One day, I dozed off while enjoying the sunlight on my yard. In a dream, being chased by someone, I was trying to catch and embark on a running bus. That was not an easy thing to do. Just as I was about to give up, someone from the bus reached an arm out and grabbed my hand and pulled me in, telling me to go to the back seat and crouch under the seat and hide my face. It was a dream, sure, but it was a tense moment.

Without doubt, it was impossible to overcome the mental suffering and stress I had to endure. The thoughts of not being able to walk and do my motherly duty for my family, and other problems that would arise out of my condition have constantly gave me psychological agony. My misery has long clouded the good things I still had in my life such as my family. My world was despair itself.

One day, I dozed off while enjoying the sunlight on my yard. In a dream, being chased by someone, I was trying to catch and embark on a running bus. That was not an easy thing to do. Just as I was about to give up, someone from the bus reached an arm out and grabbed my hand and pulled me in, telling me to go to the back seat and crouch under the seat and hide my face. It was a dream, sure, but it was a tense moment.

Few days after the dream, a friend of mine came for a visit with generous gifts of a book and a fruit basket. Published in 2000, translated into 13 different languages, and more than 4 million copies sold, the Best Seller book, The Relaxation Response, written by Herbert Benson, was about a guide to a meditation. Although Benson’s field and focus was in curing his patients’ diseases, for me the book was a way of curing my mind.

To meditate is to focus on single point. In my case, I would focus on a single word, imagining the exact sound of the word, and the sound would vibrate throughout trillions of cells of my body, spreading all the way to the permanently damaged extremities. Sleeping soundly in the deep, dark universe, a dinosaur let out a wakening breath. A fire was finally lit in the times of billions of years ago.

To focus is not an easy task. Just as you lose your focus right before you come out of water grasping for air, the more I tried to concentrate, irrelevant thoughts flooded in, hazing my concentration. My thoughts navigated the past, present and future freely, from my childhood to the present, staying in a pleasant memory for long and reluctantly moving into hated memories which would provoke my anger; these fluctuating thoughts more or less rendered me to a great state of confusion.

Overtime, incomprehensible and normally unimaginable thoughts flowed in and out like ebb by milliseconds. I would have one thought in my mind only for the second thought to overwhelm the first one, while my body would act according to the first thought: meditation was a chaos. However, I kept going, and kept trying restlessly. Under the tree during summer time, and in the boiler room during the winter time, I would meditate for four hours a day with my full vigor.

At first, my family observed me with a curiosity, wondering what it is that I am doing, but eventually, they encouraged me to go on with my meditation, as peace and quiet followed with it. A ringing phone was not answered and the books on the shelves were left untouched. Musics that I was fond of would become a distraction to my meditation. As I placed my favorites further away from me, naturally my wanting for them weakened. My desire was diminishing.

Our mind is indeed a mystery. As a coffee would be conjured up when I desired one, my agony also was conjured when I would visualize agonizing experiences, but would disappear without a trace once I stop thinking about it. Then, would the agony caused by the thought of agony itself really exist in reality? Thus, if I can distance myself as far away as possible from the thoughts of agony, it would cease to exist in my life completely. In fact, whenever I focus hard on a singular word, just as I would do every time I meditate, the agony would be gone completely from my life, even if that was only during the time of my meditation.

It was a simple concept any children could understand. Without any thought of agony, you will not agonize. To fully realize with your heart that these suffering thoughts exist in only certain conditions is not an easy thing to do. For now, the secret of salvation from agony was revealed to me. My chains were gone; I was as free as a bird.

Immense surge of delight filled me inside. Extending my meditation hour to five hours a day, I immersed in the world of meditation. I did not realize when all the darkness that surrounded me drizzled down my shoulders. I spent 10 years this way. I spent my time like this when others would use the same amount of time saving extra bucks and studying how to save extra bucks.

Seasons passed, and my thoughts started to make sense. I did not dwell on a certain thought. I would instead let them flow right by me. I wouldn’t fish for thought in the great pool of random thoughts anymore.

I believe people often times live in a flood of thoughts. These thoughts from unconscious world to the conscious ones constitute what the world is today. We believe that the world is an objective realm, but the real world is quite the contrary: the world is what you make it.

For me, the Moon appears in my existence and the tree lives when I think about them, and the same applied to the agony; it only existed when I recognized it. Surely, the fact, ‘my body cannot walk’ was not an agony after all. It only existed in my thoughts, not within my current physical form or within my wheelchair. This concept was not logical understanding, but rather a firsthand experience.

Incredibly, my 7 year of sufferings from skin sores and bladder infections were purged completely. When my family was sick of cold, I did not catch any of them. I wore short sleeves in the winter. Could it be possible that the meditation which was believed to emit the alpha wave throughout the cells of my body, rejuvenated them and cleared the mind of a woman who would catch a pneumonia just by being next to a person with a common cold?

It was a strange thing. I feel immense shame and embarrassment for the agony I felt years ago. Aside from rare sparks, my body was free from pain. As I went into this transformation, so did my family. Even in the depth of the hardship, we understood each other, even maintained a sense of humor.

In former Soviet’s Khabarovsk Living Organism Institue, ChiangKazhen, awarded for a world patent biometric device in 1991 with a remote wireless transmission, reminds a lot of my story.

In his experiment, out of 500 chicken eggs that received duck’s bio-magnetic wave, 480 eggs were hatched and 70%~90% were born with duck-shaped head, neck and eyes, while 30% of them had webbed feet. The duck’s bio-magnetic wave altered the chicken gene. Also, through Harvard’s Paul B’s bilateral brain synchronization experiment, the influence of alpha wave is already a widely approved theory.

Has my bio-magnetic wave of contentment influenced even my family? Not only did it change me, but the meditation seemed to have influenced those around me, such as my family. However, I went through hard and sleepless days to reach to this state of enlightenment. For 10 years, to focus for five hours a day, even for an entire day was never an easy thing to do. To maintain and sustain these millions of random thoughts was only possible by the motivation to raise my children properly.

The ‘agony’ have taught me a life lesson this way. Most people do not see a handicap in me, reason being I do not live like one. Indeed, it was the power of ten years of meditation. If one asks me what life is, I would respond to him that it is a question of how, not what.