Laughing at daffodils

Meditation has become a core healing practice for me since my diagnosis. It's bringing me a surprising amount of sheer joy, which has to be good for my dopamine levels...

I suppose I’m testing out my hypothesis about disease and healing. I’ve always believed that disease starts out beyond the physical realm, way before it lands in our bodies as a collection of symptoms. And that the symptoms themselves are red warning lights, messengers that let us know there’s a disconnection somewhere.

I know, to some, that sounds ‘out there’ as a theory. But I draw on the wisdom of wiser, far older cultures than our current Western one. And, thanks to the work of present-day pioneers like Dr Joe Dispenza and Dr Janice Hadlock, the astonishing healing power of spiritual practices like meditation is being proved.

Heart-Brain coherence

Meditative practices can change heart rate variability and the frequency created by our hearts. Like sound waves travelling from a drum, this in turn affects our brainwaves, bringing our brains into a new coherence with our hearts. The heart can then start to reassure the brain that, in Joe Dispenza’s words, “it’s safe to create, it’s safe to awaken, and it’s safe to raise its consciousness out of survival.”

This feeling of safety is fundamental to any healing, and as I understand Parkinson’s Disease more deeply, it’s very relevant to rewiring a brain that is lacking dopamine in the important areas that control motor function, and for ‘some types of mental processing such as visualisation of positive images’¹

Dopamine has been called then ‘feel good’ transmitter, or the ‘joy hormone’. Feeling good requires a basic sense of safety that’s internalised and consistent. So when that sense of safety is absent, dopamine gets depressed…

There's enough dopamine, but…

Contrary to what I was told by my consultant, the problem with the brain of someone with Parkinson’s is NOT insufficient dopamine. There is more than enough dopamine, but its production is suppressed in the midbrain centres of the brain, yet is elevated in the risk assessment area, the anterior cingulate. (see the 2001 study² setting out this discovery).

Instinctively I recognise this picture. I’ve realised I’m a control freak. I get caught in incessant worry-loops inside my brain. I see myself in some aspects of the ‘Parkinsonian personality’ as described by that 2001 study “compulsive, industrious, introverted, morally rigid, punctual, serious, stoic, and quiet”.

I’m not sure how I got to be that way. Inside this personality is a much more spontaneous, fun, connected ‘me’. She’s just a bit frozen. It’s hard work to interrupt the control, fearful patterns that have come to dominate my approach to life, but I’m finding out it’s possible. And meditation is key here.

As I free my brain from the need to plan, control, worry and be on constant red alert, into that space rushes something else. As Aristotle reportedly claimed, ‘nature abhors a vacuum’. So what’s rushing in to my deliciously empty head is bliss. And love. And gratitude. Like a river of life.

Which brings me back to those daffodils.

Every day I walk and meditate in my local woods, led by my relentlessly energetic pet pooch. Yesterday was a particularly blissful excursion in the spring sunshine. And on the way out of the woods was the most glorious, sunshine-yellow clump of nodding daffodils by the gate.

They filled me with such gratitude and happiness that I properly chortled. Heartily, and out loud. I didn’t care who heard me. I care less and less if people think I’m bonkers. Because my connection to life these days regularly breaks my heart with joy, leaving way less space for anxiety.

Surely that’s healing in progress.

1. Recovery from Parkinson's, Dr Janice Hadlock, p35‘

2. ‘Personality traits and brain dopaminergic function in Parkinson’s Disease’ Valtteri Kaasinen, MD, PhD et al; 2001