Finding the Heartbeat

I was in the doctor's office in Ashland, Oregon a few years ago to have some pesky skin things removed. Interesting term, pre-cancer. Isn't every cell pre-cancer when you think about it?  I took a deep breath before the nurse took my blood pressure. She looked me straight in the eye and said with great sincerity, "Neither your breathing nor anything else can affect your blood pressure." I thought that she was joking, but could see no sign of that in her expression. "Wow" I thought, "She has never heard what the yogis can do. "

Then came the doctor, and he actually asked me how I was doing. My limited (thank God) experience with doctors has often been that they look at the presenting problem and nothing else. I found myself complaining (moi!) about feeling low. He asked me a bunch of questions and stopped fussing and looked at me and told me that I had just given the classic 100% description of Seasonal Affective Disorder. It had been a long an rainy winter, slightly unusual in southern Oregon.

He started in about taking vitamin D supplements, getting a lamp thing, maybe taking antidepressants. I cut him off with "Why the hell would I do that. I am going to buy a ticket and go to the sun." I couldn't see any reason to adjust to conditions that were making me ill when I had the freedom to let go of those conditions.

But I left thinking about blood pressure and heart beats.My whole life people (total strangers in fact) have lectured me about using too much salt. I tend to have very low blood pressure. I crave salt. I never felt like a sinner for using it, or licking cow licks, for that matter. My friend Ron now tells me that the science is now saying that salt doesn't affect your blood pressure, that that concept was an old wives tale that somehow got fixed without examination. I don't take either view too seriously because science seems to change all the time.

Remember ulcers? Remember all those poor souls who had to eat no spicy foods, no roughage, had to eat mashed potatoes and drink milk all the time because the entire medical profession said that was how you treated ulcers? And you got blamed for having ulcers because they were caused by stress and it meant you couldn't handle your life. Now, thirty years later, ulcers are cause by a virus or bacteria or something and you just take a prescription and are all fixed up. A grain of salt. Or, in my case, a fistful of salt.

But to get back to the old ticker. When I was doing some African Drumming with my friend Mamadou Diop, he said that one of the reasons the drumming was so healing was that the stable beat, the background beat that everything riffs off is the human heart beat. That is why drummers can go on for days. That is why, when things are out of control in a village, the healers start up drumming. That is how many things, especially psychological, can be healed by drums.

This got me thinking about what music I like. My tastes are pretty eclectic but what I really like, what music I really go back to has something I always called "human" in it. It is a relation to my heart beat. It is the same thing that in meditation you experience by following the breath. In doing so you tend to get to the most relaxed easy breathing rhythm that you can find. Then, miracles happen. Troubles wane and you feel better.

I know that I can change most everything in my body by getting in a good rhythm. Like most things, I just have to remember to do so when life starts to go too fast or too slow.