The UltraMind Solution (85 page)

An old monk with long white whiskers and enormous ears that fanned like sails from his head informed us we could see the doctor.

He came out of his room, which adjoined the small clinic. He was dressed in long maroon robes, his head shaved. Thick, black-rimmed glasses were held around his head by a red lama string (a sacred red string used to serve as a reminder of the Buddha) nowhere near his ears. His face radiated a serene and happy interior. The doctor sat cross-legged on a platform in front of his desk listening to my questions.

I looked around the small room. In one corner was his desk, and behind it along the wall was an assortment of herbal preparations in the form of small, mud-colored round pills, carefully labeled and stored in Horlick’s malt jars. In each corner, bags upon bags of these medicines were stacked, all brought overland from Tibet.

There were a few chairs, one bed frame without a mattress, and a large photograph of the Dalai Lama wearing a great crescent-shaped yellow hat.

Though spartan, the room, the medicines, and the monk/doctor, priest/healer gave me the feeling of safety and protection.

Slowly and in pieces his story unfolded. He was sixty-eight years old and was born in western Tibet. There he learned medicine as a young monk as an apprentice to another doctor—learning the texts, the herbs and plants, and the techniques for preparation most doctors learn in formal medical schools. His remote village had no medical schools. He learned the subtle skill of pulse diagnosis and stool and urine analysis from his teacher, and engaged simultaneously in the life of a novice monk.

He carried on with his work until 1959, when the Chinese invaded Tibet, jailed and murdered religious and political leaders, and oppressed the elite class. He remained for twenty-two years in China’s jails, where he was made to serve as a laborer, carrying wood for the first eight years he was in prison.

He was moved several times, first into western Tibet, then Xiagatse, and then near Lhasa, the traditional capital of the country. He did not practice medicine for the first eight years of his imprisonment. However, once the Chinese realized his talents they thought he could serve them better as a clinic doctor in jail.

He worked there, still a prisoner, until they gave him his own clinic of Tibetan medicine, which he ran for a few years near Lhasa. In 1981, he was given the choice to stay in Lhasa or return to his native village in western Tibet. He chose the latter. After a few months in his village, at the age of sixty-three, he escaped across the Himalayas into Dharmsala, India, to visit the Dalai Lama, who told him to go to Katmandu to practice.

I found it difficult to reconcile the serene, calm, happy man who dispassionately told me of his twenty-two-year imprisonment in a Chinese gulag, where he was stripped of his community, his place in the world, prevented from practicing Buddhism, tortured, and abused.

I asked him about the greatest danger he faced during his twenty-two years of imprisonment. I expected him to say the physical and psychological torture and relentless, sophisticated brain-washing techniques designed to force him to renounce his spiritual beliefs and monkhood and embrace Communist ideology.

“The greatest danger I faced during my imprisonment was the few moments I thought I might lose my compassion for my Chinese captors,” he said.

The lack of meaning in life is a soul sickness whose full extent and full import our age has not as yet begun to comprehend.

—C. G. JUNG

Meaning makes a great many things endurable—perhaps everything. Through the creation of meaning... a new cosmos arises.

—C. G. JUNG

The same event or experience can have a different impact on different people. Most of us cannot imagine worrying about having compassion for those who kept us locked away from everything we value and believe in for twenty-two years.

Yet somehow, in small and large ways, our sense of control, our sense of meaning, purpose, and connection in life is one of the most powerful factors that determines our health and well-being.

What do you feel connected to? What gives you meaning and purpose in life? Answers to questions like these define who we are, not only mentally, but also physically.

Many of our beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions are learned behaviors that can be unlearned. Sudden shifts happen. But more often a slow, gradual examination of our lives and our place in the world are necessary to emerge from the chronic stress of “half-empty” perceptions and ANTS (automatic negative thoughts) in our brain.

We all know those people in life who see everything negatively. For them, nothing can be right or good. The glass is always half empty. I would hate to see their brains on an MRI.

Disconcertingly, studies show that it is not lifestyle or even socioeconomic status, but the perception of our place in the world that determines health. One would think disease risk factors commonly associated with poverty or low socioeconomic status such as smoking, consumption of alcohol, junk food, obesity, and lack of exercise should explain the higher rates of disease and death in poverty-stricken communities.

But a study in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
found that even after controlling for all those behaviors and risk factors, higher rates of disease and death could not be explained just by these factors alone.
¹

The key, they said, was not behavior but perception of one’s place in the world. The key findings that could account for the higher risk of disease and death were:

1.
Lack of social relationships and social supports.

2.
Personality dispositions (thinking the glass is half empty), including a lost sense of mastery, optimism, control, and self-esteem, or heightened levels of anger and hostility.

3.
Chronic and acute stress in life and work, including the stress of racism, classism, and other factors related to the inequitable distribution of power and resources.

It is more than stress alone that contributes to or creates the majority of modern chronic diseases—from the epidemic of mental disorders, including depression and anxiety, to heart disease, and more.
²

Disease is a disconnection from our sense of place in the world, a loss of control and meaning as we drift from television channel to television channel looking for a program to satisfy us; consume food disconnected from its origins, processed and unidentifiable from its natural state; as our families separate, disconnect, and communicate through text messaging and e-mail. Poverty alone does not increase the prevalence of illness, morbidity, and mortality. A lost sense of culture, control, and meaning are major factors.

How do you take a pill to fix that?

Ultimately, our perceptions mediate or influence our biology in a direct and measurable way. The science of “PNEI,” or psycho-neuro-endocrine-immune system, has mapped out these connections clearly and powerfully.

All our self-talk and perceptions—good or bad—work through a coordinated network or system. This system is called the HPATGG axis (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal-thyroid-gonadal-gut axis or network).

A big mouthful, yes, but it is simply the system that governs the bidirectional connection between your thoughts and feelings, your hormones, your immune system, and your gut (which contains all three—hormones, immune system, and nervous system).

Everything talks to everything all the time.

We have reviewed how hormones, the immune system, and the gut all talk to the brain earlier in Part II. Now we will review how the brain talks back!

Happy talk = a happy human.

Negative talk = depression, anxiety, behavioral problems, and dementia. Let’s look at how this works.

How do thoughts, perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes affect us?

A lot of us have felt that rush of adrenaline in our lives from a near-miss car accident, or other thoughts that we are in danger. One night, a few years ago, I awoke hearing the rustling of papers and banging in my house. I grabbed the phone and called 911. My heart was racing, my breathing intensified, I could see in the dark and could hear the slightest sound.

The police came over, peered in, and saw our new puppy had escaped from his pen and was playing around in the house.

In my mind and body, I “knew” there was a burglar. That imaginary “perception” turned into real biology. My flight-or-fight response was triggered.

The stress (and relaxation) response is controlled by the brain’s command and control center, called the
hypothalamus
. When I heard that “burglar,” it switched on the stress response, which sends messages out to every part of the body through an automatic part of your nervous system called the
sympathetic nervous system.

When this part of our nervous system is switched on (which is most of the time for most of us), our adrenal glands release more cortisol and the stimulating neurotransmitters epinephrine (adrenaline) and norepinephrine (or noradrenaline). These chemicals are activating and energizing.

This is a great system to have—especially when we are in trouble or danger. Think of zebras grazing in the savanna. Along comes a hungry lion and all the zebras take off acutely stressed. Then one gets killed and the rest go back to calmly grazing. Basically, your body acts like those zebras when it sets off your stress response.

According to Robert Sapolsky, of Stanford University, that is why zebras don’t get ulcers.
³
They have an immediate jolt of stress, and when it’s over they go back to calmly grazing. Their stress response is turned on rapidly. Then when the danger is over, it’s turned off.