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May 30, 2005
Voluntary Self-Poisoning by Qigong Teacher Leads to Curious Insight About The Nature of Health
There was a time in my twenties when I was so fanatical about my health that I would find myself hunched over a bowl of brown rice with a couple of sour Umeboshi plums as the only garnish. Hunched alone over my bowl, while everyone else was out enjoying the fruits of the world.
Let me use that word one more time: “alone.” And let’s throw in: “earnest”, “uptight”. “intense”, “contracted”.
Heck, if I went out to most restaurants in those days there was simply nothing on the menu I could eat. Fun, huh?
In the seventies, in particular, I engaged in a lot of similar extreme dietary practices, looking for the Holy Grail of the perfect diet for enlightenment and radiant health. I did a twenty-day grape fast. I crept along on wheat grass only, for a brief period. In India, I mashed slightly sprouted wheat into a soggy pulp and baked it on the roof in the scorching heat. And hoped to find God the Essene way as I thoughtfully chewed each mouthful one hundred times. I toyed with the idea of being a Breatharian — surviving on gulped air alone. Hmmmnnnn… you get the picture.
Tell me that the True Road to enlightenment involved rolling myself naked across a field of thorn bushes twenty times a day and I would probably sign right up… I would try almost anything once, if the promise was big enough.
Very fortunately — and also in the seventies — I was introduced to Qigong and Tai Chi. These two disciplines began to eat way at my extreme questing-behavior and started to seduce me into a far more relaxed attitude to the cultivation of spirituality and health.
I say seduced very deliberately, because they crept up on me. I frowned on the practitioners who insisted on referring to Qigong and Tai Chi as “play”.
Hey, this was a serious business of techniquing your way to the Divine. And I didn’t appreciate those woo-woo tree-huggers who denigrated my lofty practice with a moniker as unproductive-sounding as “play”.
Which brings me to theseumtimes… I joke with my staff every now and then that I’m off to poison myself at the local Chinese restaurant, which serves up a diabolically bad buffet to a steady stream of pasty-faced, overweight and otherwise challenged-looking individuals. I age five years as I walk through the door. I leave ten years older. And yet I do this to myself quite frequently. Amazing, really.
So, what gives?
Essentially, I’m indulging in playful self-poisoning. Ninety percent of the time I eat carefully, putting highly nutritious foods into my gullet that I know are going to aid my strength, vitality and energy. From eating well most of the time and keeping up my daily regimen of Qigong and Tai Chi, at 56, I feel robust and steely.
But I’ve learned the importance, for me, of building some slush, or play, into my personal advancement goals. I’ll go out and kill myself with a big mound of my comfort food, fried rice, plus some unspeakable and best-left-unidentified squacks of whatever. I’ll dose myself with a couple or three heavy espressos.
Sometimes I’ll feel Godawful as a result, but I still won’t stop. I may be chopping a day or two extra off of my life, but I’ll take that discount in favor of a lighter, easier, less rigid lifestyle.
I’ve seen it — and I bet you’ve seen it — over and over again: highly rigid people with highly rigid programs who suddenly explode or implode into a chaotic craze of unbalanced behaviors that contradict everything they claim to be.
Qigong has taught me to build some play, some looseness, some slush into everything I do. And the result, for me, has been a more balanced and happier, more productive and more enjoyable lifestyle.
How are you doing in your life right now? One of my mentors liked to say “seriousness is a disease.” Certainly, too much seriousness is a surefire way to a host of maladies. If you’re stuck in your life, consider taking up qigong (or being more consistent with it) and watch what happens to the rigid and unbending in you.
For qigong programs to release and relax you go here now.
Posted by james at May 30, 2005 5:46 AM
Comments
So true. I have just spent a number of years dining with vegans, mostly dedicated animal rights activists who were really rigid with their food and food outlook. I am happy to say that I continue to "play" with my food, also, and I do not apologize for it anymore. PS. I'm a 9-year Stage III ovarian cancer survivor.
Posted by: Sally Miller at September 21, 2005 2:57 PM