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Photo courtesy http://www.facebook.com/pages/Damian-and-Nicky-on-974-MOREFM/83550471126 Yesterday I took part in the Relay for Life , the cancer society's annual fundraising and consciousness raising event. I arrived early, saw the teams from the Diocese of Dunedin, and from Anglican Family Care, and went to the official tent to collect the purple sash which marked me as a cancer survivor. Clemency wore a green one, given to those who have supported loved ones through cancer. The event this year was held in the Forsyth Barr stadium, so it was weatherproof. It's a great event with a sort of carnival atmosphere. Organisations and businesses raise teams who commit themselves to walking for 24 hours in relay. A small entrance fee is paid and the teams raise money through sponsorship, so a considerable sum is accumulated to pay for cancer research and for the excellent supportive work of the cancer society. Each team sets up a little headquarters and the members are inclined to...

Roncesvalles has, so I am told, 18 permanent residents, so it does pretty well to maintain the beautiful and very large bascilica at which we attended mass last night. The church was full and the service was all in Spanish. At the end the priest called the pilgrims forward - 40 or 50 of us - and gave us a blessing in all the appropriate languages, including Korean - quite an achievement. Then we went to the restaurant run by residents no 11 and 12 and, for 9 euros each, bought the pilgrim's meal. Many restaurants on the Camino do this. They offer a set menu at a cheap price but you don't know until the plate is plonked down before you what you're going to get. Given my dietary strictures, we were a bit apprehensive, but had resolved to eat whatever it was that was set before us. We were, after all, ravenous after the trek over the Pyrenees. As it turns out, that St. Christopher's badge seems to be working pretty well. There was a bean soup - about 50/50 beans and water...

Get up early and sit in an uncomfortable position in the dark for a long time and do nothing? You're kidding, right?  It's hard to explain why anybody would want to meditate. For  a long time I didn't want to myself,  and then for an equally long time I did but couldn't gather up the requisite willpower to make a regular thing of it. But now there's been a corner turned and the quiet spaces in the day are my favourite bits of it. Partly, it's a cognitive thing. My life has been dominated by an insatiable quest to understand and lately there's been a sort of nagging inner certainty that the path to understanding somehow lies through this period of enforced inner silence. There's also Ian Gawler, who seems to think that meditation is as important, more important even, than any other lifestyle change you might want to make if you are intent on pursuing healing, and I have been quite predisposed to listen to him of late. And then there's lots of frazzled...

About a week into the ten day residential Life and Living programme I texted home: Awake at 5 so excited about the day. I know I am going to live. I have looked into the great festering abyss and realised that it is in the past and doesn't exist! It has left a legacy in my present but each thing can be easily dealt with. I am completely and utterly free. It's not that this programme changed my life. Cancer changed my life, but the Gawler programme shaped and focused the changes and showed me where I might pick up the tools to build a future with. The programme is non religious but is founded squarely on the practice of mindfulness meditation. The first activity of the day following the wake up bell and the daily tot of lemon juice and water, was 45 minutes in the sanctuary being gently led into silence. The aim of mindfulness is to be quiet: quiet in body mind and spirit. Quiet but not asleep or in any sort of trance. Quiet but alert and aware of the now, undistracted by thin...

I have just returned from a ten day residential programme at the Gawler Foundation's Yarra Valley Living Centre . I will write later of my impressions of the programme, but in the meantime, here are some snaps, fresh from the SD card. What is missing from these shots is, of course, the main ingredient of the place: people. I shared the experience with 31 others, all of whom, like me, were coming to terms with a life threatening illness and at this vulnerable point in their lives, whatever they were expecting from the programme, it certainly didn't include having their photos on someone's blog. Hence the unpopulated look of these shots. But I hope they give a sense of place anyway. The Yarra Valley Living Centre is located (surprise, surprise) in the Yarra Valley, an hour and a half North East of Melbourne First view from the long, tree lined driveway is of The administrative building Corridor in one of the dormitory blocks Where I slept: clean, well maintained, comfortable...

Very soon I'm off to the airport. I'm going to Christchurch and tomorrow to Melbourne to spend 10 days at the Gawler Institute . I'll eat vegan food, meditate for a period every day and participate in classes on the relationship of body mind and spirit in the company of about 30 people in much the same position as me. I hope to walk a bit. Take photos of Kangaroos and Koalas and bright raucous birds. It's the deferred beginning of the sabbatical which was the starting point of this blog , all those months ago. The Gawler Institute doesn't offer an internet connection and doesn't encourage cell phones. So it'll be a week or two until you hear from me again. TTFN

For two weeks now I've been trying to stick to Ian Gawler's Healing Diet, and, I have got to say, more or less succeeding. It's a lot of bother. There are six glasses of juice to be made and swallowed daily, and apart from the one made of fruit, they aren't the sorts of things you'd swallow for the fun of it. There are three vegetarian - well vegan, really - meals to be made in a day, which has meant a radical revamp of the fridge freezer and pantry. Because the whole day's menu has a carefully planned balance, I've been sticking to the recipes, which is not the way I normally cook. I'm more of a lets get the vibe of this dish and amend it as we go sort of cook, but this way has taught me a lot of new ways of combining food which would be worth repeating even if you didn't have a bigger agenda for the meal. It's been easy doing without meat - I haven't missed it for a second. It's been easy doing without the processed flour and sugar and ...

Today I got to the point in Ian Gawler's book where I am on quite familiar territory: the bit where he explains his theology of healing. It's a theory I know well in various guises, a theory that crops up time and again in various Eastern and/or esoteric philosophies. He says that we have seven bodies, only one of which, the physical body, is accessible to the senses. The other six - the emotional, intellectual, intuitional, spiritual and astral bodies - are of varying degrees of subtlety and while some people can "see" some of them they are invisible to most of us. Illness happens when the energies of two or more of the bodies are conflicted and healing occurs when coherence is restored between them. I'm not sure what I believe about this theory: I'm probably too steeped in my Western world view to embrace it fully but it's  disconcerting  that some practices based on this idea, such as acupuncture,  seem to have real, measurable effectiveness, as does Ia...

The Jetty, Carey's Bay I heard back from my surgeon yesterday, or at least from the young woman who works for him. He doesn't want to see me until November, which is a pleasant change from the "please come first thing tomorrow morning, and bring your wife" routine which had become a bit of a stuck record over this past few months. I guess it means that whatever he's found down there is not going to cause my imminent demise, and we can all have a bit of a breather. That's OK by me.I've been reading a book by Ian Gawler with a very self helpy type of title You Can Conquer Cancer . Ian Gawler managed to beat a very nefarious type of bone cancer through diet and meditation, so, much as Betty Edwards deserves a hearing purely on the basis of results, so does Ian Gawler. I read his psychological profile of the typical cancer patient which described me with such accuracy that I cringed at every word. The course of action described in the book seems rigorous at...