt
with his silky tongue,
inspire hope where had been none.

And yes, change was coming.
Here was someone confident enough
to gather diverse opinion,
articulate and educated,
disciplined and real enough
to call out in the crumbling wildness

and hear resounding cries in answer.
Disaster averted at the brink of the abyss.
On the final day all who had been adversaries
included in the fold,
called together to change course,

to restore, to heal what was lost.
He took the high road
and that road took him to celebration.
And because he is who he is
at this prime moment,
and can gather and sow, reap and harvest

what he has sown, we all get
another chance to change,
to be the best in us.
What a gift!
Keep him safe, keep all around him safe.
Let him be gracefully shaped by
the experiences he has chosen.
He is tempered already in fire
seasoned by flame,
and found strong, able, and willing.

From the shadows he stepped into light
and like a meteor he rose
in plain, amazed sight
to dole out hope where was none,
to dole out hope with a generous hand.
A man of compelling vision.

And like for no other leader
the world rejoiced for one of their own
to have climbed to the mountaintop.
Not a messiah burdened by
weight of unrealistic expectation,
but a heartful man of clear vision.

Let him do the work he came for,
learn from inevitable mistakes,
grow further into his power unafraid,
acknowledging the whole of himself.
For within him lies all contradiction
laid open and resolved.
Let him go forward and
let us go forward in recognition.

A family man and
we are all included in
the embrace of that family.
All is not lost.
Roll up your sleeves,
let us begin.

Margaret Dubay Mikus
© 2008

Taking the First Small Step

Once again I have gotten tangled in the need to be perfect, to not make mistakes, to not appear foolish. I want to know now what I will only know later. And so I have not begun my blog even though I am bursting with writing I want to share. I need an outlet. I want connection. And if nothing happen with all of this, well, so be it. But I am doomed to fail, if I do not begin.

I am not going to say much about myself as introduction. More can be found about me on my website, https://www.fullblooming.com/. The past two years I have done some very intense healing work prompted by a third breast cancer tumor and genetic testing that showed a BRCA 2 mutation. Some of this I may talk about as we go along and some I will not. For now just to say I am doing well, hanging in there, still working on healing. Yet again, health issues pushed me into another transformation. I have gathered to me a lot of support and I am most grateful.

For today, I want to share a poem I wrote recently:

2/4/09

Meltdown

To melt,
to be liquefied
under high heat.

To go down,
to fall,
to not be rising.

To change the state of matter,
to become more dispersed,
to be more and less than.

To lose emotional control,
to weep unceasingly,
to seek higher ground

and not find.
To float lost
as if it would always be thus.

To release,
to let go the anchor,
to be unwilling to jump

and yet jump
or be pushed
by dire circumstance.

To come out the other side
of this trial by fire,
to know it would always

end this way.
To be cleansed,
to re-form,

to cool and coalesce,
altered, yet beautiful,
even luminescent.

Margaret Dubay Mikus
© 2009