This head so gently aches; its bloodshot blur is the morning vision. “Higher” consciousness always takes its toll. Well, I did yoga twice yesterday and only had five scoops of Bob’s Homemade last night. Am I healthy because I didn’t get the flu last week? It seems my bic pen scribbles laboriously; oh God, let one more cup of coffee get me through. My hemorrhoids will forgive me for too much sitting if my meditation can convince me of my health.
It is a common misconception that we are more healthy than our great grandparents due to progress in the medical profession. For example, the epidemic of tooth decay (the most prevalent form of all human diseases) is relatively recent and is a clear indication of our physical degeneration.
Is there a right way to eat?
Is there a wrong way to write about it?
One legend gives the credit to Kaldi, a goatherd in Ethiopia. One day in 850 A.D. Kaldi noticed his goats, after feeding on the berries of a certain evergreen bush, began to act strangely. Enough so to make Kaldi try the beans himself. After eating a few, he was sure of a real find. Exhilarated and exuberant, he ran home to tell the villagers about his discovery of a new high.
Throughout history plants have been the primary medicine used to treat physical and psychological illness. Many people are returning to nature as their primary healer, finding the approach of Western medicine often ineffective and expensive. Herbal medicine does not trade an aspirin for an herb tea; herbalism and naturopathy offer an integrated method with which to respond to sickness.
We are living in the exaggerations of our memories of the future. These are HISTORICAL TIMES. I am in seclusion and I stink.
The healing of the soul (psyche-therapy) was originally the responsibility of tribal chiefs, witch doctors, and priests. In the twentieth century, we are inundated with psychotherapists. If you desire assistance and relief from the concerns, confusions, or pain of your life, select the person who will be most effective in helping you.
The Maitri program was developed by Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist meditation master. The program is designed to nurture compassion through participation in a meditative community. Students in the community practice sitting meditation, space awareness postures and meditation in action.
Man has instinctively employed his hands as healing tools to alleviate pain since earliest times, massaging a painful leg cramp, for example, or protecting a stinging insect bite.
When my body feels good, I feel good. Whenever my body is relaxed the tension releases, and I feel warm all over. As I become more in tune with my total being I can feel out where I am holding on, tightening up, and stopping the natural flow of energy through the body. Through massage my mind relaxes, the energy flows smoothly; tensions which are encased in my body are released, and the love flows through me.
Edgar Cayce once told of a dream he had in which he was taken to Heaven and shown a room full of parcels and gifts that people had prayed for and forgotten; gifts of Heaven, awaiting mankind’s receptivity.
Being well, what can we call it? Freedom from physical disturbance, from illness, or from psychological tensions? Is it freedom from illusion and self-imposed limitation? Well being probably encompasses all of these interrelated conditions as well as others whose reality is unmet as of yet. At any rate, the concept of health or well-being remains an open-ended subject. So lets take that as a tentative answer in itself, and explore well-being as openness.
The rigidly held prejudices and openly opportunistic public posturings so common among the old men who lead or want to lead this nation are a constant source of fascination to me. My own grandfather is a kindly old gentleman who exists in a quiet, courtly manner and is far above ever selling me out in his own interests. This enormous disparity between my own father’s father and those who claim spiritual ancestry with George Washington accounts for part of the amazement. The rest of my consuming interest clearly has to do with liking a good show and the naked lusts of these panting geriatrics is just too obscene to pass up. So it is that my attention is drawn to Ronald Reagan and George Wallace as they go through their spirited bicentennial hustles in an effort to become top banana.
I once thought that the purpose of my life was to answer the question: “What is the purpose of my life?” I tried to fill myself looking for the answer. I have changed; I no longer move through life wondering “why?” I move. The meaning of life is usually contained in an awareness and appreciation of the process of life. The pleasure that I increasingly experience gives me the strength and trust to know I am moving through moments in the right way.
Book Review
She Would Have Been a Taxi Dancer, But He Couldn’t Hail a Cab is an ambitious work, which, had it been published three years ago when it was written, may have proved a bit more the original allegory than it now seems. The sins and quagmire of urban sprawl is a topic we are all saturated with via the daily news and Walter Cronkite. Somehow, an in-depth exposure of that New York/New Jersey neurosis serves mainly to prod on into a revery of the ultimate Americanization of that neurosis.
Poetry, like all the arts, has taken a turn toward the diffuse since World War 2. By diffuse, I mean the opposite of the exactness that went into the work of the masters, the pointedness of a strong sensibility.
Heat shadows dance above the blacktop.
“Dont hold on,” he said. They were water-skiing, she holding on to his waist. “Dont hold on. Try it by yourself.” He knew if she let go she would go flying into the water and then he’d have to make a rescue. But he also knew she knew this, and it was a joke between them.
I was looking up monasteries in the yellow pages when she knocked. I was living at this time in Jersey City, N.J., on top of a meat market. It was the dingiest of places. I got up from my fleabitten couch. I opened the door to a dazzling darkhaired woman. “My name is Mindy,” she said. I immediately looked at Mindy’s breasts. I suggested she come in. Mindy nodded and entered my apartment. “What sign are you?” she asked as she walked to a window, scratching the glass with her fingernails. “Capricorn,” I said. “Don’t worry,” said Mindy, “Nobody important was ever a Capricorn.”
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