adaptation energy...

"It is as though we had hidden reserves of adaptability, or adaptation energy, throughout the body... Only when all of our adaptability is used up will irreversible, general exhaustion and death follow."

(Hans Selye MD)

preserve your adaptiveness by meeting each moment afresh. it's that simple. we can defy current models of aging and adaptation-depletion, and transform intergenerational and collective traumas into wisdoms...

"Adaptiveness is the capacity to respond to external stressors without rigidity, with flexibility and creativity, without excessive anxiety and without being overwhelmed by emotion."

(Gabor Mate MD)

blame...

"Blame becomes a meaningless concept if one understands how family history stretches back through the generations. 'Recognition of this quickly dispels any disposition to see the parent as villain,' wrote John Bowlby.'"

(Gabor Mate MD)

anxiety regulation...

"Compared with adult rats who received less nurturing, in adult rats who had been licked and groomed more by their mothers the amygdala was found to contain many more benzodiazepine receptors. Maternal care in infancy influenced the physiology of anxiety regulation in the brain of the adult. These differences were not explained by genetic factors."

(Gabor Mate MD)

proximal separations...

"Infants whose caregivers were too stressed, for whatever reason, to give them the necessary attunement contact will grow up with a chronic tendency to feel alone with their emotions, to have a sense - rightly or wrongly - that no one can share how they feel, that no one can 'understand.' 

"In proximate separations the parents are physically present but emotionally absent.... Experiences of proximate separation become part of the person's psychological programming: people 'trained' in this way in childhood are likely to choose adult relationships that re-enact repeated proximal separation dynamics.

"In the parent-child interaction is established the child's sense of the world: whether this is a world of love and acceptance, a world of neglectful indifference in which one must root and scratch to have one's needs satisfied or, worse, a world of hostility where one must forever maintain an anxious hyper vigilance. Future relationships will have as their templates nerve circuits laid down in our relationships with our earliest caregivers. We will understand ourselves as we have felt understood, love ourselves as we perceived being loved on the deepest unconscious levels, care for ourselves with as much compassion as, at our core, we perceived as young children." 

(Gabor Mate MD)

While I appreciate the depiction of early programming, being written in such code can be used as a gift, a jumping off point for developing the self mastery of restraint around such physiologic and psychological echoes of old worlds. The only way to throw off the old in the present moment is to throw off the compulsion of reacting according to the impulses of our design rather than the bodhicitta intention of tenderhearted lovingkindness...

maitri...

"Along with clear seeing, there's another important element, and that's kindness. It seems that, without clarity and honesty, we don't progress. We just stay stuck in the same vicious cycle. But honesty without kindness makes us feel grim and mean, and pretty soon we start looking like we've been sucking on lemons. We become so caught up in introspection that we lose any contentment or gratitude we might have had. The sense of being irritated by ourselves and our lives and other people's idiosyncrasies becomes overwhelming. That's why there's so much emphasis on kindness.

"Sometimes it's expressed as heart, awakening your heart. Often it's called gentleness. Sometimes it's called unlimited friendliness. But basically kindness is a down-to-earth, everyday way to describe the important ingredient that balances out the whole picture and helps us connect with unconditional joy. As the Vietnamese teacher Thich Nhat Hanh says, 'Suffering is not enough.'"

(Pema Chodron)

repression...

"Repression - dissociating emotions from awareness and relegating them to the unconscious realm - disorganizes and confuses our physiological defences so that in some people these defences go awry, becoming the destroyers of health rather than its protectors."

"The fundamental problem is not the external stress but an environmentally conditioned helplessness that permits neither of the normal responses of fight or flight. The resulting internal stress becomes repressed and therefore invisible. Eventually, having unmet needs or having to meet the needs of others is no longer experienced as stressful. It feels normal. One is disarmed."

"Hans Selye discovered that the biology of stress predominantly affected three types of tissues or organs in the body: in the hormonal system, visible changes occurred in the adrenals; in the immune system, stress affected the spleen, the thymus and the lymph glands; and the intestinal lining of the digestive system... pathological effects are generated by central nervous system pathways and by hormones."

"For those habituated to high levels of internal stress since early childhood, it is the absence of stress that creates unease, evoking boredom and a sense of meaningless. People may become addicted to their own stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol."

(Gabor Mate MD)

on the vital necessity of imperfection...

"We think that if we just meditated enough or jogged enough or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect. But from the point of view of someone who is awake, that's death. Seeking security or perfection, rejoicing in feeling confirmed and whole, self-contained and comfortable, is some kind of death. It doesn't have any fresh air. There's no room for something to come in and interrupt all that. We are killing the moment by controlling our experience. Doing this is setting ourselves up for failure, because sooner or later, we're going to have an experience we can't control: our house is going to burn down, someone we love is going to die, we're going to find out we have cancer, a brick is going to fall out of the sky and hit us in the head, or somebody's going to spill tomato juice all over our white suit.

The essence of life is that it's challenging. Sometimes it is sweet, and sometimes it is bitter. Sometimes your body tenses, and sometimes it relaxes or opens. Sometimes you have a headache, and sometimes you feel 100 percent healthy. From an awakened perspective, trying to tie up all the loose ends and finally get it together is death, because it involves rejecting a lot of your basic experience. There is something aggressive about that approach to life, trying to flatten out all the rough spots and imperfections into a nice smooth ride.

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually in no-man's-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again. From the awakened point of view, that's life. Death is wanting to hold on to what you have and to have every experience confirm you and congratulate you and make you feel completely together. So even though we say the yama mara is fear of death, its actually fear of life." 

(Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart)

inquiries...

in lieu of facebook email: maudeworks at gmail dot com

healing...

"Healing is an active and internal process that includes investigating one's attitudes, memories, and beliefs with the desire to release all negative patterns that prevent one's full emotional and spiritual recovery. This internal review inevitably leads one to review one's external circumstances in an effort to recreate one's life in a way that serves activation of will - the will to see and accept truths about one's life and how one has used one's energies; and the will to begin to use energy for the creation of love, self-esteem, and health.

"Healing requires taking action. It is not a passive event. We are meant to draw on our inner resources, to find material strength to leave behind our outmoded beliefs and behaviours, and to see ourselves in new healthy ways - to take up our beds and walk." (Carolyn Myss, The Anatomy of Spirit)

update

one drain just out, the second to follow on Christmas Day...

I will be fully updating my accounts here once I'm back to my office... tapping out posts on a phone is too tedious for me at the moment. I expect to be back at work Monday 6 January... my recovery continues to outpace the average thanks to homeopathy and divinely-inspired movement work... I say divinely-inspired as I long ago turned controls over from brain to body intuition, the portal for grace in our lives... listening to the body has become my main passion and the adventure of a lifetime... 

more soon, happy holidays, remember to put the accent on what you can give, what opens the heart, and forget about the rest... :)

new ideas...

"With three major papers in three major journals after my first year of research, I felt I'd arrived. The world has a way of cutting you down to size, however, and in the science game the method is known as citation. No matter how important your paper is, it doesn't mean anything unless it's cited as a reference in new papers by others and you get a respectable number of requests for reprints. On both counts, I was a failure. I was learning how science treats new ideas that conflict with old ones." [Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric]

I've been blessed by beautiful workmanship...!

tremendous success!!!

my godsend of a surgeon did a simply fabulous job, this little community hospital was spot on every step of the way...! I was on my feet after only a few hours, surprising the nurses, thank arnica and a positive attitude for that. now is time for lots of rest, gentle but persistent physio, and a recharge of my batteries for a wonderful new year ahead!!!! 

early bird...

just got the call, my little design modification is scheduled for 630a tomorrow... I'm dosing on arnica pre and post and will be eager to return to Toronto as soon as I'm able to resume the last of the hyperbaric and IV supports I have left on my tab, and to do more green juice fasting for the first few weeks... onwards! :)

angels!

I found a surgeon tucked away in small town Ontario who speaks my language and put an entirely different spin on my surgical prognosis... as I suspected I was being presented with fear-spin in order to make my compliance with chemo mafioso more likely... I'm having the operation tomorrow, so excited!!!! victory boing-boing-boing!!!!!!

update...

white team found my CT scan, to their surprise, clear. except for the massive tumour in my breast and a lymph node. this cancer is known to aggressively spread from its first location but my body is holding it off quite spectacularly. what they call a reprieve i call a lot of hard work against many forms of opposition, a minor miracle that's also eating my heart out. they reacted in restrained disbelief that I would seek surgery at this point as it would be very risky for nonhealing, create a large wound and involve a skin graft. the pinhole drain on the breast healed over last night and I felt a day of rest was in order for it. it continued to swell during the day and by the time I got to hospital it was quite enlarged again, looking like a massive tumour... I reiterated a few times that what was presenting here was at least a third fluid... they weren't buying it. the oncologist made chemo treatment sound like a temporary inconvenience limited to a few bad days a week. I explained I wasn't avoiding chemo because I'm afraid of the profound secondary effects, the whole interventionist notion of interfering with and suppressing symptoms instead of cultivating natural laws makes zero sense to me. I'm going out of town tomorrow to consult green team surgeon, see what he has to tell me.

tests...

bone scan came back all clear which means I'm still beating the odds on this cancer's spread. today I have a CT scan and consult with white team who wish to urgently persuade me again that chemo and radiation are necessary before any surgical intervention.... I'm always open to their presentations and still determined to travel tomorrow to see what green team surgeon has to say.... and if things look good, I'm going for it... have stopped taking pain meds altogether... :)

great news...

the breast continues to drain more than it replenishes and I've been successful in keeping the work of caring for it sterile, comfortable and infection-free.... I haven't even taken a damnable painkiller yet today which is such a relief... it has collapsed to the degree you can't tell I have an affected breast at all anymore!

but the best part, the general surgeon out of town has looked at my charts and agreed to see me on Friday at noon... all things being equal he will operate that night or on the weekend... this is music to my ears!!! the less time I have to run the risk of critical infection, the better... part of me still wants to see how much farther I can neutralize this cancer on my own, but so far I've kept it from brain, bone, or lung and this is a distinct advantage.... and if I play my cards right post-op I can wipe out what remains after surgery and achieve my ambition... a return to health governed by natural laws and minimum intervention... onwards!!! 

healing...

the reason I've chosen to allow a natural drain to form when a surgical one was denied me, if you look at surgical episiotomies versus natural tears you'll see wide variance in healing time and scarification or other complications with the natural tear far superior in outcome compared with the surgical intervention... this fact is often used in other procedures where manual tears are used in lieu of incisions.

busy bee...

on the basis that I've been a restless busy bee, irritable with the less active and experiencing the typical Apis swellings of the eyes, face and this seroma in the breast, I've taken a dose of 6c Apis (that's a low potency)... Apis is also on my constitutional tree as an infant. having dosed I can do my movement practice without any discomfort so far and I haven't taken any painkillers yet today... :) it's during my mat work that I can enjoy how much the breast has reduced... where it was an obstruction I have freedom again... amazing!

thanks for the drain...

doing at home what the surgeons wouldn't try since they didn't believe the ultrasound... from my report this morning to green team... "the breast stopped draining a few hours after we spoke yesterday and partially refilled w fluid overnight so this morning reapplied cabbage leaves and it started to drain again almost immediately... manually expressed as much as could be painlessly squeezed out, more than 2 cups worth... no pain really but my left under eye was puffy translucent and swollen where the sinus is when I woke up...."

there is no evidence of anything being attached to the chest wall and the breast is almost half the size it used to be with the one spot of hard mass clearly distinguished from the rest of the soft drained tissues... the colour looks good and I feel relief but I'm not entirely comfortable with my risk of secondary infection... made more phone calls and hoping for headway. if not, I'll just have to keep making my own way under adverse conditions and without complaint... MANTRA: everything that's happening is helping me take the road most suited to learning and healing....!

waters have broken...

after getting politely shut out of all three main hospitals I approached for surgical relief of local symptoms on account of my position on chemo, I decided this is a good thing... all through this I've taken position that body knows best when it comes to healing... the breast is already hugely reduced with all the serous fluid that's drained once it finally broke through earlier today... I'm keeping vigilant with sterile protocols, hot compresses, cabbage leaves and diluted hydrogen peroxide sprays... I will get ozone and hyperbaric once the acute phase of the drain is over... I remain optimistic I will get the surgery I need if I really need it... certainly they won't be able to argue that its too large a mass to proceed in spite of my insistence this was at least half fluid... 

Lao-tzu...

"As the soft yield of water cleaves obstinate stone,

So to yield with life solves the insoluble.

It is said, 'There's a way where there's a will,'

But let life ripen and then fall,

Will is not the way at all:

Deny the way of life and you are dead."