it does not matter if you are a monk or a worldly person. The main thing is that you breathe.
Jean Batist had cherished forever the memories of that sleepless night, which he spent thinking after his conversation with the monk. Soon he married the woman he loved, and he spent the rest of his life in a close cooperation with monks who revealed for him this amazing insight into life.
After graduation from the university Jean Batist came back to Rwanda with his Russian wife. They built a beautiful house. His wife was surprised by a mild sub-equatorial climate, without heat or cold. They reaped harvest in their garden several times a year. There were no mosquitoes on the shore of a boundless scenic lake Kivu, where they used to come for vacation. Sunsets and sunrises boggled the imagination with their unusual splendor peculiar only to the equator.
There is almost no twilight at the equator. An absolute day starts to be filled with red, lilac, pink colors, the solar disk dives beyond the skyline and an absolute night falls. All of a sudden. As if somebody turns off the day light and turns on a night light of an endless starry sky. This world resembled a piece of paradise created for a family’s well-being. Nature generously rewarded every day of the year with the wealth of all the benefits, which it was able to give.
Together with his wife, a nurse, Jean Batist served the patients in the clinic and worked on his thesis. The time when we are absolutely happy is like a wave of eyelashes. We do not notice it. Soon their life got filled with children’s voices, their family happiness obtained the perfection of great creation of a great artist, and a war came to Rwanda.
Genocide of 1994 claimed the lives of a million people. Jean Batist’s father and brothers were killed. Rivers of blood were running through the city and corpses of the people hacked to death with machete closed the exits from houses. Jean Batist was forced to flee the country to save his family.
Again he had got help from the congregation of monks. Jean’s wife and children were first taken to one of the West African countries, then to Belgium. In Belgium they had to start everything from scratch. In the literal sense of the word.
Russian degree in medicine was not valid in Belgium and he had to study again. To study again to be a doctor. But there was no money, so only one of them could study to be a doctor. His wife stayed at home with the children in a housing provided by social services.
Everything was unfamiliar. Unfamiliar country, unfamiliar language, unfamiliar people.
They just had to survive.
And they were surviving.
It took 4 years to validate his qualifications. The congregation of monks helped in this situation as well. They provided Jean Batist with an opportunity to work at their psychiatric hospital. Monks in many countries of the world opened medical institutions for working with psychiatric patients as well as with deaf and blind persons. This was their mission. And this allowed Jean Batist to find a work for that long period when he studied again. Even after he had obtained the official status of a doctor-psychiatrist in Belgium, he continued to work at the neuropsychiatric hospital of St. Martin on the outskirts of Brussels.
For a long time the horrors of war still echoed in the memories of all the members of Jean Batist’s family. But time moves space, and in a while the professional self-fulfillment of Jean Batist started to develop successfully as he used his life experience in working with PTSD – post-traumatic stress disorder – applying this experience to treating the people who had gone through a war.
Psychological traumas – is a special subject studied by psychotherapists. Jean Batist was not a supporter of a human body’s exposure to pharmaceuticals.
According to his long-term observations, it was quite obvious to him that a trans state in hypnotherapy was more qualitative by its nature than antidepressant drugs. Certainly not in every case, but in the cases related to mental health – for sure.
When mentally healthy people go through traumas, it is not necessary at all to introduce chemical elements into a body to exercise a forced control over people’s mental state.
Our unconsciousness – is that specific particle of God inside us. And this inner God is open to professional conversation. A psychotherapist always has a choice. To make a pharmaceutical company richer or to find the right words for a conversation.
Of course, it is easier to prescribe drugs. Substantially easier, as compared to that enormous work of the mind and soul, which is required to be done for the sake of a patient.
But Jean Batist liked what he was doing with all his heart and the more complicated the cases were, the more he committed himself to this amazing skill of curing human souls.
The children grew up, his son was going to apply to college and his daughter was graduating from a secondary school. Finally they got an opportunity to give up social housing, to take a loan and to build their own house.
Their own new house. Now each member of the family had their own room and in the evening they all could gather in the nice and comfortable living room with a beautiful fireplace made of red bricks. Only 3 years were left till the final payment to the bank. And the house would become theirs, at last.
And in this new country, in this new life, after all the ordeals of war, finally they would be able to obtain peace and to live happily ever after.
But one morning he realized that he was dying.
Jean Batist kept silence. Long ago they have agreed with Anastasia, that they would tell their own stories as well as the stories of their patients in third and first person.
This was fair.
– Jean Batist, do you mind if we get out into the garden and I have a smoke? – Anastasia realized that they needed a break. They were sitting near that particular fireplace of red bricks, where the fire was burning brightly.
– Damn it! Of course! I will breath your menthol, – exclaimed Jean Batist, smiling, as if this was exactly what he was waiting for. – You know, I will probably suggest the following. How about now you tell me how you lived. And then we will get back to my trauma. OK?
– No problem! – Anastasia took long menthol sticks out of a cigarette case, and they went out to the terrace, to the night garden filled with a citrus scent of lemon grass.
Black Caviar Sandwich
A pack of huge stray dogs surrounded her from all sides. She had to walk through the wasteland, which had a bad reputation.
For a 13 year old girl it was better to walk accompanied by somebody. And she was accompanied. As if unknown powers of her Guardian Angel took very unexpected shapes.
Until she reached the age of majority, if she walked through dark streets of the city or trough a wasteland between her home and her school, a large pack of stray dogs, led by a huge white dog, appeared out of nowhere. Wild dogs just ran alongside. And she felt that these free animals, that built up horror throughout the area, in some mysterious way protected her. The pack leader often looked into her eyes. And she looked back. Also with courage and confidence. But she never looked away first. By this age, seriously keen on studying animal psychology, she got to know the principle of a pack.
If you
