I've been watching my patterns a lot. I feel a lot better since I decided to stop fighting them. "Resistance to resistance is still resistance". I've been reading about samskaras...embedded impressions. I was going to write about that.

But something more interesting happened today. There was a speaker from Mexico that is an academic but works with indigenous medicine. He is working to integrate native healing methods (plant knowledge) with standard scientific medicine. He was amazing.

He talked about how there are many realities, and this is only one dimension--don't get too caught up in it. The school system is problematic in many ways--you consume book after book, and become full of books. But what does that get you, as far as truth? The book isn't reality, it's the author's imagination. Three months after he got his PhD, he went to Uganda, and his knowledge was worthless. He went to Peru, the same. He went to Mexico, even more so. It is not reality.

He gave examples of all the different diseases they were able to heal with plants. He talked about how the whole body is sick, not just one part, because it is all connected. The finger is not sick. If the finger is sick, the whole body is sick. For so many diseases, there is no pathogen. The top diseases are cancer, heart attack, depression, lupus, etc--and what is sick? The person is sick. There is no pathogen.

One professor asked him if he had considered the placebo effect. He said that of course they considered it, that was the point. The act of having another person heal you is in itself a great thing (connecting with another human, having that caring), and since so many diseases are from sickness of self, that anything that is heals psychologically IS important. All is integrated.

I am going to watch a movie he was in, about indigenous medicines. He noted that there are great similarities between the medicinal systems of Mexico (there are many, since there were many peoples there before) and other systems throughout the world: Tibetan, Chinese, etc.