Cannabis, or a Chinese master

THE WAY THINGS ARE

Self-help books advise on a range of things – grieving, diet, stopping smoking/drinking etc. This works for some people depending on their personality, how they think, what life has gifted or thrown at them.

After a life changing event, some feel their mental method of dealing with things is stretched like elastic to its utmost. They fear letting go of a problem real (if I don’t grieve enough I’m disloyal) or exaggerated, negatively pre-thinking what might happen if … which enslaves their mind as its burden of stress also affects physical health. Logic becomes a small disregarded voice in a battleground of nurtured emotional supremacy. Peace of mind needs a chance to literally breathe.

Breathing techniques are among the most helpful stabilisers of mood and easers of physical tensions. Qigong practice, a book on my shelf tells me, ‘depends greatly on the practitioner’s subjective initiative.’ For what your life has established as ‘you’, advice on a page or screen doesn’t always work, sometimes it needs a person in real life.

Trying to adapt ingrained habits or DNA inserted parts of ourselves to helpful voices external or close by can also depend on how willing we are to change. My friend Maari is the kind of person you visit and come away from feeling time was well spent. Financial security and her moderate cannabis intake might be partly responsible for her usually calm self. Although she has her times of anxiety, mostly for her grandchildren in a world deteriorating climatically – pollution and waste water contaminated by antibiotics that enable bacteria to form resistance, ‘What saves us one way may kill us in another.’

She long ago lost faith in politicians, ‘Tailor-dressed self-interest.’ And the limits old age places on her formerly dynamic body can irritate her. As a very young woman, she suffered physical and mental scars while in an abusive relationship, and from losing a much wanted baby after a beating that left her with lasting pain. She dropped out of university after a few months of having met him, to be ‘free’ in his commune, alienating her socially conscious parents with the wild life into which he led her.

The older man who charmed her promising a life of bliss, was far from charming when her allowance was cut because she wouldn’t return to studies and left her when she was pregnant. The death of her baby lingered and depressed her, physical pain exhausted her. She had stopped drinking when she learned she was pregnant but grief brought old unhealthy, comfort habits back. ‘I thought I loved him still and I couldn’t let the loss of my baby go no matter how hard I partied, I hung onto it, buried myself in it with worse results.’

A family friend she later married took her to Ziying, who treated her pain successfully with acupuncture and instructed her in the basics of Qigong. ‘Long before it became fashionable.’ Ziying told her his mother was a weaver and as a child he loved to watch her spools turning threads into a design. He told Maari he used those spools as a guide to mind stillness when he couldn’t perform Qigong, taught him by his father, in public. He’d visualise spools, choosing colours that soothed him and by the time he had finished his meditation, his mood had altered.

Maari smiled. ‘The colours you allow to dominate your design, he said, are dark or bright, those that lift your spirits or drag them down.’ Maari used brush strokes on mental canvas using pinks, lavenders, aquamarine. And it worked. She had wanted to study Art, and not to be the businesswoman her parents had hoped for. With her loving new husband’s help, she went back to university, older, wiser, and fulfilled.

She still practices Qigong with her grandsons when they are with her. She explains how it involves body motion and quiescence, going from exterior to interior. Qi in Qigong is not only inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide, it carries a richer, more complicated message and energy. It requires study and the help of a master to begin the journey to its amazing usefulness.