Sessions With Self

My Spiritual Fallout From A Major Health Crisis

My vision is blurry but the truth has never been clearer.

Sessions With Self: Entry 8 To learn more about this ongoing series and read past editions start here.

Lifelong myopia led me here.

Previous eye surgeries within a 2-month span coupled with a genetic predisposition to eye issues probably tipped the scales.

This is no shocker because most of life’s problems are at the hands of plain ol’ nearsightedness.

No, I’m not talking about how being nearsighted caused the retina in my right eye suddenly to detach, threatening to leave me blind, and needing emergency surgery.

I’m not referring to the paralyzing fear that engulfed my existence for 48 hours as I frantically searched for a hospital to agree to perform my surgery.

I’m not even talking about the chaotic emotional rollercoaster ride this series of events put me on as I waited to hear some good news about my situation. One minute the surgery was happening. Then an hour later, it was canceled — because of some bureaucratic healthcare hurdle standing in my way.

This isn’t about how every time the phone would ring, within seconds, I would go from feeling hopeful to wanting to unleash my wrath of frustration onto whoever was on the other end delivering the disappointing news.

However, all of this was fixable.

The problem I’m talking about is the state of psycho-spiritual crisis my nearsightedness left me in.

With every passing hour, not only did my vision become more distorted, but so did any understanding I once had about my existence and purpose on this planet. Like my right eye, all certainty about the future became one giant blur mark.

Powerlessness is the ultimate spiritual crisis.

This is because without even the slightest sense of control over your reality, who the hell are you?

• If you lost everything, your job, all your money, your 10,000 Instagram followers, and all the people who make you feel special, what remains of you?
• In my case, if I lost my vision, would I be able to write that book one day, sail the oceans, travel the world, and accomplish all the other goals and dreams I built my identity around.

And if I can’t, then who am I? Yikes, that’s a scary proposition!

These moments of losing control over your reality break you down to the studs as a human. You become just another life form among all other life forms on this planet. All sense of identity vanishes. Everything you ever sought refuge in becomes obsolete.

Because when there’s nothing to grab onto, what other choice do you have but to let it all hang out?

Enter the “bardo.”

There’s a Tibetan term for this called bardo, which means “intermediate state.” While this can be used as a reference to the afterlife, it also refers to these moments in life that greatly interrupt the continuity of our normal sense of certainty and control. It’s the feeling of having the rug pulled out from under us by life, in which we lose all desire to keep playing the game of upholding an image to the outside world.

In this single moment, our reality transforms. Where once resided a person who filtered every challenge through the lens of self-preservation now resides a being willing to lie naked on the bathroom floor, unable to control their bodily functions.

But the side-effect of such powerlessness is clarity. Our myopic nature ceases, and we start to clearly see who and what we are. Our soul comes to the forefront, the awareness of ourselves as merely a life energy takes hold, and we have the freedom to let go.

Of everything.

We also are free to acknowledge ourselves, warts and all. Our human shadow we denied for so long and worked so hard to keep buried becomes clear. We can now see deeper and further than ever before, and in this brief moment, we realize all the things we can’t see are nothing compared to the things we refuse to see.

This whole time our nearsightedness has just been a diversion — at least in my case, it has. The crisis with my eye started with fixating on what I was unable to see physically in my outer world, but that was nothing more than a pathway to expand my vision onto what is going on deep inside my inner world.

There were tiny moments during this ordeal when I experienced such glimpses of clarity.

When the outlook of getting my surgery seemed bleak, for a few seconds, I relinquished control and found solace by accepting the thing I feared the most: living my life with only one working eye.

Briefly, I was quiet and still. The panic and fear vanished, and I became a presence, but even more so, I was really just the awareness of that presence.

I threw myself into the bardo and detached from any sense of the identity of Anthony V. Lombardo.

Then, a few seconds later, the phone rang.

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