When the heart is at ease, the body is healthy.

- Chinese Proverb

"Wellness that is being allowed - or the wellness that is being denied - is all about the mindset, the mood, the attitude, the practiced thoughts.  There is not one exception, in any human or beast; because, you can patch them up again and again, and they will just find another way of reverting back to the natural rhythm of their mind.  Treating the body really is about treating the mind.  It is all psychosomatic.  Every bit of it, no exceptions."

- Abraham

LISTS: Ten Rules for Being Human

by Cherie Carter-Scott

1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it's yours to keep for the entire period.

2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called, "life."

3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial, error, and experimentation. The "failed" experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that ultimately "work."

4. Lessons are repeated until they are learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can go on to the next lesson.

5. Learning lessons does not end. There's no part of life that doesn't contain its lessons. If you're alive, that means there are still lessons to be learned.

6. "There" is no better a place than "here." When your "there" has become a "here", you will simply obtain another "there" that will again look better than "here."

7. Other people are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.

8. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.

9. Your answers lie within you. The answers to life's questions lie within you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.

10. You will forget all this.

Embodiment and mindfulness in serving a cup of tea

     In Self and Others, the anti-psychiatrist Ronald Laing tells the story of a schizophrenic woman to whom a nurse gave a cup of tea.  "This is the first time in my life that anyone has ever given me a cup of tea," the patient told her.
     Since this scene took place in Great Britain where drinking tea is a daily ritual, it seemed impossible that the patient was telling the truth.  But she was.  Laing explains that her extreme sensitivity about being recognized or not recognized as a human being, as a human body, allowed her to express a simple and profound truth: "It is not so easy for one person to give another a cup of tea.  If a lady gives me a cup of tea, she might be showing off her teapot, or her tea-set; she might be trying to put me in a good mood in order to get something out of me; she may be trying to get me to like her; she may be wanting me as an ally for her own purposes against others.  She might pour tea from a teapot into a cup and shove out her hand with cup and saucer in it, whereupon I am expected to grab them within the two seconds before they will become a dead weight.  The action could be a mechanical one in which there is no recognition of me in it.  A cup of tea could be handed me with me being given a cup of tea."*
  To be there, behind the cup of tea . . . to be there, in our body, for ourself and for others . . . to live in our body . . . . [I]t is essential for us to feel within our bodies who we are, that we are.  Be a body first of all.  Be a body at last.  Be.

from The Body Has Its Reasons, by Therese Bertherat and Carol Bernstein (1989)

* R.D. Laing, Self and Others (1961)