If you are in good health, you're balanced. If you are sick, you've lost some balance, temporarily I hope.

Hang with me here.

Picture yourself swinging between Yang and Yin over a precipice. When you stop swinging you see a ledge. You stand on it, safely.

Now, if you're unfamiliar with Eastern medicine, consider the Aristotelian Mean. Aristotle advocated following a path between two extremes. If you swing too far in either direction you are apt to get sick.

Since I have skimmed the surface of Eastern Philosophy, Aristotle, Stephen Hawkings' string theory, brain research, religions, meditation, and Western medical science, I am no authority, but I can show you how they relate to good health.

First, Yang refers to the masculine, left-brained energy in everyone and Yin the right-brained, feminine energy. When these two are out of balance, things go awry. Acupuncture is the medical practice of releasing blocked flow of energy to regain balance and good health. Obviously, it works.

String theory, I think, says everything in the universe consists of strings of energy. Nothing is solid. (Phew, wish I could understand physics!)

Brain research shows three major parts to the human brain: reptile, limbic, and neo-cortex. We use our reptile brain whenever we feel our survival threatened. (Explains continual warfare.) The limbic system, our midbrain or early mammalian brain, stores our emotions. We use the neo-cortex for thinking, forward planning and problem solving. All three brains are interdependent and function together. The neo-cortex houses the right and left brain. When either of these is too far out of balance we suffer.

You may know, slightly, an accountant or computer programmer who is so left-brained he is practically a hermit. Or you may know an artist who is so right-brained he forgets to pay his rent and is often in some kind of trouble.

I think most physicists use all three brains in balance. I may be wrong.

Experiments with meditation have shown some amazing results. Dr. Richard Davidson of the W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior studied the brain waves of some Tibetan Buddhist monks, including the Dalai Lama. He found unusually high amounts of gamma brain waves