What is the longest you have gone without a piece of food or a glass of water? A holy man in India claims that he has not eaten or drank anything for 75 years! Prahlad Jani is the 83-year old man who lives in a cave near Amba JI Temple without any kind of food or water since the age of 7. Why in the world would a man choose to not eat for such a long time, and how is he still alive?
Mr. Jani claims that he has left his home at the age of seven searching for spiritual mystery when he was blessed by 3 Hindu goddesses. Here is the story in his own words:
“Three goddesses appeared to me and bade me to follow. Ma Kali, Ma Lakshmi, and Ma Saraswati. I consented, prepared myself, and asked: ‘What about my food?’ They each put a finger on my lip and said ‘You need not be concerned about food ever again’. I was 7, and from that day I stopped eating and drinking.”
Ever since that blessing, Prahlad Jani claims that he has gained his sustenance from the nectar that filters down through a hole in his palate. A bunch of bogus, right? Maybe not.
His claims were scientifically studied by a team of 30 specialists during three weeks of a variety of tests at a hospital.
They took him into then Sterling Hospital in Ahmedabad, India. They put him under 24 hour observation in front of cameras and found out that he did not take any kind of food or water in the 15 days that he was in hospital. No food or water for half that time would be a sure death for anybody else. And he did not pass urine or stool either.
The doctors were completely surprised at this miracle. “We believe that the sadhu Prahlad Jani’s body went through biological transformation as a result of meditation and powerful yoga in a completely natural environment that he stays.” said neurologist Dr. Sudhir Shah.
The doctors in India are guessing that this phenomenon relates the Amrita Chakra (third eye chakra), as Hindu vedas speak of it being able to produce a divine nectar which sustains life.
What’s more is that his brain resembles that of a 25 year old man at 83 years of age. His practices have somehow miraculously transformed the biological functioning of his body, which no longer needs energy and sustenance from external material sources.
Is this even possible?
This sounds crazy, but let’s think about it for a minute. What do we need from food? The minerals, which are made out of molecules, which are made out of atoms, which are made out of quarks, which are made out of superstrings, which is ultimately part of the Unified Field or Superstring Field.
At a fundamental level of nature, nutrition is really just vibrating strings of non-local energy. Could he somehow be receiving this information somehow without the need to physically ingest food? Here is a news report by the doctors who observed him at the hospital:
There have been numerous studies detailing what happens to the brain in long-term meditators, but what exactly happens to people who meditate for the first time?
Sara Lazar, a Harvard researcher, has gained quite some notoriety detailing how the brain actually grows grey matter when people meditate.
Other studies have shown that meditation improves IQ, and lessens depression. In addition to these benefits, meditation also:
Reduces alcohol and substance consumption, reduces blood pressure (Chiesa, 2009),
Decreases anxiety, depressive symptoms, and relapses (Coelho, Canter, & Ernst, 2007; Kim et al., 2009)
Helps patients suffering from various types of chronic pain (Chiesa & Serretti, in press)
Lowers the incidence of stress (Chiesa & Serretti, 2009)
Aids cancer patients (Ledesma & Kumano, 2009)
Most people think they have to meditate for years before they start seeing any of these improvements, but a study conducted by Chiesa, Calati, and Serretti shows that after just eight short weeks of meditation, people start to experience improved cognitive functioning.
Still not fast enough for you? Meditation for the First Time
Here’s what happens to the brain after someone completes just one meditation session who has never meditated before:
People start to become less ‘me’ centered as the brain balances the Ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), which allows us to ruminate our worry, and the Dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), which allows us to empathize with others and feel more connected to those who we usually view as dissimilar to ourselves.
The fear-center is calmed via the amygdala and the two branches of the nervous system. You know that ‘uh-oh’ feeling you sometimes get? Meditation helps to make sure that you only feel low-level stress when you really need to, such as when you are about to put your hand on a hot stove, or you need to put the brakes on in traffic. Even then, meditation can help take the stress out of stress-full experiences.
The very first time you try to meditate, the mind calms down. It doesn’t mean you will experience profound inner peace the first time your bum touches a meditation cushion, but it does mean that you are already setting up new neural pathways that allow positive change. Each time you ‘sit’ again, you enhance them.
You’ll feel less depressed. Meditation is getting a lot of press lately because of this study by Mahav Goyal published at JAMA. 47 trials conducted with over 3,500 patients proved that meditation was as effective as anti-depressants. (The effect of meditation was moderate, at 0.3. If this sounds low, keep in mind that the effect size for antidepressants is also 0.3.) The difference is, of course, that meditation can’t kill you or cause other unwanted side effects, like psychotic episodes, panic attacks, hostility, etc.
You’ll feel less physical pain in just four meditation sessions. Brain activity decreases in the areas responsible for relaying sensory information surrounding a feeling of pain. Also, regions of the brain that modulate pain get busier, and volunteers who participated in a study reported that pain was less intense after meditation practice. These results were all reported at an annual Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego.
The ‘me-center’ slowly evaporates. As the connection between bodily sensations and the vmPFC withers, you will no longer assume that a bodily sensation or momentary feeling of fear means something is wrong with you or that you are the problem. You can just let it rise and pass, without hardly giving it a second thought.
Empathy becomes stronger. The vmPFC part of the ‘me center’ subsides and the dmPFC grows more dominant, which means you can feel others’ pain or sadness, but with the same ability as you’ve learned to handle your own bodily sensations.
Masters of Meditation
Once you’re an old pro at meditation you can look forward to even more benefits, many of which science is still reaching to understand.
Tibetan monks can sit for hours in meditation as easily as most of us can spend the same amount of time sleeping or surfing the net. These monks recently dried wet sheets with their bodies by utilizing a form of meditation called g Tum-mo. Monks were cloaked in wet, cold sheets (49 f / 9.4 c) and placed in a 40 f (4.5 c) room. In conditions such as these the average person would likely experience uncontrollable shivering and suffer hypothermia. However, through deep concentration, the monks were able to generate body heat, and within minutes the researchers noticed steam rising from those sheets. In about an hour the sheets were completely dry.
Yogis in India who practice meditation are able to slow their hearts so completely that they are hardly detectable on EKG equipment. In 1935 a French cardiologist, Therese Brosse, took an electrocardiograph to India and studied yogis who said they could stop their heart. According to Brosse’s published report, readings produced by a single EKG lead and pulse recordings indicated that the heart potentials and pulse of one of her subjects decreased almost to zero, where they stayed for several seconds. (Brosse, 1946)
A master meditator, Munishri Ajitchandrasagarji, is a Jain monk who credits his incredible memory to meditation practice. He can recite 500 items from memory, whether it is a phrase from one of six different languages, a math problem, or the name of a random object. He recently performed this feat in front of an audience of 6,000 to verify his amazing level of skill. It took six hours for the crowd to feed him the list of items, and he recited them back perfectly.
Dutchman Wim Hof is able to control his immune system with meditation. He has been in the Guinness Book of World Records 20 times for accomplishments like climbing Mt. Everest and Kilimanjaro in nothing but a pair of shorts and shoes, with no water or food, when temperatures easily reach 50 degrees celcius. He uses a special breathing meditation.
So maybe the first time you learn to control your thoughts by focusing on your breath, or simply observing your thoughts like clouds passing in the sky won’t make you a master meditator capable of these staggering acts, but even with your first twenty minute ‘sit’ you are well on your way to other-worldly abilities.
In the unconsciousness of our addictions we are at a Distance from Ease. There is no ease in the body for we are disconnected from it. There is no ease in the mind because of the constant flow of garbage being sent to it from the subconscious. There is no ease in the spirit as we have lost sight of our Soul and its mission. The great tragedy of addiction is simply that we are divine beings that have utterly lost connection with that truth.
Imagine you come upon a blind man on the street who is begging for food. At his feet, a sumptuous banquet is laid out, but he cannot see it or even smell it. You explain to him that he does not need to beg for food, that he only needs to reach out and partake in the blessings at his feet. “You are wrong,” he tells you, “There is no banquet at my feet.” You are looking at a spread of incredible fruits and nuts, breads and cheeses. To you, it is plain as day, but the more you try to tell him that he does not need to beg for sustenance, the harder he fights to stick to the story that he does need to beg.
How can we be so lost as to not know who and what we are? The great majority of us are born into a world that tells us about limitation and smallness. From a young age, we are trained in our own powerlessness and spend the rest of our lives trying to find and express our power. When the quest for power—which is an archetypal journey—goes astray, it becomes one of the great drivers of acute addiction. Unless we are given a path with tools and practices that work to unravel our misunderstandings and replace them with the divine light of knowing which is also called faith, we run the risk of a life half-lived. We will always be hungry despite the bounty at our feet, always trying to solve a riddle that cannot be solved. That was me before I found Kundalini Yoga back in 2003.
I have written a fair amount about my teacher, Guruprem Singh Khalsa. Here, I will simply say, “Thank you, Guruprem, for teaching me about “Prehab,” giving me the tools to uplift my consciousness and transform my inner life (which, of course, transformed my outer life).
Prehab is for everyone and everyone who learns the lessons of Prehab will never have to go to rehab like I did. I learned the lessons of Prehab fourteen years after rehab. Well, better late than never. In Prehab, we learn how to sit, how to stand and how to walk.
Sitting: Can you sit cross-legged on the floor or ground in comfort and ease? For most of us, the answer is no. In Prehab, we learn how to sit consciously, how to breathe consciously, how to connect literally with the Earth beneath us and to develop patience and the capacity to pass time productively. People who struggle with addictions do not have this critical skill.
Standing: You can tell nearly everything about a person by the way they “carry” themselves around. Are you able to stand with your pelvis and spine properly aligned, with your feet and legs actively pressing down into the Earth with your heart uplifted and your chest open so that your breath can flow freely and fully? This is called Tadasana or mountain pose. In Prehab, we practice this in order to develop the right relationship to gravity and the Earth, to be in divine alignment, and to come to know what we stand for in the world.
Walking: Once we know how to sit and stand we can now progress to the advanced practice of walking. How do you move through time and space? How is your relationship with gravity? Is there freedom in your body and breathing? Are you leaving a pleasant energy in your wake or does your manner of moving around bring discord rather than harmony? Most importantly, in Prehab we learn what we are walking toward. What is our destiny path and where does it lead? Once you know this in the very cells of your body, then you have realized who and what you are and addiction will have a challenge getting a foothold in you.
These are the lessons that have been passed down to me by my teacher and his teacher and so on. Working with the physical body is key. The meditation and breath-work is key. This practice makes day-to-day reality sweeter while delivering a person from darkness to light, from addiction to recovery, and from dis-ease to Ease. This is Kundalini Yoga and I wish it for you.
In Love and Gratitude,
Tommy Rosen
Tommy Rosen is certified to teach both Kundalini Yoga and Vinyasa Flow. He is a leading authority on addiction and recovery with 20 years experience helping others to overcome addictions of every kind. He is one of the pioneers in the relatively new field of Yoga and Recovery, which utilizes yoga and meditation to help people to move beyond addiction and build fulfilling lives. Tommy lives in love and gratitude with his wife, noted yoga instructor, Kia Miller, in Venice, CA.www.tommyrosen.com/yoga/
The news of Robin Williams' passing is shocking and touching so many of us. I was waiting for a friend at a bar when I first heard. All around me people erupted in a variety of emotional reactions as the word quickly spread. In the time since, a common reaction has been deep sadness, often paired with a sentiment of "I never thought someone like him would kill themselves."
What we mean when we say "I never thought someone like him..." is that we can't wrap our minds around certain people whom we deem successful or joyful or wise suffering from the same sorts to the demons that we ourselves face. Studies have shown that one in ten people in the United States are afflicted with depression. Robin Williams is said to be one of these people. In response to the news of Williams' death his friend Harvey Fierstein wrote, "Please, people, do not f-- with depression. It's merciless. All it wants is to get you in a room alone and kill you. Take care of yourself."
Yet for anyone who has suffered from depression or had suicidal thoughts, you know that self-care is the last thing you want to do when you feel that down. I teach meditation, and write books about how it effects our everyday life. That is the form of self-care that I preach. The sort of people who want to learn about meditation aren't the "All is well and good in my world" type. They are people who have come to terms with the fact that they suffer. They are people finally looking at big transitions in their life, strong emotional states, and feelings of stress, anxiety, and depression. So you would think that having taught meditation for thirteen years and worked with these people I would be a pro at this whole "take care of yourself" thing.
I have never publicly admitted this, but given the stigma around mental health issues and suicide I feel that I need to now: two years ago I was suicidal. I had written a best-selling Buddhist book and had begun working on the second one when the rug was pulled out from under me in a multitude of ways. My fiancé left me, quite out of the blue, without any recognizable reason. That set me down a self-destructive road which was only heightened when, a month later, due to budget cut-backs, my full-time job was eliminated. The straw that broke the camel's back came a few weeks after that; one of my best friends died of heart failure at the age of 29. I felt estranged from my family, and two major support structures, my fiancé and my friend were now gone, so I began to self-medicate in a destructive way. I knew better, but the vastness of my depression consumed any thoughts around self-care and regular meditation.
I cannot explain how fathomless my sadness was during that period. I had a roof I would go up to every single day and contemplate jumping. I convinced myself that my first book was out there helping people, so maybe I should finish the second one. I sat down and wrote the second half of that book, which oddly enough comes out next month. It gave me purpose, and during that short period of time friends started to catch on something was wrong with me.
I remember a day when I was particularly low. My friend Laura asked me to dinner but I could not stand to be in a restaurant, surrounded by people who seemed normal. We sat in a nearby park as it got dark, with homeless people urinating nearby and the rats slowly coming out to play. She was very patient with me, as I was not interested in leaving. Finally she asked the question, "Have you ever thought about hurting yourself?" I broke down in tears and within the week was guided by her and others into therapy. A week later I returned to the meditation cushion. A week after that I began eating regularly. A week after that I finally got a full night's sleep. I mention my story because there's not just a social stigma around mental health issues, there's also a Buddhist one. I have seen some Buddhist teachers make remarks about depression as a form of suffering; that one should be able to meditate and have everything be okay, in lieu of prescription medication. That is not true; meditation is not a cure-all for mental illness. The Buddha never taught a discourse entitled, "Don't Help Yourself, Continue to Suffer Your Chemical Imbalance." If you have a mental illness, meditation may be helpful, but should be considered an addition to, not a substitution for, prescribed medication.
I write this article for two reasons. The first is to say that Robin Williams is a person. I am a person. And like all people, we struggle with a myriad form of suffering. And sometimes things feel like they are too much for us to handle. Just because Robin Williams was a comedian, a celebrity, or someone we viewed as a joyful person did not mean he wasn't fighting demons unknown to us. I share my story in the same vein; the fact that I struggled with suicidal thoughts does not negate my years of meditation experience or understanding of the Buddhist teachings, but shows that I am human and sway to suffering like all humans are. You can be well-practiced and still struggle like anyone else. Robin Williams ended up taking his life. I was lucky in that I was able to seek help and no longer feel the way I once did. In fact, that experience only deepened my appreciation for the practice of meditation and the Buddhist teachings. In many ways, my life has turned around.
The second reason I write this article is because my life turned around because I sought help. Buddhists can't just take everything to the meditation cushion and hope it will work out. When things get tough, as in to the point that you can't imagine getting out of bed in the morning tough, you need help. And there should be no shame in seeking it. If you even remotely feel like you are struggling with depression, or are going through an emotional time that simply feels out of control, the best way to take care of yourself is to seek guidance from trained professionals. Sure that can be a meditation teacher, but a therapist may prove more helpful at that time. Therapy in-and-of itself can be a mindfulness practice, where you bring your full attention for an hour each week to what is expressing itself in your body and your mind.
Don't feel like you have to go it alone. Meditation does not preclude or diminish the power of therapeutic methods. They are powerful in their own right. There are trained people out there who can work with you to navigate your suffering. Do not be scared to seek help.
Follow Lodro Rinzler on Twitter: www.twitter.com/lodrorinzler http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lodro-rinzler/meditation-isnt-enough-a-_b_5672580.html
If anyone knows a thing or two about creativity, it's David Lynch. Arguably one of the most brilliant film directors of our time, Lynch is best known for genre-defying, surrealist art-house films like Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet, and Wild at Heart. His style is so original that it's even inspired its own adjective: "Lynchian."
Lynch is also an outspoken devotee of Transcendental Meditation, which he's practiced daily for over 40 years and brings to underserved populations through his work with the David Lynch Foundation. And the award-winning director says that meditation is his greatest secret to creative success.
"Transcendental meditation is for [all] human beings, and it transforms life for the good, no matter who you are or what your situation is," Lynch said in a Rolling Stone interview on Feb. 25. "It's a mental technique that allows [you] to dive deep within to the deepest level of life, which underlies all matter and mind. At the border of intellect, you transcend and experience that unbounded level of life: all positive, pure consciousness with qualities of intelligence, creativity, happiness, love, energy, and peace."
In 2006, Lynch penned a book illuminating his methods for achieving his greatest artistic visions. In Catching The Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity, Lynch likens ideas to fish: "If you want to catch a little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper."
For many of us who do creative work, lifestyles of stress, burnout, sleep deprivation and technology addiction can keep us from "going deeper." We multitask on texts, emails, news and social media -- without putting our full focus on anything we do -- and that can keep us on the surface of our thoughts and ideas. This can take a major toll on our creative thinking, which is never at its fullest potential if we're not accessing a deeper part of our consciousness. Lynch argues that meditation is the solution, the greatest tool we have for accessing our own brain power and diving into the subconsciousness where creativity resides.
Need a creative boost? Here are some of Lynch's best secrets to finding your personal vision from Catching The Big Fish.
1. Meditate, meditate, meditate.
Lynch is a longtime devotee of Transcendental Meditation, a practice that involves the repetition of a mantra during 20-minute, twice daily meditations. He swears that TM helps him to access a deeper level of consciousness, where all of his best ideas have come from. "Down deep, the fish are powerful and more pure. They're huge and abstract. And they're very beautiful," he writes.
But you don't have to take Lynch's word for it: The science has proven that mindfulness really can boost your brain power in a number of ways. A 2012 Dutch study found that certain meditation techniques can promote creative thinking. Mindfulness practice has been linked with improved memory and focus, emotional well-being, reduced stress and anxiety, and improved mental clarity -- all of which can lead to better creative thought.
Anyone can find time in their schedule to meditate, says Lynch -- you don't have to be sitting cross-legged in a special meditation room to enjoy the practice of mindfulness.
"You can meditate anywhere," says Lynch. "You can meditate in an airport, at work, anywhere you happen to be."
2. Slow down.
Few things crush creativity faster than excessive busyness -- research in organizational psychology has found that environments with high levels of time pressure can stifle creativity, and many of us know personally that our best ideas don't happen when we're stressed out and rushing from one deadline to another.
The world will likely only continue operating at an increasingly fast pace, so we must take it upon ourselves to slow down. Accessing one's deepest creativity, for Lynch, pretty much boils down to a simple piece of advice: "Keep your eye on the donut and not the hole." As Lynch explains, "If you keep your eye on the doughnut and do your work, that's all you can control. You can't control any of what's out there, outside yourself."
In other words, slow down, find time for your creative work, and let go of trying to keep up with endless emails, social media updates, to-do lists and obligations. They'll always be there -- it's your job to find a way to slow down for long enough to do the work that's important to you.
3. Sleep.
It's a simple equation: People who sleep better are more creative. Lynch explains that sleep is "really important" to his creative process. "You need to be able to rest the physiology to be able to work well and meditate well," says Lynch.
Writer Steven King also believes that sleep is crucial to the creative process and can help to release what he calls the "repressed imagination." King wrote in On Writing: A Memoir on the Craft:
In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives. And as your mind and body grow accustomed to a certain amount of sleep each night — six hours, seven, maybe the recommended eight -- so can you train your waking mind to sleep creatively and work out the vividly imagined waking dreams which are successful works of fiction.
The evidence that sleep deprivation disrupts creativity isn't just anecdotal: A number of scientific studies have found that sleep is essential for learning and creativity. Sleep helps the brain to consolidate memories so that we can later retrieve them more easily, and it also helps us reorganize and reconfigure memories so we can come up with new and original ideas.
4. Cultivate compassion.
Meditation can seem like a selfish pursuit -- one that cuts us off from others and the world around us as we retreat into our inner selves. But Lynch argues that meditation is anything but selfish, and for that reason, it can boost your creativity.
"Compassion, appreciation for others, and the capacity to help others are enhanced when you meditate," writes Lynch. "You start diving down and experiencing this ocean of pure love, pure peace -- you could say pure compassion. You experience that, and know it by being it. Then you go out into the world, and you can really do something for people."
Research has found that love and creativity are closely connected -- a 2009 study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin demonstrated that participants primed with thoughts of love had high levels of creative insights compared to those who thought of lust and control-group subjects. "Love enhances global processing and creative thinking," the researchers concluded.
Center for Investigating Healthy Minds studies neuroscience behind positive emotion
For 45 minutes, an infant is swaddled and snoozed into a cozy fMRI machine.
That’s all it takes for researchers at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds to observe how structures inside the child’s brain communicate with each other.
Nicole Schmidt, a research program manager at the Waisman Center, is among the researchers behind the Baby Brain and Behavior Project.
“It’s so neat because the babies are just such quiet little bundles, but there’s so much going on developmentally,” Schmidt said.
Courtesy of Center for Investigating Healthy Minds
Funded by the National Institutes of Health, Schmidt’s project investigates the effects of anxiety on early brain development. The project hopes to clear up how different experiences might affect a child at a cellular level and how stress shows up in people’s biology.
From one month and onward, researchers study the babies’ brains at different stages for developmental changes. At six months, Schmidt said the focus of the study is entirely on behavioral development and emotional style.
One way in which Schmidt studies this Temperament Assessment Battery is to study the child’s responses to everyday experiences.
Schmidt places the child in a chair and examines the babies’ response to a stranger in their environment.
“We measure the duration and peak intensities of different emotions during the experience,” Schmidt said. “Fear, anger, attention, activity level.”
The first babies will be turning one year old later this fall, Schmidt said.
The researchers use umbilical cords to gather genetic information from the baby, which avoids having to get more invasive blood tests from the mother or child.
“We’re over the idea that DNA is the only factor that goes into well-being,” Schmidt said. “The question is, ‘How can you uncover the role of experience?’ As a mother myself there’s just that enormous curiosity when you’re looking at a newborn child to really be able to understand their development.”
Schmidt’s project is still in its infancy, with funding from NIH for five years.
A challenge from the Dalai Lama
Marianne Spoon, a spokesperson for the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, said the project reflects the Center’s methods for studying mental well-being.
Jeff Miller
The Center began when its founder, Richard Davidson, met with the Dalai Lama and was challenged to further scientific research in positive emotions and mental well-being, as opposed to negative emotions that result from conditions such as anxiety or depression.
“He wanted to look at exactly what areas were active in the brain when we felt happiness or sadness or anger or fear or even bliss,” Spoon said.
Davidson’s research coincided with the idea that the brain is plastic, Spoon said. Different neurons and circuits in the brain that are active during certain behaviors, thoughts or emotions form pathways that become ingrained when people use them.
But Spoon said what research has found is that there are new pathways that can be built, and so the brain is malleable.
“This isn’t to say with individuals who have clinical or mental health disorders that this isn’t a challenge, but overall we are finding that the brain is plastic, and this is very exciting news,” Spoon said.
When Davidson set out to discover the brain activity of individuals who had consistently high levels of well-being, he studied Buddhist monks for their practice in intentionally cultivating healthy qualities of mind.
“They meditate but also practice compassion and gratitude toward each other,” Spoon said. “Rather than just internally, a lot of it plays externally in their behaviors to other people.”
Davidson’s research took a focus on long-term meditators, people who intensely meditate in isolation for many hours over many years.
When looking at the differences in brain activity between novice meditators and long-term meditators, studies found long-term meditators were able to rebound from stress more easily.
“Richie has really been a pioneer in this area in looking at the science of well-being, the science of mindfulness, how to learn about positive qualities in such a way where we can unearth whether they can be learned or taught,” Spoon said.
In his research, Davidson has outlined four key constituents of well-being: the ability to sustain positive emotion, response to negative emotion, mindfulness vs. mind wandering and pro-social behaviors, or the ability to empathize.
But for some with depression, the ability to shake the feeling after a negative experience is lessened, along with the ability to sustain positivity, Davidson outlined in the World Happiness Report. Turning research into practice
Robin Goldman, one of the co-science directors at the Center, said many of the research projects, including Schmidt’s Baby Brain and Behavior Project, work to look at development of mental well-being in different age groups.
“Looking at different curriculum in school, at meditation practices in the workplace, we can teach short-term and lifetime well-being practices,” Goldman said.
For those who don’t want to take up the meditation lifestyle of a monk, the Center teaches several techniques to reach mental well-being.
The Center has developed the “Kindness curriculum,” which promotes social and emotional skills among four and five-year-old students.
These children are taught emotional self-regulation and the development of impulse control and kindness.
Practices such as sticker sharing, breathing techniques and compassion for the sound of a siren are taught to the children to promote positive well-being.
The Center also has online audio compassion training techniques on its website to further promote the well-being practices which involve external, pro-social behaviors.
“[Davidson] is very passionate about getting the work out there and making sure it can actually promote well-being and reduce suffering in the world,” Spoon said.
Sometimes, solutions to even the most entrenched public health crises are right in front of our eyes, growing naturally from Mother Earth.
Richard Smith* struggled with an opiate painkiller addiction for four years before he found a way out through something called kratom.
“It works amazingly well,” Smith said. “I’m surprised it isn’t being prescribed as a treatment by doctors.”
Kratom comes from a tree, Mitragyna speciosa, that grows in Southeast Asia. The leaves have long been taken as medicine by people living in its native jungles, but the remedy is now growing in popularity around the world. Leaves can be chewed fresh, or dried and consumed in powder, tea or bar form. In small doses, it can have stimulative effects, but in larger quantities it acts as a sedative. Kratom has been used as an aphrodisiac, painkiller, appetite suppressant and for diarrhea relief. Its most promising effect, however, is in weaning people off heroin and morphine addiction using chemicals that stimulate opiate receptors, reducing the brain’s cravings for the genuine article.
Smith got hooked on painkillers after undergoing surgery for an injury he suffered in the military. “I was prescribed the medication by a doctor for three or four years,” he said. He tried quitting cold turkey, and by replacing the opiates with alcohol, but nothing worked.
That’s when he heard about kratom. The idea appealed to him more than checking into rehab to go onto methadone or suboxone, so he purchased some from a local natural products store and gave it a shot. He took the kratom for two or three months and was able to leave behind his addiction completely, without experiencing the crippling symptoms that usually accompany opiate withdrawal.
“I was able to go to work, take care of my family,” Smith said.
Awareness of the kratom’s therapeutic properties seems to be growing. “If you want to treat depression, if you want to treat opioid pain, if you want to treat sleepiness, this [compound] really puts it all together,” Edward Boyer, a professor of emergency medicine and director of medical toxicology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, said to Scientific American.
Side effects are minimal, including nausea, itching, sweating, dry mouth and increased urination. Kratom can be addictive, according to reports, but a 2011 study by the International Drug Policy Consortium and Transnational Institute found that withdrawal symptoms were weak and nearly inconsequential compared to the suffering of people trying to quit opiates or amphetamines. “I’ve heard there are withdrawal symptoms from kratom itself, but I didn’t experience that,” Smith said. “At least in comparison in trying to wean myself off narcotics for pain.”
The public profile of kratom is thriving, at least online. Reddit has over 5,000 members on its kratom forum that discuss its effects and how to acquire it.
Vocativ described it as the “sleeper-hit wonder drug that’s as schizophrenic as the Internet that spawned it” and called for 2015 to be “the year of kratom.” The site surveyed internet reviews and concluded that the substance could cause you to have the best or worst sex of your life, would make you feel amazing or terrible, gain superhuman strength or suffer crippling weakness, and might make you poop weird.
Another kratom enthusiast, Brandon Bird, who buys in bulk from Indonesia and resells it under the name Snake Oil Peddlers, spoke to Resetlast year about how kratom helps him manage his PTSD and allowed him to quit taking prescription painkillers.
It hasn’t gotten on the bad side of America’s drug warriors yet, so kratom remains unregulated and unlisted under the Controlled Substances Act, although the Drug Enforcement Agency has ominously and inaccurately claimed that it has “no legitimate medical use.”
However, its active chemicals, mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine, were banned in Indiana in 2012, and Tennessee followed suit in 2013.
Restrictions in other states and localities are under consideration. Lawmakers in Arizona tried to ban kratom last year, but the bill failed to pass. And Palm Beach County in Florida mulled over forcing vendors to post signs warning of its addictive properties, but recently decided against moving forward with the measure.
Internationally, kratom is illegal in Thailand, Australia, Myanmar and Malaysia, although Thailand has reportedly been considering dropping the ban.
When governments think about banning a substance or smearing it as a drug, it’s important to consider the evidence and harm reduction potential. With opiate addiction a growing problem in the United States, kratom is one therapy that can help people get their lives back on track. “Painkillers are an addiction that a lot of people are dealing with,” Smith said. “I think it’s important that people are aware that this is an option. It worked for me.”
Per request, one or more names have been changed for this article to protect the source’s identity.
There’s been an increasingly compelling pile of evidence that mindfulness training has effects on both brain and behavior—and its potential for treating depression is among its more promising uses. A new study from the University of Oxford finds that mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) is just as effective as antidepressants for preventing a relapse of depression, which affects 50-80% of people who experience a first bout of depression. This may not be entirely surprising, since previous studies have hinted at similar results. But what’s encouraging here is that MBCT may be an effective way to wean people off even successful courses of antidepressants, should they want or need to get off them in the future, without the high risk of relapse.
The team, who published their findings in The Lancet, followed 424 people who were already on antidepressants for major depression. They had them either continue taking the meds for “maintenance” (to prevent relapse) or titrate off while at the same time learning MBCT. The people in the latter group had eight group sessions of MBCT, were given instructions about how to practice on their own, and had four in-person follow-up appointments over the course of a year.
April 12, 2011. A Moment of Mindfulness led by Andy Puddicombe from Headspace, where the audience are helped to meditate. Is there a science of happiness? (AP Photo/Edmond Terakopian)
Here’s a little about MBCT: the practice marries mindfulness meditation (or mindfulness training) and cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), which are quite related to begin with. With mindfulness, an individual learns to observe his or her own thoughts with curiosity and without judgment, acknowledge them, and then let them go. Similarly, with CBT, people learn to identify their own negative or destructive thought patterns and replace them, over time, with more productive and positive ones. The two merge naturally and, as MBCT, are thought to be very effective for depression, since intrusive and ruminative thoughts can be some of the central and most crippling symptoms.
And the results from the current study were impressive: MBCT was just as effective as staying on antidepressants over the next two years following treatment: 44% of people in the MBCT group relapsed, while 47% of those in the antidepressant group did.
From their earlier work, the researchers had anticipated that MBCT might actually be more effective than medication in preventing relapse. Although that wasn’t the result of the current study, MBCT was still just as effective as medication, which is good news for those who in principle would like to go off it.
That a meditation-based practice might be as effective as medication for treating depression is not new. In a meta-analysis from Johns Hopkins last year, looking back over many studies on meditation and depression, the effect size for meditation was found to be 0.3, which is largely the same as for antidepressants. This also suggests that meditation might rival medication for actually treating depression – not just preventing relapse, as in the current study. Perhaps not for everyone, but for some.
“Compared to other skills that we train in,” says Madhav Goyal, author of this earlier study, “the amount of training received by the participants in the trials was relatively brief. Yet, we are seeing a small but consistent benefit for symptoms of anxiety, depression, and pain. So you wonder whether we might see larger effects with more training, practice, and skill.”
And that’s the other important finding of the current study: The cost was about the same for both treatments – often a concern with any form of “talk therapy” is that it may be costly more than meds, since multiple visits with trained professionals are required. But this was not the case – perhaps partly because the study used group sessions of MBCT – which gives more fuel to psychosocial treatments being as effective as drug therapies on multiple levels.
The study brings some interesting and hopeful news for those who don’t want to take medication over the long term, or who can’t tolerate the side effects. And, the authors point out, some people just prefer psychosocial treatments over drug treatments for personal reasons. Always speak with your mental health provider before changing or stopping therapies. Since 350 million people worldwide are affected by depression, and it’s one of the leading causes of disability in the world, finding alternative ways to prevent relapse from happening is critically needed. And MBCT, in the right circumstances, might be one of the more effective alternatives.
What would it take to rationalize federal drug policy when it comes to psychedelic substances? Ayahuasca, psilocybin, LSD, MDMA and ibogaine are relatively safe and bring therapeutic benefits to countless people via clinical trials and personal use. However, they are classified as Schedule I substances under the Controlled Substances Act. This officially labels them drugs with high likelihood of abuse, with no known medical benefits and leaves them strictly prohibited under U.S. law.
However, psychedelics are good for far more than just spiritual journeys and recreational use, and it’s their proven utility in treating pernicious mental disorders that may finally force the government’s hand.
As research continues to pile up showing that psychedelics can be used to effectively treat addiction, PTSD, anxiety and depression where other therapies have failed, Uncle Sam may eventually have little choice but to drop its absolutist policies and grant the substances legal status.
That’s the approach that has worked so far for marijuana. Nearly two decades after California first legalized medical usage of cannabis (in 1996), the federal government has finally acknowledged its benefits and could act soon to remove it from Schedule I.
Momentum is building for a similar track for psychedelics. In February, the New Yorker published a long piece by Michael Pollan detailing both the extraordinary potential of psychedelic therapies and the numerous hurdles that researchers must clear to study them because of federal roadblocks.
A number of other studies are adding to the evidence. For example, ibogaine, a substance derived from a shrub that grows naturally in Africa, has also shown immense promise. Patients have used it to successfully beat addictions, most notably opiate addictions. To legally receive treatment, however, people must travel to Mexico or other countries where ibogaine is still legal.
The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) is currently studying the long-term effects of ibogaine on addictions. MAPS already completed an observational study looking at the safety and long term effectiveness of ayahuasca to treat addiction and substance dependence. The encouraging results of the study were published in June 2013 in Current Drug Abuse Reviews. A host of other studies have shown that psychedelics can help people come to peace with traumatic experiences, quelling suicidal thoughts and relieving depression even after pharmaceutical interventions have failed. MAPS received a green light from the federal government in March to go ahead with a new phase two study using MDMA to help treat anxiety related to potentially fatal diseases.
A common thread is that psychedelics help people come to terms with themselves, and therefore make them more capable of battling their afflictions.
“Addiction and drug abuse have a function which is to escape from stress and difficult emotions like shame, loneliness, fear, guilt or shyness,” Pål-Ørjan Johansen, co-leader of the psychedelic advocate group EmmaSofia, said to Newsweek. “Recently our colleague, Matthew Johnson, completed a pilot study with psilocybin for smoking cessation, also with encouraging results.”
EmmaSofia is currently raising money in a long-term effort to legalize psychedelic treatments for addiction and other ailments. The group was recently featured in an attention-grabbing piece in the Independent, pushing the notion that the substances are as safe as common activities like riding a bike or playing football. Although there are risks involved with taking psychedelics, particularly for people who are using prescription medications or have existing medical conditions, studies have shown that there is no connection between their usage and acquiring mental health disorders.
“Based on extensive human experience, it is generally acknowledged that psychedelics do not elicit addiction or compulsive use and that there is little evidence for an association between psychedelic use and birth defects, chromosome damage, lasting mental illness, or toxic effects to the brain or other body organs,” Teri Krebs, a neuroscientist and EmmaSofia co-leader, wrote in the Lancet Psychiatry Journal. “Although psychedelics can induce temporary confusion and emotional turmoil, hospitalisations and serious injuries are extremely rare. Overall, psychedelics are not particularly dangerous when compared to other common activities.”
Ironically, prohibition actually causes psychedelics to be more dangerous, because they are unregulated and buyers never know when they are getting something with impure additives. A change in federal policy could correct that problem, and provide safe, legal access to treatment to millions who need it. The path forward to bring psychedelics into the legal mainstream is clear, although the time-line is not.
After the Washington Postreleased an article in 1974 that stated THC, “slowed the growth of lung cancers, breast cancers and a virus-induced leukemia in laboratory mice, and prolonged their lives by as much as 36%,” the world was remarkedly quiet about it. It took years, until after the advent of the internet and dissemination of information for the world to buy in. Also, video footage of the cells in action helps drive the point home: certain strains of THC can kill cancer cells and let normal cells live in peace. In 1998, a new study, by Madrid Complutense stated that ”THC can cause cancer cells to die, and unlike chemotherapy the THC kills nothing but the cancer cells, leaving the brain of course completely unharmed.”
It is believed that the Delta 9 THC eradicates cancer cells because they have so many more receptors; they are bombarded, whereas normal cells are treated much more gently.
These three videos are a great example, and even some direct footage, of the THC molecule binding to cells and slaying the cancerous ones.
It was 1997. I was visiting the Neem Karoli Baba ashram in Vrindaban, India, when I learned that my old friend and spiritual teacher, Ram Dass, had had a major, possibly life-threatening stroke. How strange to hear such news in that particular place, which took me over 20 years to visit since first hearing Ram Dass's wondrous stories about Maharaj-ji in the mid '70s. ("Maharaj-ji" is the less formal, affectionate honorific used by Neem Karoli Baba's devotees.)
In a shamefully narcissistic manner, one of my first thoughts had to do with me. Because of all his work in the field of death and dying, not to mention being my teacher, I always assumed that if push ever came to shove and I was lying in my death bed somewhere, I'd call on Ram Dass to come sit with me through the process and all would be well. It simply never dawned on me that he was 22 years my senior, and, barring unforeseen tragic events, he was quite likely going to pre-decease me. I was a bit in shock at what should have been an obvious revelation, and felt orphaned.
Ram Dass demonstrated through his stroke experience what it means to truly walk one's talk, for he managed to re-frame a frightening, painful and shocking event that would completely change his life and abilities forever, into what he would eventually refer to as "fierce grace" (which also became the title of a wonderful film about his ordeal.) The teaching he offered is that all circumstances -- seemingly good or bad from our own perspective -- can be seen, felt and even known as God's grace, if one is but willing to hold them that way and learn from them rather than merely complain and be the unfortunate victim of a terrible turn of events in one's life.
Of course, being a spiritual hero to thousands, Ram Dass really had no choice; he couldn't very well indulge in kvetching about his reality for very long, or behaving as if God and his guru were somehow suddenly absent from the universe! Clearly, if God is real and present -- no matter what happens -- then one must learn to accept all experiences ultimately as the grace of God, some more fierce than others.
For most of us, though, how could having a stroke, being paralyzed on one side, and initially losing nearly all of your speech capacity, possibly be the grace of God? If such a thing happened to me, I know I'd be extremely pissed off at God, and asking questions like, "What about playing guitar and piano? Or bicycling? I mean, I teach movement and dance for crying out loud!"
Rabbi Harold Kushner's famous query comes to mind: "Where is God when bad things happen to good people?" According to the mystics among us, the answer is always the same: God is present, and cannot possibly be elsewhere, for the "One Vast Eternal Omnipresent Source of All Being and Existence " certainly cannot be off at a brothel in Thailand while you're being mugged in New York City. No, as Thich Nat Hanh might say, God is the mugger and the mugged (and the Thai prostitute). Given the daily state of affairs in our own lives as well as the headlines from around the world that bombard us each morning, if any of us presume to intuit the presence of God, then that presence is clearly not impacted one way or the other by actual events that occur. The good stuff that happens doesn't mean God is here, and the bad stuff doesn't mean the divine has left the building. God is the animating force, or the all-pervading intelligence within which all experience takes place. The Tibetan Buddhists call it "cognizant emptiness." Not very spiritually romantic for devotional, religious types, but accurate.
I had a video Skype session with Ram Dass a few years ago, a service called a "Heart-to-Heart" that he makes available to his website subscribers. My agenda in setting up the conversation was to ask him for his blessing before I set out on a book tour to promote a memoir that featured my history with him in the first and last chapters, symmetrically framing the whole work. And though I had badgered him repeatedly the previous year, in the end he had opted not to endorse the back of my book. So now, if I couldn't get his blurb, I felt I at least needed his blessing. He paused a moment when I asked, closed his eyes to search for his answer, then looking straight into the camera and pointing his finger, said very calmly, "You have my blessing, as long as you tell the truth."
That gave my little brain plenty to think about! Was he saying I didn't tell the truth in the book? That I somehow misrepresented him in my story? What did he mean? I didn't ask him, and rather than try and figure out the answer, I lived, as Rilke said, "inside the question." As I traveled the country on my book tour, it became my personal Zen koan each time I took the stage.
And I think I told the truth. Mostly.
He also gave me an extremely valuable piece of advice: "If you go on a book tour as an ego, in order to sell books," he said, "it is a complete pain in the butt. But if you approach each event as a gathering of souls, then you can have a meaningful evening together." I took that very much to heart, and brought my guitar along and wound up singing and chanting with people in bookstores all across the country, and I do believe that souls were touched. Mine was.
Apart from that Skype call, I hadn't seen Ram Dass for some time. But since I was to be in Maui, not 10 minutes from his home, I requested some moments of his time, and he was gracious enough to receive me. His place is gorgeous, overlooking the sea. His living room features a very large holy shrine adorned with flowers, photos and sacred relics, that pays homage to his guru and many other saints from a diversity of religious traditions. Although he can swim in his pool and walk a bit with a walker, he is for the most part confined to a wheelchair, presumably for the rest of his life. Yet not only is he not complaining, it seems he has managed to arrive at an even happier and more content state of being than ever before! This is clear both from being in the room with him as well as from his own public talks about his personal process in the years since his stroke.
I first met Ram Dass in 1975 at the age of 23, when I was first emerging as a spiritual seeker, full of longing and penetrating questions, deeply hungry for answers and direction. Ram Dass was bigger than life, rapidly gaining worldwide notoriety as a counter-cultural hero and teacher to millions, and author of what was becoming the pivotal spiritual guidebook of those tumultuous times, "Be Here Now." He had returned from India wearing the trappings of that culture -- white robe and beads and long, wild hair and beard. But even in his more ordinary American attire, he exuded a powerful, loving presence that was quite palpable, penetrating and real.
I vividly remember the intensity and significance of our first meeting. He would often do an exercise with new students that involved sitting across from one another, eyeball to eyeball, with the instruction, "Anything that comes into your mind that you don't want to share with me, share with me." It was astounding for me to witness and subsequently reveal the vast array of normally private, psychological material -- shameful secrets, things I was embarrassed about and so forth -- and to feel the unconditional love pouring through his eyes as he listened silently to all that came spilling out of me in what amounted to being a liberating confessional of sorts. The exercise continued until I reached my limit, my line in the sand, where there were just certain things too horrible to say aloud, and I didn't, and he didn't ask me to.
And I never have, to him. In a way, I never completed that exercise. Although I had seen him many times in the interim, perhaps I should have used this visit in Maui to pick up where we had left off some 35 years ago when we first played that game, but this time I was determined to show up as an "adult." I wanted to approach my old spiritual teacher not as what George Bernard Shaw called a "bundle of grievances and ailments." I did not want to greet him as a needy spiritual seeker full of problems and questions looking for someone to provide me with answers. Rather, I wanted to have no particular agenda apart from paying my respects, human to human, to an old friend and mentor, with the awareness that I didn't know if we would ever meet again in this lifetime. (Ram Dass never leaves Maui, and this was my first visit there in nearly 25 years.)
I didn't want to arrive empty-handed; yet there didn't seem to be any physical object I could bring that would make any sense. It's all just "stuff." I had picked up various chatchkes around our house to bring to him, but my wife Shari nixed each one. Then, in Maui, a few days before we were to get together, someone was giving away a very long and exotic Hawaiian flower, and I thought that one of them, like a single rose, would make a nice offering. I put it in water for two days, but on the morning I was to drive over to meet Ram Dass, I discovered that the flower had started to turn brown and die. That would have had its own significance, I suppose, but I wanted to bring a fresh flower, and it was too late to look for a florist. As I drove to his house, I passed a field of wild flowers, pulled over and picked one beautiful fuchsia-colored flower on a thorny stem. I spent some time on the side of the road, scraping all the thorns off with my thumbnail until I felt confident that I could hand it to him without the risk of him getting pierced by a thorn.
Meanwhile, I was recalling a story Ram Dass used to tell of his early days in India, when he was agonizing over finding just the perfect gift for Maharaj-ji. He had finally settled on purchasing a beautiful blanket, because Maharaji basically only wore blankets, and Ram Dass carried the blanket with him throughout his travels, building up in his mind how wonderful it was going to be to present his beloved guru with this token of his great love, and how special he would feel as the bestower of such a perfect gift. But in fact, when he was finally sitting before his guru and with great ceremony presented him with the blanket, Majaraj-ji picked it up by the edges of one corner with two fingers, holding it up like a dead rat, and then turned and presented it to another devotee as a gift. He then turned to Ram Dass and asked, "Did I do the right thing?" "Perfect," Ram Dass responded. In that moment, he saw how much his ego had riding on the blanket; it was not a "clean" gift in that way, and Maharaj-ji held it up in that manner to indicate as much.
I examined myself carefully, but as far as I could discern, my flower offering was clean. I liked that I picked it in the wild and not at a store, and that I had smoothed off the thorns to protect his hands. And so, when he wheeled himself into his living room to see me, I rose to greet and hug him and presented him with the flower. He held it in his hand awhile, feeling it, contemplating it in silence. And continued to do so throughout our hour-plus conversation.
Because of my decision to come to him not wanting anything, the result was that in large part our meeting together remained mostly on a "chatty" level, in great contrast to the original soul-bearing, life-changing contact we had had over three decades earlier. But several times we lapsed into silence and simply gazed at one another, and I later concluded that it didn't matter what we talked about. Whatever connection or transmission that needed to occur was going to happen anyway. I suppose this is true of every interaction we have with everyone, but right or wrong, I give my relationship with Ram Dass more weight and significance than I do some others, despite his repeated reminders in the early days that the bus driver or your Aunt Gertrude just might be the Buddha.
At one point, after one of those silences, he said, "You're in good shape; you used to talk off the wall." I puzzled over that one for awhile, then recalled that when I had been badgering him to endorse my book and he wasn't returning any of my emails, each time I wrote him I opened with a bigger apology: "I don't mean to be a nuisance, please forgive me, maybe you didn't get my email" etc., and then even sent him a snail-mail letter on top of all that, until I finally browbeat him into at least agreeing to read my manuscript, but then as press time approached and I saw no blurb from him forthcoming, I bugged him one last time, and my apology had escalated to, "I know you must hate me and think I should rot in hell for all of eternity, but please know that our deadline is next week."
And to that he finally responded: "If you go to hell, I will miss you. Namaste, Ram Dass." I laughed -- a lot -- and I was simultaneously crestfallen. Because now I knew he was choosing not to endorse my book, it wasn't simply that my requests had gotten overlooked in a pile of mail. So perhaps my "rot in hell" routine was what he was referring to when he said I used to talk "off the wall." Though undoubtedly I had teetered on the wall many times before that.
Now, sitting across from him in Maui, talking about this and that, he suddenly said, quite out of the blue, "You should let something else, or someone else, write through you, instead of just writing from your ego." I felt a bit defensive, because I had not posted any blogs in months for that very reason; as an ego, I knew I simply had nothing much to say or offer, and yet nothing else seemed to be wanting to come through me either. In response to Ram Dass's suggestion, I said, "Well, I'm usually pretty dense when it comes to subtle energies or other dimensions." He replied, "Well, your ego is dense through and through, but your soul isn't."
That was a conversation stopper, and we fell into silence a bit. Who knows, though? Maybe this is what I sound like when I'm letting something else write through me! I always figured it would sound more like, "Blessings to all my children who come seeking union with their beloved." Maybe I am a channel for Shecky Greene rather than St. Germaine. (Given a choice, I would have opted for Kerouac.)
When the renowned Brazilian healer, Joao de Deus (John of God) came to the United States for the first time, I hopped a plane to Atlanta to meet him. Some two thousand of us, all dressed in nearly identical white yoga clothing, had the opportunity to walk past him for a brief moment, while he was presumably inhabited by a variety of "entities," the spirits of deceased physicians. Through a translator, he would quickly direct each person to either a healing room to receive psychic surgery from the non-physical guides that were hovering about, or to a meditation room to simply sit quietly in the energy that permeated the place and was tangible even to a closed-off, skeptical cynic like myself. After whisking people away one after the other in rapid succession, when I approached him the translator abruptly stopped me dead in my tracks, pointed at me and said firmly, "You, he wants to see in Brazil."
I moved on past, thinking to myself, I schlepped all the way to Atlanta to see him, why do I have to go to Brazil? I'm here now! Plus, how do I know if I go to Brazil he's not going to say, "You I want to see in Atlanta?" But I decided to go back a second day, and again I was one of two thousand new (and some repeat) visitors. Once again I watched person after person march by him in half a second, getting waved on to the healing room or the meditation room. And once again when I came before him the translator stopped me and said, "You he waits for in Brazil!" Needless to say, it gave me food for thought, but I never went.
I had heard that Ram Dass had gone down to Brazil to visit Joao's well-known healing center, known as the Casa, and had had very good things to say about it. He compared the loving, heart-opening atmosphere he discovered there to the feelings he had only experienced previously at his Guru's ashram in India, although he did not receive any physical healing of the stroke symptoms that had prompted the visit. I told him my story of meeting John of God, and receiving the repeated admonition to head to Brazil. Since Ram Dass had had a positive experience down there, I asked him if he thought it would be worth the trip for me to go. After a brief closed-eye contemplation, he responded, "Given your attitude, I don't think it would do you any good," and we both cracked up; it was so clearly the truth about me! I am famous for going to places like that in order to demonstrate that they don't work for me. I have a reputation to uphold as the 99th Monkey, the proverbial one who never gets it. (It's a really crummy job, trust me. You wouldn't want to be me.)
Earlier in our conversation, we were talking about his stroke, his physical condition, and with his left hand pointing to the paralyzed right side of his body, he made a a gesture of dismissal, and said, "Just my body," then pointing to his heart, added, "Not me." Of course some could argue this is just cognitive dissonance, that once you've lost half your body, your identity had better reside in the heart and soul, not the failing flesh. And I also realized that if I was to share with him any of my personal issues, I couldn't very well bring up my hurting knees or lower back or the osteoarthritis in my big toes.
Witnessing the contentment, joy and absence of struggle he was clearly enjoying, moment-to-moment, it was fairly obvious that he had arrived at a pretty happy place in his consciousness, stroke or no stroke. The wheelchair and the condition of his body were truly irrelevant to his primary self-identity as "loving awareness," a term from his current book, "Be Love Now." The new title ups the ante, nearly 40 years later, from merely being here now to being love now. I'm guessing they are interdependent, however, and arise together; if you are truly and fully present in the here and now, love is the inevitable outcome. Conversely, if you are truly "being love," you will find yourself in the here and now. But the one-word change in the title points the reader in an ever-so-subtly different direction, imbuing one's journey with a somewhat softer focus, somehow, perhaps a bit like moving from the austerity of a zendo to the bhakti-infused devotion of a Hindu temple.
When I got up to leave, he wheeled himself behind me, steering me in the direction of the altar (unless I went there on my own and he followed? I can't remember.) As I stood before the altar, he gently handed me back the flower, and I understood that I was to offer it, which I did, and gently set it down. My wild, thorn-free fuchsia-colored flower had been received, my offering had been accepted.
The flower reminded me of the time I saw Ram Dass several years after his stroke. He was making his first trip to Taos, New Mexico, to the Neem Karoli Baba Ashram there, in order to celebrate bhandara (commemorating Maharaji's mahasamadhi, the time of his passing from this Earth, which occurred in 1973.) It would be his first public appearance in several years. There were hundreds of people anxious to greet him personally, if only for a few moments. I didn't want to add to what I imagined might have been too much for him, or overwhelming, so I opted instead to go into a small meditation chamber in the rear of the ashram, away from the hubbub.
There were only one or two other people in the room. Not five minutes after I closed my eyes to meditate, I heard the door open, looked up, and someone was wheeling Ram Dass into the room. Feeling thrilled and privileged, I closed my eyes to enjoy this intimate meditation time with my teacher sitting right beside me. Some time passed, and we looked over and gazed into each other's eyes for a prolonged moment. Then, as the aide began to wheel him out, Ram Dass looked up at him and commented aloud, with his then still-limited speech, "Every individual, like a flower." It was his commentary, it seemed, about our silent interaction.
He left the room and I burst into tears, for through that one poetic remark I recognized that he was seeing the "flower part" of me, a precious and pure, unsullied natural place within that I myself had long since forgotten was still in there somewhere. And I also knew I wasn't special. He said every individual. What would that be like, to go through life seeing each person as if gazing at a flawless, beautiful blossom?
Our good-bye in Maui was less dramatic. I asked him if he still did spiritual practices, and he looked at me as if I was speaking Greek and asked, "Spiritual practices?" And I said, "You know, spiritual practices; you remember those." He replied, "I just hang out with Maharaj-ji." When you're living in the presence, certainty and awareness of "being love now," one is no longer doing anything in order to find or cultivate that love. I leaned over and kissed his bald head and said I love you, walking away and not looking back; just before I went out the door, he called out, "I love you too," and of course I didn't believe him, and got in the car and immediately thought I had acted like an idiot, wasted a precious opportunity to ask the deeper questions, and figured that he probably thought I was an a**hole. And still off the wall.
But that's just my way, and I got over it. Meanwhile, I have some gardening to do if I want this flower to bloom.
