A Parkinson's recovery journey
Sent to the email group:
My wife's book group was reading the Tara Brach book Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha (2003, 2023). She came upon this passage relevant to what many of us are doing, and passed it along to me. (Thanks, N!) Right on target, I'd say.
In a prior post I talked about the need to push past the medical establishment dogma that holds Parkinson's to be incurable. I offered a quote from JH that makes clear what a powerful impediment that dogma can be for someone trying to recover. And I mentioned that it can also shape the doubts of those around us. This too can fuel doubts of our own, interfering with our recovery.
It's been a while! I've actually written a portion of a more process oriented post. That's coming soon. But i wanted first to make this small point. You may have observed that my recovery will be one of those that's measured in years. While that might influence some readers to dismiss the JH practice as taking too long to be worth the bother, that would be a mistake! Here are two reasons:
[Updated 11/8/23]
I've written here frequently about maintaining the connection with your Friend. But what if you feel you're maintaining it but not getting the results you would hope for? My experience suggests it may be possible you're not, in fact, connecting with your Friend.
So what's going on? Well, in your efforts to communicate with your Friend your talking may have become mechanical such that you're now talking, in essence, to no one, to the void, if you will. Or you may have drifted, without realizing it, into talking more to yourself than to your Friend. I believe that at times I've experienced both of these diversions. [Update – 11/8/23: For some related discussion from JH see RFP (2020, p. 127) under the heading Talking by rote or requirement.]
When talking with my Friend, I aim for a connection that feels the same as if I were talking with some flesh and blood friend right there in the room with me. When I have that feeling I know I'm connecting directly with my Friend. (I also get feelings of energy in the head portion of the Du channel.) But sometimes I don't get that feeling. So how to fix this? I find a helpful technique lies in the use of the word “you.”
A few months ago I began writing a post about my increasing focus on letting my Friend guide me as completely as possible. It wasn't long, though, before I realized I still had so much more to learn about that process that I would do better to wait a while before writing about it.
When I woke up this morning the song below was going through my mind. I'll take that as a good sign! :–)
Those seriously involved in the JH practice may have some interest in comparing their daily musings about the practice with those of others. And so I have culled from my daily notes of the last couple of months a representative selection of thoughts about, and prompted by, this process. The material here is lightly edited for clarity, presented roughly in chronological order as it appeared in my notes. Added commentary appears in brackets. How do these thoughts compare with the daily thoughts you have about your own practice? Are they similar to or different from the kinds of things you think about? Contact me to let me know!
Here are two videos related to the idea of surrender, always an important topic in the JH practice. The first is from spiritual teacher Angelo Dilullo, and packs quite a number of nuanced insights about surrender into just a few minutes. The second, from Alan Watts, provides very lucid commentary on the closely related subject of trusting the universe.
In SOP (2022, p. 29) JH says:
“Brain research shows that having a silent conversation with someone loving and trusted, or even thinking about communicating with someone or something who is loving and trusted, stimulates activity in the striatum – a brain area that is electrically inhibited in people on either type of pause.”
On p. 67 she adds that activity in the pericardium is thereby increased as well.
Put simply, some of the key effects of communicating with your Friend can be had even by just thinking about doing so. Why does that matter? Well, in my own case, I've found I can stay connected with my friend more continuously by including “just thinking about communicating” in the equation.
Often I consider that my recovery would likely speed up enormously if only I could immerse myself completely and almost full-time in the connection and dialogue with my Friend. Of course I've made plenty of incremental progress in that regard, but the continuity of connection remains inconsistent.
For others who struggle with this I offer something I sent out to the email group a couple of months ago:
In RFP JH talks about different meanings of surrender in her approach, and the need to surrender to the dialogue with your invisible friend (see p. 204). And in my ongoing quest to more consistently stay connected with my invisible friend, I recently had a thought that may be helping me stay oriented in the right direction. Here's what I wrote in my off-and-on journal: