Where's Our Compassion?

My friend will remain anonymous, so I trust he will not object to find his story on The Buddha Diaries. It's a story that we need to pay attention to. A fellow meditator and a reader of these pages, he returned a couple of days ago from a Christmas trip to London with his wife. I received an email from him the morning after their return, in which he told me that his wife had taken a fall on the steps down to the Underground at Piccadilly Circus, and had suffered two broken bones in her arm as a result of trying to break the fall.

I called at once to inquire after her recovery, and was pleased to hear that Britain's National Health Service--along with several of my (former) fellow-citizens--had proved both caring and efficient. I'm well aware that what is dreaded over here as "socialized medicine" is not without its failings, but my friend had nothing but good words for the English version. Bystanders, he said, who had witnessed the fall, had readily stepped in to help while he hurried off to summon the police from the Underground substation, and the bobbies (are they still called that, in the UK? It sounds so... well, innocent!) led her off to their station until the ambulance arrived.

At the hospital, I gather, bones were set and casts applied with professional dispatch, allowing my friend and his wife to be ready for their planned return flight--all at no cost, save that of medications. As visitors to the UK--and therefore as non-payers into the health system--they were amazed and gratified by the treatment they received.

Imagine their chagrin, then, after a long and I imagine highly uncomfortable flight back from London, they spent hours on the telephone--this on a holiday weekend, true. But even so...!--trying to set up a follow-up appointment with an appropriate American physician. No luck. As my friend explained, on the telephone, local doctors were reluctant to take time for a Medicare patient. They could probably have checked her into Emergency, but she naturally wanted the attention of someone trained in the right area of expertise.

Now, I understand, after a weekend spent with a painfully swelling arm, she is hopeful of getting an appointment tomorrow, Monday. Hopeful.

I was certainly happy to hear that the health care system in my country of origin served them so well at a moment of crisis and, while unsurprised, both sad and angry to hear that our health system over this side of the Pond provides so negative a contrast. I think not only of our friend's plight but, by extension, those millions of other Americans, many of them indeed less fortunate, whose legitimate needs remain ignored or treated with indignity and haste. I know that there are many other pressing problems on Obama's list, when he takes office in a couple of weeks. But I hope that this one remains at the top. It's a disgrace that we, the richest country in the history of the world, have been so stubbornly resistant to what every other developed country sees to be a basic necessity and a human right.

Come right down to it, it's a matter of compassion being put to work. It's a sad reflection on our culture that we lack the humanity to take care of our own.

A Sunday Sit

What a pleasure to be sitting once again with Than Geoff (Thanissaro Bhikkhu) late yesterday afternoon, after a long period of absence. Than Geoff (more properly Ajahn Geoff, since he has been for some time now not just a monk, but the abbot of the Metta Thai Forest monastery in Valley Center, north of San Diego. Long-time readers of The Buddha Diaries may recall that he comes up to Laguna Beach on the second Sunday of each month to lead and teach our little "Laguna sangha." Ellie and I have been away so much in the course of our remodel, and often simply unable to spend our weekends down here, that we have missed his regular sessions, as well as his occasional weekend retreats. And while I have been able to maintain my own daily sits, the sangha sits each Sunday and the monthly sessions with Than Geoff have been an important part of my practice since the mid-90s, when I first joined the group.

A glorious pleasure, then, to arrive at sunset for our hour-long sit and to be enchanted, first, by the lovely spectacle at the wide window across from where I sat, of the red glow of the setting sun over a deep purple ocean. Dark clouds and the outline of the eucalyptus trees gave depth and contour to the vista--a sight to rouse the soul before even closing the eyes for meditation. Eyes closed, I found it easy to be guided by Than Geoff's steady, familiar voice, the depth of his calm, and the knowledge of his long dedication to the practice. As usual, he guided us through the observation of the breath for a half hour, then left us in silence for the remainder of the time. It has been quite a while since I reached so intense a meditative state and so profound a relaxation.

Our hour's sit is followed by a question time, and I led off with a question about healing. During meditation, my mind had wandered off frequently to a friend who is fighting off a severe attack on her health, and had been formulating my question despite my best efforts to keep it focused on the breath. Addressing it to Than Geoff, I gave that context, along with the memory of my father's powerful (Christian) belief in the laying-on of hands and my understanding of the Tibetan healing practice of tonglen, and asked whether, in his own tradition, there was any similar healing ritual and, more particularly, whether there was anything I could do in my practice to be of benefit to my friend.

I could actually have predicted Than Geoff's response before I heard it. To his way of thinking, it's more about the state of mind than it is about the illness. Healing, then, is about developing a state of mind that serves to reduce the suffering rather than cure the disease. The practice of metta--sending out thoughts of goodwill--can facilitate the more peaceful state of mind required for a return to health. I responded that it felt somehow impertinent, to me, to wishing happiness for a person experiencing so much pain, but he reminded me that "happiness", in its broader context, embraced the notion of physical well-being, of health itself.

Still, I wondered, were there any rituals in his practice related to the healing of the sick, as in so many other spiritual beliefs? Had he himself had any personal experience of healing? Than Geoff smiled as he recalled an episode when, during meditation, he felt the pain of a bite on his finger. In the dark, he was not able to see what creature had bitten him, but within a few minutes his finger began to swell, then his wrist, then his arm... In some alarm, he consulted with his abbot, who gave him an amulet blessed by his teacher, Ajahn Lee, to place against the wound. In short order, the swelling was reduced.

Amulets, then. I suppose it is the blessing that infuses such ritual objects that is the source of their power.

As usual, though, Than Geoff had neatly turned my question back into myself. The mind, certainly, is the most powerful weapon that we have in and and all contingencies--a weapon that we too often forget when pain comes along and we turn to others to relieve it for us. It happened, yesterday, that I had put my back out earlier in the day, and I found the meditation period useful in relieving the pain. It was afterward that it began to make its presence known again. Ironically, I have found that sitting is the very thing that is the worst for a bad back--especially when the time comes to attempt to stand! Better to keep it warm, I find, by keeping it in motion. Thus it was that I decided to leave the session before the whole two hours were up. But I was extremely glad that I had decided to go.

Cholera: London, 1854

It's curious how these things happen. My mention yesterday of the cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe set me off on a journey that led all the way back to mid-nineteenth century London. After making my blog entry, Ellie and I joined our neighbor for the morning's exercise walk around the hill and it turned out that she had just finished reading this book... I asked if I could borrow it, and I'm already a third into the fascinating story that it tells.

"The Ghost Map," by the journalist and popular science author Steven Johnson, is a scary and totally gripping ride into the past--and one that makes you glad to have been born into a place and time where flush toilets and good sewer systems make life infinitely more livable, in the quite literal sense of that word. I spent the afternoon yesterday wandering the streets of a London whose stench and squalor is barely imaginable today, though Johnson does almost too good a job in helping us imagine it. It's, um, vivid. The descriptions of the biological waste of two and a half million human beings jammed into a small space--and of the primitive methods then available for its disposal or recycling--leave the reader holding his nose and gasping for a breath of clean air. Drawing liberally on the resource of work by Dickens and other contemporaneous writers, Johnson takes us on a tour of the riverbanks and the overflowing cesspools that were the primitive and ineffectual sewage system in those bad old days, and introduces us to the "night-soil men" whose (relatively well-paid) task it was to collect the human waste and transport it out to the countryside to be recycled by farmers in the form of manure. These descriptions, while offered with great zest for the telling detail and a wry sense of humor, are certainly a challenge for the squeamish.

They're also a lesson for the contemporary world, since Johnson usefully wanders off to explore their meaning in the broader, continuing contexts of ecological science and urban planning. I've just arrived at the point where he begins to discuss the relationship between sanitation and health. By today's standards, the paucity of medical and pharmaceutical knowledge at the time of Johnson's story is nothing short of astounding, with opiates being the favorite means of treating all kinds of ailments and disease. Letters from newspapers of the day suggest that home remedies, folklore, and simple quackery vied for medical credibility, along with academically trained physicians and workman "surgeons"---who operated until well into the 19th century without the benefit of anesthesia. One particularly hair-raising passage narrates the performance of a mastectomy in agonizing detail.

This being a story about a cholera epidemic, Johnson is at pains to prepare the reader for its onslaught with a brief and pithy introduction to the microscopic life of bacteria and their skillful work of survival in biological environments, drawing the parallel between the action in this infinitesimal micro-world and that in the macro-world of human beings and their crawling cities. (The effect of the cholera bacterium, as I understand it, is to deprive the intestine of its normal functioning to preserve water and thus to drain the body of its liquids, leading to a rather swift and nasty death from dehydration.) Nothing of this is understood by the scientists and medical professionals of the time, leaving them defenseless in the face of imminent disaster.

Thus far in my reading, Johnson has introduced the reader to what I take to be his two main protagonists, a doctor and a clergyman, whose observational powers and devotion to empirical method will--I presume--pave the way for an eventual understanding of the disease. I have to say, despite the intestinal discomfort as I read, that this is a totally compelling story, a page-turner, rich in historical, social, and scientific information and in evocative description. Its subtext is as relevant today as it was some one hundred and fifty years ago: the interdependence of all living things--including those sneaky bacteria--and the absolute necessity of vigilance when it comes to the survival of our species in a world of infinite and often dangerous complexity.

There, more than you ever needed to know about nineteenth century London. Now, back to my book...

The Right Medicine?

After reading this report on the presidential and vice-presidential candidates' health by Dr. Lawrence K. Altman in Monday's New York Times, I was jolted once more into a frightened understanding of just how reckless and cynical was John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running-mate. While the medical information remains incomplete--Altman's article calls urgently for more complete records for all the candidates, but particularly in the case of John McCain--enough of the Republican contender's has been made public to alarm any thinking person. In addition to his age, McCain's history of malignant skin cancer should be enough to require from him a vice-presidential choice who is truly capable of stepping into the office of the presidency at any moment.

Sarah Palin is apparently not even to be trusted with a serious, probing interview or a press conference. If this is the case, how in God's name can she be entrusted with the most powerful office in the history of the world? For reasons that are inexplicable even to ourselves, my wife and I sat through a rerun of last weekend's Saturday Night Live, which started with a mock press conference with Tina Frey playing the part of the VP nominee. Standing in the wings, the real one--playing the "good sport"--insisted that this was "not a real depiction of the way my press conferences might have gone." "One of"? "Might have?" She has not held a single one, and has been protected obsessively from all but the most Palin-friendly media.

I have to say that I found the whole performance at best adolescent, if not childish. From the (unrelated) "fart-face" skit--please!--to the mock news desk scene that included Palin, the level of humor was depressingly juvenile, and the parts she was entrusted with were pathetically small. The sight of the vice-presidential candidate sitting behind the news desk dancing with her arms whilst other performers did the song-and-dance work that the piece required was definitely not the least bit demonstrative of her performance skills, or even particularly of a sense of humor. She seemed not to get that she was encouraging the audience to laugh at, rather than with her. They say that humor is the best medicine. If this is the prescription the McCain campaign has to offer, I'd rather take my chances without swallowing it, thank you.

Last night, I watched the first part of the biography of Lyndon Johnson, up to the point where JFK was shot and killed, and Johnson took the oath of office aboard Air Force One in a hastily gathered ceremony. Though his presidency was eventually marred by the tragedy of the Vietnam war, he was surely one of the great presidents in what he managed to achieve for the poor and disadvantaged. I was unable to watch his swearing-in, however, without thinking about Sarah Palin, and what McCain's election and subsequent disability or death would mean for this country. Obama, of course, is at a different kind of risk, one that I deeply dread in the atmosphere of barely supressed violence fostered by the Republican campaign. In that dire event, I would trust Sen. Biden to rise to the occasion.

(There is a follow-up on Dr. Altman's report, by the way, in the form of a lead editorial in today's New York Times. I trust that that this issue will receive greater attention and more thoughtful response in the days to come.)

Infant Mortality: A National Scandal

Okay, good. The debates are over. Obama won all three, no question. He won with poise, grace, calm, compassion, and an easily accessible resource of knowledge and understanding. He has done an incredible job thus far, with a finely calibrated campaign and a personal commitment that have never wavered. Now it's our turn. He won the debates. We need to see to it that he wins the election...

Speaking of compassion, I wonder if Governor Sarah Palin, that ardent defender of the rights of the unborn, and self-annointed supermom, took note of this report in yesterday's Washington Post about the infant mortality rate in the United States. This country, which she touts constantly as "the greatest in the world," is clearly not the greatest when it comes to giving birth to its babies. This most powerful and wealthiest country in the history of the world today ranks 29th among all nations in its record on infant mortality. 29th! In 2000, we ranked 27th. In 1960, 12th.

You'd think the governor would be out there shouting from the rooftops about this scandalous state of affairs. Well, no. So far as I know, not a peep. I suppose you could argue--albeit somewhat cynically--that abortion is a conscious choice, and therefore sinful, according to a particular religious belief; and that infant mortality, on the other hand, is no more than an unfortunate accident of nature. I myself would argue, though, that given the advanced state of our medical knowledge and the technology at our disposal, infant mortality is also a choice we make, as a society. In failing to provide our citizens with the health care they deserve--whether pre- or post-natal, or at the moment of birth--we are in fact choosing, I suspect in the large majority of cases, to allow those babies to die.

What moral universe do we live in, that we permit ourselves to make these scurrilous distinctions? How easy for the Governor to pick up on this report and make it an issue in her campaign! How great a service to her country and its people! I'm not holding my breath, however, for to draw attention to the problem would be to admit that, in this area at least, we are far from great; and that, to address it, we would need to make some serious improvements in our health care system and--I'm guessing here that, as with most other problems of this nature, it's the poor who bear the brunt of it--in making care available to the poor as well as to the wealthy.

So how about it, Governor? You'd pick up a pinch of much needed respect from voters if you were to champion such a cause, instead of simply bloviating about our supposed greatness. Drop the hot air. Talk about something that shows you really care.

A Fistful of Bills

Remember my old friend Bill and his notion of Sacred Lifeboats? I was writing about him just a short while ago on The Buddha Diaries, and his conviction that the big boat is sinking, that we need to prepare ourselves for that catastrophe by building our own lifeboats now. By lifeboats, as I understand Bill's thinking, he means small, mutually supportive communities of like-minded people who share values and a commitment to the survival of the human species and the human spirit on this endangered planet.

I was thinking of this old friend Bill as I sat at lunch yesterday with another old friend Bill, Bill Megalos, a documentarian whose films on people of different cultures throughout the world will be familiar to those who watch public television, even though his name might not be. Bill has been traveling the world recently with Prof. Muhammad Yunus whose pioneering work in the field of micro-credit for "leveraging small loans into major social change for impoverished families" earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006; my friend has been privileged to meet numerous world leaders in the company of Yunus, and has developed a new direction of his own. These days, much of his energy goes into teaching, and his goal is to create workshops and schools, especially in poor and underdeveloped countries where control of the media has been restricted to the powerful. In passing on his technical skills and film-making experience to the less privileged, he hopes to empower them to bring change to their communities in ways similar to those effected by Prof. Yunus.

The past ten days are nothing, surely, if not a reinforcement of my first Bill's thinking. He is further along the line than I am--I who believe that we have not yet reached the tipping point, that we can still work to achieve the changes that we need. But the meltdown of the financial markets and its revelation of deep cracks not only in the world-wide credit system but more broadly of the magical thinking that goes into the free market system with its unconscionable exploitation of the planet's resources and a belief in endless "growth." In this context, my second Bill's actions are a positive and constructive move towards a future in which human beings of all classes and cultures are equally empowered to live their lives according to their own values and traditions, and not some version of a terrifyingly global "American dream."

I am encouraged that there are people in America who are thinking in these ways--and of course not only in America. Bill's (the second) good faith is manifest not only in his large scale thinking about global challenges, but in his small-scale actions: for years he has been devoting precious time from his weekends to the needs of the homeless in his home town of Santa Monica. His gift to them is a special one: he cuts their hair. This intensely personal act of compassionate, physical closeness has earned him the lasting affection of people on the streets, who receive too few such gestures in their often desperate lives.

As we finished our lunch and prepared to leave the diner where we had met, we caught a glimpse of another old friend Bill, this one Bill Clinton, being interviewed presumably in connection with the Clinton Global Initiative, set up to support precisely the kind of community action that we're talking about. Seeing the familiar face on the television screen, I couldn't help but have that momentary cringe, recalling the contrast between the Clinton administration's engagement in the world and our current petulant isolationism. I also remembered those FOBs--the friends of Bill--and reflected that I seem to have a collection of OFBs. Old friend Bills.

Which reminded me to make a call this morning about another OFB, to see whether I might go over this afternoon to sit with him a while. This Bill, a physician, a distinguished teacher, and a writer of many articles and books on the important topic of health care provision, is now himself suffering from the early stages of a debilitating disease. It has been too long since I stopped by...

Hypnotized!

But first, speaking of clowns... has anyone else noticed that John McCain is looking more and more like Charlie Chaplin?


Poor Charlie, a lifelong lefty, would be horrified of course. Still, I couldn't help but notice.

So… yesterday, a most interesting experience. Hypnotherapy. I had long ago connected with a fellow Brit, one of those who came to that old college reunion that I hosted, and wrote about, way back in June—or was it July?—and who has chosen this healing art as his third career path. He had offered at that time to give me a session, and yesterday, after a long interval, we finally got around to it.

I was interested primarily in the experience itself. I was hypnotized once before, years ago, when I was trying to give up cigarettes. It didn’t work then. Perhaps the single session was not enough to address a long-ingrained habit. And I have thought about it on and off since, in the context of simply finding another avenue to delve into the core of my being, to further my persistent inquiry into who I am and what on earth I’m doing here on this planet.

It seemed important, however, to find a purpose for the journey, so I opted for an old familiar: the slow, inexorable, and seemingly irreversible expansion of my waistline over the past, well, twenty years, and the accompanying gain in weight. As those who remember the short-lived blog, “A Diet of Choice,” will remember, it has been a losing battle. No matter how many good resolutions I make, no matter how well I know a variety of reliable methods to lose weight, no matter how readily I can identify those foods that do me in (bread, butter and other dairy foods, ice cream… and wine!) I have proved incapable of making the good choices. I eat—and drink wine! Not too much, just a couple of glasses—for comfort. To relieve the stress of everyday life. To distract me from more painful realities.

So there it was. My friend—my hypnotherapist—and I talked these things through for a good long time, laying the groundwork before he went to work on my recalcitrant mind. Then he walked me down, gently, into the recesses of my subconscious, and gently implanted a few sensible notions: to eat when I want; to eat what I want; to eat consciously; and to stop when I’m full. Nothing terribly complicated.

There’s a part of me that naturally wants to resist when I begin to sense that someone else is taking over the controls of my mind; and there’s that other part that sees it as an adventure and wants to surrender to whatever experience might come. On this occasion, the surrender was a little easier than I expected, perhaps because it was established that I was in fact still firmly in control, still balanced on my bike even while I let go of the handlebars, so to speak. I did not feel unsafe. I did not feel submissive, as I feared I might. Instead, I felt totally relaxed—more relaxed than I have felt for a very long time. By-passing a lot of that automatic technical control stuff, I think I went deeper into relaxation, even, than in meditation, where the mind is still (ideally!) alert. It was a little like flying—or how I imagine free flight might be.

And that sense of relaxation persisted. An hour or so later, I took a nap and drifted off into a deep sleep. When I awoke, I was still feeling limp—not fatigued, exactly, but as though all the muscles in my body had agreed just to let go. Even today, I can feel some of that pervasive sense of relaxation in my body—a not unpleasant feeling at all, a kind of remove from the external cares.

And the eating? Well, I have noticed that those useful ideas are still at the forefront of my consciousness as I eat. I hear my inner voice reminding me: eat when you want, eat whatever you want, eat consciously, and stop when you’re full. It’s a persuasive voice. I am, indeed, more conscious as I eat. At breakfast, I was not even tempted by the New York Times, lying by my plate. I chewed twenty times, and tasted the food. At lunch, I felt like a ham and cheese sandwich. I love ham and cheese sandwiches. But I heard the voice as I ate, and before I was halfway through I had decided it was enough; I cut the sandwich in two, and wrapped the other half to put in the refrigerator, ready for a second attack. Instead of a whole apple, as is my wont, I ate just a half. And ate, again, consciously. No newspaper. No crossword. Just me and the munch.

I'll be watching my progress, and perhaps reporting on it from time to time. Has anyone else had the experience of hypnosis? Was it similar to mine?

I'm Back...

... and taking this weekend to get reoriented. The Laguna cottage is just barely livable. We came down here yesterday, after a night in Los Angeles, to find it--who'd have guessed?--less far along than we had hoped. We created a small space for ourselves in the living room...


... surrounded by stacked furniture and boxes.


Of course, we can't remember exactly what we put in which boxes, and the scrawled notes on the side--"Kitchen," say--don't help us to locate the box where we keep the tea bags. It's trial and error--and mostly the latter. The kitchen is nowhere near completion, as you can see...




... but we have a tiny fridge in what was once the dining room...



... and have hooked up the microwave. No stove, no tea kettle. In a few minutes, I'll be trying to make a decent cup of tea in the microwave--a new adventure.

Meantime, more serious and much more distressing, Ellie's injured ribs have started to cause her terrible pain. Her work yesterday at the cottage to make it slightly habitable--lifting and moving things--may have contributed, but the pain last night was such that I had to help her into bed. This morning, then, when she wakes, it's a trip to Kaiser for x-rays and examination. We did manage to sleep some during the night, having cleared a space for ourselves on the bed--it was piled high with clothes and linens, and covered with a plastic sheet to protect it from the dust--and rigged up a temporary bedside electrical supply with the aid of industrial sized extension cords left by the contractor.

In a word, all is not yet right on the home front in Laguna. Today, Saturday, after that Kaiser visit, we will likely return to Los Angeles and leave the cottage to the contractor for the next couple of weeks. The Buddhist teaching, of course, is the practice of equanimity--and for Ellie, the difficult art of non-attachment to the physical sensation. Much harder for her than for me, when the pain is so intense. It's annoyingly easy for me to exhort her to breathe and focus the attention elsewhere. And next to impossible for her.

I'll probably be slow in getting back to The Buddha Diaries, given all this distraction. A big thank you to those who joined me on Travels With George. I hope you enjoyed the trip. I'm planning to tidy up that site and beef it up a bit with more recollections and reflections, with a thought to publishing it in book form, if I can ferret out a more coherent "story" and its meaning. Apologies for not having responded to comments, and for not having visited other sites this past month. As I've said before, I do very much appreciate this community of bloggers, and look forward to getting back in touch. I personally have some thoughts about politics...

A Movie...

... we just couldn't bear to watch, even though I suspect that it's a very good one: The Savages. It had been sitting on our Netflix shelf for a few weeks, neglected for reasons unknown to myself but better known to Ellie, who had read about it, and we took it down last night and slipped it into our DVD player. Twenty minutes later, we pushed the eject button on the remote. Too raw. Too close to the bone. It nettled all our fears about growing old and dependent on others for our care.

I understand that the movie is really about the brother-sister relationship between the younger characters, but the first twenty minutes, at least, were devoted to their aging father and his "girlfriend," who in one memorable early scene sits rigid in front of the manicurist who is pandering to the last vestiges of her vanity. "Very sexy," the manicurist declares, delighting in the color she has just applied to a fingernail and looking up at the wrinkled face in front of her... just as the old woman topples over and dies. Ah, eros! Ah, thanatos! The old man, her boyfriend, the father of the squabbling siblings at the center of the story, is rapidly approaching dementia. Incensed by the insolence of his care-giver in scolding him for not having flushed the toilet, he returns to the scene of the crime and smears the word "PRICK" in his own feces on the bathroom mirror.

We did not reach for the remote, however, until the scene where the old man is strapped by airline officials into a wheelchair to be loaded unceremoniously onto the airplane to return him from Sun City, Arizona, to the nursing home facility his son has chosen for him. (Great exterior shots, by the way, of the Sun City location: curiously symmetrical homes and landscaping, almost surreal, overly bright, and distinctly scary.) Caught short on the plane, the irascible old geezer preremtously yells "Bathroom!" at his accompanying daughter, and again, "Bathroom! Now!" Struggling with tiny, painfully slow steps down the narrow aisle in the crowded plane, both he and she are ignominiously shamed as his pants fall down around his ankles amid the pitiless stares of fellow passengers.

Well, it happens to be my birthday in a couple of days. Not a Big One--no zeros. But the first number in the double digit figure is higher than I'd like it to be. A friend pointed out yesterday at the gym that she still manages to feel young when the second digit is a low one, as mine is. A nice conceit. Still, I have been feeling the weight of years. I notice that my steps are sometimes slower, lacking the energy of youth, and I consciously make the effort to appear more sprightly. I notice with aggravation that those things I liked least about myself--my impatience, say; a tendency to testiness--become more pronounced, and harder to contain. I think much more often about the inevitable end of life. My greatest fear about growing old is the dependency depicted in that movie, the loss of simple dignity, the need for others to take care of me, prop me up when I walk, feed me, clean up after my eliminations...

Which is why the most meaningful part of my metta practice, the first and last moments of my daily meditation, is that line from the chant on the sublime attitudes that comes after "May I be happy" and "May I be free from stress and pain": May I look after myself with ease. It's not often that a film is just too intense for me, but this one was. I never even learned the end of the story--a loss that, as those familiar with The Buddha Diaries know, is a serious one for me. But at least a fine metaphor for the experience of life itself, whose end we are rarely privileged to know.

I'm sure I'm not alone in any of these feelings. I'm hoping you might share your own...

A Diet of Choice

The last thing I need is another blog. I have two of them already, The Buddha Diaries and Accidental Dharma. Not to mention my blog at The Huffington Post. But this one will be a little different. It will require less thought and writing… but more real-life attention. It will be called "A Diet of Choice."

Here’s the thing. I woke up yesterday morning and stepped on the bathroom scale. I was not pleased with what it had to tell me. It’s not that I’m obese, just a few pounds overweight for my age and height, ten pounds maybe. Well, maybe fifteen. And it’s not just what the scale tells me, it’s how I feel. I’m uncomfortable with the extra weight. It weighs on me, like a winter coat. My clothes feel uncomfortable.

I look at others who lack the bulge above the midriff that I have, and I realize that they are healthier than I and, yes, that they do look better. Not that it’s about cultural imperatives or aesthetics. No, it’s truly about how I feel about myself, and about the realization that this is an area in my life where I am still being driven by reactive patterns rather than by consciously-made choices.

I’m reminded of my battle with cigarettes, years ago. I started smoking at the age of thirteen. By the time I was forty, I was hopelessly addicted to the filthy weed. I was all too aware of the consequences to my health, and had plenty of aggravating reminders from my wife and daughter—which made it all the harder to give up: I didn’t want anyone telling me what was good for me and what wasn’t. So I started “trying” to give up.

I tried everything, from will power to nicotine patches to phony cigarettes to… well, everything. Nothing worked. I would manage to “cut down” or even stop altogether for a few days, but then I’d be back again, sneaking cigarettes like a teenager when I thought no one would know and disguising the results with breath mints and mouthwashes. I would stop buying cigarettes—and start bumming them from fellow smokers. I kept telling myself No, no, musn’t, shouldn’t, can’t… And nothing worked.

Nothing worked, until the day a reformed smoker suggested making it a matter of choice. Give yourself permission to smoke, he said. Carry cigarettes wherever you go. Stop saying No and Mustn’t. Try saying, instead, I can, I give myself full permission to light up… but I choose not to. I choose, instead, the positive things: no smelly clothes, going to sleep at night without a pounding heart, walking up a few steps without losing my breath. Perhaps, even, a longer life.

Then it worked. I don’t know about others, but it worked for me.

So I hereby give myself permission to eat and drink as much and as often as I want to, but undertake to be conscious of the choices I make and aware of their consequences. And this will be the place where I hold myself accountable. The blog…

(More about goals and intentions a little later in the week. This is just to get me started.)

I understand that this particular journey might be of little interest to anyone else. In my other blogs, I try to talk about things that will have some meaning and resonance for others. Here, it’s about me. It’s about my choices. It’s also about practice and consciousness. If anyone chooses to check up on me, I welcome their kindness. I’ll welcome their comments and support. If not, not. I choose to check up on myself.

For yesterday, the choices were as follows: multi-vitamins with half a glass of cranberry-apple juice and a small bowl of cereal at 7:30 AM, with half a banana, half a dozen grapes, a scatter of raisins and a little milk—with just a splash of half and half which happened, unusually, to be in the refrigerator. Oh, and I forgot my cup of morning tea. All these were, thus far, my choices.
After gym, at 11AM, I made myself a Canadian bacon sandwich with an English muffin spread with butter. Delicious. And a cup of instant coffee with milk and sweetener. On our return to Los Angeles, I chose to eat a bowl of leftover spicy couscous with chick peas and red peppers, PLUS a small melted cheese tortilla AND half an apple. Too much. More than I needed.

Then, at dinner, a small bowl of Ellie’s delicious home-made squash soup with two crackers and a green salad. And a glass of white wine.

I swear I will not bore readers of The Buddha Diaries with such details again. Those interested are invited to follow me to "A Diet of Choice."

The Heart of the Matter

I have been thinking a lot about the heart this week--prompted, in good part, by the review I have been writing of the new book by Ken McLeod, "An Arrow to the Heart: A Commentary on The Heart Sutra." (The review will be published here on The Buddha Diaries and probably elsewhere within the next few days.) For the better part of my life I was simply embarrassed by the heart. Specifically, my own. Brought up distrustful of every emotion, let alone its public display, I reached maturity--in years at least--obsessed with the brain (oh, and that other organ, down south.) The heart, when I noticed it, was only the source of trouble, discomfort, fear and pain--all things I would rather not have to contemplate. As for "love," that was too risky for me, involved too much giving of myself to others. Sex was a whole lot easier to deal with.

As I have said elsewhere--and perhaps, too, in these pages, though I don't remember--I didn't discover that I had a heart until I was more than half way to heaven. It happened at a men's training weekend, where I had gone at a period of great trouble in my life to find out what I might be able to do to make it better. For the first time in my life, I encountered men who were willing to admit that they had an emotional and spiritual life as well as an intellectual and physical one, and who almost coerced me, in a loving way but much against my will, to get in touch with the heart I didn't know I had.One of the requirements of the weekend was to come up with a mission, a sense of one's life purpose, of what one was given to do with one's time here on earth. The mission I chose has been modified several times in the years that have since elapsed, but I am happy with where it stands today: to mediate harmony in the world by getting to the heart of the matter.

That weekend started me, too, on the path that has led me to this day. One of the signal heart events along the way was a retreat with that same Ken McLeod who wrote the book under review. I forget the name he gave to the retreat, but it concerned the inner warrior, that fierce part we need as our ally to do battle with the inner demons as well as the outer ones. The exercise I remember in particular was a visualization in which we participants were invited to grasp the hilt of a sword with full intention and, for the first stroke, to turn it inward, cutting from throat to sternum to reveal the open, beating, vulnerable heart. Sometimes in meditation, as this morning, I rehearse that powerful movement, opening the chest in my mind's eye to expose my heart to the world.

These days, when I attend to the heart, I am aware of other feelings. I have put in substantial mileage on this miraculous little machine, without--so far--any maintenance at all; and while I have been pretty good about keeping it turned over and exercised, the gas and oil I have fed it with have not always been of the highest quality. Each time I'm in touch with it, I have to wonder how much more service it can be expected to provide, and when the poor old thing might simply decide that enough's enough and leave me stranded in the middle of the freeway. I contemplate that fear, even as I strive to keep the heart open and generous.

I'm grateful to Ken for his book, and for the reminder that the heart is something that I always need to pay attention to. As a final note, if any man feels the need to know about that men's weekend--or any woman who loves him--he is most welcome to be in touch with me and I will supply more detail.

Peace of Mind

I have been noticing that my mind has been more than usually restless in the past couple of days, during meditation. It has been busy trying to write, while I have been busy trying to bring its attention to what I want it to attend to: the breath. I attribute this in good part to the recent conflict of opinions on The Buddha Diaries, in consequence of which I have been questioning my meditation practice, and what purpose it serves.

The simple conclusion that I reach, time and again, is that it works. I have a limited amount of time left to me in this life—and I’m still unable to jump that hurdle into belief in another, or other lives—and a limited amount of energy. Ahead of me lies the strong possibility of some form of illness or debility, and the certainty of continuing aging and death. I want to experience these parts of life with as much clarity and forbearance as I can muster, and that requires peace of mind. When I say that meditation works, I mean that it teaches me the path toward peace of mind.

I do need, still, to be engaged. I need to be engaged in books and movies, in the visual arts which have been the focus of much of my writing over the years, in politics and culture… My mind is still capable of learning, my heart still capable of growing when I immerse myself in such things.

What I don’t need, though, is a restless mind. I’m finding that I can engage just fine without it. For me, intellectual curiosity is not necessarily fed by battles over rights and wrongs or goods and bads. I believe that I have largely surrendered the need to be right, and that position feels comfortable to me. I am not averse to being in a place of comfort.

These quiet thoughts an observations, for a Saturday morning. Metta, then. I wish the world a peaceful weekend, filled with true happiness. And that would be enough, for me.

Hope: the Utah Mining Disaster. Earthquake in Peru.

I once devoted three weeks of meditation time to an exercise proposed by Ken McLeod in his remarkable book, "Wake Up to Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention." I had recently reviewed the book for the Los Angeles Times, and in the process had learned a lot about Buddhism--and a lot about myself. Ken McLeod's teaching reflects a rigorous Tibetan training, and his book is in itself an eminently practical, no-holds-barred training manual for Western readers. It puts the attentive and conscientious reader--one who is prepared to follow the author along the demanding path of meditation exercises that form the core of the book--through the paces, learning how to dismantle those reactive patterns of the mind that control our lives without our knowing it, and create barriers between us and our happiness. (By the way, my review was an enthusiastic recommendation; those interested might want to check out McLeod's website at Unfettered Mind.)

The particular exercise I'm referring to involved sitting in meditation on the infinite number of ways in which you can die in the course of a typical day. I was reminded of one of my personal favorites (!) by the dreadful ongoing saga of those miners trapped for days now in the cave-in of a coal mine in Utah and again, with a jolt, by news of that massive 8.0 earthquake in Peru last night, coinciding with more bad news from Utah with the death of rescue workers. My visualization was of a slow and terrifyingly claustrophobic death, trapped under tons of rubble after a major earthquake--the kind that is still ominously overdue in Southern California. After three weeks of this charming exercise, believe me, I had learned a lot about my fear of death!

With regard to the Utah mining disaster, every time I read or hear about it in news broadcasts, the key word has always been "hope." As the days passed, I noticed that the meaning of the word began to shift for me. At the beginning, it was benign. When hope was somehow real, before the enormity of the obstacles began to emerge--the depth at which the men were trapped, the problem of oxygen and sustenance, the daily seismic events that caused numerous delays--there seemed to be at least some basis for holding on to it. With the passage of time, however, hope seemed to become an increasingly cruel concept. On the lips of mine officials, it began to sound more and more like a desperate means to deflect responsibility, to demonstrate good faith in a situation which, it seems to this reader-in-between-the-lines, was brought about by risky mining practices in the context of a history of neglect of safety and concern for men's lives.

I was interested in Buddhist thinking about hope, so I ran a search on Access to Insight and came across this narrative from the texts, translated from the Pali by Than Geoff. In this story, we learn that the aging Ven. Khemaka, sick and in pain, was plainly irritated by the message from his fellow monks expressing their "hope" that he was getting better and feeling more comfortable. "I am not getting better, my friend," he responds with crotchety displeasure. "I am not comfortable. My extreme pains are increasing, not lessening. There are signs of their increasing, and not of their lessening." The upshot is a sermon on the five clinging-aggregates, suggesting--as I understand it--that hope is indeed a form of clinging which brings only further suffering. The lesson made sense to me in the context of the mine disaster. The longer the officials preached hope--and the longer they clung to it themselves--the greater the potential for suffering. The loss of hope, perhaps, though painful, will come as a release.

I suppose it's natural to pay may more attention to things closer to home, but doesn't it strike you as odd that the television news will spend countless hours asking pointless, repetitive, unanswerable questions with regard to the story of a mine collapse that takes the lives of (forgive me, I don't mean to take them lightly) a handful of men in Utah, but glosses over the deaths of thousands in East Asian floods with barely a mention? Of tens of thousands in famine, disease and warfare in Africa? Why did it seem important to mention that "at least one American" died in Peru, amongst those mounting hundreds? There's almost an implication that the American death counted somehow more than all those Peruvians. Curious, no?

STRESS....! and Meditation

I have a major writing assignment to complete. I have an interview scheduled this afternoon with an artist for my Art of Outrage series on Artscene Visual Radio. We have a contractor coming over this morning to talk about some work that we need done on the house. I need to renew prescriptions, pick up pills. And the cleaning! We leave tomorrow at noon to spend the weekend at our beach house (poor us...!) And Tuesday of next week we leave for ten days in Canada. What to pack? What bags to take? What instructions to leave for Cardozo, who will be staying at our house?

Have we thought of EVERYTHING?

And of course, there's always the next entry in The Buddha Diaries... Especially now that the readership is expanding, both geographically and in numbers, there seems to be a kind of near-obsessive obligation to keep punching it in every day, as though anyone would miss me! Performance anxiety! (The truth is, I would miss the practice more than anyone would miss me.)

It all amounts to.... S.T.R.E.S.S.S.S.S!!! I don't know about you, but I feel it in the gut. A kind of continual seething, a perpetual sense of something left undone without being able to focus quite exactly on what it is. You know what I mean? That, and the familiar tightening in the neck and shoulders, a hunching-up that adds to the general feeling of discomfort, of not-well being, of dis-ease. And the ANGER that results.

I wish that my meditation skills were up to so formidable a task, but I'm aware that I still have a long way to go. Sure it helps. That half-hour, forty minute sit in the morning serves me well, I'm sure, throughout the day. And I know enough, when I think about it, to stop for long enough to recover consciousness, and breathe... and I feel the benefit, at least a momentary relief.

You'd like to think, wouldn't you, that ten years of practice would have resulted in release from the stress that every one of us feels? But that's perhaps a little like expecting earnest practising Christians to have learned not to sin. We're all human, after all.

So what I'd like to know is this: are others more successful in reducing stress with daily meditation than am I? What's your experience? What is your skill level, in this regard? Do you have to practice longer--or more often--for the desired result? Or am I just, as I suspect, a human being like the rest of us?
photo credit

Healing: Feeling the Toes

It's been a while since I mentioned my friend and miracle-worker Dr. Steve in these pages. I had a follow-up appointment with him yesterday, and had him check out a problem I've been having with two toes on my right foot. Don't laugh. It's very distracting to have two toes permanently tingling and numb! Readers might remember the story of my right hip, an area in which I had been experiencing pain for months--even waking up with it every night. I had visions of that hip replacement surgery that seems so common these days. It's the Western medical way. One visit to Dr. Steve--my first--two or three months ago, and the pain was gone, and I'm here to report that it has not returned. I have returned a couple of times since, and after each visit I feel a great resurgence of energy and well-being. Those interested could do a simple search back through The Buddha Diaires to learn more.

Anyway, I got some good help with those toes. The numbness hasn't quite completely disappeared, but I'm beginning to be able to feel their presence once again. Thanks, Steve.

The day looms large ahead of me. I'm working on a monograph for an artist, which promises to be a challenging and complex task, and my head is already moving ahead into what needs to be said. So I'm giving The Buddha Diaires short shrift this morning. But I'll leave you with a link that will bring a smile to your face. A chain of events that surely Buddhists (an non-Buddhists) will enjoy. It starts with a wake-up call. Thanks to my friend Michael for sending it to me.

The Malingerer--Part II

I was gratified to hear from my fellow-malingerers yesterday in the "Comments" file. I did actually see the Sopranos' finale--a day late. We missed it Sunday night, having missed the previous two episodes while we were in Europe, so we caught up with our recordings last night, on our return to Los Angeles. Onion rings, eh? Not sure of their therapeutic effect, Anonymous, but I agree that they made a great ending to the series. After all that agony and gore, it was good to end up with a laugh of relief and dismissal. Garlic, Carly, yes, I know of its health benefits.

But back to our sheep. I was tickled to hear from Quink, whose website I quickly surfed to--a satirical take on the British boarding school and a gathering place for some of its victims. Skimming through the site, I found a quote from the novelist Evelyn Waugh, a product of my own alma mater, Lancing College. He had as little love for his experience there as I for mine. In my last year at Lancing, my co-editor on the school literary magazine had the cheek to write to the by-then eminent Waugh, requesting a submission for our journal. Waugh responded--but dismissively: all he had ever learned at Lancing, he wrote (and I paraphrase here: this was many years ago,) was how to avoid hard work. My friend wrote back to ask permission to publish the response, and to ask if Waugh could give his assurance that he would never write for our distinguished magazine, to spare future editors the trouble of writing to him. He received a postcard in response (and this I remember word-for-word): "Yes to both questions, E.W."

Here's some of what Waugh had to say about the boarding school experience: "Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums ... who find prison so soul-destroying." (Decline and Fall). And "Our form-master is one Woodard, a new parson who, people say, is related to the misguided old gentleman who founded us. He seems quite decent but undoubtedly means to make us work - a fad I abhor in masters." Waugh's acerbic wit was surely honed on the miseries of the public school experience.

Anyway, thanks to Quink for putting me back in touch with that world. I wonder if he ever came across an organization called Boarding School Survivors? I came across this support group for those living with the wounds of boarding schools back in the early 1990s, when I had begun to do some men's work over here wih The Mankind Project here in the U.S. Satire is one way to salve the wounds; some form of psychological/emotional therapy is another, for those who are beyond finding it funny. I happen to like both approaches. "Quink"? That must be the dreadful blue or purple Parker's liquid I used to get all over my little fingers as I struggled for mastery of the pen and nib at prep school.

I never suffered the kind of abuse that Dr. Steve describes in his comment. I was ritually strapped and caned, but ony because that was the accepted form of punishment in the ethos of the private school in those days. I was also buggered by a dirty old math teacher at the age of twelve--a not uncommon experience, often overlooked if not exactly condoned by that same ethos. And my natural teenage appetites for sexual exploration were all satisfied with boys: there was no one else around to play with--or to fall in love with. The first time I fell in love with a girl was the actual, very same day that I left Lancing, when my parents arrived to drive me off with a French girl in tow--an exchange student who had come to spend a month with them. Her name was Jeannine, and I fell in love with her instantly.

So much "stuff", eh? All grist for the mill of learning to understand myself, and learning to see what still stands in the way of the spiritual liberation that is the quest of my life. Another word about Dr. Steve: readers may recall that I spent a couple of hours in his office in the weeks before I left for Europe, and found him to be a healer of the very first order, keen of hearing and sensitive of touch, and one who combines insight with a true feel for the body's energies. A man, then, who--as he suggests in his comment yesterday--has learned to listen to the powerful voice of the body-mind, and who has transformed the experience of those abusive wounds into the remarkable ability to heal.

The Malingerer

An interesting and possibly useful insight during meditation this morning. It started out with the observation of the discomfort and un-ease of the breath, with this continuing cold, and moved into an annoyance with its recurrence and its refusal to quit. I began watching the flow of energies in the body and asking myself where the blockages were: the throat, certainly, and the lungs--the whole upper torso. Then I thought to ask myself what the old emotional blackages might be: what was it, I wondered, that the mind could be setting up to impede the natural healing process--because I do believe that the body wants naturally to heal itself, and has the knowledge and the power to do it.

Okay, so the mind came up with a very interesting memory: as a boy at boarding school, from the earliest age until the day I left at the age of eighteen, I had learned to practice the art of malingering. The "san"--the sanitorium, the little school hospital at each of the two schools I attended--had appealed to me as a wonderfully safe refuge from boyworld out there. In my experience, this meant school work (essays, learning the rules of math and algebra, learning the tenses and cases in Latin and other languages, learning great chunks of Caesar by heart--thank God, I've forgotten them, though I still remember whole poems by LaFontaine that I learned back then); and sports, which I hated with a passion--I was never able to see a ball approaching me through space; and teasing--especially about the plump little body of which I was inordinately ashamed.

So if I was fortunate enough (I thought of it this way!) to get sick, I made it my duty to myself to find ways of prolonging the sickness and the stay in the "san." I got to be quite good at it. I could develop a fever at the drop of a hat, and my symptoms, mysteriously, seemed to hang around indefiitely. In my last year at boarding school, I spent the second (winter) term of the school year as an exchange student in Germany, where the DKW (now the Audi: I have never liked those cars since then) skidded on an icy road and ended up in a head-on collision with a tractor. The impact was so great that it broke the heavy farm equipment neatly in two--and cracked my head in a nasty way against the windshield. Returning to school in England, at the most miserable of periods in my life, I found comfort in the "san", where the good nurse was sweet and kind and motherly, and delivered nice little pills at night to help me sleep. I suspect she knew that I was malingering at the time, so I'll never forget her kindness.

Kind of pathetic, no? But there's a sad truth here: what I learned--what my body-mind learned--was that you make the most of your sickness when you have it, you protract it as far as possible to derive the last little piece of benefit from it. Sickness becomes a great, protective force which excuses you from any other unpleasantness that life may bring.

Will this insight--and the power of the mind--help me get past this dreadful cold? Or is just a piece of fanciful gobbledy-gook? The medical profession, certainly, would have me believe their story--about infections, the need for anti-biotics, etcetera--and the rational western mind with which I have been trained finds it hard not to go along with them. Still, an interesting insight, no?

Return of the Dreaded Lergy

Those unfortunate enough--or young enough--to have missed out on the British radio comedy of the 1950s, The Goon Show, will not catch the reference in the title. The Goons--Peter Sellers, who later achieved film fame, got his start here--would refer to any dire sickness as "the dreaded lergy." Not that it made much sense, it wasn't meant to: I guess 'allergy' was in there somewhere.

But no matter. The sad truth is that I'm as sick as the proverbial dog. (Why dogs? Because they look so pathetic when they're under the weather? Maybe.) That cold I got in Budapest...? Seems I passed it on to Ellie, and appeared to be recovering nicely myself. Until yesterday, when it hit me again: sore throat, nasty cough, congestion, fever, the whole bit. From noon on, it was all I could do to struggle out of bed for the occasional trip to the bathroom, and drag myself to the couch in the evening to watch a movie. (We stumbled on "Munich"--not a cheering choice, but we got hooked.)

This morning, better, but not well enough, sadly, to attend our little sitting group, as we usually do on a Sunday morning. Ellie was well enough to make it there, so here I sit, all sick and lonesome, having made the effort to do my own brief sit and give the body permission to do the work it needs to do to heal. Too often, in my own experience, the mind gets hung up on the suffering and delays the healing process with its own self-pity. I'm trying to avoid that trap, and listen to what the body tells me about what I can do to help.

More later, from a better place. It feels good, by the way, to be back from the travel log and into The Buddha Diaries...

Nightmare

The old, familiar academic conference nightmare last night. I don't recall the details of the dreadful, boring event in the conference rooms of the hotel, though I do remember the feeling of needing to escape. I look for the elevator. It is an old-fashioned affair, roomy, with decaying overstuffed couches. My room is on the hundredth floor, and the elevator is incredibly slow. The higher it gets, the slower it goes, and the more I'm grappling with my intense fear of heights. So far as I remember, I never reach the top. I never find my room...

It has been twenty years since I left academia. I was never meant to be there in the first place. I just thought I needed the job. Oh, I had the qualifications--the years of study, the Ph.D., the teaching experience... And in many respects, I guess I was a reasonably good teacher: a bore to some, perhaps--and happily an inspiration to a few. But I was never fully comfortable in any of the academic posts I held for twenty-five years. I always had the feeling that I was not supposed to be there. And I became an expert at sabotaging my own jobs. The truth is that I have not missed it for a moment, and I have been fortunate in surviving without the salaried position.

So this is a familiar dream. A familiar nightmare. Back where I don't beling, feeling out of place, and lost, and in some way threatened. All very real, of course, while it was going on. I was glad to wake up and realize that it was a dream. Now, looking back on it this morning, I wonder to what extent it might not be about academia at all. Because there was a second tower to the hotel, a second bank of elevators, I remember, and something about the structure of the buildings and the elevators reminds me of a more recent dual elevator experience--which had to do with a financial restructuring that Ellie and I embarked on last week, too shortly before our planned trip to Europe, with the result that we felt unduly pressured into decisions that we finally began to doubt.

Ah, yes, the mind is a funny thing. It speaks to us often in rondabout ways--whether in the form of the bodily aches and pains I have been writing about recently, or of dreams that are actually about something very different than they purport to be. Things, to get back to Carly's question in a recent comment, are rarely what they seem. As always, a lot to observe, a lot to learn.

Pain & Suffering

About yesterday's debate in the comment section about pain and suffering, I subscribe to that old notion that pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. No way you can go through life without encountering pain, as I see it. You prick your finger with a pin; it hurts. As a child, you fall off your bike and scrape your knee when you're learning how to ride. That hurts. You fall in love with someone who fails (inexplicably!) to fall in love with you. You get cancer. That brings pain. You fall, when you're old, and break a bone. It's all pain. I don't believe, Carly, that any single human being can get through life without it.

But yes, you're right: suffering is not inevitable. In theory. But it takes a whole lot of practice and skill to learn to live without it. Suffering is what we choose to add on to the pain when we cling to it, as you so rightly note. What you say about movement is interesting here, because to let go of the pain is, in a real sense, to "move on" from it. My current experience with Dr. Steve is also interesting in this regard, because in some sense pain is where we choose to feel it; and when he talks about the flow and the blockage of energies, he's clearly talking about movement.

As usual, Carly, we're not so far apart in our thinking on this subject. In my judgment, at least. Have a great weekend, everyone. And if you have a spare moment and the interest, I'd love to know your take on this. Are you in pain? Do you suffer from it? Let me know...