Natural Health Help

If you arrived here through my main practice website, drnandunne.com, you may have seen the new notice in the upper left corner. It says “Please help 9 year old Logan Smith fight his cancer”. Logan is a regular kid, part of a regular family here in my town, Missoula, MT. He has kidney cancer. There are 3 boys in the Smith family, as well as 3 gigantic dogs. Logan has guinea pigs in his bedroom and there are chickens around too. They have a passion for the Green Bay Packers. And they have some very very good friends who are making room in their daily lives to move in closer to the Smiths, to loop in the needs of these pets and otherwise take care of the necessarily abandoned household. Meanwhile the family has moved into the Ronald McDonald House in Seattle, suspended there, supporting Logan as he works with his doctors to push back at this pretty ferocious disease.

There’s a lot of that going around of course. We all know someone who is recently diagnosed, or someone who has recently died. A lot of us are facing illness ourselves, or have been knocked askew by an accident. Almost always this news, these events, are stunning in their unexpectedness and power to disrupt. We are comfortable in our routines and comforted by the illusion of regularity. It’s a good thing then, when we are woke up. Bad things happening is also a regular part of life. We do a lot in America to flicker away from that fact as often as possible. And it is fine, necessary really, to now and again check out from awareness of suffering, to take a rest from the anxiety and tension that comes up when we face this regular fact of life. However, we can pursue that illusion so much it can become another way of being crippled. We can become trapped in an awareness of pain by the habit trying to avoid it.

We are generally speaking more practiced with avoidance that we are with grappling, with the practice of taking care. We tend to leave taking care to the specialists, either the professionals, or the designated family members who carry most of that function for the rest of the group. That specialization might seem to make sense on the surface- leave it to the experts! But that can leave the majority of us feeling more anxious, more threatened, because we have so little practice at the essential skills that are inevitably required, if only by our own unavoidable death.

The most essential skill we can all use for the relief of any kind distress is the act of extending our awareness. We might need to become aware of information about a condition so we can help manage it better; we might need to reach out for a deeper awareness of the Divine, of something larger than ourselves, so we can hand it off. We are, in fact, not in charge of the Big Picture and we can let go of that which has become too much to bear. We might need to become more aware of how what we are doing is adding to the pain we are in. Awareness of a broader slice of our reality can bring enormous relief. The act of turning our attention away from our pain to something also important, is a reliable and effective way to become free of chronic and otherwise insistent pain, whether it be physical, emotional or spiritual pain.

Connecting in an authentic way with some aspect of life that is outside of, or in addition to our distress will always change the intensity of that distress for the better. Help Logan by connecting with him. Use his blog site Logan’s Cancer Journey, http://tumortown.blogspot.com, to tell him something that’s going on with you, in your town, in your body, in your heart. Help his family with a donation and help yourself lift into a different place. Distract yourself from you own pain while you figure out what you have that you can share with them. Share your attention with the Smith family, or with anyone in your circle of awareness, and make life richer, more colorful, interesting and nourishing for yourself and everyone you reach to.

You can help Logan and his family with a monetary donation here: http://www.logansmith.org

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