This morning, I was reading a passage from Suzuki’s Not Always So, and it made me think of Parkinson’s recovery: “To be completely concentrated on what you do, that is simplicity. And the beauty of practice is that it can be extended endlessly. You cannot say our way is quite easy or that it is very difficult. It is not difficult at all. Everyone can do it, but to continue it is rather difficult. Don’t you think so?”
This made me think of the Recipe for Recovery. If you did not have Parkinson’s, the Recipe for Recovery, in and of itself, is not too easy or too difficult. I understand this from both sides of the disease. But you do have Parkinson’s, and even though everyone can do the recipe, I know that on a sliding scale of easy to difficult, the marker is much closer to difficult than it is to easy. However, as Suzuki points out, even though all of you can do the recipe, your true difficulty will be in continuing to do it until you recover.
This is where faith has to be stronger than fear and FEAR (False Evidence Appearing Real). This is where faith in yourself and your decisions and in your connection to your Higher Power, the Greater Consciousness, the Greater Healing Power, or simply the electro-magnetic waves inside and outside your body, have to be stronger than fear and FEAR. This is where faith that you are on the correct path has to be stronger than every other person’s opinion about how you should be treating your Parkinson’s. That right, your Parkinson’s.
When I say “your Parkinson’s,” it is because I feel that since we all experience the symptoms of disease a little differently, each of us is the expert of our Parkinson’s…we are the ones living inside the Parkinson’s polluted body, thinking with the Parkinson’s polluted mind and feeling with the Parkinson’s polluted spirit. No matter what anybody else thinks you should do for your Parkinson’s, they do not live in your body, and at the end of the day, they go home and you’re the one who has Parkinson’s, not them. So, what are you going to do about it? How about cleaning up the pollution one step at a time.
Body Pollution (Physical symptoms and Medications). The Qigong and Standing exercises help cleanse your body’s Parkinson’s pollution by helping your liver and other internal organs heal and function better.
Mind Pollution (I will end up with a walker or in a wheelchair). The chanting and visualizations help get your brain active with a healing “can do” attitude, which cleanses your mind pollution.
Spiritual Pollution (It seems hopeless, how do I know this will work). The meditations and prayers and affirmations help you connect your Inner Divine to a Greater Healing Power Divine outside of your body, which cleanses your spiritual pollution by replacing fear with hope and faith.
Parkinson’s can only live in a polluted environment. Clean up the pollution and Parkinson’s dissolves into nothing. That is why once I recovered, I did not need to continue doing the recipe for recovery. As a result of eradicating all three levels of pollution, I removed the causes of Parkinson’s, and I knew they would not come back.
I felt that if I continued to do the recipe for recovery after I became symptom free, it would have been out of fear that if I did not do it, the disease would return. I feel that if we live in fear, we create the things we fear the most, and then False Evidence Appearing Real becomes our reality. This is one of the important lessons I learned during the recovery process as I was becoming a new person.
So, when you are deciding whether or not to continue with the recipe for recovery, ask yourself this: Do I feel like I have been cleaning some of the pollution out of my soul, mind and body? So far, everybody who has emailed me and told me they are following the recipe as it is written has told me that the answer to the question is yes. How about you? Send me an email and let me know, howard@fightingparkinsonsdrugfree.com. Your information will be kept confidential unless you tell me what, if anything, from your email I may publish on this web site.
Have a great weekend!
All my best,
Howard
