Trying to figure out how to move forward. What are the magic words? Very successful people are probably people who get a lot done on their own. They may also fit themselves into systems and organizations well. Everybody's disgusted with me because I keep asking them for stuff. What should I do now?
The way to understand health is to think about tissues. Let's imagine a simplified representation of a tissue. Imagine a sphere, and inside it are many little dots. The sphere is an organ, or part of a body: a volume of tissue. The little dots are cells.
If this tissue is healthy, the cells in it are healthy, and if the cells in the tissue are healthy, the tissue is healthy. Cells are little beings, and healthy cells are vibrant, happy, doing their jobs fast and well.
Cells are sustained by circulation. A tissue is like a sponge, and circulation moves through a tissue the way water moves through a sponge. Circulation isn't something that gets pumped into cells, it's something cells are bathed in, and they can get what they need from it.
As long as cells are bathed in healthy circulation, they will strongly tend to be healthy. Healthy circulation has two components. One is the quality of what's circulating, but the other, more importantly perhaps, is the quality of the circulation itself: is it free and easy, or sluggish and constrained.
When circulation is sluggish and constrained, cells become starved of their needs. They then become unhappy, and, sometimes, rebellious. That's what cancer is: unhappy cells rebelling, or running amok.
How, then, can healthy, abundant circulation be maintained? How can we maintain healthy, abundant circulation in all parts of our bodies? It's an interesting fact that just thinking about healthy abundant free flowing circulation in a specific part of our bodies helps tremendously to create that healthy, vital condition. The body is not as automatic as we tend to think. Our conscious minds actually are involved in functions like circulation, as a matter of general principle. If we recognize that fact, we can use it for our health. If we don't, we are left somewhat helpless.
Pain is our cells communicating distress to our conscious minds. If we feel pain in a certain part of our bodies, that's cells in that place telling our conscious minds, "Hey, conscious mind of this body, we've got some limited circulation going on, here. Please give some attention to free flowing and abundant circulation in this area." You can solve a lot of health problems, and even be kind of invincibly healthy, by giving attention to your cells in this way.
When we feel pain, we feel something like lumps of pain. When circulation becomes impeded in a tissue, it's like, say, clay, accumulating in a sponge. It can form a rather solid mass. To restore circulation in an area where something has accumulated and solidified in a tissue, we can't just blast out the obstructive mass. It doesn't work that way. We'll damage surrounding tissues and make the obstruction even more solid. The solution is to bathe an obstructed mass is circulation. Just gently push the circulation around it. Then it will begin to dissolve from the outside, a little at a time, and from the inside, by its own osmotic tendencies. Gently bathe an obstruction in circulation, by imagining that happening, and it will progress very quickly, this opening of circulation into every part of the body, this liberation from obstruction of circulation.
The body also has automatic responses to impeded circulation. Coughing is an example. Coughing is not a sign of disease, it's a sign of health. It's your body working on circulation in specific areas. For this reason, we should cough with gusto, and here's where people get into trouble: they think coughing is a sign of disease, so they suppress the cough. There are times and reasons to suppress a cough, but it is healthy to also sometimes cough with gusto. "This cough is developing free circulation in my body and clearing obstructions from my tissues. I will cough loudly and freely and happily." And people who continually suppress coughing can end up not being able to suppress coughing at all. The coughing isn't doing its job well, because it's being suppressed, so the need for it becomes more and more urgent and continuous.
Still, there is one way of suppressing a cough which can be very useful and healing. Usually we suppress a cough out of something like politeness. But if we are having trouble controlling a cough, if we consciously suppress it, we will feel increasingly strong tickling sensations, until, usually, we at last cannot suppress the cough any longer. If, however, we work very hard not to cough, in these situations, the tickling sensations will become very intense. If, in such situations, we pay very, very close attention to those tickling sensations, really commit ourselves to feeling them and feeling them, that has the effect I was speaking of, of sending circulation to the affected area. I cured myself of pneumonia using this technique. I was coughing and coughing and felt terrible, really sick. I was lying in bed at night. Desperate, I hit on the idea of practicing zazen - zen "sitting" -, something with which I had had some small experience, because in zazen we work hard to suppress our coughs, and, consequently, intensely experience the tickling sensations that stimulate coughing. As soon as I got into my sitting position and started to meditate, I felt much more peaceful. Then I worked really hard to feel the tickling in my throat more and more intensely while not coughing. And I was able to do it. I was able to not cough. And then the tickling started to abate. After a while, I was fine. The next morning, my cold was simply gone.
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