Know Your Rights

About a week after my arrival, I met a woman named Rachel who'd just arrived at the monastery. She was a university engineering student who'd never practiced meditation and figured she might as well dive in head first. She seemed to enjoy herself, asking questions where appropriate and following the meditation schedule rigorously. But four days in, her mood noticeably shifted. She began walking through public spaces with her head down, and that night I heard her crying in the adjacent room. At breakfast the next morning, I could see she was still in a great deal of emotional pain. During a question and answer period with one of the monks the next day, Rachel shared more of her story. She'd been on vacation in Thailand four months earlier, during the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami--one of the most devastating natural disasters in history. The tiny channels in these structures carrying lymph are controlled by the Gallbladder function of keeping the lymph clean. The Gallbladder channel is the channel of lymph - the lymphatic system. The Channel of Tao At the very beginning of this article I talk about God. I don't believe in God, though; I believe in the Tao (or Dao). What is the Tao? It is best described in the first lines of the 2600-year-old classic of philosophy, the Tao Te Ching: The Tao that can be described is not the Tao. What this means is the moment you describe it, you limit it and then by the very nature of the Tao you are no longer quite describing it. And so it feels impossible to dismantle. Again, I'm surprised.

There's a soft squidginess to `breathing through it'. It feels organic and human. It hadn't occurred to me. I don't really know what she means, but my guts glow warm at the thought of it. We've done this kind of thing before, and although I've never been convinced that we've done anything other than waste time in whooshy, companionable silence, I've also learned that if I want a different outcome, I need to try a different method. That's a good thing. Let's not fight it. Let's just imagine for a moment that you don't hate yourself. If I don't start treatment, they might send me to prison. I can't stand listening to other people whine about their problems. Group therapy is full of whiners. I'm bored sitting in my room all day. I like partying and having a good time. Drugs and alcohol are fun. I shouldn't have crashed my car. Now I don't have wheels. Maybe I can get help so I don't do stupid stuff like this anymore. Rules are made to be broken. Also, I occasionally overheard my parents talking about me and their worries about me. It was my near-complete lack of friends, a lack that became more and more obvious as I progressed into my teens, that worried them the most.

Indeed, it worried me enormously too, but I realize now that I put enormous effort into appearing placid and unconcerned on the outside. I did this instinctively--I can only assume it was a defense mechanism. As for my parents thinking I was different from other children, it was not really an option to be seen as different from others. There was no concept of pervasive developmental disorders then--none at all. If your life seemed deficient in some way, you had to give yourself a shake, as Mum would say, and get on with it. However, my parents were not too worried about me because I consistently came out on top of every class in primary and high school. This was a source of some pride to my mother (a former schoolteacher), in particular. I was brought up in a not-too-strict Church of Scotland (ie, Presbyterian protestant) background. Still, other studies have shown that by the age of eight weeks, female babies' smiles far exceed those of boys, which may be natural rather than knowledgeable. The possible explanation is that smiling fits the evolutionary role of women as pacifiers and nurses. This does not suggest that a woman cannot be as authoritative as a man, but an extra smile can make her look less traditional. Dr Nancy Henley described women's smiles as her app badges, often used to soothe stronger men. Her research shows that women spend 87% of the time smiling in social situations, while men spend 67%, and women are 26% more likely to get a smile from the opposite sex. Two hundred fifty-seven interviewees evaluated the attractiveness of experiments using 15 photos of women showing happiness, sadness, and neutral faces. Women with sad expressions are considered unattractive. Pictures of women who do not laugh are decoded as signs of unhappiness, while images of women who do not laugh are regarded as dominant signs. The lesson here is to allow women to reduce their smiles when dealing with dominant men or reflect the number of smiling men. If men want to be more convincing to women, they need to smile more in all situations. So how can I sit here in therapy and complain that I was abused if I caused it? The therapist looks steadily at me like she's trying to balance a spoon on the end of her nose, and if she twitches a single muscle in expressing a response, it will fall off.

I feel slightly disturbed that she is so still. Either she's going to throw me out--because she's realised how wrong it is for me to be here--or she's going to demolish my belief in a single retort. But I don't yet know which. She doesn't speak. She just keeps looking at me. It goes on for about three hours. Or maybe three seconds--I'm not sure. Time has gone scrunchy. It kills healthy cells along with cancer cells; It kills the most rapidly dividing cells, but not all cancer cells are fast- growing; Chemotherapy drugs do not kill cancer cells. He has been researching cancer for more than 20 years, and he can say unequivocally that cancer is a different disease in every single case. That presents a real challenge in figuring out the best treatments. Yes, there are commonalities in cancers, but cancer involves a complex roadmap of genes and pathways that can take on exponential numbers of possibilities. Therefore, approaching it with only one tool is fruitless. We need to approach cancer knowing that those smart cancer cells can adapt to the ever-evolving disease in each cancer patient and make drug treatment ineffective at an impressive speed. Cancer is defined as the uncontrolled growth of abnormal cells in the body. Old cells do not die and instead grow out of control, forming new, abnormal cells. There are many tantra yoga techniques, as well, in which you visualize and move energy with your mind. In your relaxation, you can see energy systems moving, activating, integrating.

You can open up your chakras, making them spin both inwardly and outwardly. You can trace the flows of specific meridians. You can trace the flow of the radiant circuits, knit your aura, draw figure eights in the Celtic Weave--all while you are in this deeply resting, open state. Energy flows where attention goes. There are many wonderful articles with photos or drawings of what the energy systems look like, if you'd like some visual templates to start with. Donna has drawings in her article Energy Medicine. Energy medicine teacher Barbara Brennan has some wonderful illustrations in her articles. The artist Alex Grey also creates incredible art based on the energetics of the body. The death and destruction she'd borne witness to had haunted her ever since. She'd come to the monastery in part because of its connection to Thailand and was struggling with images and memories of the tsunami in meditation practice. She found the hardest part, however, to be the quiet and solitude: I thought coming here and being in silence would help me heal, she said as she started to cry, but it's just bringing it back up. I'm trying to be mindful of the memories, but all I feel is sad and alone. We sat quietly and waited to see how the monk would respond. He stayed present with Rachel as she continued to cry. Being mindful of this pain can be helpful, he eventually said, but it alone won't always help. You can stay here, but it also may be best for you to go home and be with family and friends. Sometimes, people--not silence and solitude--are the best medicine for such wounds. Rachel looked up and nodded, seemingly in agreement with what he'd said. It is like a de-anthropomorphisized God, with the same omniscience but none of the social baggage. The laws of science that we describe are really (to paraphrase Stephen Hawking) the mind of the Tao.