Sunday, February 18, 2007

Sunday Pain aka Pandemonium

So today there was no time for our usual talk at The Daily Pain, just no talk whatsoever. Today a beehive of hungry customers invaded The Daily Pain... It happens on some weekends... The stream of people is coming, and coming and coming... there's a line at the door all day... the dishwasher works full speed but still can't keep up with washing and there's not enough glasses, egg cups, plates... and things are slowed down, and customers are impatient, and we run like crazy to make things work... If you can believe the value of food I sold during my 9 hour shift was $1,600. Do you know how many sandwiches, salads, coffees and pastries I delievered? Sounds like impossible... It means I made about 50 km walking around that restaurant, feeding all these hungry mouths... On Saturdays and Sundays like this, at the end of the shift I don't know my name anymore... On Monday I wake up at 5:00 am, start work at 6:30, finish at 3:00, go to school 6-10 pm, and when I come home around 11 pm I not only don't remember my name, I don't know who I am at all, and what the purpose of this, let me call it purgatory, is... It's all a blurr... When I wake up on Tuesday morning, I remember my name but the purpose is still unclear... I recover though and on Wednesday it all comes back to me again! Until the next weekend pandemonium... But I am not complaning. The amnesia is temporary. The feeling of having a purpose is always staying deep inside me and it comes back when the body recovers. The one thing that I can't stand in life, I really absolutely can't stand and won't ever, is boredom, so anything other than that is fine. Nothing in my life is boring. What I study is super interesting to me and the customers at PQ are constant entertainment. Some are very difficult and very confused, as I mentioned before, but dealing with them helps in training patience and benevolence - sometimes I feel like casting a bad spell on them but eventually I just let them deal with their issues by themselves and their karma to teach them what it suppose to. Let Ganesh take care of that and put obstacles on their path when they are needed and lift the obstacles after the lessons from overcoming them have been learned.

So my friend Katarina has been staying with me. She left her apartment and is looking for another nest and until she finds it, she will be staying in my monasterio. Katarina also studies and works at a restaurant (but totally different hours) so there's not much time we can actually spend together but when we can, we listen to around-the-world music, burn incense, read wise books (Katarina studies anthropology) and have insightfull conversations.

Yours truly, without a name... until Tuesday...

Sunday, February 04, 2007

Le Pain Quotidien aka "Daily Bread" or "Daily Pain"

Yes, in French "Le Pain Quotidien" means "The Daily Bread" (pain = bread) but for us, its staff, it's "The Daily Pain". So I returned from the Daily Pain and it was a rather amusing day, as usually. On some days, like today, my shift coincides with the shift of Ingrid, Erin and Elan. When they work on the same day I do (and also Julia who belongs to this group but she wasn't there today) we have most interesting conversations. All of them are actors (and Elan is also a writer) so the conversations are often about culture, human nature and psyche, and subjects connected to all this. Usually we start in the early morning hours, awaiting the first customers, and then we continue throughout the day. Sometimes we have a few minutes to talk, sometimes a sentence or two can be exchanged. Sometimes one of us has to run to attend to a customer and then when the person returns, the person is updated on where the discussion was left off. Today I got to work at 9:00 and we started with Ingrid's exclamation "I hate Freud!" I got so excited that someone shares my opinion that I exclaimed "I hate Freud as well!! Psychology stinks! And psychotherapy and psychiatry!! " I looked around thinking I exclaimed too loud and saw some customers looking at us puzzled... (We then got on the brooms and flew away via the windows...) Then Elan came and he brought up the subject of the book "The Games People Play" which was the continuation of our earlier talk about psychotherapy and psychiatry and the function of human psyche, and human behaviour, from the Western point of view. (more about this in a moment) I love these conversations in haste. On weekends we usually run our asses off (pardon but it's the truth) there are so many customers (demending, eternally dissatisfied, unhappy, neurotic, and often rude) to attend to and we still find a minute or two to entertain our minds with fresh ideas which come from this exchange of our explorations and experience, our minds and all that makes our life rich and exciting. We are all studying, working and doing many things in between. Elan's baby son was born two weeks ago, he is sleep-deprived but still full of energy for talking and enjoying life basically... I sometime overhear our customer's conversations and they are so incredibly dull... so cliche dull... This may be prooving my point that certain amount of hardship creates creativity; things which come easy are not appreciated nor stimulating... A sentence between serving coffee and picking up a dropped spoon may be more meaningful than a long talk when there's time and money to spent half a Sunday at a restaurant...

So regarding "Games People Play" Ethan started by trying to convince us that people "play games" (meaning use methods, often deceitful, to get what they want) and they do it everywhere, that it is a universal fact, true under any latitude and in any place in this world. But then my point was such: this theory is based on a research done by a Westerner and it is based on the Western concept of how the human mind works. So I, naturally, can't agree with this, having seen (mostly by travelling to distant places) how a certain perspective can make a certain "fact" "true". To Elan's saying that the research was done to proove the point, I exclaimed that "Research is biased and science is bull shit in any case!" (half of the clients must have gotten heart palpitations at that point I am sure... I was half joking... meaning I only use such strong words to amuse (or confuse) the customers, or rather to get them out of their comatose state...). And this brings me to what I have intended to write about the medicine I study.

I wanted to write about this for a long time but had no time earlier. It seems that on weekend days when I come home I am too tired to study or do anything except write a little on the blog so it will be a weekend paper in sections about the fascinating world of Eastern medicine. I was thinking that usually when I tell people what I study they rarely know what it is, meaning they associate Oriental medicine with acupuncture good for muscle and joing problems. So I thought, dear friends, that I will write a little more about it so you know what treatment you will get, when I finish the program...

Let me start from the beginning or the philosophy on which the Eastern medicine is based. To do this I will also talk about the Western medicine. Western science, including medicine, operates on principle that scholars or people who study a lot are the ones we should all look up to with great respect - they are the ones who know how to lead us, how to cure us, how to show us our purpose of being here. We should read books written by these people, see them on TV, go to the churches they operate, etc. They are the people who collect the various degrees and the higher degree they get, the higher they seem to be above all the rest... It does not matter what kind of persons they are and what the moral values they go by are. What counts is the social status. So in principle when we are born we are a "white page" and we have to strive and learn, learn, and learn from all these learned men's books to become learned ourselves and to understand what this life is about... We trust that these learned people know so we listen to them. We do what they ask of us. We do what politicians ask of us and we do what doctors ask of us. It's easy in any case: it doesn't require our active thinking or listening to our intuition or any work we will have to do to proove to ourselves that this and that is good for us. So when we go to a doctor we ask the doctor to cure us. He administers some tests, gives us some pills and that is it. Our problem is gone and we don't have to focus on ourselves again, our mind and body which gives us some signals which we can't understand (but a doctor can or so we believe). We have more time then to spend on reading, listening, watching... or acquiring knowledge externally, as I call it.

Eastern philosophies operate on a very different principle: every being born is equipped with everything that being needs to understand all which it needs in this life to operate, be well and content. What damages the ability to use the equipment is what is artificial and goes against the laws of nature, hence man should rather empty the mind of external knowledge and instead turn into himself and discover again what lies within him and what will make him understand all that he needs to understand and strives to understand during his lifetime (Do you remember what I wrote a year ago when I was in Nepal, what the Tibetans said: "While the Western men was exploring the outside of himself, going even to the Moon, we explored the inside of ourselves"). So the Western man drives himself crazy with reading books and magazines, watching TV, obtaining data, doing research, etc., etc. and trying to get wise on this second-hand knowledge, while the Eastern man leaves to a cave to meditate and concentrate on nothing, on only his experience with his own mind. What the Eastern philosophies tell us is that we are presented during our lifetime, this lifetime, with certain tasks and out of these tasks we get the experience which we need to lead us to where we can get, if we respond to these tasks naturally (listening to our intuition and our internal wisdom). There is no one who can really be a guru for us or who knows what is good for us better than we ourselves. We may find friendly souls who will be of help to us but on us depends our wellbeing - only on our own experience. So a doctor should be such a friendly soul. A friendly soul will do acupuncture sessions and proscribe herbs, and also tell us how to cultivate our qi energy, what changes to make in out diet and lifestyle, etc. Eventually, we ourselves become our own healers since whatever sicknesses we suffer from are due to our own making. This is actually what the Eastern medicine does: it shows us that we are masters of ourselves, of our bodies and our minds and we may think external factors make us ill (and in certain cases it is true) but all our internal long term diseases come from our neglect of taking responsibility for ourselves.

More on this (and specific cases) next week. Next weekend I will be taking the herb class again with what I call a "famous professor" but really what I should call him is the "healing presence" in Eastern terms. He is a very modest and humble man who just puts the knowledge into our hands and makes us responsible for acquiring it through our experience with it - there are no tests during the class. The "Healing Presence" knows that whoever got to his class is a person who understand the value of responsibility...