The Only Way I Know to Live a Human Life: Healing, Wholeness, the Challenges of Suffering, and the Paradoxes of Success

The Only Way I Know to Live a Human Life

Healing, Wholeness, the Challenges of Suffering, and the Paradoxes of Success

Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.

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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of Nature and the nature of mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, happy to be here with you so that together, we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

Auspicious interbeing to you and yours, my friends. Today we go back into the wisdom, love, and beauty archives to contemplate together the only way I know of to live a human life. This is a rich contemplation, and I think you’ll enjoy it.

This contemplation is about healing, wholeness, the challenges of suffering, and the paradoxes of success. In what sense is life a self-healing truth? What is the nature of health and healing? What is the nature of sickness—our cultural sickness and our own mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical sickness? These are some of the questions we can think about together.

Our contemplation riffs on an essay by Darlene Cohen. She called it, “The only Way I Know of to Alleviate Suffering.” The path for alleviating suffering outlined by Cohen is the very path of LoveWisdom or philosophy, and Cohen seems to have been a skilled philosopher, in the sense of someone dedicated to presencing wisdom, love, and beauty, dedicated to working with positive intentions, working with their own life for the benefit of all of us.

One of the things I like about this essay is the way Cohen touches on issues that have proven very important in my own work with students and clients who have come to me with issues related to physical illness, injury, or pain, as well as other kinds of suffering, like emotional pain, or an urgent need for success in their work, or problems relating to past karma they can’t seem to shake free from, and countless other kinds of suffering that are present even in the midst of apparent success, or that show up in our striving for success even when we don’t have obvious physical symptoms. Often these things are interwoven, so that physical symptoms have what we might call emotional and spiritual causes and correlations.

Cohen’s essay begins with lines that can feel quite heart opening. She writes, quote, “Self-healing is an area I’ve explored intensely because I have had rheumatoid arthritis, a very painful and crippling disease, for eighteen years.” Isn’t that something? She’d been dealing with a crippling disease for almost 2 decades.

Maybe some of you have never dealt with chronic pain, but if any of us happen to enjoy an embodiment free from something comparable to rheumatoid arthritis, we should count our blessings. We often forget how many people in the world might dream of being able to have our well-functioning lungs, or our well-functioning heart, or our well-functioning knees, our well-functioning hands—any part of our body or mind that seems to be functioning in relative health might be the dream of millions of people in this world who don’t enjoy that same good functioning.

Cohen goes on to sound out a clarion call from The Blue Cliff Record. That is a very special book of spiritual common law. Much as ordinary common law represents a repository of judicial wisdom that presences the spirit of justice with no need of a formal statue, spiritual common law represents a repository of wisdom, love, and beauty, and by studying cases of spiritual common law in the right way, we ourselves can learn how to presence wisdom, love, and beauty in our daily life. Studying spiritual common law cases in the right way can be transformative.

Cohen cites a case in which a great philosopher named Yunmen says the following: “Medicine and sickness mutually correspond. The whole universe is our medicine. What is the self?”

Like all key questions in spiritual common law, this is a questioning of the human condition, and all humans face such a question—whether we like it or not, accept it or not, notice it or not. We all face it, most obviously anyone who has ever suffered and wanted to heal that suffering, in whatever form the suffering took. But even on the simple level of success and skill, this question becomes central. We’ll come back to that. For now, let’s follow the golden thread of Cohen’s experience and insights.

Right away in this essay she points out one of the gifts of real suffering: It heightens awareness. Many times we turn this gift against ourselves—We brace against that heightened awareness. The odd result, the irony, is that we actually increase our suffering. The mind adds its ideas and reactiveness to the raw experience, and an awakening pain becomes an unbearable pain, which in turn hampers our ability to effectively work with it, and to heal the source of the pain if possible. In a further irony, we can start to try and get “spiritual” about our experiences of pain and create problems that way as well. It can get tricky.

Cohen found a way to begin breaking through this sickness. She tells us that she lived just half a block from the San Francisco Zen Center. By the time she made it from her home to the stairway leading up to the entrance to the zen center, she was sometimes in so much pain that she could do nothing more than return home. The very ground had become part of her sickness. Stepping on it gave her such pain that the walk to that stairway left her totally drained. She just couldn’t go up the stairs to the entrance after such a great struggle to arrive at them–they presented a fever too treacherous to bear.

But one day, she asked why. Why the pain? Where did it come from? What was it—really? Not as an idea but as an experience.

She turned her attention to the act of walking, and she noticed she wasn’t really walking. She was doing her idea of walking. The idea was a clump of weeds separating her from the garden of actual experience. As she turned her attention, gently and openly, to that clump and began to see through it, to consume those weeds as medicine, her experience of walking changed, and she found her stamina increased. She never again had to turn back from those stairs. Thus the sickness became medicine. And it had more healing to offer.

She began to notice other clumps of weeds growing in her garden. By turning our attention to such weeds, they can become herbs of healing. Then we find ourselves standing in a garden of rich, nuanced experience. The nuances are places where we can touch our lives intimately, body to body. These are the places where we smell the fragrance of Nondoing, taste the joy of awareness and presence.

Cohen tells us that, at arthritis workshops, she brings out carrots and a cutting board. In the body-minds of the people present at those workshops, the sight of those carrots and that cutting board immediately provoked the idea of carrot cutting—the idea of carrot cutting that most of us do, instead of just cutting carrots. Those people knew, they knew in their bones, that their arthritis prevented them from cutting carrots. They couldn’t do it anymore! And, that’s the point. It cannot be done. Cohen writes that,

when you actually hold the knife in your hands, feeling its wooden handle and sharp, solid blade and you touch the vulnerable flesh of the carrot on the cutting board, your wrist goes up and down, up and down, and the orange cylinders begin to pile up on the board, and you realize: “I can cut carrots.” Tears come to people’s eyes.

Pour lives can’t be done, but they can be NON-done.

Cohen goes on to examine the many facets of attachment as it relates to health. She points out that most people are, as she puts it, “temporarily abled.” Many people enjoy the blessing that, for relatively long stretches of time, their body gives them few problems. They can walk, run, dance, do yoga, climb sheer rock faces, catch thundering waves.

But all of this is impermanent, and even a bit illusory. If we look closely, we know that the greatest athletes suffer many injuries, as do musicians, dancers, and all manner of other people. Some of these injuries keep them out of their professional work for days, weeks, even months. Some athletes have to play with their injuries, as many dancers have to dance with theirs, and many construction workers or warehouse workers have to push through with their injuries. Some of these people find their careers suddenly over. Many people in professional sports, dance, even yoga, and many other fields are forced to retire from their careers at fairly young ages with injuries they must deal with for the rest of their lives.

What happens when a serious injury or illness comes into our lives is that we may enter a period of intense mental suffering. We cannot let go of what we had, what we thought we had—that feeling of health, that freedom from this unrelenting pain and the dread of illness that now hangs over us. We cannot let go of that dream of our life as a dancer, an athlete, or whatever it might have been.

In a way, we find ourselves attached to something that never existed in the first place. In some cases, we never really got intimate with our own bodies and our own experience of life. Our body was a tool, a servant—sometimes we found it a stubborn one, other times a willing or even impressive one. And our life was a means to an end.

Now we grieve for our body, grieve for that end we dreamed of. We eulogize the body and even eulogize our life as a medicine that has become a sickness. All this is fairly normal in our culture.

But with all of that, Cohen invites us to do something else: to “see [our] present bodies as real and [our] current lives as demanding all the creativity and energy [we] can summon.” When we do this, the sickness becomes medicine.

Cohen details the nature of this duality between sickness and medicine. It is deeply rooted and resistant. Supported by our ego and its attachments, it creates many stumbling blocks in our growth as human beings. Cohen admits that

it’s true that you can use mindfulness practice to achieve your health goals. You may even get rid of your disease or injury. But if you practice mainly to get rid of your suffering or restore an ailing body to function rather than to express your life and your nature, it is a very narrow and vulnerable achievement . . . . a goal-oriented practice cannot permeate deeply enough. We must penetrate our anguish and pain so thoroughly that illness and health lose their distinction, allowing us to just live our lives.

That really cuts to the bone. What she’s inviting us to consider can really stop us in our tracks: To cut through our anguish and suffering so thoroughly that illness and health lose their distinction, and we live every moment as a full expression of what we are, a full expression of wisdom, love, and beauty, a full and perfect expression of the mystery and magic of life.

Remember Yunmen? He had a famous saying, part of another spiritual common law case. He said, Every day is a good day. And remember, he walked with a limp for the rest of his life, because of an injury that led to a crucial spiritual breakthrough. Was he healed? Did the injury heal, if he had a limp? Should we consider him healed if he really did experience every day as a good day?

This is challenging stuff. If the deepest healing can only occur when we let go of our agendas, how can we effectively approach the work of healing—or any orientation of success in our life? The spirit of this question actually applies to the whole of our life, because we approach so many things with an agenda, and that includes our careers, our romantic partners, our hobbies, our horses and other non-human companions, and certainly our spiritual practice. On the path of LoveWisdom, we may seek enlightenment, knowledge, self-confidence, courage, skill, salvation, and certainly healing of various kinds.

Many of us turn to spiritual practice precisely because of suffering. Clients come to me with all manner of suffering, from challenges in their work life to personal demons, relationship issues, and more. The sickness may be mainly psychological or spiritual. But anyone with severe enough psychological or spiritual ailments or injuries knows they can hurt as much as the supposedly physical ones. And, again, the physical ailments are bound up with spiritual and psychological ones, and in the end mind and body are not two things.

Many people turn to the Alexander Technique because of pain or injury, and part of my training as a philosopher includes having become a teacher of the Alexander Technique. The pain my clients experience—however physical, psychological, or spiritual they may characterize it—that pain often becomes an obstacle, and the path becomes materialistic, the path to healing, transformation, insight, and inspiration.

It so happens that, when I was younger, I seemingly chose to NOT specialize in people with pain—a kind of deliberate avoidance. At that time, the younger me couldn’t easily imagine how Alexander teachers deal with it. People in pain want to be free from pain. When someone has a serious health problem that other modalities have not resolved, they do sometimes go to teachers of the Alexander Technique, wanting the Alexander Technique to be the thing that helps them where other modalities have failed. I wasn’t drawn to people in pain. As a philosopher, I found myself attracted to a focus on high performance. Wisdom is what works, and I felt drawn to serving clients who were pushing the envelope in some way, rather than clients who had lost functioning due to pain or injury.

But, LoveWisdom, or philosophy, has always been a kind of therapy. It has always had an essentially healing heart. Its essence is care, and, as Epicurus put it, “Vain is the word of the philosopher that heals no suffering.” LoveWisdom has to do with suffering and liberation from suffering.

Technically speaking, philosophy is therapy for the soul, not physical therapy, and not psychotherapy. The FDA is not likely to approve philosophy as a way to heal injuries, relieve pain, or diagnose and cure disease. So, FDA disclaimer on all these contemplation.

But, there’s a twist here, because people who reorient their lives and take up a philosophical or spiritual practice often experience a correlation between their practice of philosophy and these kinds of goals. It’s a correlation. We don’t know the causes. But, for instance, Kelly Turner’s research into the IONS database of remissions of terminal illnesses indicated that spiritual or philosophical reorientation is consistently correlated with the remission of terminal illness. Turner studied a massive database of people with illnesses that conventional medicine could not cure, and yet the patients somehow healed. We call that spontaneous remission, because our current paradigm cannot explain it. But Turner found that, consistently, these people had reoriented their lives spiritually and philosophically, and only after doing that did they experience the spontaneous remission. And we have other research on the positive health effects of a philosophical or spiritual life.

So this becomes an incredibly tricky situation. Next thing you know, people get in touch with Alexander Technique teachers or philosophers, wanting to see if they can manage their arthritis, deal with their fibromyalgia, cancel their back surgery, recover from a car accident, deal with cancer, and more. That’s a lot of pressure for teachers of non-doing. Nondoing is a core skill of wisdom-based coaching.

And yet, the student is often begging for something to be done. Again, it doesn’t matter if it relates to physical injury or illness, or it relates to something in their career, in their relationships, in their agendas and life goals. We have an agenda-driven mindset, a style of consciousness that creates our problems in the first place.

Naturally, one feels compassion and wants to help. But a crisis of faith in the efficacy of non-doing becomes likely, in the teacher, in the student, or in both. Our long-practiced habits of doing and control get provoked, and all the stories of the ego play themselves out loud.

All of this was mainly in the back of my mind. Like a lot of people, I chose my areas of specialization in life by following my bliss and my sadness. Since those weren’t directly connected to chronic pain, I naively hoped for many “healthy” students and clients.

It would be so nice, the younger me figured, to move people further and further toward optimal functioning and help them go beyond what they thought possible, rather than dealing with a situation of what we might call impaired functioning, and trying to wrestle with what may or may not be possible there.

I share all of this because of our need to see the absurdity of this naïve view. Of course, today, I have lots of clients with all sorts of pain, and I welcome it. We have so much healing to do. Our ecological reality calls us to see the necessity of healing, of turning toward the sore places, turning toward the wounds. And our ecological reality makes it clear that our whole culture and our habitual style of consciousness is impaired. So, the people I used to see as functioning at a high level were themselves quite deeply impaired by larger circuits of mind in the culture itself.

There is much to contemplate there, but there is also a deeper philosophical truth to consider:

If we are what we are at every moment, we are functioning at our best. There is a kind of completeness, a kind of perfection present each moment. There is just functioning going on, at times seemingly healthy, at times seemingly unwell.

There is actually an Alexander Technique example that helps to illustrate this. Patrick Macdonald, was great prodigy of the Alexander Technique, and a renowned teacher of the Technique. Near the end of Macdonald’s life, he was literally bent out of shape because of a chronic degenerative disorder. A former student asked him when in his life he thought he had really been at his best. Macdonald, stooped over, his body weak with age and pain, replied that he was at his best right then and there! That is a wonderful response, worthy of being placed in a book of spiritual common law cases.

At the same time, we understand the metaphor of “optimal" functioning, and stories like this reveal the truth of that metaphor as well. We get in our own way, and so we can’t function optimally—not fully, no matter what feats our body can perform. The former student asking that question was not able to function optimally because the idea of optimal functioning was interfering with him—he saw an old man in front of him who couldn’t be at his best now, looking like this; that had to be in the past, with some more perfect body. Our culture provokes us to seek a perfect body, a perfect bank account, a perfect partner, a perfect job—All fantasy objects we wish to possess.

There’s nothing inherently “physical” about functioning optimally. It has to do with thinking, concepts, habits, reactions, judgments. And it’s beautiful to work on these weeds.

We can recognize that various kinds of injuries and illnesses manifest, that we all age, we get sick, and we eventually die. However, if physicians of the soul like Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, and Confucius are correct, people in general—especially those subject to what we can call conquest consciousness, the style of consciousness that characterizes U.S. culture—such people in general have a deeply ingrained habit of being unwell, because, as a general tendency, they constantly cut themselves off from their own true nature and the true nature of reality. That’s the diagnosis from our physicians of the soul, the soul doctors of our wisdom traditions from around the world, including wisdom traditions that have had contact with conquest consciousness and responded to it.

There is a basic kind of suffering that arises in conquest consciousness. The whole notion of salvation—to point out just one example—exists because we are not already in tune with peace, love, healing, and joy. That is a basic problem, in addition to the fact that all of us will get sick and things will go wrong with our bodies. The body is impermanent.

The point is that people come to me with suffering of all kinds. And many of those people—explicitly or implicitly, consciously or unconsciously—hope the work I do can help them heal in some way, succeed in some way, arrive at a deeper experience of well-being, a deeper experience of love and liberation, insight and inspiration.

We could say, it’s the only reason they come to me. What are the odds that someone would knock on the door of a philosopher and say, “Gee, I am feeling soooo fantastic, and everything in my life seems totally perfect, but I just got curious about what you do, and I want to learn about it”? That might happen, but usually, in our culture, someone saying they are “just curious” has at least an unconscious sense of the presence of suffering in their life.

World-class performers may seem to come to me without the presence of significant or chronic pain. However, even in those circles, pain is a big motivator. We’re back at the dichotomy again, back in the illusion. Many “physically” healthy people suffer a great deal from the pressure to perform, to be the best, to get just a little more of an edge, to feel more confident, to look more poised, to have more presence, to be better leaders, to make more money, to innovate, to expand their company. And they may struggle to accept themselves, to allow themselves to experience love and worthiness. They may be great in their domain of expertise, but an absolute mess in their family life or in their romantic life.

A trained warrior may be able to face the deadliest combat situation with great poise, and yet might fall to pieces if they have to give a public talk, or if they have to confess how much they love someone. All of us can fall apart in turning toward the suffering of those we love and trying to hold space for them, or turning toward the suffering of the world.

In all of these cases, and in every client I have ever worked with, there is something in the person that drives them to DO something, to find a way to GET what they want, to SOLVE their problem, and every other variation of human agenda that goes directly against the great wisdom traditions of the world.

Oddly enough, it often takes a state of crisis to open us to real transformation and healing, to actually letting go of our agenda and our doing way of life. If we can stand our pain, we often simply carry go on—especially if our patterns give any kind of success at all, even if it’s just monetary and material. We perpetuate the patterns we know, no matter how much they ultimately work against us.

When we begin to have pain we don’t think we can handle or medicate, we start to look for help, and we become more inclined to leap into the unknown.

At any rate, all of these kinds of naïve thoughts can keep a philosopher caught in the duality of sickness and medicine, and thus philosophers may remain as materialistic as the supposedly sick student. The truth is that every student and every teacher is caught in this duality—and I mean this broadly in an educational sense and in the manner our culture is organized. The very nature of LoveWisdom or philosophy is to begin to break through this, even in a small way. This is what makes wisdom-based coaching rich, rewarding, and also deeply challenging.

To grow from that challenge, the student and the teacher must confront Yumen’s question—remember: What is the self? The whole cosmos is medicine, what is the self?—We have to somehow turn toward that question and begin to cut through the dualism and materialism of LoveWisdom. The student is both sickness and medicine for the teacher. The teacher can become sick with doing, or that teacher can taste the medicine of awareness, acceptance, connection, and non-doing. The same goes for the student. The teacher can in fact become the student’s sickness as the student wonders: How can I ever do this by myself? What’s the right way to do this? Why can’t I get this? What is the teacher doing for me? Is this working? Am I getting better? What am I doing wrong? Am I ever going to really succeed? Will I ever be worthy? Will I ever be loved? Will I ever stop feeling this fear and self-doubt? Will I ever escape my habits and find freedom?

Cohen describes this dualism and materialism clearly: when we are “sick” (cast a wide net with that word), getting well becomes “just another hindrance to us, just another robber of the time we have to live, just another idea that enslaves us, like enlightenment.”

This is all fairly sticky stuff. She isn’t telling us to give up in a heap. Indeed, her story is about how she went from being incapable of walking to the Zen Center or, when things got really bad, incapable of even combing her own hair . . . Her story is about how she went from that to being highly functional, teaching workshops that helped others become functional, and even cut carrots they were certain they could not cut. Her story is about how to alleviate suffering.

Here again the weeds grow up around us, obscuring our view. While they are weeds they are toxic, and they intoxicate.

Among our intoxications and hallucinations is “the illusion of progress,” and Cohen specifically makes note of it. The illusion of progress is more than getting healthy. The very notion of progress—this illusion of progress—goes altogether with the whole of western culture. And it goes altogether with our desire to be right, our desire know, our desire to control and manipulate, our desire to fulfill our agendas. Fear and desire provoke us, and as a result we let go of the means, we let go of the moment, and our life in the here and now vanishes . . . we stand in the weeds of ideas, weeds as high as our whole body, our whole existence, our whole world. Our life gone. Only our ideas of life remain.

But we get awfully comfortable in those weeds, even if it hurts. What an odd thing: that we would rather hold on to the pain . . . because we think we know it—we think we know how to succeed at life, we think we know what we desire, we think we know what success would be, think we know how to make ourselves happy, and we are totally frightened of the unknown, frightened of the joy we don’t yet know, the love we don’t yet know, and so we would rather hold on to the pain we think we do know.

As the pain builds, or perhaps by some act of Grace, we become more inclined to leap, to leap into the unknown. But we will hold on by our toenails if it’s possible, we will prevent that leap by any means, often sounding perfectly rational to ourselves.

All students of LoveWisdom are sick with one thing—and I’m just a student of LoveWisdom. All of us are sick with one thing. No matter what we think our sickness is, we have it all wrong.

This is so awful a truth that one can never speak it to one’s students. It must be discovered, tasted directly. The depth of the discovery corresponds to the depth of transformation that any student of LoveWisdom can realize.

Let’s think for a moment about illness. Can we really tell someone with MS that MS is not a sickness, not in the narrow sense, but that it’s just what the universe is doing right now? Can I tell you your pain is not a good thing, but also not a bad thing? Do we have the strength to see with Rumi how “A craftsman pulled a reed from the reedbed, cut holes in it, and called it a human being”? Can any of us let the music fully come through us, or will we fill up the reed of our being with the mud of our agendas, our ideas, our fear and self-doubt?

Can we let the music come through us, not only when it is a joyful tune, but also when it becomes, “a tender agony”? Can we see that our only sickness is not letting ourselves be the song that is playing at each particular moment, be the essence of music that is also the great silence of the soul?

As Cohen points out, “Even if your body is weak or painful, it’s still your home, it’s how you’re manifesting this life.” Moreover, that home is the place where the Guest will enter, where the Beloved will enter, the place where sacredness reveals itself, the place where our true nature becomes clear, the place where we discover the interwovenness of all things, the place where we resolve all our doubts. Instead of treating it as holy, we think of it as profane, problematic, pitiable, and poor. Why do we impoverish ourselves? The Guest who demands gold from us secretly slips it into our pocket, says Rumi. Instead of checking our pockets, we wring our hands over our poverty.

This has to do with larger ecologies too. Our true nature transcends the boundary of the skin. To say our body is our home means our ecologies are our home, that the mountains, rivers, forests, and great Earth are our home, and they are how we are manifesting. The body or Raven and Wolf is our body. The Cosmos itself is our body and our home. Why would we narrow ourselves to this impermanent localized abstraction we call the body? Why would we confine our state of true well-being to such a small set of habits?

Cohen writes, “When we pluck wellness out of the void, illness always comes with it.” All the ideas and ideals, motivated by fear and craving, just create problems. We constantly measure, compare, bemoan. We don’t want to manifest this way, or we want to grasp after and hold on to that way of manifesting. We imagine what we think we used to be, we imagine what we think someone else is, we judge what we think our own condition is. When do we have time to live? When do we allow our liberation into larger ecologies of body and mind?

Cohen suggests that we can let go of or bodies. What does this mean? Her essay is in a book on embodiment, on respecting the gifts of the body, acknowledging that wisdom and compassion come through this human body. So what does she mean?

What it means is letting go of all our ideas about the body, because the body, in our culture, is now an epicenter of spiritual materialism.

Notions about the body and embodiment are creating problems. We have all sorts of spiritual materialism related to the body: political notions, psychological notions, medical and economic notions. Embodiment as an idea meant for liberation has become part of the pattern of insanity.

In place of all of this, we could instead turn to practice, turn toward intimacy. As Cohen puts it: “Your health habits can be more reliably based in daily practices which do not change with feelings about your body. You can decide how to best take care of your body, your life, and you can do it dispassionately.”

In other words, we can do it without attachment or agendas. Passion is fine, but craving, attachment, and conscious human purposes will only create trouble for us.

We have to take direction from wisdom, love, and beauty, not from our hopes, fears, confusions, and agendas. The whole community of life depends on how we care for what we call the body, and how we care for how that body extends into the living, loving world, the landscapes and communities alive and alove with vitality and potential. Birds take care of their feathers and bears take care of their fur, without getting on a self-help program. They do it as part of taking care of the whole world.

At time, we may not feel like taking care of ourselves. Students of LoveWisdom have all sorts of reasons why they can’t follow its principles, which are simply the principles of living a balanced human life, a life of joy and love in a living loving world. Usually we have the best reasons for not practicing at precisely those times in our lives we most need to practice.

The principles of LoveWisdom are not faith-based, opinion-based, or “philosophical” in an abstract sense. They are scientific and spiritual. They have to do with how human beings function, with how ecology functions, with how ecologies of mind and body function, and they have to do with wisdom and compassion, with love and beauty, and with a sense of skillful living. Taking care of ourselves, living life in accord with our own nature, living in attunement with Nature’s ecologies, is the most wise, loving, and beautiful choice.

Cohen gets at this from several angles, but she sums it up in a statement that captures the heart of the healing potential of philosophy and spiritual practice: She writes, “Healing yourself . . . is living your life. It is not a preparation for anything else . . .”

That’s it. And it seems to be why people notice a correlation between reorienting their spiritual life and experiences of greater health.

LoveWisdom is an education, an unlearning of the ideas that interfere with living our lives and enjoying our basic goodness—which includes our capacity for endogenous healing, healing that happens from within. We consume the weeds that encumber our basic goodness. They become medicine. Flowers begin to grow—because the soil is healthy. The gardener doesn’t DO anything to the flower. There was no healing. Just living, functioning, being the music of the moment.

At this point we have arrived back at our starting point, in a certain sense. We began by saying that Cohen’s path for alleviating suffering is the very path of LoveWisdom. This point can now be clearly summarized by Cohen herself. She writes,

Intimacy with our activity and the objects around us connects us deeply to our lives. This connection—to the earth, our bodies, our sense impressions, our creative energies, our feelings, other people—is the only way I know of to alleviate suffering.

We could print that out, with ever so slight editing, and think of it as a slogan that crystalizes the nature of LoveWisdom. LoveWisdom is about cultivating intimacy with our own life, intimacy with the sentience in every direction, taking life in our arms and dancing with it, like a lover, a friend, a goddess, a devil.

Who is the friend, we may ask? Is it us or is it life?

Life already has us in its arms! It already dances with us as if we were a lover, a friend, an angel, an insect.

We can stop doing, and start dancing. We can be the voice box of the earth and stars, the music and poetry of every moment, the body and mind of life itself. It’s the only way I know of to live a human life.

But how? How do we overcome the sickness that keeps us from an intimate relationship with our own life? How do we awaken to an ecosensual awareness that is the basic nature of our mind and our world?

The quote above points, in an intellectual way, toward the relationship between the work of LoveWisdom and Yunmen’s spiritual common law case. The six core skills of LoveWisdom constitute path and realization. They are what we need to practice in order receive the medicine of the whole cosmos, and they are what we are and always have been, once that medicine is received. That’s about it. There is nothing but awareness, acceptance, connection, non-doing. That’s human life, and it’s all life here in this world.

When the duality of sickness and medicine exists, we have to, so to speak, get the sickness in touch with the medicine. We become aware that we are living our ideas of life rather than life itself. We become aware that we are doing our lives instead of dancing them. We pause and perceive. That’s the element of awareness. To pause and perceive is to say a gentle, life-affirming No to the parts of us that want to react, tense, brace, bolt, rush, run, avoid, evade, space out, grab, or cling. It’s a gentle “No,” a life-affirming No, to the things we project on top of experience, and a return to the present moment, to awareness, to experience, to the mind of beauty and joy, the mind of love. We remember that we can wake up. We remember that we are on a spiritual path. We remember our breathing. We feel our feet, feel our own spine, look at our own hands. We remember the larger World all around us, supporting us. We sense, intimately, what is unfolding, the mystery unfolding as the here and now. Not our ideas, not something in time, but the inconceivable here and now.

We accept where we are at this moment. We accept our poverty, and we accept the riches placed in our hands every time we open them. Acceptance is the life-affirming Yes. It smiles. It is joyful. It says Yes to what is, to what actually emerges here, now, so that we can work with it, and it can work with us, and we in mutuality can co-discover and create. Acceptance is Yes to all that supports us to care for the world and its beings, to creatively accomplish something needed right now.

Connection receives that support. It is our relationality. We relate to the energies of wisdom, love, and beauty, we invite the sacred powers and inconceivable causes to work through us. We let Nature sense our natural charisma, our virtue that is our virtuosity, our natural empowerment by means of the energies of love and liberation, the energies of the nonduality of Mind and Nature.

We connect to larger ecologies of mind, to the beings, patterns, energies, and mysteries that support and guide our every movement, who grant our every success. We connect to the Earth, to gravity, to raven and wolf, to eagle and horse, to countless awakening beings in the soul, to the integrity and synchronicity of mind-heart-body-world-and-cosmos.

Nondoing means staying, resting as awareness and deeply trusting the emergence of life, the active, interwoven presencing of wisdom, love, and beauty in, through, as our mind, heart, body, world, and cosmos. We trust the emergence of the mystery, the presencing of it in, through, and as our experience and our world. We lean into the inconceivable. Every time we sense the doer, we go back to the life-affirming No.

Nondoing means we let. We don’t go to sleep. We remain connected, alive, and alove. So, when non-doing comes it isn’t not-doing. Rather, it’s the highest and most effective form of action, the most aesthetic, the most wise, the most compassionate, the most trustin—and the most trustworthy. It allows the best chance for healing to happen, for freedom to happen, for wisdom to happen, for joy and beauty to happen, for love to happen, and for suffering to fall away.

Outside of practical experience, this is all abstract. When we practice the six core skills—we only specifically mentioned 4 of them—but when we practice these four and the full six, it all feels radically pragmatic and concrete, as if all the rest of our life has been impractical, unskillful, abstract, confused, reactive, and now, with these core skills, we get to arrive, as if for the first time.

In wisdom-based coaching, students learn how to self-liberate into larger ecologies of mind. They learn to move, we could say, from outside of themselves, where the medicine is, and also from deeper inside themselves, where the medicine is. The more they touch that medicine, the more the ego and its ideas fall into their proper place. It’s a realignment of our being, an attunement—and an atonement—with sacredness.

This moving from the outside is not so easy to understand. Agency is not dualistic. Non-doing is paradoxical.

The self cannot go to the medicine, because that is doing. Doing is carrying the self forward to realize the countless beings of life. As great the philosopher Dogen makes clear, that doesn’t work.

Instead, the countless beings of life must be allowed to advance and realize the self—for they are already in our soul.

This happens in an active, engaged, non-doing way, so that sickness and medicine “subdue each other,” in non-obstruction. That notion of subduing each other is how the American philosopher John Daido Loori translates this interwovenness of sickness and medicine, the interwovenness of everything, including the union of opposites Jung wrote about. The fierce lion of the universe is also a gentle lamb. The hard, knotted self transforms into what it always was: a flexible reed.

Does the Cosmos kick now and then? Sure. Does the reed play songs of sadness? Yes. It never refuses a tune. It plays everything with the whole of itself.

The mutuality here is essential. Sickness and medicine subdue each other, sickness and medicine mutually correspond, sickness and medicine mutually illuminate.

We should pause here and clarify this with slightly dangerous language. We already used this phrase: All healing is endogenous. Let’s say that again: All healing is endogenous. That means all healing is self-healing. Life is a self-healing truth.

We may think that a person healed us or a medicine healed us. But the healer and the medicine do nothing but remove blocks to our own natural healing, or we could say they stimulate our own healing response. This is why even surgery, as the surgeon Ian Harris suggests, is at least sometimes nothing more than the ultimate placebo. Isn’t that remarkable? Dr. Harris suggests that, with many surgeries, the only reason we heal is that the surgery itself functioned as the ultimate placebo. We would have healed anyway, but we couldn’t let go of our blocks to healing. But if someone cuts us open, the ego finally steps aside, and our body can heal itself. Even if a surgery wouldn’t qualify as placebo in Dr. Harris’s sense, our surgeon still depends on our body, mind, and larger ecologies to do the healing. The healing remains mainly endogenous in a deep sense.

Keep in mind the irony here, since many scientific thinkers would see religion as the ultimate placebo. Indeed, the placebo effect itself blurs the rigid boundaries between what we accept as science and what we insist, on the basis of faith, must be a matter of magical thinking in the most pejorative sense. We need to get beyond this narrow faith in materialism and find out for ourselves the nature of healing.

Spiritually, we can see this endogenous healing response in the image of Jesus as healer. Jesus casts out demons, which we can understand as blocks to our healing, our wholeness, our holiness. Those words all share same root: Healing is wholeness and holiness. Jesus was able to heal because he and the divine are not two things—there is a wholeness there. And thus Jesus can trigger our endogenous healing response, because we ourselves are not cut off from the divine, which is all-healing, all-holy. We and the divine are not two things, and thus we can relate to the divine, and enter into the mutuality of attunement and atonement, healing and holiness. All self-regulation is co-regulation. The endogenous healing response in us is the healing of the world—if we allow it. The world very much needs our healing right now.

There are mysteries here, including the fundamental mystery of the inherent sacredness of life, of love, of healing, of wholeness—wholeness that never obstructs our uniqueness.

In the end, no amount of words will work here. If you are listening to this as someone who has never tried some form of LoveWisdom practice, go and get instructions. If any of this makes sense, seek to verify it for yourself, seek to enter into the mystery and mutuality of healing and wholeness. For those who are students, keep practicing. There is more to learn, more to verify. There is a whole universe of medicine waiting.

In closing, I want to go to the end of Cohen’s essay. Even though the key points have been made, the richness of her final thoughts moves me as much as anything else she wrote in this piece. She writes:

People sometimes ask me where my own healing energy comes from. How in the midst of this pain, this implacable slow crippling, can I encourage myself and other people? My answer is that my healing comes from my bitterness itself, my despair, my terror . . . . I can never give up to it when I first feel it stir. You’d think after a million times with a happy ending, I could give up right away and just say, “Take me, I’m yours,” but I never can. I always resist. I guess that’s why it’s called despair . . . . But I’ve come to trust it deeply. It’s enriched my life, informed my work, and taught me not to fear the dark. . . .

It seems to me that when we fall ill, we have an opportunity we may not have noticed when we were well, to literally in-corp-orate the wisdom of the buddhas, and to present it as our own body.

That despair she experienced is beautiful, not necessary. So, we could sprinkle a little just a little bit of spice over this delicious morsel. The poet Rumi sang out these delightful lines:

Someone once asked a great master

what sufism was. [The master replied,]

“The feeling of joy

when sudden disappointment comes.”

That’s a definition of LoveWisdom in general, and it’s a little like a whack on the side of the head. Sophia must laugh as we so often turn ourselves into those monks in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and keep whacking ourselves with this notion over and over until it sinks in. How many sudden disappointments do we have each week? How many chances do we get to presence wisdom, love, and beauty in the form of our very own body, our very own heart, mind, body, world, and cosmos? How many moments of Joy do we forget to savor and become intimate with?

Everything is rousing us to our own true nature. Everything is rousing us—both the pains and the joys. We don’t have to despair. But even if we find ourselves despairing, we don’t have to wait even one moment longer to return to ourselves, return ourselves to life and love, to healing and wholeness, to sacredness and wonder.

What do you think?

What are the challenges or paradoxes of health, healing, or success you have noticed in your life? To what degree is it possible to let go of our agendas so that we and the world can heal in mutuality, in a profound way?

If you have questions or reflections about today’s contemplation or about health and healing in general, send them in at wisdomloveandbeauty.org and we address some of them in a future contemplation. Until then, this is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, reminding you that your soul and the soul of the world are not two things. Take good care of them.