Have I lost it?

I was looking throught the archives in my blog and came across this post

Sand in the oyster

And I started wondering why nowadays my postings about the interesting cases I meet almost daily did not make it into my blog.

What has changed about me that I fail to put in writing life's lessons?

I think being a coach has something to do with it.

Having people confide in me makes me reluctant to put it in writing because just maybe somebody might recognise the person I am writing about and that could be devastating for them to know I have written about them. no matter how well meaning my post is.

Having said that , perhaps there is a way to keep making notes of the interesting life events that pass by me and the lives I manage to touch or that manage to touch me as I pass through this life journey.

An interesting conversation I had with two old ladies is one that may be of interest.

The younger one had a backache and I cannot remember how the conversation drifted into the subject of death. She looked at me intensely and asked me , " So what is your perspective on death, Ustazah,"I find it quite common that some people knowing I am a doctor still manage to call me Ustazah rather than doctor but I will take that as a compliment !

I then gave her a mini lecture on my understanding of death . My perspective has been influenced greatly by some books I had been reading lately about the nature of man .

I expand that mini lecture to give my perspective as follows:

A Human being is made of at least two parts , one is matter which belongs to the Earth and the other is spirit which belongs to God . Of course since the Earth also belongs to God then a Human belongs to God in total anyway.

So when we die, the matter part of us goes back to the Earth , all the components return to the dust that it was and this dust is recycled , perhaps absorbed by plants and then eaten by animals or humans and maybe becoming flesh again in another living creature.

Then there is the part that is spirit and returns to its spiritual origin .

The Quran invites the soul at peace to enter into God's garden*. Then again, are all human beings, oomposed of body and soul at peace when they die?

What about those who have a lot of hate , anger, vindictiveness , revenge, cruelty , pride and all that which makes a person restless and not at peace? Do they keep these emotions after they have lost their earthly component ?

According to Al Ghazali , yes they do. If they have lived a life of pursuing the pleasures of the flesh and have no taste for spiritual enlightenment then when they die they will crave the same.

So what prevents the soul from entering the Garden ? A soul not at peace.

And how then would the soul not at peace resolve the issue of entering the garden anyway?

The soul would have to work on their issues and resolve them , only , it is much more difficult without the embodiment they had while on earth. If you think it is difficult to work on your issues now, wait until you have to work on them without this body.

That working on it is Hell. Die before you die is a quote from Imam Ali. It has many meanings and one of it is to die from the negativity that is possible in being human .

*AL-FAJR 89.
27. "O (you) the one in (complete) rest and satisfaction!
28. "Come back to your Lord, Well-pleased and well-pleasing unto Him! 29. "Enter you, then, among My honoured slaves, 30. "And enter you My Paradise!

Further reading on Al Ghazali, click this link

Healing awareness

I have not written a title on this post !
I do not know what to call it yet because I do not know what is going to come out from these typing fingers .
I have been keeping pretty silent about my thoughts for a pretty long time and have not written much about what I have been up to .
Today was a full day. It is now nearly 10.30 pm and I just got back from my clinic .
I asked C , my clinic girl whether she noticed a difference in me. I have been asking this question of various people lately because I had been noticing a change in how I felt which would be reflected in how I acted. This is exactly what Dr Leonard Yong had said in his book Emotional Excellence in the Workplace.

How had this change been brought about?
I think it had a lot to do with how I felt about myself and how I felt in relation to people.
I see it as coming into alignment with my REAL self .

It had been a long time since I had the luxury of going for a full body massage and today , in between my clinic hours , I managed to get such a massage. My regular massage therapist asked me, " Who has been massaging you?"
I said " No one but you! Why do you ask?"
She said " Your body feels soft , with no tensions and not flabby soft either , it has tone and yet it is soft ."
Then she went on to say , " Last week I was in Kuala Lumpur and massaged a lady who was known for her spirituality and her diligence with her prayers . Her body felt the same as yours now ."
I knew she was comparing my body with what she usually found when she had not worked on my body for a long time. It would have knots of contracted tissue and would be sore in many places but not today , inspite of leading a totally hectic life for the past month!

I told her that the reason my body was not contracted and knotted and tense was because I had found alignment in the last one month . I had found what I really wanted to do , I had found my passion and my mission .

I had also found a homeopathic remedy that worked on a level of my psyche that was really deep .
I had related earlier about the pain I had felt in my heart and how it had gotten almost resolved during Maggie's workshop. That however was only part of what goes on within me .
After the heart pain got resolved, I began to notice my colon and intestines. They were in pain and in spasm and sometimes it was really bad . The only reason I did not take any painkillers was because I did not react to the pain and did not feel emotionally overwrought by the pain.
That is what awareness does , that and breathing my zikr all the time . I knew that this is the oldest illness that I had in my body. It had been there since I was 5 months old and had felt abandoned by my mum . There was something else to it than this and a few days ago while talking to my mum I understood what it was. My mum related to me the emotional turmoil she had been through while pregnant with me . While I listened to her I felt my body resonate with the emotions she was beginning to recall. I started to understand why I always tried too hard to impress and prove myself when just being who I am is more that enough most of the time and ...what did it matter anyway what kind of opinion people had of me as long as I was happy with myself ?

When I got back from KL , I instinctively knew what remedy I had to take. I took out my Clarkes, the book edition rather than the software one because I wanted to ponder over the remedy that had come unbidden to my mind. I would never have thought of this remedy except that I was able to accept at that point that I would allow myself to be guided by my instincts ,
Much of the pain I was experiencing was exactly what I read in Clarke's. As soon as I could , I took the remedy. The reaction was immediate. I could feel my body softening and relaxing and at night I could also feel where the remedy had lead my body to start to heal. My sinuses. ,my lungs, my stomach . colon and rectum all felt like they were being worked upon . The back of my throat felt raw , like I was about to catch a cold . This was in the middle of the night and when I woke up the next morning, my sinuses were clear, so too my lungs and my abdomen felt very much better.I repeated the dose more often than I usually would because it had felt as if the energy of the illness was very strong and it was consuming the remedy very fast .

And that brings me to this moment , at the end of a very long day, I still have a lot of energy and clarity of mind with a coolness and a sense of joyousness in my heart that makes me want to share this moment with someone dear ..yet I find myself in solitude in my bedroom with no one to share this moment except my blog!

I now remember that I have some work to do before I start my day tomorrow for I have an appointment tomorrow with the Vice Rector of KUIS .
And what is that about? Wouldn't you like to know!

The Nature of Harm

"Tis the nature of harm to scurry in trenches already dug, its rivulets deepening its draught and widening its bore in a scurrilous way; though inconsiderate and ostensibly inanimate, its effect denotes purpose, though that may through echo have belonged to another from long ago, an even forgotten owner."

Thus wrote a friend in a post on his blog here.

I wonder if he knows how aptly he has described how our internal wounds keep getting deeper and wider until we reach rock bottom? It is as if the wounds within keep up a chorus , repeating, repeating and playing back to us its message of gloom doom and depair. The original wounds need not even be our own as we inherit via scripting deep emotions from our parents and those who are within our environment when we are growing up. More so when the adults around us are wounding presences. When we are little we absorb and take on these burdens like sponges and make them our own wounds and burdens and then we carry it with us, weighing ourselves down with it in our life's journey , adding to it from time to time from our own personal experiences more hurts , more wounds to 'scurry in trenches already dug' as Simon wrote.


A not so poetic analogy I could think of is how an abscess developes and grows, eating its way at the margins and pushing its way until it makes for itself a path to the outside skin and bursts , or makes its way to blood vessels and cause untold damage pouring its poisons into the bloodstream.

Yet this the nature of things , this is how it happens and this is how we are.

Most of us scurry along in the corridors of life doing what we think needs to be done , adapting ways and devising mechanisms to lessen the pain .

Defense mechanisms:
Some encase themselves in shells, some develop thorns, some withdraw into a secret garden within, protecting their private thoughts from any intrusions , some turn to the pleasures of the flesh , to drink , to drugs . Yet others seek a healing and some find solace in religion, in hobbies, in work , yet all the time , the harm is making its course , cutting its way deeper and deeper into the depth our our being.

Unless we find a way to heal ourselves . But healing ourselves is not easy for we first have to throw the light of consciousness into the dark realms of our Being . It is in itself painful. Not the dull pain that we have gotten used to and adapted to but a pain so searing and intense that we would want to avoid this pain. The problem being avoiding and postponing the examination makes the problem worse...like discovering a cancer too late....

I had worked through this pain. It was like being in a dark long tunnel not seeing the light at the end wondering if there was any light at all or, was it pain all the way? I found out it was not pain all the way, there was light but try telling me there was light when I was in the dark tunnel. Try telling me then that it had an end. Only faith had kept me going , faith and knowing that there was no other way around the pain except through the pain.

Drama in my Life

So now I really know how erratic my method of working is, or rather how I really do not have a system in place.
I think doctors are not the most methodical of people, given the irregularity of the free time on their hands, and with me gallivanting here there and everywhere almost all weekends does not help at all.
But work is piling up, a book to write, procedures to read through a homeopathy case to analyse, a healing class to prepare for..When are all these assignments due? Now ! And what do I do about it? Almost nothing! At least I have marked the patho assigments and sent them back !

My children are amused ! I have been watching a Malay telenovella based on a Mexican one..you guessed it , Manjalara..it ends today and what a blessing! Remind me not to get hooked on another one. Admittedly a lot of cliches and some scenes like a female character tripping and is caught by the male character is just too common but..having said that, and being a sucker for romantic moments ..I let myself be moved by it...oh? so you thought grandmother types do not have any romance left in their hearts..guess again....
The beauty of a teledrama is that it leaves much to the imagination, like what is going on in the mind of the character that is unspoken ..that one has to guess from the expression , the subtle nuances of the voice etc...I have to admit that the quality of the acting and the actors and actresses have improved tremendously since the last time I spared the time to watch malay dramas ...which is a pretty long time!

So , how on earth does this relate to spirituallity? It does really , and I will relate this in another post , soon as I can get the shadowy ideas in my mind into print!

Yes I have a healing workshop for a very small group , kept small on purpose...
I find more people who are the type of people I am most able to help are coming to me ...perhaps because they are ready for me and I for them?