Monday, March 31, 2008

On wisdom and music

I am studying for the test and taking a little break to write on the blog. On Friday I went to the Rubin Museum of Art again to see the new exhibits and I encountered the CD with the soundtrack from the SAMSARA movie. Just seeing the cover with the scene of the movie, a monk against a background of Himalayas, brought memories to me of my short time spent in Tibet and Nepal and being surrounded by vast spaces and mountains. The vast spaces around me and connection to nature give me the feeling of such freedom... The concrete around me now is so limiting... It's much more difficult to retain the sense of freedom in this present scenery. The music composed for this movie includes voices of the Himalayan people and instruments such as Armenian duduk, Japanese flute, Indian sarangi, Mongolian violin. The music is transcendental. The movie is beautiful, deep and simple, and I saw it in Kathmandu - I wrote about it on the blog after I saw it. I read the director's statement on making the movie and his spiritual connection to it and it deeply moved me. Here's what he says: " I went to a school called life and taught myself cinema. I always knew that I wanted to make films, even before I saw one at the age of nine. I lived in a very small and poor village in India, next to a railway junction where many trains stopped but only to exchange passangers. My village was nobody's destination. As a kid I sold tea on this unique railway platform. I would often sit on the deserted rail track, waiting eternally for a train to arrive, staring at five empty cups of tea, hanging from my five fingers." During my travels in India so many times I observed boys and men selling tea, walking around railway stations, streets of cities and villages and walking through the cars of trains. The image of cups hanging from five fingers is vivid in my mind, always...

Yesterday I took another of these boring communication and clinical skills classes. The material covered has nothing to do with ethics, at least not what I would consider ethics or anything that would bring me any realisations... It's just part of the curriculum and I had to take these classes. The school is changing its profile and is changing for the worse but I will write about this some other time. This time I just wanted to write about this class. During the class we watched a movie on Rumi and his poetry. It was basically a group of translators and literary persons talking about him and his work and how difficult it is to translate works such as these into English, etc. At one point of the movie one of the translators is meeting with a Turkish musician in Turkey and the musician tells him: "Forget about books, throw them all out." And the translator says: "But I like books, I learn so much from them." The two men talk about different things because they belong to different cultures and although they understand the words, they don't understand the meaning or the different meanings the words may have. The Turkish man really says: "You will learn from books how the material reality work - you are in it so it will help you adjust to it and make things easier for yourself. But if you are looking for answers to your deepest questions, you have to look in you. You will not learn the deepest meaning of life from books. You can only learn it from experience, daily experience and relationship of things, and your relationship to them, the illusive things and images that can't be captured in words". The American translator doesn't understand him. He looks for answers to his questions in literary works and believes it is the only way. Before my trip in 05 and 06 I read books very seriously, thinking they will bring me answers. Now I read them for entertainment. I study all this material for school and read a lot of books. It's all very interesting but it always is teaching me only the skill to do things - they are only teaching me the reality of one, material, dimension. The images I experienced during my trip, and also in NY but to a lesser degree because here the energy is scattered and hectic and concentration is fleeting, is what gives me connection to different dimensions, not as visible as the material but equally present. I am learning the skill of putting needles, applying herbs, moxa and guasha, but if I don't have the deeper connection with universal energy I am not going to be of any help to anyone. What heals is presence and wisdom. What brings me to wisdom is the image of tea cups hanging from five fingers and other images which I can't really describe.

Here's a line I also found in the CD:

"The winds of grace blow all the time. All we need to do is set our sails."
Ramakrishna

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Various thoughts...

I mentioned before that Steve Brown, a friend since my time at FSG, has been sending for 10 years, from time to time, "Steve's Questions" to a group of people who all met at FSG and of whom some are still there and others are somewhere else but who are all still linked by "Steve question". Recently the question involved an "original thought" that the participants may think of and some people replied with some really great original thoughts. The most interesting to me was the idea of the USA buying Canada. The reason for such purchase was as follows: the climate is changing and soon the terrain of the USA will become a barren land, a desert, while Canada will become a moderately warm place. (I would just add to that that the USA would have to kindly ask China if they would lend them more money for the purchase.) Further, the USA should sell Hawaii to Japanese because with snows thawing at the poles, it will soon disappear under water anyways. Isn't that a very interesting and original idea? The reason why the USA will become a barren land is not only due to climate change. I was reading a magazine devoted to nature of the US and its national parks and it seems that great majority of the "wild West" and the national parks is dying of pollution and toxic radioactive waste that is dumped there. This isn't an original thought but came to my mind when I was reading Steve's compilation of responses to his question.

And another idea came to my mind that has to do with my class at the school's acupuncture clinic. The last two weeks at the clinic were very interesting because some new walk-in patients came and we had very new cases to discuss. The way it work is that I follow an intern Ann who is in her 8th semester so is pretty advanced in her skills. She does the intake, checks the pulses and the tongue, and then I get the chance to ask any additional questions that I might think are relevant, and also check pulses and tongue. Then we discuss the case and Ann presents it to our supervisor (a licensed acupuncturist) and he approves or suggests changes to our treatment plan and then we go back to the patient and Ann does the treatment and I help her if I can (doing moxa or guasa since I can't needle patients yet). We had, this semester, various people of various ages, backgrounds and ailments. However, what came to my mind recently is that all these people have one thing in common - they all live in a culture that promotes what we call "excess". Basically it's a culture that promotes habits of wanting more, eating more (or none at all, which is also excess or the other extreme), getting lots of stimulation of all kinds all the time, excessive desire, excessive expectations, etc. They come to the clinic and they tell us they are constantly tired. Why are they feeling so tired? They have been running around all the time all their lives, doing so many things, sleeping 5 hours per day, having fun, and now they feel this fatigue all the time. What happened? - they ask us. Well... it's not so hard to understand... after 20, 30, 40 years of this excessive running around the body gets tired and it just shows the person to slow down, recharge, recover, rest... Some people don't eat, they just don't eat... They basically starve themselves or live on coke or other soda and sandwiches grabbed here and there and eaten in haste. They poop twice a week and consider it normal... but they ask why they have digestive problems... It's not possible for the body, and mind, to be healthy with that kind of abuse. The body is like a flower - you have to constantly water it, put it out to get some sunlight, nourish with some plant food, change soil from time to time, delicately clean the leaves... But the culture they live in approves of such lifestyle so how do you tell them that in order to get healthy they need to change their lifestyle... It's very difficult. It's so easy to take a pill or two but so hard to change habits which were ingrained early on. For some people the idea of resting and relaxing is strange (you do that on vacation - two weeks per year). Time has to be filled out entirely, to the last minute, with some kind of stimulation of the senses. I don't have a tv at home but when I get a glimpse of it when I am at someone else's home, I see how the mind is "trained" to thinking this way - the programs change with amazing speed, the advertisements are trying to pack so much in a few seconds - my mind feels violated by this speed and amount of information... It seems the real tragedy happens for the people who get retired. They suddenly loose that need to run around (and wouldn't have the strength to do it anyways) but haven't developed any peaceful activities which would fill their time. I am thinking of these old grandpas and grandmas in South America and some places in Europe who just sit in old market squares, or cafes, among other grandpas and grannies and sit and sit and just talk or don't talk but look content as fat cats warming up on window sills. The granpas and grandmas who come to our clinic have a very different state of mind: it seems they are in panic - so much time and nothing to do. A lot of this has to due with the fact that people don't build communities here so they are really on their own. They have few friends, they don't know their neighbors... In the end it creates emptiness. If you have friends and neighbors you spent your entire life with, you can sit in a cafe and not even say anything - you just feel good in their company and you can "just be".

Speaking about friends we had a very nice Easter celebration this year. Last year I spent Easter on a plane, coming from Poland to NY, and this year I was blessed with spending it with friends. It was supposed to be a small party but then it turned out there were many immigrant souls without families to celebrate Easter so we ended up celebrating it in a 14-people group at my small apartment. Everybody brought something, Gosia and two Patrycjas cooked some delicious festive specialties, there was wine and herbal tea, babkas and kekses, and lots of nice music and calm energy. Marta, our rising star of opera singing (who just got into Manhattan School of Music so we can let go of fingers which we were crossing all the time) sang for us parts from Carmen and other operas and it was beautiful and very emotional. We went for a walk looking for some green but in Jackson Hts. where I live there are no public parks, unfortunately. We just encountered a garden adjecent to an Anglican Church and longingly looked at irises and grass from behind the fence. We decided we will have to find time this coming semester to go to the beach because it's really hard for us to live without nature and the only place you can really feel space and see the horizon in NY is at the beach.

Today I, hopefully, passed the first final exam in this semester. I have 4 more to pass, one next week and three the following week. I am glad the semester is almost over and I will be able to go on vacation and spend time walking in the forest with my dogs - which, as I mentioned before, is my absolute favorite activity of all activies.

Thursday, March 06, 2008

Pictures















The picture which you see in the "Almost Spring" post was made by my friend Marcin who lives in Warsaw. He took it a few years ago on the Baltic coast near Wiselka - the village in which Michal lives. I also used this picture on my Syrena website because I really like it.

Grzes, my neighbor who created the Syrena website, showed me how to put pictures on the blog so now I can put some from time to time. This picture is of my friends and I at Gosia and Rashid's new apartment. We were playing with the new furniture.





Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Almost spring


Mom came and left already. The month passed slowly and quickly at the same time. I tried to show my mom NY and took her to some tourist places in Manhattan but I think she felt most comfortable in my neighborhood, in Queens, full of immigrants and looking cozy in comparison to other parts of NY. She wasn't very impressed with it and very glad to be going home to daily walks with the dogs in the forest. We spent a lot of time paying visits to various institutions. My mother is entitled to receive benefits from social security (after my father's death) but to be entitled and to actually receive it is two different things so we spent a lot of time at the immigration office, social security office, court houses, etc., trying to close my father's affairs here and take care of her affairs. The only institution which is a pleasant place to visit and where there are high manners, helpful atmosphere, and humane treatment is the Polish consulate. After my previous experience with the immigration office I thought there could be nothing worse but it turns out that the Supreme Court of the USA beats everything... The immigration office has actually much improved since I was there last time about five years ago. The building got remodeled and people who work there are actually quite nice. They are not very knowledgeable but at least they are nice. That's a huge improvement. At the court house they are not knowledgeable and quite ignorant actually. I went there several times and each time different documents were needed. Every time I had to see a different clerk and explain the whole situation all over again. When I say that my father died in Poland I see this puzzlement on the clerks' faces... I wait for some response... I "see" the neurons in their brains firing, going back and forth, straining, trying to remember where this state called Poland is... or maybe it's an island on the Pacific that just got annexed to the United States... When I see they are about to get a stroke - from all that straining - I explain where Poland is, that mysterious country inhabited by almost 40 million people. I wouldn't actually mind their being so ignorant - not everybody is born equal (which is the advertisement here but not the reality) and has access to education or education that is educating. The reason why I let them strain is that they are mean to petitioners and everybody who comes to that office is treated like garbage. So I asked Ganesh to put some obstacles on their path, so that they learn the basic law of karma which really just means that what goes around, comes around. The faster they learn that lesson the better for their souls and for all the next petitioners who will come after me to the court. A little respect on their part would make our lives much easier and more pleasant.

I have about 5 weeks of this semester left. Feeling happy about it. With all the information we are getting on extra channels (besides the main 12 channels I wrote a little about earlier) I begin to feel that my head is getting very full again and it feels I almost can't take much more or it will all become a mush. I don't know if I mentioned this before, I think I did, that I had this great pathology class with Adriano Borgna, an MD from Italy who now is also a practitioner of Chinese medicine and who also practices environmental medicine. I really like this approach. It basically consists of detoxifying the body of heavy metals and toxins, arranging healthy diet and overall healthy life style. And then applying some Western med. tests which may apply and acupuncture and herbs. The main concept is that if the body is nourished with good, organic or biodynamic food, free of toxins, oxygenated and rested, it will defend itself better and keep diseases at bay. Hugs are very important (at least twice a day according to Adriano). Here's his website: www.macrohealing.com. Check it out for the general guidelines. The worst, when it comes to diet, is margarine and hydrogenated oils, and artificial sweeteners (including sugarless gum which is packed with aspartame). Spring is coming so do spring cleaning, of house and garden but mostly of the body and mind. Clean your colon and digestive tract, your nose and sinuses, liver and gallbladder, and blood. Ask for herbs at your pharmacies, for detoxifying massages (every old medical tradition has them, a very good one is the Ayurvedic Panchakarma), neti pots for the nose, spend time outside close to nature and oxygen, and go for brisk walks in the sun. Do some meditation to clear the mind of impurities and you will be like new. I am planning to do all this myself, except the brisk walks in the sun will have to wait for April - I will be going to Poland for the break between semesters to rest and get some energy for the spring/summer semester. Good night everyone.