CHAPTER 26:
What if?
September
13th 2012
I
just got home from my second Chi treatment with Shifu. I am having a bad time with my asthma even
with all the Prednisone and steroidal inhalants over the past several days and
I have begun the cold clammy sweating that goes along with poor oxygen
saturation and the bodies effort to remedy it.
I was ready for some help.
The
school was quiet. Shifu and I went into
the studio and I told him about the difficulty I have been having quieting my
mind in the meditation. With all the
albuterol and the Prednisone comes this manic state of mind; my mind races 24/7
and I have a hard time staying focused on what I wanted to do next. My body is shaking from all the
bronchodilators, my blood pressure is high, and my resting heart rate is never
below 91. In short, I’m wound like a spring, but I still can’t breathe.
He clearly understood all that was happening medically and physiology (Shifu has a doctorate in medicine) and explained to me that the inability to quiet the mind is a double edged sword. The noise means the mind is trying to deal with life and the chaos taking place within the body. But being unable to control the noise enough to calm the mind and allow the channels to open to the healing energy is problematic. So today, the entire chi treatment focused on maintaining control over my breathing.
For
most this is a relatively easy thing to do.
You just close your eyes and listen to Shifu’s instructions; when to
breathe in, when to breathe out; coordinated with slow movement of the body
when he instructs so. As an asthmatic in
crisis, I felt like a fish on dry land.
My gills were pumping, my blowers were blowing, my flippers were
flipping, my diaphragm was straining to clear the trapped air from my lungs,
and all the while I was hearing Shifu say, “relax your mind; relax your chest;
breathe in deeply…”. I don’t know how
long we chi’d, I just know that 2/3rds of the way into the treatment, I felt
those spasmed ligaments that line the trachea and bronchus relax. It happened like a breeze of wind followed by
breaths that were all at once restorative and unlabored. What an incredible feeling to experience in
the midst of a bad, prolonged crisis.
As
I drove home I wondered - what would my life be like today if I had responded
to my “adult on-set asthma diagnosis” at age 19 proactively rather than reactively?
Where would I be now if I had sought non-traditional therapy’s, learned
meditation and relaxation techniques early on, and achieved mastery of the
anxiety that is habitual with chronic breathing problems; what if? Why does my Western mind reflexively view
these alternatives as the option of last resort, so much so that it has taken
me 34 years to get to Shaolin? And
again, what if?
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