MEDICAL TOURISM

It is Sofia’s spring break from school and we are off again, exploring Asia.  This time our destination is Lombok, the next island to the right of Bali on the map.  We load our bikes onto our car and our car onto a ferry, sailing four hours aboard a not particularly clean, quite crowded vessel; a good time for a bubble blowing contest.  

Aside from our friends traveling with us and a handful of backpackers, we are the only non-native Indonesian passengers.  Once we dock in the port town, we let our intuition be our guide and happen upon a wonderful place to eat and hang out beside a picturesque stretch of beach.  A few Indonesian surfers are catching waves beyond a rocky outcropping as we eat Italian Indonesian food and sip limoncello.  Wandering further along the coastline, we discover a dramatically lit hotel with 30 foot Goddess statues beside tiki torches and decide to spend a few days floating in their gigantic pool beside the ocean, then in the ocean beside the pool.  Sofia has her first ever bicycle riding (no training wheels) experience on the expansive oceanside lawn.

While enjoying my family and the location tremendously, my heart symptoms persist almost daily.  I find myself not wanting to go off on my own, on my bike, strolling down the beach, for fear that something happen to me and my family not know where I am.  Certainly this is not me, living in an increasingly narrow box.  In the midst of my physical symptoms and the terror they trigger in me, I feel myself committing more than ever to living fully, adventurously, joyously.  And so, in Lombok, I make a decision.  I promise myself that I will get whatever help I need... medical tests, medical procedures, exorcism, blood letting, anything.  I tell my heart to hang in there until we get back to Bali, and then I will go wherever the next place is to go for assistance.  I breathe in and breathe out, telling myself all is well.  I visualize every vessel in my heart open, clear, flowing smoothly.  I meditate through each wave of uncomfortable sensation, yet one night in Lombok I still need to take a valium in order to get any sleep.  So much for vacation on a tropical island. 

Back home in Bali (it’s still fun to write that!) I phone Singapore to set up a cardiology appointment, schedule an angiogram and arrange for blood tests to check my hormone levels... until I learn the prices and stop in my tracks.  I have no health insurance and the cost is as high as in the United States.  If I need a procedure to keep me alive I won’t have funds to continue on with my saved life.  In one day I research and call Singapore and Bangkok, ruling them both out, then focus in on Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia as well as the capital of Java, next island to the west of Bali, making all the necessary arrangements to visit there (including finding out the best restaurants, of course!).  This kind of organizing has always come easily to me, but of late I could not manage a fraction of the energy output it requires; most of my energy has been turned inwards.  I notice that I am able to handle the stress of language difficulties, differing cultural norms, multiple phone calls.  Without any medical intervention I have reached a turning point.  

My friend Michelle who, conveniently for me, was a cardiac nurse in Bend, Oregon, accompanies me to Jakarta.  Michelle is an avid athlete, including an enthusiasm for the athletics of international travel.  We label our traveling to a Jakarta hospital “Medical Tourism” in order to reap as much pleasure from the journey as possible.  

It begins with a portentous synchronicity.  While visiting a clinic in Ubud for possible blood work, a gentle mannered Balinese attendant had recommended a cardiologist in Jakarta, even calling the hospital and gathering all the pricing for me.  His bald head is an unusual shape and his persona is serene, giving the appearance of an alien from an enlightened planet.  As Michelle and I board the crowded flight to Jakarta, while squeezing through the narrow isle to Louis Armstrong singing “What A Wonderful World”, I am pleasantly surprised to see my helpful friend seated on the plane.  After landing he offers us transport with his driver who is already waiting and helps us find a reasonably priced hotel near the hospital.  It turns out this humble angel is a doctor and the owner of the clinic where I met him.  The next day I learn he has phoned ahead to my new cardiologist, further paving my way.

I have one word to say about Jakarta: traffic.  In Bali people complain about the growing number of cars on the footpaths-turned-roads.  It’s all a matter of perspective.  Bali is a breeze when compared with Jakarta.  It’s a wonder that pedestrians survive the exhaust choked, nearly gridlocked byways without a sidewalk in sight.  

Stashing our bags in our hotel room, Michelle and I venture into the Jakarta night.  Excited to be in a big city with big city entertainment, we find a nearby mall housing a cineplex but discover every film is some variation of slasher movie or horror flick.  Instead we buy inexpensive Indonesian made girlie trinkets for our daughters in a cute shop with a pink and white picket fence and eat street food from a cart.  The queue of people waiting for padang food find humor in seeing two western women on a nondescript side street eating with them and laugh at my communications in Indonesian.  Returning to our hotel, we hire a becak motor, a converted motorbike with a back seat for two and a colorfully painted metal housing that keeps out the sun and rain but allows in all the exhaust fumes.

Early in the morning at the hospital, while waiting to see the doctor I show Michelle photographs of my previous incarnation in Oregon.  So far in Jakarta I have been feeling great and sleeping great.  The photos of our friends, our Applegate house, our cat Malia, the construction of our garden, trigger a feeling of loss and I feel it right in my heart.  My cardiologist is competent and speaks English well.  He detects a slight irregularity in the stress test I took in Bali that no one has pointed out before, but seems unconcerned about it.  He also is not worried about the protein level in my blood from my first heart event 2 months earlier.  He is not convinced that I had a heart attack at all.  He schedules me for an MSCT, a multi-slice scan that utilizes the most high tech equipment available and is less invasive than an angiogram.  First they draw blood for my battery of information gathering tests and to check for kidney function before injecting me with dye for the scan.  While awaiting the results I skype with my son Gabriel, providing entertainment for the Indonesians in the clinic as I talk into my computer with someone halfway around the world.  My kidneys are working great, so they put me in an all white room with an all white machine made by GE that makes whirling sounds as it emits radiation.  Under the arch of the powerful white mechanical eye that can see into my body, into the very vessels of my heart, I must lie completely still, breathe and hold my breath upon instruction, all the while keeping my arms in a specific position above my head.  The dye moves from my arm into my head and down throughout my body, a warm, weird, liquid sensation.  I hear Beatles songs playing in my head... all you need is love... It feels like science fiction, reminding me of the movie “Sleeper” and I expect to have someone walk in next with an orb.  Instead a baby faced doctor informs me they will not have an analysis of my imagery until late that night.  Time for further exploration of Jakarta.

If a beautiful section of Jakarta exists, we didn’t find it.  We did find a spiffy mall with a better movie selection.  It was a treat to be in a movie theatre.  We saw “The Company Men” where Ben Affleck loses his job and then his upscale house; I didn’t know the theme of the film in advance or that it would hit close to home.  Watching the movie I felt some pain in my heart and understood clearly the emotional component of my symptoms.  Later Michelle and I stroll on a boardwalk over a bay while in the distance a live Indonesian band plays their version of “What A Wonderful World”. 

Returning to the hospital late that night, the results of the testing are astonishing: my heart is not just okay, in working condition; it is spotless, pristine, perfect.  Every vessel registered zero calcification.  Not a hint of any blockage.

When we meet with the cardiologist the next morning he acknowledges that he has never seen a scan as clean as mine.  He expresses an interest in visiting the Green School and learning about raw food, confiding that his personal scans do not look like mine.  As for an explanation of my symptoms, he only offers that “symptoms are subjective” and writes me a prescription for Xanex, assuring me that these tranquilizers are not addictive at a low dose and further confiding that he pops one himself before he has to speak at a medical conference. I am relieved, elated and slightly mystified.  I am not surprised that the tests give me a clean bill of heart health.  I am somewhat amazed at how the symptoms, both physical and emotional, seem to have lifted off of me and floated away.  I try to fill the prescription but the response at the hospital apotek (pharmacy) is “habis”, in other words they are fresh out.  (I never try again but carry the prescription around for weeks in the filing cabinet called my purse.)

Later I receive further confirmation of my radiant health.  Some of the blood test results are in, showing all levels normal except one; the HDL cholesterol (good guy pack men that gobble up the not-so-good cholesterol) is off the charts high and the score is in red.  That’s a good thing.  Michelle says she has never seen scores so strong.  I am more convinced than ever that eating raw food is youthing my body.  Most important to me, the results are self-affirming; I can indeed trust my intuitive knowing about my body and my life.

We dig around a few more Jakarta neighborhoods, finding some stylish food in a swank setting and a few trendy stores, but no outdoors beauty.  Then we catch our flight back to Bali.  Louie Armstrong is still singing “What A Wonderful World”. 

It is indeed a wonderful life.  All of it.  I am blessing every intense, glorious, mundane, romantic, trying, mysterious moment of it.  I am noticing an increase in my ability to be grateful for things as they are.  

What is it that has been happening with me?  What are these heart episodes and eruptions of terror?  They are my path to freedom.  They are an evolutionary impulse stretching and shaking the roots of my old paradigm, cracking through the mud of old fears that have held me back.  My previous life has cracked apart, decomposed and vanished.  My every cell, the very fibers of my heart, the wiring of my entire system has been shifting, up-leveling to carry more voltage.

My spiritual explanation has not been sufficient for many friends and family members close to me.  Well meaning voices want a doctor to discover what is wrong with me and fix it.  That mindset is exactly what is wrong for me!  All my life thus far I have carried, buried in a tiny, secret corner of my heart, the belief that I have something wrong with me.  What I have been doing is letting that go.  What I need to know in my belly, in arteries, in my blood cells and my bones, is that everything is right with me.

Like an athlete, I am developing the muscle, the persistence and the endurance to make it through the transformation ultra marathon.  Like a musician, I am practicing my focus over and over, moment by moment; focus on what feels good, focus on what I know to be true, my inner ear finely tuned to hear the cosmic song.  It takes great power of focus to remain positive regardless of what is happening, no matter what.  Like an artist, I am dreaming my design into form, observing as the pieces of my new life come together like a mosaic, one tile at a time. 

The colors of the rainbow

So pretty in the sky

Are also on the faces

Of people going by

I see friends shaking hands

Saying how do you do

They’re really saying

I love you

I hear babies crying

I watch them grow

They’ll learn much more

Than I’ll ever know

And I think to myself

What a wonderful world    

     

  

HEARTQUAKES & EARTHQUAKES, HEARTWAVES & TSUNAMIS, and MY NEW IDENTITY AS A CACAO GODDESS

In the midst of my heart fluctuations I received an invitation to be a Cacao Goddess.  An extremely bright eyed young man was creating an event with a strong intention of building community and turning people on to the delight of raw chocolate.  The idea was for three Cacao Goddesses to prepare copious amounts of raw chocolate in a variety of forms, conferring their blessing to the assemblage through delicious treats and anointment with cacao butter.  Along with the chocolate, the line-up for the evening included Indian temple dancing, singing crystal bowls, sacred music, presentations by visionary artists, a Mayan calendar specialist, raw foodists and cacao enthusiasts.  And all this unfolded on Asher’s birthday, a gathering we didn’t plan or host, created for his enjoyment. 

I made chocolate for two days.  When I thought I was done I intuited that we still needed more and whipped up another batch of truffles.  I had a large supply of materials, yet went through my entire stock of cacao butter and powder.  I even used some of my ingredients from afar -- lucuma, mesquite, goji, blue green algae -- medicinal superfood treasures unavailable in Bali. 

The beautiful people gathered, a fascinating collective of souls who have been drawn into the vortex that is Bali, spanning the generations and the continents.  Displayed as a mandala or on overflowing platters, a table brimming with cacao tempted the guests to sample more and more and yet more still.  Cacao with cayenne, cacao with cashews, cacao with mint, cacao with macadamias, cacao with tahini... As the temple dancers invoked the Goddess Kali, as the speakers shared from their depth of wisdom, the Cacao Goddess had the pleasure of passing trays of filled raw chocolate cups and cinnamon sprinkled truffles, connecting with each grateful recipient.  With sparkler candles firing atop a raw chocolate brownie cake, the collective sang happy birthday to Asher in multiple harmonies.

As a bookend to the weekend, as if that was not already enough chocolate, Daniel Aaron, yoga trainer and raw cacao bandleader, hosted a housewarming at his new abode.  His Balinese staff prepared a wide assortment of cacao delicacies.  Having previously attended a dinner party at Daniel’s where his pembantu created a magnificent raw spread, I was curious to talk to this woman.  While the party pulsed outdoors around the pool, I made my way into the kitchen -- surprise, surprise -- I must spend more time in kitchens than any other room.  Three Balinese women and I had an in depth conversation about raw food preparation.  Then I asked them if they eat any of the raw food.  Nervous giggles all around and a resounding NO.  In Bali, it isn’t food if it isn’t rice.  White rice, that is. 

Amidst all this cacao and high vibrations I continue having heart episodes.  No longer one major heartquake or a single wave of them, it has become an ongoing storm of turbulence.  I don’t know when it will hit next, lay low, don’t plan much with confidence.  In the past couple of years I have lived with much uncertainty, but could reliably count on my physical strength.  Now I don’t know when my body will give way or what will happen when it does.  The terror is immense and mounting.  I become afraid of being afraid.  I have never lived on such shaky ground. 

On the Balinese calendar it is New Year and the entire island has been preparing for the Nyepi ceremony.  For weeks every village island-wide has been creating Ogoh-Ogoh, elaborate, larger than life size sculptures representing demonic or negative tendencies.  The night before Nyepi begins, each village marches their Ogoh-Ogoh through the streets carried by the village men on a grid work of bamboo.  They don’t march in a straight line but move forward, then abruptly sideways and backwards, in a crazed trancelike motion to the rhythm of the pulsing gamelan orchestra clanging on metal percussion instruments.  During the procession and throughout the night homemade noise makers, created by exploding volcanic ash in a bamboo tube, thunder like bombs.  The next day is a contrasting silence.  No one leaves their home, uses fire or electricity.  Not the sound of a single motorbike on the road.  It is a time of introspection and fasting, 

facing and transforming the inner demons, balancing light and dark.

We have plans to spend Nyepi with friends, witnessing the dance of the giant Ogoh-Ogoh in Ubud, sleeping in our friends’ home for the day of silence.  As Nyepi approaches I cannot leave my house.  For three days I hardly leave my bed.  Generated from my heart and shooting through the electrical circuitry of my veins, I ride out wave after wave after wave of physical experience linked to emotional memory.  I am terrified to go through it alone.  Asher talks me through each episode, telling me the truth about my eternal being.  In heightened sensitivity and connectivity, each village’s mediation with their demons has merged with my own.  I am facing the heart of darkness, the appearance of evil in the world.  It feels like a black SS boot is standing on my chest.  A dark, amorphous blob is laughing at me.  I use every tool in my box and every fiber of strength to love myself and the world and all of existence through this, to see love in the face of evil, to find peace in the midst of physical discomfort and uncertainty of my own survival.  

In my first 50 years I did not give death much thought.  I have carried a knowingness that I would live a long life and I have not had many encounters with the death of others.  I have always been healthy, my parents are healthy, I still have two grandparents living, one of whom is about to turn 100.  Now the subject is up for me.  Regularly.

A bit of a respite and it returns.  A pressure or burning in my heart leads to nausea, a tingling spreading down my arms and legs to my fingers and toes and a feeling of impending doom.  I don’t know if I am about to die.  I thought I had given up my fear of death; I have died and come back, have experienced life beyond the physical many times and know it to be exquisite.  I know that life is eternal.  I KNOW it.  I have experienced the bliss beyond the body. I know that we choose when it is time for us to shed the body.  I KNOW this, too.  Somehow it does not stop me from experiencing fear, enormous fear, terror in fact, not so much of death but of death overriding my desire to live, sheer terror that I will suddenly leave my body for good at a time not of my choosing, imposed upon me by... ?  I don’t know what.  The mere thought of it frightens me.

Asher says, essentially, why don’t you just go ahead and die.  That seems cold, but he’s been on duty with me for quite a while by this point and has some fatigue and frustration with the situation.  He says he knows who I really am and it is not this quivering, extremely vulnerable little child.  Beyond that, he was encouraging me to go ahead and fully surrender into whatever this thing is.  He asked if I was holding on out of a sense of responsibility and told me I am always putting everyone else before myself.  He has work to do, leaves and I am alone.  I surrender into the sensations in my body as best I can.  I tell myself it is a good day to die... and an even better day to live.  I relax a little and find a little relief.  The sensations subside.  I live.

It returns again.  And again.  I get to the point where I am afraid to go to sleep.  When I start to fall asleep I jolt back awake, afraid that I have stopped breathing.  I seem to be in an extended pause in between breathes each time. (It is something I have been noticing for quite a while now, that I seem to be able to hang out for a long time after an exhale before breathing in again.)  Or I doze off and pop awake with my heart racing.  I must be absolutely vigilant about my thoughts; even the slightest movement into a negative stream of thinking can trigger an onslaught.  This surreal movie cannot possibly be starring me.  The walls of this old paradigm are closing in on me.  Something must shift.  I have  heard that the aphid, after hatching, eating and demolishing its food supply, at the moment when it looks like survival cannot continue, suddenly grows wings and moves on to new leaves.  I need to sprout wings and fly.  

The next night it continues.  I’ve been a do-it-myselfer most of my life but now I need help.  I decide to magnetize to myself everything I need to help me.  I feel it happening.  For starters, I take a valium I received weeks earlier at the hospital and finally get some sleep.  In the morning I wake up feeling fabulous.  Truly fabulous.  It is fabulous to feel fabulous.  I am grateful to be alive.  I am enjoying every bird call, every insect sound, the sensation of the breeze on my skin.

The lovely couple I connected with synchronistically in front of the photo of the Lubavitch Rebbe in a Penang, Malaysia museum call me, out of the blue, and are visiting Bali.  We have lunch together.  They have completed a few months on the Thai Burmese border working with traumatized Burmese refugees.  He is a psychologist, she teaches English.  I do not often pour out my innermost darkness to anyone other than my closest of friends, but my heart leads me to tell them my story.  They are compassionate listeners and have experience with post traumatic stress.  He tells me the low dosage of valium I took is not dangerously addictive and encourages me to take more when necessary.  He emphasizes the importance of relieving symptoms.  I could not agree more.

Later that day I visit a local apotek (pharmacy) to buy more valium.  I try 5 apoteks in various villages but none have valium in stock, so I call my friend who had offered me some of her supply.  She has just returned from surgery in Thailand with an excess.  It turns out she has her own history of panic attacks and likes to keep a supply of valium, just in case.  She lets me know there are plenty of other moms we know in common who keep themselves stocked, too.  This is a whole new world for me.  At dusk she meets me by the side of the little bumpy dirt road beside her house for our drug exchange.  In my head I hear the Rolling Stones singing about “running for the shelter of her mother’s little helper...” 

Driving my motorbike at night down a steep pockmarked road used to scare me, but it is a breeze compared to what I have been facing inside myself.  I feel light.  I still feel fabulous.  Instead of going straight home, making sure I’m there to read my daughter to sleep, I decide to take myself out to dinner in Ubud.  As I descend the stairs into my favorite little Japanese restaurant I see the friends I met in Penang, Malaysia are having dinner with my friends from LA (who have lived in Bali a number of years).  Another synchronistic meeting with these wonderful people.  We laugh and enjoy another meal together, two in one day.   

Fabulous lasts about a day and a half.  Some symptoms return and some fear creeps back in.  I skype with my cardiologist in America who, of course, recommends an angiogram.  The angiogram machine in Bali is broken, so that means flying to Singapore.  My network of gorgeous friends here kicks into high gear and within a short time they have assembled medical referrals, flight schedules, someone to accompany me, someone volunteers a place to stay, someone else to take me to dinner.  Then I remember that our family’s passports are at Immigration for visa extension and even to expedite the process means I won’t have my passport for another week.  That message tells me to reconsider, at least for the time being, the medical route which I feel can only tell me about the mechanics but not shed light on what is happening in my being.  I watch closely.

I visit a Balinese homeopath.  A friend kept suggesting I see him and, in my desire to be open to help, I make an appointment.  I have never before seen a homeopath and decide it is worth a try.  Tjok is a sensitive, intelligent, humble young man with an unpretentious elegance.  He is a balanced hybrid; his father descends from the Ubud royal family and his mother is Australian.  I open up to him immediately and sense his understanding of every word I speak.  Throughout our dialogue I notice an old photograph on his wall of a Balinese elder.  Before I leave I ask him if the photograph is of his grandfather.  Yes.  I ask if he was a balian, a traditional healer.  Tjok pauses, then says his grandfather was beyond a balian.  He could transport himself psychically all over the island for various ceremonies, before the time of automobiles.  Then Tjok gives me two remedies; one is from a highly poisonous Amazonian snake and the other is phosphorous.  I take the snake remedy the first week and then start in with the phosphorous.  I don’t know how they work or why, but I notice the volume has gone way down on both my physical symptoms and my anxiety.  Perhaps it is just the placebo effect.  Frankly, I don’t care.  I am interested in relief.  Every day I feel better.

One night I am in bed.  I have been asleep for several hours but have awakened.  After just a bit I notice our bamboo house rolling right and left, gently dancing.  Sofia sleeps through it.  The earth has stretched and moved and shifted.  I have ridden out many earthquakes in Los Angeles far more powerful than this one and I do not feel alarmed.  

The next day I learn about the earthquake in Japan and the tsunami.  I find it curious that I have been referring to my heart experiences as heartquakes and heartwaves and now the earth has quaked and the ocean has thrown a tsunami upon the Japanese coast.  A letter from an American living in Japan circulates the internet (and I receive it from several people) telling stories of heart openings in Japan following this hardship, of people coming together, taking care of each other, caring.  We are all realizing, we are all remembering, how interconnected we are.  

This time of earth changes, this time of awakening, has been predicted by numerous cultures.  The time is now.  I feel I am recalibrating from the inside out, fine tuning every system, every cell, to be able to hold more love.  My voltage has increased from 110 (US) to 220 (Indonesia).  I am doing less, stuffing less, feeling more.  I am feeling... everything.  And with my supply of valium in place, I haven’t felt the need to use it.  

Now I have become a seismic instrument.  I wake up yet another night, after sleeping a few hours, feeling so much energy going through me it is almost overwhelming.  My skin is itching madly and huge energy is pouring through my entire body.  Asher has been awake and suggests we lay down together to work through it.  When we do, our bamboo house gently sways and dances again.  Another earthquake.  The epicenter of this one is in Singaraja, Bali on the other side of the island.  My body calms immediately.

When the earth’s crust moves, it creates seismic waves.  I believe we are all experiencing these quantifiable vibrations whether we are conscious of it or not.  The waves are furthering us on our evolutionary paths.    

Along the way the Cacao Goddess receives special acknowledgement, as if the Universe offers me a treat for diligently walking the path of fire.  A sincere (very) young man who feels it is his calling to honor the Divine Feminine in all her human female forms gifts me with a Goddess empowerment massage.  With cacao butter.  I know, I know, it sounds like something more suited for the back roads of Bangkok, but it wasn’t like that at all.  It was adoring.  It was a prayer.  Throughout the session this lovely young man channeled words of affirmation, telling me how beautiful I am, how important I am, calling me an ageless angel, calling forth my gifts into the world.  Every woman is a Goddess and every Goddess deserves this. 

SWINGING

In three weeks I have visited two Balinese hospitals and three traditional Balinese healers.

After my initial heartquake that landed me in Sanglah, the people’s hospital, my new neighbor, Adriana, took me to see a traditional balian.  (Adriana is from Slovakia and her husband, Brij, is from India.  They met in Dubai.  I just love how international Bali is.)  We drive about 30 minutes, arriving at a house surrounded by rice fields.  Several others are ahead of us in the waiting room, a mixture of locals and westerners.  A Balinese woman attended by her grown son slowly sips an herbal potion the healer’s wife has prepared.  It is evident that the tea is not a delicious mixture conducive to gulping. 

When it is our turn the balian greets us as a gracious host, makes a sincere effort to memorize our names and, holding my hand, escorts us to a private room.  The look in his eye is clear, deep and direct; a knowing, reassuring look.  We sit together on cushions.  He does his healing work with Adriana first, then Brij; I go last.  He asks us to look into his third eye and keep our eyes open.  He closes his eyes, telling us he is able to view inside our bodies.  Brij is clearly in a high state of discomfort as the balian does his hands-on energy work, a deep and specific massage with coconut oil.  When he works on me, focusing on the organs below my rib cage, I feel no pain at all, just a sense of elation that continues to rise.  The balian says I don’t sleep well and it’s true that I sleep very little.  He talks about my pancreas, but doesn’t say a thing about my heart.  Adriana tells him about my recent heart experience and he says, unconcerned, “Heart is easy!  Just need to see me one time for heart!”  He does a little additional energy work on my heart and we return to the sitting room.  His wife brings us individually concocted teas that look and taste as if she has scraped the jungle floor and added ginger.  The balian and his wife focus their bright and intense eyes on me, remarking repeatedly about how young I look for my age.  The balian insists over and over again that I am from India.  

Once we leave and Adriana asks me what I think of the balian and his healing powers, I am not sure.  I certainly feel uplifted by the experience.  “He is a spiritually conscious man,” is about all I can say for sure.

At home I find a dear friend has sent me the link to a Hindu chant called “Devi Prayer:

Hymn to the Divine Mother.”  I have been asking my heart what will make it sing.  As I listen I feel this chant is one of my heart’s songs; the extended New Age synthesizer notes replicate sounds I have heard during some of my out-of-body travels beyond this world, the Sanskrit lyrics tie in with the balian’s insistence that I am Indian. 

Ma Amba Lalitha Devi

The Divine Mother is everywhere.

She is in everything.

She is the Divine Essence that lives within all beings.

Her domain is the field of life, for she gives to all beings the sustenance that is needed for life.

Her beauty lives in the natural world, and spans the universes in all their splendor.

She has been called by many names, for all traditions recognize Her.

Into each consciousness, the knowledge is given of the sacredness of life.  This sacredness IS the Mother.........

I have spent most of my life paying very little attention to my pancreas, not really even aware that I have one.  Since the balian brought the subject up I do a little research.  Insulin production, part of the job of the pancreas, is not my issue, but I did come across something that caught my attention, a couple of somethings: metaphysically the pancreas has to do with the sweetness of life; and the gemstone that relates to the pancreas is the emerald, my birthstone. 

Just a few days later our family is on another vacation, a long weekend school break.  We begin at a place called Turtle Bay near the village of Jasri, far on the southeast coast of Bali.  Our friend Emerald lives there and has invited us to stay as his guests in the Javanese joglo house he usually rents out.  The joglo, made of teak and standing on tall stilts, has two bedrooms, two baths, a sitting room and a gigantic balcony looking out on the crashing waves.  From the balcony it feels like being on a ship at sea; no human-made structure is visible, just a small island off shore exactly the shape of a sperm whale.  

Emerald’s staff serves us a healthy lunch on the balcony, a combination of the fresh greens I have brought and vegetables from Emerald’s organic garden.  It feels good to me being here, a taste of the sweetness of life.  Emerald has lived in Bali for decades and we have known him for almost as long as we have been visiting the island.  I always feel uplifted by conversation with him, absorbing the depth of his understanding about such diverse topics as the sacred geometry and lay-lines connecting Balinese temples and the intricacies of Balinese politics.  I feel like Emerald gets me; we understand each other.  It does my heart good to be seen and met.  Emerald has recently begun growing coffee and invested in a small chocolate making operation, subjects of great interest to Asher and I.

After lunch I have some physical discomfort.  I can feel the balian’s fingers working my pancreas area, although he is nowhere in sight.  A wave of exhaustion comes over me and I rest on a daybed with abundant, plump pillows.  Soon I feel my spirit begin to journey away from my body and the prickles of fear that rise up in me when that starts to happen.  I hear Asher’s voice -- not his physical voice  -- say, “Don’t be afraid.  Go into the Light.”  I relax more, surrender, and move into a Glow that is yellow in the center and vibrant orange all around.  I experience a peace beyond peace... serenity.  As it dissolves away I find myself rubbing my fingers together making sure I still have a body.  I have been having these experiences with increased frequency the past two years.  They are so real to me that I know beyond any sense of doubt that much more exists than what we know as physical reality.  Each experience is a little -- sometimes a lot -- like dying.  I believe I am learning to die so that I can live well.  To live well is to live free of fear, in absolute trust that all things are working together for good.  To live well is to live in joy.

For the rest of that day and well into the next I am in a state of bliss.

We visit Emerald’s chocolate partner, Charlie, at his gnome-like chocolate factory right beside the ocean.  All the buildings look like elves or preschoolers live and play in them, but actually it is Charlie who makes natural soap and raw chocolate there, living upstairs in one small room with a bed and a chair.  Overlooking the beach, hanging a great distance down from a coconut palm, is a wide plank wooden swing.  I put Sofia on it, but it swings out so far over the sloping land, reaching out to the ocean, that she is afraid to stay on for long.  Asher does the full-on adult ride, pulling the swing up the hill to a wooden treehouse-like platform built around a palm, then sailing out in a long arc high above the ground.  He finds the swing kind of scary, too.  Ordinarily I don’t find frightening things fun.  I don’t care for roller coasters and horror films.  On this day, having walked along the lip of the volcano between life and death, and having staked my territory in bliss, the swinging is magnificent.  I pull the swing up to the platform, let go, and surrender with supreme ease.  I am tasting the sweetness of life.  I relish the sensation of flying.  The swing is a barometer for me and I am registering no fear.

Later, I crash.  An emotional crash.  Having moved into my most expanded state yet, I then take a swing in the other direction.  I contract.  It starts as anger about a couple of seemingly small things, but what it touches off in me is a profound feeling of not being cared for, provided for, assisted by my husband, and by life itself.  I put myself through the worst of my teenage anxiety, comparing myself to others and judging myself harshly.  We had left Emerald’s beautiful surroundings -- Sofia and I traveling by car and Asher on his bike -- to join about about 20 Green School families in Amed, the easternmost part of Bali.  It was much too large a crowd and far too crummy a hotel for my plummeting state of mind. And ordinarily hot, dry, beachy Amed is overcast and rainy our entire stay.

This is a big crash for me and it takes me days to climb out of the pit.  It gets worse before it gets better.  I want Asher to listen, be compassionate, be affectionate, but he tells me it’s all an inside job, I have nowhere to look but inside myself.  True, but still I want him to listen.  The more I want him to listen the less he is willing to do so.  I would like him to be able to hold his own joy while compassionately hearing my pain, but he will not budge from his absolute stance, his insistence that his duty to himself is to selfishly pursue his own joy no matter what.  I think he feels that listening to my fears and insecurities will pull him down.  A gulf widens between us.  I can’t believe this is happening, and at such a tender time.  Of course this is when I am getting to the real emotional roots, the epicenter of the heartquake.  This sense of betrayal by someone who I think is supposed to love and care for me emotionally duplicates wounding from long ago when the imprint formed.

During the week I have an impromptu visit with another balian.  This one has been my friend for 13 years, since our first trip to Bali.  We took one look at each other and became friends for life.  His name is Ketut, but I have often affectionately called him Ketutski.  That’s hard these days when the growing entourage around Ketut calls him Shri Guru.  Yep, he’s been elevated to guru status.  Guru in Indonesian means teacher, but the connotation with this crowd is closer to Exalted Avatar. We have an intimate conversation for a few moments, but the circle of adoring women trickles in and I discover they have lunch plans with Shri Guru.  I join them along with Ketut’s family at a small warung just outside of Ubud.  Shri Guru tells the story of Ketutski’s visit with Avara and Asher in Los Angeles for a month maybe 12 years ago including the story of the time the three of us were together in our West LA kitchen, I passed out, Ketut saw my spirit leave through my heart and when I came back in I was in bliss for days afterwards.  We all pause for a moment, seeing the thread weaving a connection to the present.  I am not entirely comfortable with my propensity for this kind of travel, but sense it is leading me somewhere important.  It strikes an incongruent note for me that Shri Guru tells the assemblage how scared he was when I passed out.  I do not tell everyone that a year later, when Ketut and I were together at his home in Bali one night, he passed out and I picked him up after he bopped his head on the stone floor.  We have a connection beyond this world.

Somehow the enormity of the gulf between Asher and I recedes.  The tides of relationship go in and go out.  Gratefully they come back in again.  Just as the cycles of nature move through birth, life and death into rebirth once again, relationships die and are reborn as they evolve.  I tend to my own needs more deeply and he comes forward with a greater willingness to ride through the moment by moment fluctuations with me.  Just in time.  

A few days later I am having not one heartquake, but an extended series of waves somewhat like labor contractions.  They come on in the night.  Sofia is sleeping beside me and Asher is stroking my hair, helping ride out the quakes.  With each wave I pour forth a stream of consciousness release of every significant trauma I have experienced in my life, sometimes crying, sometimes laughing.  My body is doing something beyond my control; I cannot stop it or alter it.  The eruptions are powerful and they scare me.  I realize this terror is something I have carried my entire life.  I am riding the razor edge between life and death.  I affirm my desire to be in this body, my passion to live fully.  I have only just begun to get the hang of being here.  It feels like the waves will go on forever, but then they recede.  

I decide to go into the hospital again.  The hospital maneuver gets set into motion;  Cynthia finds a cardiologist on duty late at night, Michelle finds a car and a driver.   Asher stays with Sofia and angel nurse Michelle accompanies me.  I notice as I have time to pack my own bag that I am already feeling better.  Each time I go to the hospital it is after the fact.  I go anyway.  All the tests are normal, every single one.  I go back home in the middle of the night and slip into bed with my family.  I am glad to be home.  

I know this is not about a problem with my physical heart.  Asher knows this, too.  He also understands me better and knows me more intimately than he has ever known me in the 15 1/2 years we have been together.  Side by side with me as I died and birthed and spilled my lava, what had previously been a fuzzy understanding came into sharper focus for him.  Now it is easy for him to be compassionate.  

Day by day I feel better.  Some of the physical symptoms continue.  Some of the fears still lurk... will I pass out if I am driving a motorbike?... can I scuba dive?...  

My pembantu (helper) takes me to see her balian.  She comes to my house with her husband and son, during the hours she is usually off duty, and takes me on the back of her motorbike to a remote village.  We sit on the porch of a typical Balinese compound. A middle aged man in a sarong and nothing else struts towards us with the gait of a basketball player.  My pembantu, Komang, and her husband make some comments in Balinese about his physique and he flexes his muscles good naturedly.  At times like this I don’t really know what is happening but just go along for the ride.  No one speaks any English and I don’t know what the protocol is.  The athletic man slips into the house and returns all in white.  So he is the healer... I wasn’t sure.  He takes the offerings Komang brought and goes into his temple where he prays briefly.  When he comes back he asks me in Indonesian (at least they speak Indonesian, a language in which I can crawl along like an infant... in Balinese I am completely lost) if I had an experience where I suddenly fell over, passed out and... his hand trails up into the air signifying me leaving my body.  Okay, that’s impressive.  I hadn’t told anyone present.  He asks me some more questions, only some of which I understand and then begins his hands-on work.  Much of it is incredibly painful.  Komang holds my hand.  He does something between my toes and asks me if I feel heat.  No, just pain.  He massages my heart deeply with coconut oil.  My top is in the way and they ask me to take it off.  I am half naked with my pembantu, her husband I have just met, her son, various members of the balian’s extended family and the balian himself, receiving intense and sometimes excruciating massage, yet I am very much at ease.  In between phases the balian looks at me with piercingly loving eyes and asks how I feel.  I laugh a lot and respond that I feel good, but he is not convinced and does more work on me.  His hands and arms shake as he pulls energy out of my heart.  He is chanting something I cannot hear over the clucking of the chickens roaming around with newborn chicks.  He massages my arms and legs, always returning to my heart with that inquiring look to see if I have released my burden.  This man and I see each other, understand each other, without language.  When it is all over I feel lighter.  He directs Komang to make a jamu for me, a healing tonic of mostly turmeric, some vegetables and, uhhg, a raw egg yolk.

The next day some of my symptoms continue.  They come and go.  It is not intense, but it is not gone.  The lingering question is:  Will there be more? 

I arrange a cardiac treadmill stress test at the hospital.  When I arrive the staff tell me that the machine is broken.  Bali.  Asher gets a little huffy with the employees which is a good thing because they then decide to send us to the customer service office.  I am amazed that they have such an office.  The woman inside schedules an appointment for the test later that day in a private office.  They hook up 10 electrodes to my chest.  The same doctor who saw me in the hospital administers the test.  I walk on the treadmill.  At intervals the treadmill gets steeper and faster.  My blood pressure remains normal throughout and my heart rate is steady.  I pass the test with flying colors.

I receive a clean bill of health from the doctor.  My heart is just fine.  I am not going crazy.  I am not even having heart attacks.  Not really.  I am awakening. 

Whatever my life was about the first 50 years, the next 50 are swinging in another direction. 

Heart Opening on the Lip of the Volcano

I never thought I would... but on a Sunday I went on one of the monster, crazy, off road bike rides with Asher.  Billed by my friend Michelle as a fun couples ride, ten of us strapped our bikes onto an open bed truck and climbed in beside the bicycles for a journey up the mountains.  We unloaded beside the temple at the top of Mount Batur, each person and each bike receiving a blessing with holy water before embarking on our ride.  We started on a paved road, but soon turned onto a muddy single track that lasted for hours.  My friends had said much of the ride would be downhill into the crater.  They hadn’t mentioned that it would be downhill over jagged volcanic rock and slick compressed mud that causes the back wheel to fishtail.  They hadn’t mentioned that in between downhill portions would be steep uphill climbs.  Nor had they breathed a word about narrow trails with shoulder high, thick blades of grass overgrowing the path and blocking the view of what comes next... massive downed tree trunks, for instance, causing us to lift our bikes up and over in order to continue.  

Most of the riders were far more experienced that I am, having bombed around on  highly technical trails for years in places like Aspen, Colorado or Bend, Oregon.  Fortunately my friend Blair was along for the adventure, as much of a newbie as me, and we didn’t have a single qualm about walking our bikes downhill through some -- well, most -- of the really treacherous parts.  Some places were so steep everyone was walking their bike.  It was an extremely strenuous ride, and magnificent every bit of the way.  

Several of my friends fell repeatedly and had gigantic bruises, but I was much too cautious for that.  When I could take my concentration off of the next meter of trail immediately before me, all around us were stunning views.  We were at the very top of the mountain, the lip of the ravine.  The air was cool and fresh.  Sometimes we rode through thick, fragrant pine forest.  On the left was usually a drop off and a cascading blanket of mist.  Off to the right was the open mouth of the volcano, filled in with a lake, beside small villages and a patchwork quilt of farms.  Children on terraced fields of vegetables called after us, “halo! halo! halo!’  I found myself enjoying it all more than I could have imagined.  I found myself exhilarated. The beauty made my heart sing.  I felt tenderized and open, the veil between the worlds was thin.  I surprised myself by liking the exertion of the uphill portions the best.  The riding was fun and scary and earthy and mystical all at once.    Asher said every time he saw me I had a huge smile on my face.  (Couples ride, ha! he was way ahead of me most of the time, of course.)

Even after we left the dirt path for a paved road down into the crater, the curving surface was strewn with rocks, soaked with rain and extremely steep.  We came upon a bat cave in the rocky mountain wall housing thousands of live bats squeaking and flying around, their guano feeding healthy patches of giant bamboo.  “We’re almost done!” they had been telling me for at least on hour, but we still had a long distance to go in a drizzling rain, through the farmland we had viewed from above, past gorgeous rows of cabbages and chillies, rolling uphill and downhill sections.  By the time I met up with the group at our final destination, a warung in the crater, the rain was coming down hard.  We had been on the bikes for 4 or 5 or 6 hours --- I had lost all sense of time --- a huge ride for me and I was feeling it in my lower back.  Just when I had the thought that I’d love a massage, a Balinese woman approached me offering massage service.  It was such an immediate universal response to a request that I went for it.  The massage was fantastic; deep and intimate and personal.  I felt like a professional athlete getting a rub down after a big event.  Maybe 50 minutes into the massage there came a knock at the door.  The rain had let up and the truck was moving out.  The masseuse said we would be driving into more rain and she was right.  As the truck puffed its way up the steep incline out of the volcano (on Asher’s usual rides they cycle up this road and then all the way home), a downpour dumped copious amounts of water on us.  It felt so cold I expected to see bits of ice in the rain.  We huddled together in the back of the truck making jokes, laughing and singing to keep from dipping into frigid despair.  Finally we reached the top of the ridge where we had begun, purchased rain ponchos that we draped across the tops our heads like tarps and continued down the mountain in greater comfort, ending up at a nice little Ubud restaurant, joined by our children.  My friends said to me that it is time for me to buy a bike.  I agreed.

My week proceeded, serving up healthy, tasty raw food in the Green School warung, greeting the ongoing flow of new families and visitors.  Asher and I have become the unofficial welcoming committee, the ambassadors of goodwill sharing information about the school and tips about living in Bali as we offer raw chocolate truffles or fresh roasted lattes.  The warung is a vortex, a place for connecting, for community building, our specialty.

Thursday night, I read to Sofia at bedtime and fell asleep with her.  I woke up a few hours later feeling like an elephant was sitting on my chest.  I went upstairs with Asher and began feeling strange sensations radiating down my arms into a tingling in my fingers.  Asher called our friend Michelle, who was a cardiac nurse in America, and she sent her husband Andy over to drive me into a clinic and stayed on the phone with Asher.  None of us were really sure where to go for something like this.  

Again the veil between the worlds was thin.  In fact, it didn’t exist.  I wasn’t afraid.  I knew my being was continuing to make a strong conscious decision to remain in this body.  And I knew that to leave the body is to merge into the ongoing bliss of the universe.  I have already left and come back.  I know it is okay.  So I surrendered and went along for the ride.

At the absolute epicenter of the heart/soul earthquake, something lifted off my soul.  Truly.  The medical profession calls what was happening in my body a heart attack, but to me that is too violent a description for the quickening I experienced.  What was happening in my body forced me to relinquish control.  When I did, I experienced a release of something I have been carrying almost my entire life thus far.  It felt as if I had been encased in a thin crust of mud and the heartquake caused the mud to crack and peel off.  I had a huge smile on my face, like riding on the lip of the volcano, and my radiance was pouring out.  The radiance felt real, authentic; it felt like the real me.

I opened the little vial of nitroglycerine I had been carrying around since my first heart episode in May 2009 -- the time I left my body for a short while and came back -- taking over an interval of time three tiny tabs under my tongue.  The nitro must have allowed any constriction in my spasming heart to open enough that I fell asleep and slept through the night. 

When I woke up it felt like a St. Bernard was sitting on my chest.  Maybe a St. Bernard puppy, an improvement.  It was Friday, the day of the week Asher, Michelle, John Hardy and anyone else daring enough go on their crazy monster almost all day bike ride.  Asher stayed home with me.  

During my first heart episode in 2009 a chain reaction of events got set in motion when I passed out, stopped breathing and my family called 911.  No one asked me what I wanted.  When the paramedics called the ambulance and the ambulance drivers decided to helicopter me in to the hospital, I said, “no,” but no one was listening.  Protocol took over.  This time Asher repeated to me, “You get to choose.”  I could stay home.  I could go to the hospital.  I could choose.  I liked that.  I chose to go. 

Michelle, keeping tabs on me, aborted the bike ride and came with us.  Cynthia Hardy came over to check on me and sent us all with her driver into the hospital in Denpasar.  She had called around, determined the best place to go and had a cardiologist waiting for me.  Her generosity and her 30 years living in Bali were a blessing of help and support.  Having Michelle as my medical translator and consultant was also a miraculous blessing.

Once again, the hospital stay was anticlimactic.  The real event had already taken place.  I received very good care, including sponge baths and oil rub downs from sweet young Javanese nurses in training.  ER in a developing country was a bit like M.A.S.H.  Even ICU was communal; I could hear the cacophonous beeping of all the patients’ heart monitors.  Soon they moved me into a private room in a different wing that felt like a hotel room.  I had a seating room, the bedroom, a gigantic bathroom and a garden.  I called this my ashram.

In the ashram I continued letting go of fear about what was happening to my body.  I knew with certainty that I have a commitment to being here and that I won’t leave until I choose to go.  I have learned that letting go into the womb of the Universe is exquisitely blissful.  With each heartquake experience and with each aftershock, I take a deeper drink of reality beyond time and space, beyond daily living, beyond worries and fears, a deep, long sip of eternity.  I am unravelling the knots in my mental body so I can be free, freedom being the quality I most desire in my life right now.  Having long ago put a bushel over my radiance, I now want to allow it to shine.  I want to shine all the way.