Curses and the Power of "Haola"

“WARNING: This product contains a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer.”

I've been noticing all of the ways we "curse" ourselves to follow fates out of alignment with our hopes and dreams. When we believe that we "know" about a potential danger the "knowing" itself can actually increase the effects of that danger on us. This is sometimes called the placebo effect, but today I am finding the framing of "curse" more useful.

Examples of curses I have witnessed include diagnoses (medical or otherwise), cancer warnings (they're everywhere in California thanks to proposition 65), pretty much all diet and sex advice, most of today's news, and so much of the well meaning but limiting comments and advice from friends. These little curses are everywhere and insidious when we don't recognize them for what they are and address them with our full consciousness.

In the book God's Hotel by Victoria Sweet MD, the author talks about her time working in the alzheimers/dementia ward of the Laguna Honda alms house. Many of these patients had serious diagnoses (cancer, diabetes, heart problems) in addition to their memory loss; however, on this ward these secondary diseases didn't progress. The author speculated this was likely because the patients didn't have the capacity to fixate and identify with their diagnoses. Without the ability to attach to their diagnoses, the patients were free to believe that there was nothing wrong with them, and that just maybe they were unconditionally perfect in every moment.

This brings me to how I've been handling these curses recently: with the power of "Haola". In Chinese haola means "all is well and getting better" or just "everything is good". In Zhineng Qigong, we often greet each other with a haola or repeat the word haola as a mantra to remind us of the True goodness that we are. This is not self deception but the skillful ability to hold paradox: yes, we may have a health situation that needs medical attention, and at the same time, this does not take away from our intrinsic and unconditional wholeness. I have found in my practice that the concept of "haola" is wonderful for breaking these little everyday "curses".

At the gas station yesterday, I saw a Prop 65 cancer warning. I quickly did 3 haolas to the sign. When I hear negative self talk inside my head, I send it some haolas. I microwaved my lunch today; rather than indulging in unnecessary guilt, I sent my food some haolas. When the dentist told my daughter she had a cavity, I sent both of us some haolas (just in case a "I have bad teeth" or "I'm a bad mom" curse wanted to stick) before scheduling her an appointment to have it fixed. This simple word can help us tend what needs to be tended in the physical realm without attaching any of it to who we see ourselves as being. It clears the air to allow space for all of the infinite beauty and possibilities to come through.

Today my qigong group did a simple "open, close" practice where we expanded and contracted an imaginary qi ball between our palms. We chanted "hao" as our hands went out and "la" as our hands came back in. In this way, we became aligned with the act of creation and destruction, the expansion and contraction of the universe. I was reminded of symbols for the divine union of masculine and feminine, the V for the receptive feminine and the upside-down V as the penetrating masculine. Stacked together they form a diamond, or positioned another way, the Star of David. When information counter to our highest self comes in, it can fix us into an identity and cause this free open/close movement to cease. It is as if all the possibilities become frozen into one possibility, and in the case of a cancer warning, that's probably not a possibility one would choose to fix to. Our job as mature and whole human beings is to oscillate between both: yin and yang, good and bad, right and wrong, black and white, sick and healthy. Haola.