With the spontaneous remission of my cancer and the diabetes gone, I naturally wanted to get on with my life. I started to make lists of possible employment posts that looked interesting and proceeded to make applications. My husband was not happy about this at all. He was insisting that I should “stay put for a while and see how my health would hold out”. I kept assuring him that I felt fine. But he persisted. He was also concerned about our marriage. We had had a short separation of a few years, although we still saw each other every few months. Now we were back together again and the problems we had in the past were behind us, or so I thought. I believed this because he had been very good to me over the past year. He helped me recover from cancer and diabetes so I had agreed with him that ‘things were good between us now’. Perhaps he wanted to hear me say ‘we will live happily ever after’ but deep down I was cautious, so instead I said ‘let’s see how we go’. Maybe I also did not want him to feel ‘rest assured’ because I did not want him to go back to his old ways of being highly critical of me and even sarcastic at times. He had become difficult to live with back then and now he seemed to have changed for the better. He did not like my answer, but despite that he remarked that he believed ‘one way or the other we would stay together’. Nothing more was said on the subject of our marriage.

On my way to the first interview I had a panic attack and though I coped alright, my confidence was shaken so I made a bad impression during that interview. I had nothing more for two weeks until the time of my second interview. I had a second panic attack, which was mainly due to asthma. This one was on the day before the interview and I was worse of than after the first attack. My natural reaction when it comes to problems is to investigate. I don’t like to simply rely on others for answers. As I was at home this time, I was able to be more observant both of my self and my environment. Within my body I certainly identified a problem with my heart but it was gone once the panic was over. I had had asthma before, two attacks but they were a year and 5 years earlier. However I also noted that though the panic was gone I still felt uneasy so following my instinct I looked around outside. In the street at the front of the house there was no one. It was a small street with almost no passing traffic. However we lived next to a park, which was large enough in area to accommodate six or eight houses. For nearly a year no one had frequented the park but in recent weeks a few rather unsavoury figures sat around, mainly drinking beer. So I looked out onto the park. There was a large tree being trimmed, and there were a number of people involved with that. However I noticed a couple of men, who hung around near the tree, but did not seem to be involved with the trimming of the tree. I pointed them out to my husband and complained that one of them in particular gave me a bad feeling. He began to rant and rave and told me that I was over-reactive and too sensitive. He claimed that I was imagining things and then curiously added “I suppose you’re going to blame them for your bad health”. I was taken aback, for I had not said anything to him about my health. I had not even told him about the panic /asthma attack a short time earlier. I felt irritated by his remark but as I could not find anything that connected these two characters to me, even though I felt uneasy by their presence, I dismissed the matter.

A few more weeks passed and I still did not feel up to another interview. I did not want to go to an interview feeling unsettled. I thought a change might help. So seeing neither of us was working I told my husband we ought to go on a holiday. He did not want to go anywhere. I took it upon myself to go alone so I told him I would go up north again for a short while, just a couple of months, to visit friends. I thought a change of scene would be beneficial. He reluctantly agreed and I left. And certainly for the first three weeks I was fine but it wasn’t to last. Again I had problems with my health, this time my heart was racing quite unexpectedly. A friend who was with me urged me to see a doctor and came with me. The doctor diagnosed a possible heart problem. He said I should see a specialist and suggested that I may need to have an operation and have a wire put into my heart. Another doctor later on claimed the wire might not be enough and that I may need a pacemaker. Again I felt that an operation was not the way to go. I was not really convinced that my heart was at fault, despite the difficulties I experienced and despite the advice of the doctors. At my husband’s seemingly very concerned advice, I returned to Sydney. However over the next few months the heart problem worsened. At times my heart raced for no apparent reason and I felt dread. I could hardly manage to go for a walk and I certainly had to put any idea of finding work on hold. I returned to the herbalist and he began to treat me for a heart problem as well as giving me tonics for my lungs. But as my condition would worsen during the trips to and from the herbalist, I was forced to seek out a new herbalist closer to home. This was good in a way because the new herbalist also specialized in acupuncture and had shown me several points that had helped me manage the excessive heart rate, especially during the night.

Despite the herbs and the acupuncture, which I have to say helped restore me every time almost as if by magic, I was living a nightmare just the same. Two or three times a week I would awaken in the middle of the night, usually around one or two in the morning. I had pain in my chest and my heart was racing. Sometimes I felt inexplicable terror and sometime anxiety. On two occasions when my husband was in the corridor between his bedroom and mine I thought I heard whispering. The first time I called out to my husband, ‘who are you talking to at this hour’? He came in and told me I must have been imagining things and that he was alone. But on the second time I distinctly felt someone else’s presence in the house. Again my husband came into my room and insisted that I was imagining things. He returned to the corridor and I heard him walk up to the front door. He called out to me saying that he could see no one outside on the porch or in the street but I had not heard him open the door and the door had a chain which always makes a noise when you open the door. Then I heard him close the front door. I didn’t believe him so he helped me up to see for myself. Certainly I saw no one. However I was curious because for one thing I never heard him open the door, for another my gut feeling was never wrong and quite apart from all that I felt inexplicably annoyed with my husband.

Two years passed and my ‘heart problem’ waxed and wanned. Needless to say I was unable to find work and my health was poor. However it had given me a unique opportunity and an opportunity, which years later would prove to be a boon. Many years earlier I had studied Buddhism with a variety of teachers. One of those teachers taught me Vipassana or insight meditation. This type of meditation enables one to observe insightfully and to make what is held as unconscious, conscious again. And I say again because I found out that we make ideas and thoughts unconscious by seeking a comfort zone, which is nothing more than creating a mental fuzz –a very bad habit indeed! Where intuition requires a general relationship, the relationship that one bares to all things in creation, Insightfulness is quite different. It becomes activated by the existence of personal relationships, and the closer and more trusted the relationship, the stronger the insightfulness. Unfortunately most insightfulness gets pushed into an unconscious realm due to the desire of living in a comfort zone. With my lifelong meditation practice I had sought a comfort zone less and less, so now I was able to use my body and specifically my heart as the object of my observation, with some degree of success. Where years earlier I had even been able to vaguely observe muscle tissue in my legs, now I resumed the practice of Vipassana to placed my attention on my heart. Within about four months of intensive practice, I regained much of the skill levels of the past, I observed insightfully my heart muscles but I found nothing there that seemed out of place. My inspiration was to move my attention to the blood vessels in and around my heart and the main arteries. I incorporated the observation of certain arteries into my regular meditation practice. Over a year and many, many hours of daily practice, I patiently observed the activity in my arteries under different conditions. There were certainly many quiet times when finding rest was easy, but there were also times when I felt inexplicably hot and at other times when I felt inexplicable anxiety. The times when I was inexplicably hot were more common and there was higher activity within the arteries. As I was not moving about but seated in a chair I had to ask the question ‘why my blood was rushing around my body at a higher rate’? My attention was soon drawn to the base of my neck and specifically the thyroid gland. I remembered from my university days that the thyroid gland produces a substance called thyroxine which governs energy-producing processes at the cellular level. But curiously my thyroid gland was highly active at times when I was inactive! And more particularly why did it become hyperactive on some occasion of inactivity and not others? For I had discovered that it was not arbitrary; the higher thyroid activity always occurred when I felt inexplicably hot but not always when I felt anxious and never when I was calm.

With the heart problems I experienced inexplicable anxiety and on studying this closely I isolated fear and worry as the two prominent emotions. Fear, which is a very important emotion, is triggered by the perception of danger. Fear ignites the sympathetic nervous system, which moves the body into high gear and ready for action. The danger was inexplicable. However I am not one for believing in neural glitches or ‘just a malfunction’. Besides there have been many occasions in my life of unseen danger where I had acted on my gut feeling and found every time that my gut feeling was right and I escaped harm. So I did not want to dismiss the possibility that something was wrong. The other emotion involved in anxiety was worry. I’d had occasion to examine worry many years earlier and had found that worry is really circular thinking and for a very good reason. When we are faced with a problem, for which we have insufficient information, we may think it through over and over but we cannot get an answer. If the problem is serious enough to affect our lives, then such thinking through is impossible to avoid. This is worry. Thinking needs the body to be at rest and this is facilitated by the parasympathetic nervous system. Thus I found anxiety is really about the alternating movements between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems owing to fear and worry co-existing. The two nervous systems do opposite things. One stimulates the body to higher activity, while the other brings the body to lower activity and facilitates digestion. So the body is caught repeated in stop-start / go fast-go slow activity and not only the body, more significantly the heart. To overcome the anxiety I needed to understand what was wrong, what sort of danger was there? The heat was also a matter that I needed to understand because it meant that my heart was working harder than it needed to.

My investigations would have brought me to a dead end but for the very nature of meditation. Over the many years of meditation I had found that with good quality meditation the breath, of its own accord, becomes subtle and regular and the body is brought to profound states of rest. So I could not help but notice that when I felt hot and during times of anxiety, my breathing became more pronounced and deeper. I was breathing in a greater volume of air. As I breathed in more air, the body’s life giving activities increase so my body was moving away from good quality rest and my attention was distracted. Thus my concentration at such times was affected. As an experiment I deliberately cut back my breathing by holding down my breath and not allowing my lungs to fill as much as was my desire. I wanted to see how that would affect my body. Trying to reduce my breathing deliberately was very difficult to begin with as I had a strong habit to do the opposite. I purchased a blouse that was too small for me and used it to help me cut back on my breathing. I realized that then that my breathing deepened and became stronger whenever my experience was unpleasant. I can see now that but for the many hours of meditational practice over a lifetime, I would have been a lot worse off. I was able to use any knowledge I had gained to bring the heart problems under control. To eliminate the heart problems I knew that I needed to understand much more, so my quest continued. And when the answer came it was a shock, a shock for which I was not prepared.