By Doug Pinto
Father and Co-Founder Don’t Go Nuts
I wanted to write and share a father’s perspective to your wonderful community as a way of being supported in my personal search for meaning, in living with a severely allergic daughter. I thank you for the opportunity to be heard by so many who may understand from the inside out.
One of the most perplexing challenges of “surviving and thriving” my daughter Lily’s peanut and tree nut allergy is the call to be ever vigilant and also to find a balance and “lay down the burden” often. Children like ours learn how to be persistent and consistent with respect to being aware of peanuts and tree nuts in their presence. This vigilance can be taxing. It took me years to find a way to “lay down the burden” of being on constant alert of what could kill my daughter. I wondered how it could be different and easier.
The answer came in the practice of present moment awareness. Looking and seeing where she is at any moment in time and asking the simple question, “Are there nuts here, now?” This “in the moment” vigilance relieved the developing habit of my mind arcing back and forth from fear of what could happen in the future – to the suffering from the anaphylaxis story of the past. I needed to find a way to “be here” with Lily.
I won’t lie. The process felt ruthless. Everything I was trying to control in the future or past was just a concept. And as such, it was sucking energy away from where I really needed to be – which was in this present moment – bringing awareness to where there might be a nut “now”. Would it be safe to drop my concepts of future and past? Would I be doing enough if I just focused on the “now” with my daughter? Would my radar be effective enough to pick up an incoming nut?
What I longed for, for Lily, was her liberation, her freedom. What I found in my simple “present moment awareness” practice of “Are there nuts here, now?” was that we as a family began to enjoy life as it is…not as it used to be or as it could be if…Each and every moment became open with the same possibility as every other “normal” kid. We just had to ask, “Are there nuts here, now?” If the answer is “yes”, we take action to move away with a graceful, powerful, confident and certain intent into the next arriving moment of time and place. And begin again.
The weight of carrying the future and past can be too much to bear. To lay the burden down of future disaster and past trauma, means that we are left to only carry this moment and the next and the next. Just here. Just now. No nuts. We find freedom even in a cloud of conceptual threat.
Love to all.
Doug Pinto
Father and Co-Founder Don’t Go Nuts
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Thanks for sharing inspiration from your struggle! My uncle is an allergist in Naperville, IL exactly because of his son’s intense allergies. It’s a real challenge, one the whole family has tried to assimilate a little piece of in an effort to lift that burden.