So Called Dis-ease ᐞ･ﾟ✦

**A note: the words which humans have constructed to describe our experiences are limited by the human intellect. They are not capable of describing the indescribable. All teachings around presence are but signposts pointing you in the right direction, and the more different iterations you read, or the more you meditate on the same ones, the closer you get to understanding at the experiential level. Read these words with an open interpretation – then drop them and allow them to simmer.**

When bad things seem to happen at random and frequent intervals for long enough, your system begins to believe this is just how it is – it won’t get better. You check around every corner and analyze every human face expecting pain. The beautiful thing about meditation is, even when you go into this mode, there is now a part of you that is still awake to reality, that recognizes on some level that this vigilance isn’t necessary.

This is how people with so called dis-eases and disorders learn to heal. They recognize that the way they are thinking isn’t necessarily in line with reality, and they dare to see beyond the environment they have created for themselves in their minds. In fact, in a study recently published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, two of three people once diagnosed with a mental illness or with a history of substance abuse are able to recover from symptoms to attain a state of moderate to good mental health, a statistic that blew the lid off my perceptions of mental health.

I am one such person. Having paid a visit to a general practitioner in a time of severe distress long ago, I was given a diagnosis of Generalized Anxiety Disorder, told to eat less sugar and do more cardio. Nobody recommended therapy to me, only medication. In reality, at the time I was undergoing a traumatic change that was outside of my control and all I needed was to be validated in my reaction, told I wasn’t going out of my mind but merely anxious, and that I had what I needed to redirect it given time and patience. In fact, a single massage therapy session was enough to bring intense repressed emotions to the surface and give me the hope that calmed my symptoms.

We take great comfort in the structure we have surrounded ourselves with, in our diagnoses and our story of reality, but the truth is, it’s all trial and error based on extremely limited perceptive abilities. There is really only one universal truth that one can experience for themselves without question – our bodies are made of energy, and that energy is animated by the source behind its existence. The energy has an intelligence that is far greater than the intellectual capabilities that have developed in our simple brains, mired by fear-based animalistic reflexes that have only relatively recently been given voice via thoughts – via the entity that has arisen in us known in Buddhism as the ego mind. To make this truth more condensed – we are made up of the divine, the Force, Source energy, Pure Awareness, whatever you want to call it (it’s limited and beyond our understanding either way), and limited by the experience we’ve been born into – our bodies which hurt, our minds which wander, and our life situations which are overcomplicated. To condense it even further – we are divine beings, having human experiences. Everything else we have tacked onto our concept of “known” has only gotten there because it has been perceived so by limited minds that have come before us.

So. You’re about to start a job, and you need two forms of identification. You grab the keys for your fire safe box to get your passport, but the keys aren’t there. Someone moved them. Despite your best efforts to arrive 45 minutes early, you may not be able to make it at all if you can’t produce the documents. And so, as you take a sledgehammer to the box only and snag the docs, you dash out of the house thinking to yourself that nothing is where you thought, you don’t want this job that much anyway, and you just want to retreat to a mountain cave with nobody to move your things, you then question whether you’d even need any things, and whether you’d need a job, and from this relatively minor dark night of the soul, you begin to grasp – our entire society is a thin veil separating you from the basic nature of humans and the basic sense of being alive. (Of course this didn’t actually happen to me, no way.)

In Buddhism, the Ego is the entity that humans developed to cope with the emergence of thought. It gives us our constructed sense of individual identity, it attempts to protect us from psychological threats we perceive via a controlling boss or family member, it tallies rights and wrongs, and it gets us stuck in one way of thinking, as though our very identity and existence depend upon it. Conversely, animals don’t think, they simply are. At one time, humans simply existed, with no constructed ideas of emotional or financial shortcomings.

While we don’t wish to lower our consciousness to a place of pre-thought, as we often attempt with substances and phone scrolling, the way forward for human beings is to put thought in its place – to be made useful when needed, and to take a backseat to pure consciousness all other times. Thought allows us to write a helpful book and arrange a book tour, but it doesn’t facilitate the emergence of love through which we gain the insights for the words on our pages. We must transcend thought – set it free. This is why we have been unsuccessful in quelling the emergence of anxiety and depression, which are indicative of disconnection from love, from the source of life. While medications may help to ease symptoms, learning to love oneself and others without condition is the cure. To sit in dignity that cannot be taken away from you by the mere unfolding of events and actions of others: that is peace.

Shortly after my diagnosis which was described as a deficit of certain chemicals and a surplus of others, I quit watching TV. I began drinking herbal tea each evening, a sacred ritual I continue in colder months to this day. I took baths, I wrote lovely messages on myself in henna and I learned to believe them. I meditated, and faced the voice in my head. I learned to recognize the voice was not me, and ceased to identify as that voice. I made different choices, I held boundaries at work and eventually worked where I found value and was valued. I practiced yoga. And it stopped. The daily vigilance that told me if I stopped worrying I might cease to exist turned out to be the Ego’s one and only move of preservation, and over time, gradually, I simply ceased to worry. Now, even in the throes of anxiety after an upset, you could not convince me of my having a disorder of any kind. I know very well that to struggle to thrive in a broken society is a sign that one is awakening, still perceiving, and searching for the message inside that will reconcile what we know. This is what it means to begin to awaken to life.

Yoga, meditation, tai chi, chi gong, rock climbing, cycling, running – all these things help to manage the excess or depleted energy within us, to bring us in balance. By further looking at our thoughts and reframing them, we can then manage the chemicals that these thoughts turn into, allowing our physical systems to operate within a healthier range even without diet and exercise changes. When our bodies function better, our minds – encased in our bodies – do too. When our energy is flowing, then we can sit with the vast mysteries of existence. When we can learn to be with these mysteries, and not to be overcome in the quest to put words to the pursuit, it begins to make sense. When we can learn to be present with life, dis-ease ceases to be a problem.