I Can Only BeGrateful
BYMA PREM SANGEET
Six years ago I was diagnosed with tongue
cancer and ended up having 60 percent of
my tongue removed. As a person who always
considered herself articulate and who liked to
talk, this might have been a traumatic experi‑
ence that “ruined” my life. In reality, it was a
very different kind of experience that trans‑
formed it instead. The road to the transforma‑
tion began when I m e t Osho, but the story
began when I was born.
The story of my infancy is a common one. I was born to
a mentally unstable mother and an emotionally absent
father. He was pretty typical of his generation, and her
level of dysfunction probably wasn't as unusual aswe
might hope. I was the fifth child, and they couldn’t
afford to support the four they already had. Yet n o t only
was abortion illegal, they were Catholics, and for them
to even wish for the death of a child was a deadly sin.
She did wish for it though, as she later admitted. I don’t
think she ever forgave me for stubbornly insisting on
being born after she tried so hard to wish me dead in
the womb.
She was already in postpartum depression from my sis‑
ter’s birth when she got pregnant, and after I was born,
she was at the lying-in‐bed-in-a-stupor stage. Today
they would pump her full of drugs or hospitalize her,
but those were different times. So I was left as a new‑
born infant, lying in a crib in her darkened r o o m for
many hours a day, with no other caretaker during the
hours my eight-year-old sister was in school.
I forgot m o s t of this as I grew older; I also managed to
forget my o w n emotions about it. I knew I had certain
baggage and that my parents were n o t top-of-the-line,
but I prided myself on getting on with life. I saw myself
as competent, capable, and pretty strong. By my late
205 I had decided to take sannyas, yet I was managing
to stall for a little while longer. During this time my
brother took me to see some psychics in San Francisco,
and they told m e , at length, that I had been abused as
a child. I didn’t like that image of myself at all. I didn’t
see myself as a vulnerable Victim; I was the one who
helped other people. I hadn’t been beaten much as a
child; I hadn’t been sexually abused or burned with
cigarettes, so I j u s t didn’t see myself as abused.
Eventually I stopped stalling, took sannyas, and did
a few groups in Berkeley, but then the Ranch was in
full swing, and there was no time for foolish things
like therapy...or sleep. By Pune Tw o I was still carrying
much of the baggage from childhood. When I told Osho
I was feeling depressed, He said that I had been abused
as a child and I should do what He called
de-hypnosis. Rats! There it was again, and
this time I had to pay attention. I began
what turned o u t to be a many-year-long
relationship with hypnosis.
I continued the work after Osho left the
body, and as I recovered more and more
memories I became aware of a p a r t of me
that had felt so stunned and overwhelmed
at birth by the lack of welcome and n u r ‑
turing that it didn’t want to be here. It had always
wanted to t u r n around and go back, if n o t into the
womb then o u t of the body. That p a r t perceived the
world asan unfriendly place where I ’ m n o t welcome
and preferred death to a t o r t u r o u s existence here.
Though I was aware of that p a r t of me, I didn’t think
of it as a threat to my life until at 55 I was diagnosed
with cancer. Then I realized that I could die, soon. A
healer I was working with also tuned into the part that
was choosing to die. It seemed to me that the weight of
energy I had been carrying all this lifetime was just t o o
much for the body to go on carrying. I had to choose to
live or choose to die; there was no more time to sit on
the fence.
After some soul searching I chose to live; then began
the long road through the cancer treatment and the
recovery process. To get through that p a r t I did what I
called a gratefulness practice. Every day I would take
time to remember things I was grateful for, such as
the support of friend s, the medical care I was receiv‑
ing, my cat, that the s u n had risen that morning... I
found that gratefulness was like turning on a light
switch. When you t u r n on the switch the light comes
on and the darkness is gone. Light and darkness can’t
exist together in the same moment. When I was grate‑
ful there was no space for "why is this happening” and
"why m e ” kinds of energy. So, in spite of the m a n y hor‑
rors of the cancer treatment experience, I remained in a
good space m o s t of the time.
This practice was itself so transforming that I thought
I would remember to do it every day for the rest of my
life. Of course, I haven’t; I got better and got "too busy”
to remember to do the practice every day. But I find
I always have access to that space and can erase the
darkness of negative thoughts anytime I remember, and
when thoughts begin to darken, I usually do remember
these days.
There was pain and fear in the cancer treatment. The
doctors told me that if they had to c u t across the mid‑
line of the tongue I might never taste again. I knew
I would never speak normally again, and there were