DHARMA MEDICINE

Until we change our restless, discontented mind we shall never find true happiness.

By Coach Cary Bayer  www.carybayer.com

My friend Gary, an acupuncturist and Nature photographer, often has chronic back pain. He sometimes gets relief from chiropractic, acupuncture, and massage, but sometimes pain is so bad he can’t stand up straight. Once, while preparing his house for a visit from several childhood friends, pain was so intense he had to lay down.
When people hear that he was recently on a special photography vacation in Scotland’s hills where every day there was significant hiking with camera and tripod through rugged terrain to take exquisite photographs he didn’t experience back pain.

Coincidence?

Or was doing something he loves so much stronger than back pain? Better yet, doing what he most loves put him so much in the flow of being on purpose that this spiritual fact was greater than physical back pain and acted as a kind of holistic “medicine,” more than acupuncture, chiropractic, and massage?

The relationships between Dharma and medicine is worth pursuing. By dharma, I’m referring to the performance of those activities that are most appropriate for a particular person.
Taking pictures with a camera in the Scottish highlands is not my dharma, but it is Gary’s. There’s much that we don’t know about the relationship between what a person does and how his health is.
We do know, however, that an estimated 75-80 percent of disease is caused or complicated by stress. Drug dependence can add to this statistic, as well. We’re well aware that health can be jeopardized when someone is out of the flow of things. There are jobs people hate but do — to pay the mortgage that are so harmful and toxic that they lead to heart disease and sometimes even death itself. But what about the other side of this equation?

Can doing what is most right for you keep you healthy longer and even help you heal existing diseases?  With National Recovery Month upon us we know that sobriety can keep one healthy longer, too.

A case in point close to home: I’ve been meditating since the age of 17 and teaching meditation since the age of 20. From the age of about four till the age of 16, I was getting weekly shots from my pediatrician for hay fever and rose fever symptoms.

These maladies affected me so severely that I literally could not walk past a lawn that was being mowed. My reaction to freshly cut grass was so intense that I would need several packages of tissues to rub my terribly itchy eyes and a bottle of Estivin to take the redness out of them. My nose also became terribly stuffed, so those tissues did double duty. To say that I was a mess was an understatement.

Things began to change when, at the age of 17, I started Transcendental Meditation, a wonderful technique for creating deep relaxation. Shortly thereafter, my symptoms improved somewhat. Within nine months of starting the practice I would say that symptoms had improved by a good 50 percent. Within two and a half years they had disappeared completely. I could have had two-hour picnic with my girlfriend while lawnmowers were working feverishly without any trace of hay fever or rose fever.

How do we explain such a dramatic healing?

Could it be that the practice of meditation, while certainly strengthening my immune system, might have contributed to the healing of these allergies? That would be the logical explanation by anyone who understands mind/body medicine, by anyone who comprehends the relationship between stress and illness, between the relaxing of the nervous system and the reducing of nervousness in that system. Perhaps the itchy eyes and stuffed nose were a nervous reaction to the presence of ragweed and pollen in my environment.

But what about the possibility that, because meditation is my dharma, doing it helped me heal these diseases? Maybe it was the connection to my dharma is what caused the healing. We might conclude, therefore, that living your dharma can help you become healthier and free of certain illnesses. Perhaps it can even extend longevity. And since prosperity includes financial abundance and abundant well-being, we can see that doing your dharma enhances your prosperity on both fronts.