As a teenager I discovered the cure for car-sickness.  Just drive.

I would drive down through the Ozark Mountains in Missouri to our lake cottage each weekend from St. Louis where I grew up.  I’d sit in the back seat and be fine until we got into the mountain curves and then that life-long problem would come rushing on.  Yuck.

I’d ask my dad to pull over and let me drive.  The minute I’d get my hands on the wheel sitting in the driver’s seat, my illness would clear up and immediately disappear.  I’d be fine from then on as long as I drove.

It got so that whenever we got to a certain little town, Dad would just automatically pull over and I would take over the driving.  I don’t remember the name of the town, but I do know that it was just before we got to the mountains.

Years later, when I was in my 30s, I found myself one afternoon on a mini vacation out at sea with some friends standing out on the bow of a pontoon sail boat hanging on to the mast enjoying the salt spray and the afternoon breeze.

We had gone pretty far out into the ocean and we could no longer see the land.  The boat was small and the swells were large; it was not at all a storm, but out little craft was kind of going up the side of one swell and down the other.

As I stood and enjoyed the moment I remember thinking to myself, “How interesting it is that I have lost perspective of the horizon.”  As I tried to get my bearings on what was true ‘up and down’, I then thought to myself, “Oh, this is what must happen when people get seasick.  They lose track of their equilibrium and that’s probably what makes their inner ear get out of whack and then their stomach starts to churn.”

I kind of laughed then to myself as I looked at the strange sensation of lost focus.  It made total sense why people get seasick.  You can’t find the simple truth of your sense of balance, your horizon, and so there’s no point of focus like you normally have, and so the stomach starts to lose track of the ground below and everything begins to go a bit haywire.

And so then and there, standing on that bow, things started to go a bit haywire.  I thought to myself, “Oh, yeah, and then the stomach turns over just like that because those waves just keep moving and there’s no true point of reference and then, yeah, the knees go a bit wobbly, and then…”

Any I suddenly realized I was getting really seasick.

I turned to one of my friends sitting back at the stern and waved and they yelled, “Are you all right?  You look kind of green!

And green I was.  Sick as a dog seasick.  All within about 3 minutes of contemplation.  I thought to myself, “Oh my God, I’m gonna throw up.”  Then I remember thinking, “Oh no, I’m ruining my beautiful day.  I got trapped into this stupid story and I can’t get out.”

I leaned over the side to puke and as we started to move up the next wave I nearly lost my balance and fell into the water, but saved myself at the last second by grabbing onto one of the sails and holding on for dear life.

That was the turning point.

The thought suddenly came into my head.  Just drive the car.

I staggered back to the bow to our sailboat captain trying as hard as I could to be cool and said, “Hey, do you mind if I steer?  Teach me how.”  He said, “There’s really nothing to it; you just hold on to the rudder and keep it steady.  Pick an imaginary point out ahead and keep going to it.”

We switched places.  I put my right hand on the rudder, assumed the position as captain of the ship and began to steer.

I was immediately whole.  Within 10 seconds I was completely free of any trace of seasickness – no wobbly knees, no churning stomach, no whacked equilibrium and back to my normal pink self.  We’re not talking here about feeling better in the course of the afternoon; we’re talking about immediate and radical change of mind and consequently, body.

I had no problems the rest of the afternoon and haven’t since.  I figured it out, made sense of it, understood the mental cause that produced the physical effect and upon fixing the mental cause, I negated the mental cause – resuming my focus on the absolute – and thusly changed my mind, eliminating the effect, the physical sickness.  I took no drug to heal the physical.  I simply corrected the mental.  Cause and effect.

Healing.

For more inspirational music, thoughts and ideas from Peter Link,
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