Even the withered branch grows again
And the sunken moon returns.
Wise ones who ponder this
Are not troubled in adversity.
—Anonymous
Like you, I’ve been forced to change more times than I would have preferred. But I have come to appreciate what I have learned, even though at the time I haven’t always enjoyed those “learning experiences.”
This was brought home to me recently at a women’s conference in New Jersey where I was the keynote speaker. A Fox News producer threw me a surprising question:
“What’s your secret for getting through a disaster?”
I answered instinctively, without thinking.
“There must be another way.”
This belief has kept me going—around, over, and through obstacles that would have caused me to give up if I didn’t truly believe that there is always another way to approach a problem. Believing that is my default position whenever I’m up against an impasse. Without this mindset, I might not have taken the time needed, which led to my discovering the Five Gifts. Each gift offers another way to discover hope, healing, and strength when disaster strikes. Together, the Five Gifts strengthen our core. Think of them as “Pilates for the soul.”
Meltdown
After the water receded, my initial euphoria was short-lived. One week later, a FEMA adjuster told me that my house was “fine” and I needed to rebuild in the same footprint. I felt that it needed to be demolished and replaced with a new, hurricane-safe, raised home. But FEMA insisted that I rebuild, thereby destroying my Thelma and Louise fantasy of collecting my insurance settlement and moving to a friend’s house in the Midwest, where I would change my identity and start a cash business. (It turns out I lack the requisite Thelma and Louise DNA and that I’m really just a compliant, responsible, middle-class citizen.)
In terms of rebuilding, I fared better than most. The insurance settlement came quickly, thanks to my contractor, Sandy Denicker, who submitted the required forms in contractor-ese and negotiated a stronger settlement than I could have done myself. Before they could get started, a water mitigation company I had hired to clear out moldy Sheetrock, tile, and fixtures billed me more than twice the fee they had originally estimated. When I offered to settle, they threatened to put a lien on my house. As scared as I was, I knew that I was only one of about a million people who were going through something similar and hired Denis Kelly for legal protection. Not only did he resolve the lien situation; he secured a lower fee and a written apology from the company.
Simultaneously, I spent hours on the phone every day, trying to get the bank that held my mortgage to release the insurance settlement so that we could pay for supplies, labor, and building permits. Immediately after Sandy, the town had announced that building permits were not needed for repairs, but that changed suddenly. Construction stalled for a couple of months because the building department was swamped with permit applications.
The meltdown came when my insurance agency left a voicemail saying they were cancelling my homeowner’s insurance because they received a letter from the bank that held my mortgage, stating that my house had been abandoned. Without homeowner’s insurance, the bank would assign me to a high-risk pool, where my premiums would double or triple.
Listening to that message after a long day’s work put me over the edge. How could they do that? Nobody I had spoken to had ever heard of anything like this happening, but as I found out, if a home is abandoned for 90 days and you do not inform your insurance company, you can lose your homeowner’s insurance in New York State. But my house was not abandoned. It was unlivable, as I pointed out in the voicemail I left in response.
“My house has no floor, no electricity, no water, no toilet, no kitchen, and no heat. But you know that because your company gave me money to rebuild after Hurricane Sandy,” I explained via voicemail.
It resolved the next morning with a voicemail promising not to cancel my insurance because “I checked my file and I see that you are a Hurricane Sandy house.”
Wouldn’t you think that person would have checked my file before deciding to cancel my policy? I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if that voicemail had gotten lost.
A Forty-Eight-Hour Moratorium
The ongoing conflicts were taking their toll. My baseline state was agitated with surges of hypervigilance. Like my neighbors and those who were attending weekly group meetings in the courtroom, I bounced back and forth between feeling confused and embattled. Sleeping offered no relief because of the dreams that replayed the days’ litany of frustrating phone calls. (Years later, those dreams resurfaced after watching hurricane coverage on TV.) After months of non-refreshing sleep, it was getting harder to stay focused and calm.
But that’s what I was helping others learn—how to stay focused and calm while fighting for the money they needed to survive. The irony was impossible for me to ignore. It is never easy to live your own advice, but now that it was staring me in the face I had to ask: What would I tell myself if I was my own client?
First up was a forty-eight-hour moratorium on all things related to the disaster: no phone calls, no emails, and no conversations with friends and family. I took a walk along the ocean, went for a massage, took naps, and drank lots of water.
By the second day, I was ready to meditate, but if I stopped thinking about my “To-Do” list, I was sure it would open up a Pandora’s box of fear and fury that would obliterate everything else. That level of vulnerability would release fears I needed to put aside in order to survive. On the other hand, I hated that my inner landscape had become a battleground. Like many of the disaster survivors I had counseled over the years, when I closed my eyes, streaming images showed a barren, burned-out terrain that symbolized the state of my inner world.
I started meditating and studying Buddhism in 1987 when I was bedridden and disabled with a chronic fatigue virus, which was probably caused by burnout from overwork during the Iran-Contra hearings. There were no conventional medicines for the disease, but new research into the health benefits of daily meditation looked promising. If I could only sit up for one hour a day, I could use that time productively to meditate. Even if it didn’t boost my immune system, at least I was being proactive and felt like I was doing something to improve my health.
It was not easy at first. Working in newsrooms for nearly two decades, I had been so busy in the external world of people, activities, and things that I didn’t even know I had an inner world! But two and a half years after I started my daily meditation practice, the word from several doctors was encouraging. My viral symptoms resolved in about half the usual time.
Daily meditation had become as integral to my daily routine as taking a shower. But since the storm, my mind was swimming in chaos soup and it was impossible to settle down. Increasingly frustrated with myself, I spoke with a Buddhist monk.
“That’s why we call it practice,” she said.
The forty-eight-hour reprieve took the edge off. Breathing to a count of ten floated me into a stillness that felt like home. My intention for the meditation was to “find another way” of paying attention to each crisis without agitation.
Seeing Around the Corner
Carl Jung once described intuition as “the ability to see around the corner,” a trait that gets truncated with exposure to trauma. With a foreshortened sense of future, we cannot conceptualize a future that is different from the harsh aftereffects of a traumatic event.
When it comes to tragedy there is no competition, and while I would never compare my situation to Viktor Frankl’s in Auschwitz, I took heart from his description of a turning point, when he saw his future self, talking to an audience about life in the camps. That vision of a meaningful future became the core of logo therapy, which he developed after World War II.
At that point, I was too worn out to believe in a different type of future. What if living in crisis was permanent? What if I didn’t have a future self? Maybe she was dead—another casualty of the storm.
In my mind’s eye, an image emerged. Watching it behind closed eyes reminded me of developing pictures in a darkroom. Immersed in the first bath of chemicals, a white sheet of paper would start to take on lines, shapes, and shades. Similarly, a future version of myself began to develop—standing in the sun and smiling, she looked pretty calm. Finding her there, in my own private mind space, was encouraging. From somewhere beneath awareness, five words floated into frame: Humility. Patience. Empathy. Forgiveness. Growth.
I repeated them. Then came a message:
“Write them down. These are the gifts you need for healing. Give them to those who need them.”
As a former journalist, I’m always questioning the source. Where were these words coming from? Were they seeds of wisdom that had been incubating in the fertile soil of my unconscious? Or did they come from a spiritual reservoir of healing and creativity?
In the end, it didn’t matter. When I said, “humility, patience, empathy, forgiveness, and growth” out loud, the tension released. Now I had a foundation for believing that things would improve.
The words themselves were a gift.
As I relaxed into this new truth, I didn’t know how these gifts would impact my life, but I knew they would help me in my work with others who were fighting through similar obstacles. It never occurred to me to question the source. The origin of these gifts—Spirit, angel, or my own inner wisdom—was not as important as their meaning. I had been given a light that I could share with anyone who was struggling through his or her own katabasis.
Being intangible, they cost nothing. They weigh nothing but carry gravitas and hope. They have no monetary value but they are invaluable. We can bring them with us wherever we go or wherever we stay.
There is science behind them. A substantial body of research provides evidence that each of the five traits—humility, patience, empathy, forgiveness, and growth—can produce measurable, positive changes in belief, emotion, and behavior. In addition, these studies further our understanding of how science and spirituality are interconnected.
Some of you have asked if the Five Gifts are connected to the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The answer is, “Not directly.” The Five Gifts coexist with those five stages of grieving. Those of you who have brought them into your heart after a loss have told me how each of these Five Gifts have helped you get through the worst days of your life.
Five Minutes a Day to The Five Gifts
At the end of each section, you will find “Five Minutes a Day to . . .”
When you make it a daily habit to practice self-care for five minutes a day, it takes about eight to ten days for your baseline emotional state to calm down. Many people report a 50 percent improvement after ten days of self-care practice.