George's lungs cleared

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• The noisy breather on the Sydney retreat

  In brief: On a nine-day retreat in Sydney one man breathes so loudly that a meditator complains. Ajahn Brahm explains he has a terminal tumour…

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  At meditation retreats I always remember this one man when I was teaching a Meditation Retreat in Sydney many years ago and a 9-day retreat. You know that people are supposed to be quiet when they are meditating but this man (Ajahn breathing noisily) He was breathing so heavily through every meditation sitting so much so that someone came up to me to complain Can you please tell this person to keep quiet. I am trying to meditate. He had a tumor in his nasal passages blocking both nostrils. It was terminal; the doctor had given up surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy So the doctors have abandoned him and he came to the meditation retreat as a last resort So when I told all the meditators that, they felt very embarrassed and guilty that they were complaining about somebody who got only few weeks to live. He told me that; on the last day of the retreat (Ajahn making the sound) breathing loudly again but not thinking being silent; he had a 'pop' He said he could breath again. That's what he said 'a pop' as his nasal passage cleared but only for about 5 or 10 minutes then it closed again. That was an amazing thing which happened I thought that meditation was working but he left it a bit too late. I never thought he would survive. Few years later teaching meditation in Sydney, this guy came up to me 'do you remember me?' I said 'of course I don't remember, who are you? ' As a monk I am honest He was that man. He cared with his meditation and his nose had cleared and now he was going around teaching people how to be peaceful, how to be silent. because his cancer had got into regression even though he should have been dead years ago.

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• Ajahn Chah sits in the centre of the fever

  In brief: Malaria was an occupational hazard for jungle monks, and Ajahn Chah suffered it for years. During one intense attack, instead of lying in…

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  And I know Ajahn Chah's story, my teacher, being a forest monk living in the jungles he had malaria for many years it was for those monks an occupational hazard just like these days, for current monks having tummy aches is an occupational hazard simply because as I told you I don't own my stomach you put whatever you want into it, and sometimes my stomach says 'no' (Ajahn laughs) But nevertheless you get to peace with that. His occupational hazard was malaria for many years I remember him telling me how he overcame his malaria once and for all having a very intense attack of the fever and instead of just laying in bed, sitting up meditating with it instead of running away from the thing or complaining about it, worrying about it what most people do when you got a problem, a disease or a tumor or whatever you think about it too much it creates more problems by the way react to them Instead he sat with it, he said he sat right in the centre of his fever quietly silently had peace with it. And it's a very hard thing to do but it's a wonderful thing to train yourself to be able to do. To be able to make peace with pain or with the fever, or with difficulty to make absolute peace with it so you don't even think you are just there at one with what you are experiencing not making any inner speech with it. he said as he was just with that he sort of felt like he was in the centre of a raging forest fire. but in the centre it was cool. but he could perceive all around him was a fire getting hotter and hotter and hotter which was his fever increasing in intensity and he said at one point the fever got so hot it burst and everything was cool. He never got malaria ever again.

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• The tangled brain cleared before the second operation

  In brief: A Malaysian man in Penang had a rare disease he described as things in the brain physically tangled; after one painful operation it seemed…

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  this guy in Pinang is a Malaysian gentleman. And he told me, "Oh, he had this terrible disease, a very rare disease where the best way he could describe it is things in the brain were all tangled up, physically tangled." And he said he had one operation for that and it's really painful and very sort of unpleasant. But he went through it and they thought it was cured. It was very very rare. And then when later on he had some aches and pains in his brain, in his skull, then they said again that it's reoccurred. It's very very rare that reoccurs, but it's back again. They showed him the the CT scans and he was really scared because you've been through these terrible operations once. You don't want to go through them again. Ah, what am I going to do? And so I told him about meditating, meditating properly and just relax. Don't be afraid. Don't try and cure it, but care for it. That's s the trick there. When you try and cure things, you get tense with it. When you care for it, you just allow it to be really relaxed and at ease. And so he did that. And I think straight after the what was supposed to be the operation, he came back up to Pinang, I think, just to see me and just to thank me. He said, "What happened?" He said, "They took the CT scan again." You know, just before the second operation and they said the words to him, "Uh, sir, I'm sorry to say this, but there's something wrong with the CT machine. The cat's going. We have to do it again." And they put him through the CT scan again and realized nothing wrong with the machine. It's something they didn't expect. They whatever the disease was scrambling up some of the stuff in his brain had actually unscrambled and he was perfectly healthy again. So what the heck is going on? They never seen that before. That's he did that sort of procedure in Singapore

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• Meditating through the fever

  In brief: Three or four weeks into an undiagnosed fever (later found to be scrub typhus) in a basic Ubon hospital ward, with no energy and nothing…

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  But I do remember one of the times. And I wish I had been a bit more mindful, but I can understand why I wasn't cuz I had such such incredibly low energy. Never had so much low energy as that time fever of about 3 or 4 weeks. And anyway that uh one day I got sort of depressed but not a depression which was um negative. I don't know that I thought oh this is really awful. Nothing's working. This is terrible. So why don't I do some meditation actually practice know what my teacher would teach me what the Buddha would say do something useful. And this was like three weeks or four weeks into a a very heavy fever and nothing was working, feeling just so exhausted. So I decided to meditate and obviously not cross-legged but just laying on the bed, laying on my back or half on my back, half on this, half on that and being able just to let go of my body. And it was such a wonderful experience just sitting there or not so not sitting. They're laying there with legs all over the place. We've seen people in hospital with a fever. They're not really caring about just how their body is positioned. You're all over the place. But then just going deep inside away from my body, closing my eyes. It was in a a ward of a hospital. So there's lots of noise there, but I couldn't hear anything. No smell. No taste, just going inside to some nice beautiful mind state. Oh, it's just a wonderful time. And I'm really sure that that would be when the fever stopped simply because that's the nature of the mind. It's incredibly powerful and it's so powerful inside. It just stops all this stuff in your body and very happy afterwards.

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