The Enlightened MD PhD: Confessions of an MD PhD Heretic: November 2015

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Get Naked!

Take off your clothes

No, not your actual clothes

Well, you can do that too

Take off that overcoat of ego

Shed your protective layer

Be free

Sit

or Walk

Dance!

Examine this racing mind

Do not be discouraged

If you didn’t stop to look at your racing mind…

You would never see it was running so fast…

It is all OK

Everything unfolds

Exactly as it will

Yet we must act

Paradox upon Paradox

Yet

Paradox

Reveals

Truth

Peel away the layers

Until there is nothing left

Source

Is always shining

Beneath the clouds

Of your thoughts

Rejoice!

Sunday, November 22, 2015

Navel Gazing at the Center of the Universe

My wife is studying in a 9-month advanced yoga class, studying the theory, sutras, and practice of yoga.

As part of her class she picks one type of meditation, of several that are offered.

She chose “navel gazing.”

I remember that “navel gazing” was the snarky remark that was present in the 1960’s regarding what meditators do during meditation.

I often try out new meditations to see what comes up.

Of course, being the designated heretic, I didn’t get the exact instructions.

The “navel” has great significance in Eastern practices.

In my time in karate and aikido we learned to move from the tanden, located 2-fingerbreaths below the navel and centered within the body. This area has many names, hara, tan t’ien, dantian, dan tian.

This is the gravitational center of the body. When you move in karate, aikido, or tai chi, you bend your knees slightly to lower your center of gravity and you move as if a string were attached to this center point, pulling you forward, backward, or sideways.

In traditional Japanese and Chinese medicine this area is also the center of qi or life force energy.

When I teach meditation, I often ask the students to bring their consciousness down from their heads into their abdomen, breathing from awareness of the movement of the abdomen.

So, waking at 2 am, as I am wont to do, I sat on my cushion with awareness of this area of the body.

What came up was “this area is the center of the universe.”

Then, every being has this center, and therefore, “every being is the center of the universe.”

To further complicate this meditation, arose “every holon is the center of the universe.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holon_(philosophy)

What I first felt was a buzzing sensation of this area of my body.

This was followed by a spreading of the sensation that all beings are buzzing at this center.

Next arose the sensation that every cell, molecule, and subatomic particle in this body-mind is vibrating.

Then the sensation of the entire universe vibrating…

Interesting!

Later I was contemplating this paradox.

How can everything be the center of the universe?

Well, current scientific and mathematical theory says that there is no edge to the universe.

https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/seuforum/faq.htm

If there is no edge, then there is no known center.

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/GR/centre.html

If there is no center, then the opposite is also true; everything is at the center of the universe.

Perhaps this can be taken as “mind-blowing.”

Perhaps, this can also be taken as the simple Truth.

Truth is found in Paradox.

Our minds are too primitive to understand the nature of the universe.

However, we can grok what is true.

“Grok /ˈɡrɒk/ is a word coined by Robert A. Heinlein for his 1961 science-fiction novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, where it is defined as follows:

Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us (because of our Earthling assumptions) as color means to a blind man.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok

Gotta love Heinlein!

He got it.

Everything is connected to everything else.

We think we are separate beings.

We are separate, but only on a superficial level.

We are holons.

Separate beings on one level.

Completely connected to the entire universe on the level of Truth.

Perhaps we can slowly grok this.

And

act

accordingly…

Namaste

Sunday, November 1, 2015

Naikan Therapy

“Nikon therapy?” I was thinking to myself.

Psychotherapy using photography?

I was confused!

My wife, my mother-in-law, and myself, were sitting in on an intake session at Kansai University Department of Psychosomatic Medicine.

The patient was a middle-aged taxi driver with abdominal discomfort.

The doctor first did a typical Western medical intake along with a dietary and an in-depth social history.

He then went on to do an in-depth physical exam, and an in-the-room abdominal ultrasound, no technician needed.

My wife and I were visiting her family in Japan.

I got to give a talk at Kansai University.

Due to my interest in mind-body medicine I was invited to sit in on this patient’s intake. As my wife is a nurse also with a long-term interest in mind-body medicine, she was invited as well. My mother-in-law was invited as an additional translator.

Psychosomatic medicine?

That practice had not existed in the US since the 1970’s, but now is being reconsidered as a legitimate field of medicine, recently being recognized as a psychiatric subspecialty.

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/726444_2

In Japan and Germany, Departments of Psychosomatic Medicine never went away.

The doctor recommended dietary changes, supplements, no conventional medications, and Naikan Therapy. In Japan, Naikan Therapy means you spend a week or more in a hospital contemplating 3 questions:

What have I received from __________ ?

What have I given to __________ ?

What troubles and difficulties have I caused __________ ?

http://www.todoinstitute.org/naikan3.html

Dan Goleman wrote a nice review article on Naikan Therapy in 1986 for the NY Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/03/science/in-japan-gratitude-to-others-is-stressed-in-psychotherapy.html?pagewanted=all

I’m writing this today because of an article entitled Naikan Therapy written by Gregg Krech in this month’s Tricycle, Winter 2015.

This article started my thinking about our visit to Japan in 2008.

I am the course director for our first and second year medical student’s elective in Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

Accent on the fact that this is an “elective” course. Maybe 10-30 students, of 175, take this course each year.

There is no required teaching on mind-body medicine in my medical school.

Is that crazy, or what!

Yes, I am a medical heretic.

But, ignoring mind-body medicine?

Ignoring psycho-neuro-endocrine-immunology?

Yes folks, we are still in the dark ages.

There is even a Mindful Magazine.

Come on now. This is the year 2015, and there is no required course that teaches about meditation, supplements, acupuncture, yoga, or tai chi in our conventional medical school education.