the call and response of the universe

The story of this week's reading begins with my dermatologist, an elderly Vietnamese man whose office is in a little vine covered house in my town.  I've been going to him for years and apart from the excellent treatment he provides, we often have good conversations.  We talk about the passage of time, or the necessity of living in the now. We've talked about a friend of his whose writing received international acclaim.  Once he told me he was completing a memoir and asked if I could help with proofreading or copy-editing.  Of course I said yes, but a year went by and I heard nothing more.

Then, a few weeks ago I went in for a check up and afterwards as we sat in his office I reminded him that he was going to send me his manuscript. He smiled and replied with his usual modesty, thanking me for my interest. Then we said goodbye.

I went to New York the following weekend, and when I returned I was surprised to discover that Dr Nguyen had at last sent me his book. "Thank you so much for accepting to review my manuscript," he wrote. "At your urging I was finally able to finish it and submit it to you."

Thus I began an amazing journey into the heart of an astonishing book.  It turns out Dr Nguyen's manuscript is not a memoir as such. It isn't about his life in Saigon or his passage to America. Nor does it concern his medical career.  Rather it is a survey of his spiritual journey - a journey touched by Hindu sayings,  Chinese medicine, physics and metaphysics, his knowledge of the nervous system and the Chakras, Love and a sense of awe.  He writes in detail about his daily meditations, the yin and the yang, the Bagua or the Eight Triagrams, the five elements of fire earth metal water and wood, his daily breathing techniques and how they correspond to these elements and to acupuncture points.

"One of the biggest impediments in the search to finding oneself," he writes "is the human need to be recognized, in the hope of finding acclaim, as this would give validation, confirm our existence and exalt that narrow concept of the self.  We need others as reference points to exist, but we also need to come to terms with a certain solitude if we want to find ourself."

I should mention here that for the last several years I have been going regularly to an acupuncturist as my primary care physician, and have been practicing Bikram yoga three or four times a week.  And over the past month, I've been meditating daily with Sacred Acoustics.  I have been on a kind of journey - and yes, coming to terms with a certain solitude.  So the idea that Dr Nguyen, who has been in my life for more than a decade would choose this moment to send me his manuscript rather than say, a year ago - tells me a lot about the call and response of the Universe.  It tells me that while growth and transitions are sometimes painful, if you listen, things can fall into place with astonishing synchronicity.

In talking with a friend I was recently using the analogy of a chrysalis - and how the larvae must enter a cocoon - there to transform into a butterfly. I was thinking that no matter how hard we might hold onto a chrysalis, the butterfly inside is going to develop, whether we want it to nor not.  My friend sent me a quotation from Anais Nin "Then the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."  As I finished Dr Nguyen's manuscript this evening, I found myself reading the following passage:

"Qi Gong is not a temporary or occasional intellectual exercise, but a complete and permanent change of behavior and mind set.  It is the deconstruction of all our previous conditioning.  A point to stress is that I do not view the early conditioning as harmful or something to look down upon.  It comes naturally with life, as a necessity and means of survival.  It gives us our roots, our strength and our culture.  However, one needs to move on.  Deconstructing it is like the larva breaking out of the cocoon to be free and fulfill its potential.  It is about building and destroying, again and again, to be in sync with the eternal dance."

Here came a message to sustain me with my challenges.  I've noticed that messages from the Universe can often come in unexpected ways. But if we keep our hearts open, they can bless us on our journeys and through our transitions, helping us let go of even the most cherished expectations and teaching us how to trust.