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Saturday, March 21, 2020

The TAO of Discovery and Recovery


The Discovery and the Recovery

Hippocrates (460 - 370 B.C), the father of medicine, once said: “Our food should be our medicine. Our medicine should be our food.” Take a step further: Let food be the “only” medicine. If you have developed a degenerative disease, start thinking of food as your medicine, in fact, the best medicine, if not the “only” medicine. Your body is designed to digest and utilize food to get its nutrients and energy. But only wholesome food can do just that—not even supplements, because all supplements are just what they are called.

If food is the “only” medicine for you, you will empower yourself with knowledge about food, and you will then pursue a proper diet with high quality, non-toxic, and nutritious food. That means, you will refrain from eating the commercially-prepared and chemically-loaded food obtainable at supermarkets. When food becomes the “only” medicine, you will also learn to trust your body; that is, you will learn what your body is telling you, and how it responds to real and wholesome food.

When you do become sick, you should also learn how to use herbs as medicine. Herbs from different parts of plants have different therapeutic values that promote self-healing without the use of dangerous pharmaceutical drugs. As a matter of fact, many common herbs, such as cinnamon, garlic, and ginger, have been used as “food” medicine for thousands of years.

If food is your “only” medicine, you will make good use of it to improve your health and heal yourself of any disease, including myasthenia gravis.

Hippocrates had also said: “Healing is a matter of time, but it is also a matter of opportunity.” Therefore, give your body that opportunity for natural self-healing by going drug-free, although it may take more time.

Your life is a journey through which you make many choices—some good ones and also some bad ones—that contribute to your health or illnesses. Life has a purpose with a unique destiny for each individual. Therefore, it is important that you know yourself, and self-healing is "knowing the self" as a part of your destiny. Sometimes and somewhere along your life journey, you may hit rock bottom and begin to despair. You may even ask the frequently-asked question: "Why me?" But that may also be the time of self-awakening for you. You may then begin to question how and why you have found yourself in that difficult and despondent situation. True self-awakening will make you take a different path—a detour from that journey you have been prodding along. Taking a different path creates the energy for self-healing.

Your self-awakening can be physical, such as a change of diet or taking up an exercise regimen. Your self-wakening can be emotional or spiritual, such as self-awakening to the power of love and compassion. Self-awakening may give you the desire and intention to heal, precipitating in changes that will ultimately heal not just the body but also the mind. Your very desire to heal is the healing energy for the body and the mind.

If you know yourself well, you will empower your mind with knowledge to heal yourself, and that empowerment generates more healing energy. If you know yourself more, you will make more right choices, than wrong ones, regarding your health. In making those right choices, you are well on the path to your own self-healing.

The bottom line: self-healing begins with knowing yourself through self-awakening to generate internal healing energy
         
The TAO

According to the TAO, the ancient wisdom from China, your discovery in life is your effortless search for learning and teaching from unexpected people in unexpected places; your recovery is your subjective perception of all the connections of life with your own spontaneous flow with them. Embracing everything and everyone with no judgment and no preference is the way to the discovery and the recovery of your health.

“The Way is paradoxical.
Like water, soft and yielding,
yet it overcomes the hard and the rigid.
Stiffness and stubbornness cause much suffering.

We all intuitively know
that flexibility and tenderness
are the Way to go.
Yet our conditioned mind
tells us to go the other way.

We accept all that is simple and humble.
We embrace the good fortune and the misfortune.
Thus, we become masters of every situation.
We overcome the painful and the difficult in our lives.
That is why the Way seems paradoxical.”
(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 78)

The recovery journey is never smooth and straightforward; it is always long and winding, with many detours and even setbacks. Healing is invisible, inaudible, and intangible:

“Look, it is invisible.
Listen, it is inaudible.
Grab, it is intangible.

These three characteristics are indefinable:
Therefore, they are joined as one, just like the Creator—invisible, inaudible, and intangible.”
(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 14)

Discovery and recovery are part of your healing journey.

Stephen Lau
Copyright© by Stephen Lau
  

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