How I Rescued My Brain

by David Roland

  ‘And before this?’ she asks.

  ‘Well, all the way to the beginning of the universe,’ I reply.

  But something must come first, she insists.

  I have no reply. She’s not convinced by my point of view.

  Before bedtime, I Skype in Rex’s office with Anna and the kids. Ashley tells me that she’s made a video to the soundtrack of ‘Sweet Dreams’ by the Eurythmics. Anna says it’s very good. Emma is already in bed, but Amelia is chatty. She is amazed that there was no sand at the southern end of the beach today. ‘It was like a swimming pool, Daddy,’ she says.

  I am warmed and comforted by their conversation. It feels right that I take this time out to get better; I’m doing it for them as much as for me.

  After we hang up, I retire to my caravan and turn in. I think I’ll sleep soundly after the intensity of today. But I’m troubled by the discussion about the source of emotions. During the night, I get up and read the book I’ve brought with me — Buddha’s Brain: the practical neuroscience of happiness, love, and wisdom, by Rick Hanson, a neuropsychologist, and Richard Mendius, a neurologist. I look for a reference to the neurological source of emotions, but instead get stuck on reading about the self.

  Hanson and Mendius suggest that the concept of the self is an aggregation of brain states. A person begins, as a baby, without a sense of self. He or she forms one over time, believing that there is continuity in brain states, rather than each existing only in infinitesimally small slices of time. In other words, the self is a concept we manufacture, an attribution we give to our brain states, they say. The Dalai Lama said something like this too, although he did not put it in neuroscientific terms. Interesting.

  I’VE NOTICED SINCE I’ve been here that Choeying’s students pop in at any time of day. She doesn’t seem flustered by it, and takes time to speak with each of them. She’s clearly a valued member of the community.

  The next evening, one of the younger students in the course, Alena, joins us for dinner and brings her steel-string guitar. The top string has broken: it has only five strings instead of the usual six. She sings two of her own songs in a soulful and tuneful voice. I take a turn and sing ‘Father and Son’ by Cat Stevens. Alena begins to cry and says how beautiful the words are. Josh, a classical guitarist, tries playing a piece that would be challenging enough on a steel-string guitar, let alone one with only five strings. Then we switch to golden oldies and folk songs, and everyone sings along. Rex sets up saucepans of water on the table, which he bangs with a wooden spoon. Choeying taps metal spoons together energetically. Shas jiggles a rice-filled jar, and Queenie sings along in a soprano voice, surprised at how many popular songs she knows, given her Baptist upbringing.

  I look at the faces around the table and see such happiness. I have that ‘in the music’ feeling, where ego disappears. I’m struck acutely by the thought that making music is really about bringing joy to others; it’s not about being impressive, or even about self-improvement.

  The next morning, I’m mentally fatigued but happy. Choeying tells me, ‘I saw the real David. I saw someone who was really enjoying himself. When you’re singing, there are bigger moments of seeing you. Your eyes twinkle and you look so young. This is why chanting is valuable, too.’

  I’VE MADE A decision not to watch or read any news while I’m here. I want to rest my mind and keep mental disturbances to a minimum. I hope that this will intensify mindfulness: I want to make the most of my time here.

  We’ve had relatively little rain in Hervey Bay since I arrived. Rex explains that this is because Fraser Island, just off the coast, provides a buffer to the weather. But it’s raining all around us, he says, and floods are causing widespread devastation throughout south-east Queensland.

  That morning, Choeying has those of us at the house chant with her in the meditation hall. The chant emphasises the recognition of suffering in all living beings; it’s a means of cultivating compassion in us. We focus our minds especially on the flood victims. Afterwards, I’m so knocked out that I take a longer-than-usual midday nap in the caravan.

  That night, there is lots of talking and laughter among Choeying, Queenie, Shas, Josh, and Alena, who are sitting on the upstairs balcony until late. I’m trying to sleep again. The humidity, the mosquitoes, and the lack of breeze make it difficult anyway, without their noise.

  As I resign myself to being awake, my thoughts begin to drift. I wonder, not for the first time, what sort of Buddhist nun Choeying is. She sees an endless stream of people during the day, stays up late, laughs lustily, cracks jokes, and starts the routine all over again the next morning. She doesn’t seem to run out of energy. She always allows each person her full attention and is unsparing when giving advice — some end up in tears. She has already told me, ‘You tend to be the teacher rather than the student in every situation. Until we can be the student, the one that’s not coping, we won’t get better.’

  I can see how she would’ve been a charming and savvy business-woman.

  I have asked her about this capacity to be with people, to listen intently to their troubles and not be sucked dry by them. I remembered how worn out I’d be, when I was working in my practice, after only six hours a day of hearing others’ stories.

  She told me that she feels endless compassion for others’ suffering, and that she finds this uplifting rather than draining. ‘We can’t have compassion for others until we know what it feels like to be rejected, criticised, abused, and judged. If we don’t, and someone shares their pain with us, we’ll say: “Just get over it.”’

  I also asked her how she handled the distress of inmates at the prison when she was visiting. She said that it required empathy, but you needed to move through empathy to compassion. This is ‘empathy with the view’. ‘The view’ is the Buddhist way of understanding existence and human suffering. We are ultimately responsible for ending our suffering. ‘Empathy is the fertile ground to grow compassion. You had the empathy without the wisdom,’ she said.

  I’ve clearly got a long way to go before I have the type of compassion Choeying has.

  SEVERAL DAYS INTO my stay, I have a one-to-one session with Choeying in the meditation hall. I’ve asked if we can review my meditation practice, and I have some specific questions.

  Choeying suggests that, in addition to the calm-abiding meditation, one could extend the object of meditation to every sensory experience simultaneously. This is difficult, she says, but it trains the mind.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about what you’ve been saying during the course about what happens with meditation,’ I say. ‘I think I experienced these things when I had the stroke.’

  I describe what it was like being in the waiting room at the hospital and during the investigations with the doctors: how I wasn’t perturbed by anything (except for the noise of the breathing machine from the patient in the bed next to mine). How everything and everyone seemed fascinating, and I didn’t have a sense of people being good or bad, inferior or superior, and wasn’t troubled by thoughts of whether I liked them or not. Time became irrelevant. I felt present in each moment as it unfolded, thinking neither about the past nor about the future.

  ‘It’s remarkable. Your experience … meditators take years to achieve these things. I’ve been sitting on my bum for years, looking at my crazy mind to experience something as profound as you have. Wow. A knock on the head: it’s a fast track to enlightenment!’ Choeying says. We both laugh.

  It sounds preposterous, but I think there’s some truth to it. I’ve only seen my stroke as something bad that has happened to me, as something gone wrong, but now I can see it as something special. I decide that while I’m here I will write an account of my experiences immediately following the stroke.

  After my session with Choeying, I go for a swim at the local pool. As I do laps, my mind hums with reflections, my body enlivened. I have experienced the in
tense mindfulness that long-term meditators aim for, a taste of nirvana, and it’s real — it’s achievable. I’ve done it once, and perhaps I can do it again.

  17

  IT’S A NEW day. As part of my morning meditation, I’ve been doing a loving-kindness practice. In the hall, I sit cross-legged and begin. I visualise someone that it’s easy to have an unconditional feeling of warmth for — my father — and then draw the feeling of warmth and loving-kindness into myself. It feels awkward, as if I don’t deserve these emotions, but it’s getting easier.

  Then I move on to someone close to me (Amelia), projecting the feeling of warmth onto her. Next, I think of someone neutral (the waitress in the cafe yesterday), and, lastly, someone I find difficult (the creditor I had the barney with over the telephone), projecting feelings of loving-kindness towards them both. I have been including Anna, the children, extended family members, close friends, acquaintances, and strangers in the practice.

  As I finish, I remind myself that I’m doing everything I can, and that it’s okay to feel inadequate and lost at times. More and more often, I’m believing this.

  Then I reflect on my progress in recent months. My brain is behaving better. Before I left, I completed the Brain Fitness course, reaching the higher levels of achievement on all six exercises. (‘Tell Us Apart’ — the exercise that required me to distinguish between similar-sounding phonemes — remained the toughest, and my weakest.) Doctor Small said there would be natural improvement with time, and I’m sure I’m seeing the benefit of this, too.

  I haven’t had suicidal thoughts for months. I still get in a flat mood sometimes and it can be an effort to do things, but I’ve worked out that this is mostly due to physical exhaustion and mental fatigue.

  It is now eighteen months post-stroke. After the emotional storms of recent years, there are finally patches of blue sky. Following my talk with Anna last November, I realised that I’d been so caught up with survival — with simply getting through each day, with trying to meet the family’s immediate needs, my rehabilitation obligations, and the legal and financial crises — that I had had little mental space for anything else. Lately, my mental space has expanded to include others; I want to know how they’re going. These whiffs of expansiveness are like smoke from a fire I can’t see, so I’m not altogether sure the fire is there, but it feels close by.

  Before I left for the course, I was keen to check in with my daughters. As I was driving to a swimming squad with Ashley a few weeks ago, she’d said, ‘Why do you get angry so easily?’

  ‘What do you mean, “so easily”?’

  ‘Compared to everybody else.’

  Ashley doesn’t often reveal her private thoughts, so I’d seized this opportunity. ‘Well, I got traumatised from hearing about the bad things that happen to people — the people I helped at work. This made me irritable, you know, getting upset. Then I had the stroke and my brain wasn’t working properly.’

  ‘You don’t even understand my question,’ she said, and dropped into silence.

  The door had closed.

  Two months before this, we had been driving to her water-polo session in the late afternoon and the sun was in our eyes. ‘That sun is annoying,’ she said.

  ‘How can the sun be annoying?’ I said. ‘It gives life, sustains us.’

  ‘Well, you gave me life and you’re annoying … Maybe not all the time.’

  I laughed, and caught the flicker of a smile on her face. I like her quick wit. But I was disheartened by her comment. How has my irritability, fatigue, and self-absorption affected the family?

  Late last year, I booked, after doing lots of research to find a place on our limited budget, a nine-day stay at a family resort in Fiji for late January. It was cheaper than a similar kind of holiday in Australia. I should be reinvigorated by then, after this break from the family. I want us all to have a restful holiday: relaxing in a natural environment, all meals provided, and no telephones, television, or computers. It will be an ideal way for the family to reconnect, and to assess what the damage has been.

  Today, after a swim, I head into the police station. Due to the floods, I’m becoming concerned about getting home. The police officer tells me that the roads will be closed for at least three to four more days, and then they’ll be in poor condition. He doesn’t know when I’ll be able to travel south. Nothing’s getting in or out of town, and fresh food supplies are running short in the shops. There are signs of panic buying.

  Upon hearing this news, I get that trapped feeling I had in Seaview. How will I make it back in time for the holiday? When will I get home? I also need to see my GP to complete the monthly claim form for the insurer so that I am paid. A delay could mean more financial disaster.

  Rex suggests that I book a flight to Brisbane. The earliest flight I can get means that I will arrive a day late in Fiji. The family can go on before me. I speak with my claims manager, and he says that he doesn’t expect a claim form this month because of the floods; others are in the same position.

  The other out-of-town participants in the course are also ‘trapped’. Choeying says that it’s a wonderful opportunity for us all to stay longer; our employers will understand. It means I will be here for almost two weeks.

  Choeying’s right. With the assurance that I can join the family in Fiji, I feel better. And the almost daily revelations I’m experiencing are too valuable to miss.

  Something Choeying said on the first day has stuck in my mind: a bad cup of coffee at a cafe would have once put her in a terrible mood. She’s also given us homework: to notice how our feelings change in different situations and in response to different people. This is to encourage mindfulness.

  My usual practice when staying in a new place is to ask a local where the best coffee is. If I like it, I keep going back there. I only allow myself one cup of espresso per day, so a bad one is disappointing. So I thought, what if, rather than re-create the safe experience of going to the same cafe with the best coffee, I go to a new cafe each day, and watch my reaction to the quality of the coffee, the service, and the ambience?

  This has been my project since my arrival. The first cafe I went to, on the Esplanade, had good coffee. The service was fine, but the place was noisier and more cramped than I’d like. I gave it eight out of ten, and I would’ve been happy enough to make it my preferred cafe. But, staying true to my resolution, that afternoon I arrive at a new cafe. Immediately, I don’t like the ambience. It has uninviting tiled floors, hard metal chairs, and no softness or quirkiness in the décor. But I push myself to go inside.

  The older man serving me seems like the proprietor — he doesn’t look like a skilled barista — and his lack of passion for making coffee is obvious. I can’t stand to watch him, so I go and sit outside.

  My first taste of the coffee tells me that he has burnt the milk, and the flavour is thin. Disappointment. I register my impulse to leave. But I breathe, lean back, and sit with the feeling. I look across the road and notice the greenery and the children’s playground in the park opposite. I get a whiff of the sea air. People are on holiday, cheerful. The disappointment and the urge to leave fizzle out.

  I sit for half an hour, and end up leaving most of the coffee. But I’ve enjoyed my coffee experience, and I’ve enjoyed watching my mind and investigating how tricky it is.

  When the course participants meet for our mid-week evening catch-up, I say, ‘I’ve been doing coffee meditations.’ The others laugh. I explain my rationale and what I’ve discovered. ‘I sit with the bad coffee and notice the initial disappointment. If I relax into the experience and I don’t push the disappointment, or whatever, away, it fades. I can still enjoy being in the cafe. Although I’d prefer a good coffee.’

  Each time I meet them after this, I’ll be asked: ‘David, how are your coffee meditations going?’ They want to know my latest ratings.

  I
N MY PRIVATE morning meditations, I’ve been slipping into deeper and deeper states of mental stillness; the realisation that I experienced intense mindfulness during the first hours of my stroke has super-charged my meditations. I can sit for up to seventy-five minutes before it becomes physically uncomfortable. Often, I lose sensation of my lower body, or it feels distant.

  To begin with, Choeying has given us a ‘love and equanimity’ meditation from Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, which focuses on ourselves. I understand this to mean that until I have true compassion for myself, I can’t have it for anyone else. After we’ve focused on ourselves, Choeying says, we can focus on others. It goes like this:

  May I be peaceful, happy, and light in body and spirit.

  May I be safe and free from injury.

  May I be free from anger, fear, and anxiety.

  May I learn to look at myself with the eyes of understanding and love.

  May I be able to recognise and touch the seeds of joy and happiness in me.

  May I learn to identify and see the sources of anger, craving, and delusion in me.

  May I know how to nourish the seeds of joy in myself every day.

  May I be able to live fresh, solid, and free.

  May I be free from attachment and aversion, but not indifferent.

  I’ve been doing this, both for myself and for the family. It has a soothing, softening effect and, somehow, it warms my heart.

  One morning after meditation, Choeying and the others decide to go into town to shop and have coffee. When I say I’d rather go out by myself, she suggests that I do a ‘driving meditation’ as another way of practising mindfulness. She tells me to cultivate the attitude that I’m not driving the car, the car is driving me, and to notice everything. ‘And careful,’ she says, ‘you might get hooked.’

  I sit in my car with her instructions in mind. Then I exit the driveway and turn into the road. I’m paying careful attention to the surroundings, in that non-judgemental way I experienced after the stroke.