Elephant in the Room

What does health mean; is it to be healthier than someone else? Is it to feel good? To have energy? To be capable of doing what you want to do? Health is an extremely important part of being human, and it is something you only seem to appreciate after you start to lose it. There are an infinite number of health issues that can arise in our experience at any point in time. When it does, it can grab our attention with so much strength and focus that it often becomes our ‘elephant in the room’.

When you are hit with a diagnosis it doesn’t seem to make sense. Why would this happen to me? After all, a disease is for someone else’s experience, not mine – is what the mind tells you for your whole life. When I was given my diagnosis it was something I expected yet didn’t fully understand. I wasn’t angry, mostly at a loss. “Well of course, this is just the way it is. It’s just another one of those things to deal with.” is what my mind told myself. I was diagnosed with a disease called Retinitis Pigmentosa. There is no cure. According to the diagnosis I will continue to lose most of my vision until all I can see is like looking through a roll of paper towel – an extremely limited tunnel vision by the time I am 40 years old. And then after that I will start to lose that little bit of vision until I can’t see anything else. My older brother has the same eye condition, and when I found out he had it I was about 12 years old. I never thought I would have it because that’s what my parents told me. They simply told me that so I wouldn’t worry as even they knew there was a fair chance I was born with it but haven’t showed the symptoms yet. It is something that slowly creeps up on you until you are bumping into things walking down the street or miss a car when pulling out of an intersection when you’re driving.

Going back a few years ago I had concerns that I was losing my vision. So I went to the local eye doctor and did a visual field test, the one where you click the button when you see the lights flash at the corner of your eye, and I could barely see any of the lights. So there it was, he pulled out the visual field test results and it showed that I can’t see any detail at all in my peripheral vision – the vision that would be outside of the roll of paper towel when you look through it like a telescope. This area of my vision will continue to get worse until I can’t see anything at all. This will impact every part of my life – like my ability to play sports, to drive, to even walk down the street without tripping, and to watch my daughter grow up. When I drop something in the ground it takes me a very long time to find it. Every daily task I do is already more difficult because of this progressive condition, let alone what the future looks like.

This brings me to Harmony meditation. I grieved the state of my body. Every part of my body is perfectly healthy that I know of – except for my vision. After knowing I had this condition, my awareness was constantly brought to my vision. 24/7, every waking minute of every day was focused on what I could see and what I couldn’t. There was an elephant in the room. I knew there had to be a way out, after all I never focused so much on my eyes before the diagnosis even though my vision hasn’t changed much in the space from before I found out till after. However, I hadn’t had the tools to shift my awareness. What does it take to shift your reality?

I had practiced meditation as a stress reducer before. Like many people I had an app on my phone to do 15 minute daily guided meditations. They were good but I didn’t see the point beyond stress relief and relaxation. Perhaps more knowledge was the way to shift my reality – after all I excelled in school and most other parts of my life seemed to be able to be solved with more knowledge. I spent months researching my condition and seeing where the most promising upcoming cures are. Will stem cell research or gene therapy come in time to save my sight? Perhaps. But it wasn’t enough. Knowledge could only go so far it seemed, even though most people would say that there’s no need to worry if there’s a good chance a cure is coming. The elephant in the room had not gotten any smaller even with more knowledge. Knowledge is power? Sometimes? Knowledge did absolutely nothing to change my constant awareness of the condition. I needed a different way. It was stealing my ability to be present with my wife and with my future daughter. There had to be a better way. I could let the condition steal my eyesight but I could not let it steal my ability to be present. This thirst for knowledge brought me to Westfield, NJ. One therapy that held potential was an acupuncturist who treats inherited eye conditions with the ancient practice of acupuncture. With no other option I wanted to give it a shot. With 2 weeks of treatments I had some time to explore the area – which brought me to Harmony Meditation.

Better me and better self. I always knew that meditation would help relieve stress, but deep down I knew it was so much more. I had practiced body scanning meditation with a therapist in the past to help reduce negative thoughts and recognize that they are just noises in the background. This was very successful in bringing down the weight I put on thoughts. However I finished the program and I was still hungry for more. After all, my focus was still on my elephant in the room very often but I had caught a glimpse of what it was like to shift my awareness temporarily, but I did not yet have the power to shift it for long. Harmony Meditation was somewhere I wanted to try to explore the deeper area of meditation. While I was in Westfield, Harmony Meditation was where that I learned the concept of becoming a better self – this really struck a chord with me and was exactly what I was looking for. This goal of better self will lead to becoming stronger, feeling love more intensely, handling conflict with confidence, and letting relationships handle themselves more freely. The one relationship that is the most important to handle is the relationship with yourself. One cannot be in Harmony when your body and mind are playing their instruments out of tune with each other, while the audience (your soul) will certainly not enjoy the music if they continue to play out of tune. Bringing my awareness down from the head to my chest is how I currently meditate. Bringing it down, bringing it down. I believe most of us have a lifetime of discovery to happen in the center of our chest. Mine is only beginning but has made an incredible difference in my state of harmony.

I haven’t yet been back to Westfield, but I still continue to practice meditation every day. I am still gaining understanding of what my body and mind are like when they play in Harmony. My life has certainly gotten more enjoyable. I no longer resist the sensations in my body that I used too. I can let them go, and since I let them go they come and go with more ease. My negative thoughts come and go but they are no longer a major source of distress. The elephant in the room has shrunk and will continue to shrink as I practice. I still struggle and deal with my more limited eyesight and progression of my eye condition, however it is in a much more peaceful state. I plan on going back to Westfield this fall for more acupuncture treatments and to meet Master Choi again for some more life changing techniques.