It was interesting getting help from the Taoist Master. It was hard going dealing with doctors and hospitals and general practitioners. It looks like the Taoist practice is more about doing practical physical exercises to maintain the body. Also paying respects to the natural energy all around us. To the spirits as well that are everywhere. I can’t believe I lost my way for so long. It is easy to do though. There is a world indebted to complications. For example one problem suddenly becomes two then three until there are many problems to solve. Sometimes too many. In my story ‘Precision’ there is a scene in a hospital where body parts are stored. It is the idea of the human as product. Human as test rat. Human as patient which essentially means the body can be worked on as a set of problems. It lacks humanity and becomes a machine.

In my book machines work on bodies part living and dead to revive humans, sometimes building them from scratch. I used these types of ideas to create the true horror of medicine. An industry. Sometimes though it can help. Sometimes it can’t. When things go wrong that can be it. An ending. I had small problems that started to build and become more complex. It was the exercises that unravelled the complications. The body was worked on through gentle exercise. Firstly my back was fixed after a few years of issues. The pains started to disappear in other parts of my body. After a month the colour started coming back to my face. I started putting weight back on. My appetite returned. My energy levels went back to normal.

The doctors found nothing. They didn’t know. They did tests and looked. It was a mystery. Now I do the Taoist training every day. I go to see Master Dong Yang once a week in North Ryde. I hope this year is less dramatic than last year. That I can have the kind of health that I am used to and hopefully better than before. Our bodies are everything in that we can’t live without them. Daily exercise keeps disease at bay. The problem I had was that I have a lot of blockages and I tried Yoga and just couldn’t get to the core problem. It was like an itch I couldn’t scratch. The upside of the cultivation techniques is that they have many ways of helping maintain and strengthen the body and mind.