TREE POSEI was diagnosed with bone cancer when I was
five years old. I had chemotherapy and radiation.
Then, when I was thirteen, it happened again. The
cancer came back in the exact same location,
and that’s when I had the amputation.
I also had more, pretty aggressive chemo. The
job of chemotherapy is to kill things, and it killed
my kidneys. Twenty years after the chemo, when
I was thirty-three, my kidneys just stopped work-
ing, and I had to start going in for dialysis.
In dialysis, a machine does what your kidneys
normally do: It cleans your blood, removing
waste and chemicals. You’re hooked up through
tubing connected to two needles in your arm. The
blood runs through one tube and is processed
through a filter, and the clean blood is returned
to your body through the other tube. The pro-
cess takes up a lot of your life. Each session lasts
four hours in the hospital, and for the rest of the
day I would be zonked. But if your kidneys fail
and you want to be alive, you have to do dialysis.
If you don’t, you can be dead really quickly.
So I did this every Monday, Wednesday, and
Friday for eleven years, until I finally got a kidney
transplant.
The thing with dialysis is that everything is
right there on the surface for you to watch. Your
life depends on a machine, and you can see the
machine in front of you, literally removing your
blood and washing it. It’s pretty unbelievable and
amazing, like a fast river moving.
I had done some yoga on and off, but it was
in dialysis that I had this miraculous calling to
help people understand that they’re never sep-
arate from their essence, and that their essence
is really this divine energy. You can be as close to
death as I was and have this prana, this life force,
flowing through you.
I don’t think I would have as much empathy
if all of these things hadn’t happened to me.
Everybody has their story. Everybody has their
losses. We’ve all had something brutally cut off
from us in some way. We all have to go through
that process of recovery.