Healing – A Poem by Wendell Berry

I

The grace that is the health of creatures can only be held in common.

In healing the scattered members come together.

In health the flesh is graced, the only enters the world.

II

The task of healing is to respect oneself as a creature, no more and no less.

A creature is not a creator, and cannot be. There is only one Creation, and we are its members.

To be creative is only to have health: to keep oneself fully alive in the Creation, to keep the Creation fully alive in oneself, to see the Creation anew, to welcome one’s part in it anew.

The most creative works are all strategies of this health.

Works of pride, by self-called creators, with their premium on originality, reduce the Creation to novelty – the faint surprises of minds incapable of wonder.

Pursuing originality, the would-be creator works alone. In loneliness one assumes a responsibility for oneself that one cannot fulfill.

Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

III

There is the bad work of pride. There is also the bad work of despair – done poorly out of the failure of hope or vision.

Despair is the too-little of responsibility, as pride is the too-much.

The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life.

For despair there is no forgiveness, and for pride non. Who in loneliness can forgive?

IV

Good works finds the way between pride and despair.

It graces with health. It heals with grace.

It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.

By it, we lose loneliness:

we clasp the hand of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us;

we enter the little circle of each other’s arm,

and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,

and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vaste that no ear hears it except in fragments.

V

And by it we enter solitude, in which we also lose loneliness.

Only discord can come of the attempt to share solitude.

True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation.

One’s inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources.

In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.

One returns from solitude laden with the gift of circumstance.

VI

And there is no escaping that return.

From the order of nature we return to the order – and the disorder – or humanity.

From the larger circle we must go back to the smaller, the smaller within the larger and dependent on it.

One enters the larger circle by willingness to be a creature, the smaller by choosing to be a human.

And having returned from the woods, we remember with regret its restfulness. For all creatures there are in place, hence at rest.

In their most strenuous striving, sleeping and waking, dead and living, they are at rest.

In the circle of the human we are weary with striving, and are without rest.

VII

Order is the only possibility of rest.

The made order must seek the given order, an find its place in it.

The field must remember the forest, the town must remember the field, so that the wheel of life will turn, and the dying be met by the newborn.

The scattered members must be brought together.

Desire will always outreach the possible. But to fulfill the possible is to enlarge it.

The possible, fulfilled, is timely in the world, eternal in the mind.

Seeing the work that is to be done, who can help wanting to be the one to do it?

But one is afraid that there will be not rest until the work is finished and the house is in order, the farm is in order, the town is in order, and all loved ones are well.

But it is pride that lies awake in the night with its desire and its grief.

To work at this alone is fail. There is not help for it. Loneliness is its failure.

It is despair that sees the work failing in one’s own failure.

This despair is the awkwardest pride of all.

VIII

There is finally the pride of thinking oneself without teachers.

The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a learner.

In ignorance is hope. If we had know the difficulty, we would not have learned even so litle.

Rely on ignorance. It is ignorance the teachers will come to.

They are waiting, as they always have, beyond the edge of the light.

IX

The teachings of unsuspected teachers belong to the task, and are its hope.

The love and the work of friends and lovers belong to the task, and are its health.

Rest and rejoicing belong to the task, and are its grace.

Let tomorrow come tomorrow. Not by your will is the house carried through the night.

Order is only the possibility of rest.

—

From “What are People for?”

Dark Matters: Pain and Suffering

This is the first of a series I’m calling “Dark Matters” where I’ll be exploring some areas of life that may be a little uncomfortable. Some are taboo, some are awkward, but the idea is that they are important issues to explore and discuss openly – if we bring these issues out into the open and shed some light on them, maybe they won’t be so dark. It feels particularly fitting to be exploring these topics during the darkest part of the year, moving with the season and embracing the things they bring up. Today is after all the solstice, the day with the least amount of sunshine, but the beauty of our world is that the darkest day is also the beginning of the days getting brighter.

I don’t mean to be morbid, but pain and suffering are things we must all confront throughout life. As a healthcare practitioner I’ll become especially well acquainted with them. They are also topics that happen to be showing up in my personal life recently. Pain and suffering are dark and heavy topics, and because they don’t feel good we generally try to avoid them. I’ve learned through experience that there is a lot of important and powerful energy locked up in those dark places and they are therefore very worthwhile places to explore.

When I first started writing this, I was going to explore the different attitudes and perspectives on pain a suffering that come from different religions and cultures. The first and most obvious was Buddhism. The Buddha makes it’s seem pretty simple: Life is suffering, suffering comes from attachment, cessation of suffering is possible, the eightfold path is the way to end suffering. I’ve engaged in Buddhism a bit, mostly on a superficial level, and it hasn’t proven to be an effective way of coping with suffering for me, though this is probably due to the superficiality with which I engaged it.

Another interesting approach that resonates with me comes from a lecture my Classics professor gave my freshman year in college when discussing Greek theater. She said clearly that we gain wisdom through suffering. I like this idea, but it wasn’t really touching me in the right place in this instance.

While sitting and writing in my journal one day, I realized that what I’ve been doing, what I always do when confronted with things that I don’t understand and can’t comprehend, is try to to understand them – what do they mean? I search for a way to make them meaningful – to me that makes it all more manageable and more digestible and easier to experience. What’s the reason? What’s it for? This is the coping mechanism I’ve learned from my ancestors – tell the story, even if the story ends in a question mark. But first you have to find the story. Where is it? You have to weave the story.

I  saw an image of  raw emotions, like wool, and shearing them out of places in my body and spinning them through talk and expression into threads and then weaving them into a tapestry that tells a story.

It’s a power we’ve been endowed with as humans – to make stories out of this nonsensical world – some are tragedies, some are comedies, some inspire, some leave us with a sense of wonder, others with confusion – but they’re all beautiful, each in its own way, and they teach us and move us.

Some people tell their stories through music and other through dance, some through painting or poetry – that’s my understanding of what art is – storytelling. And we’re here on this planet to make art to express the richness of our lives – to share it and touch others with it. I’m not saying that I see all art as a depiction of pain and suffering, rather that all art is an expression of the human experience, and pain and suffering are inevitable parts of the human experience, so at least some art is about going to be about pain or suffering – there’s really no avoiding them. Numbing ourselves and running away from them potentially even takes away from our humanness and generally has a way of creating more pain and more suffering.

The power to tell our stories, to create art, is something many of us have become disconnected from. Many of us weren’t taught a craft and some of us have been busy with work or caught up in consuming the stories of others through the media and we haven’t had an opportunity to write or sing or play or paint our own stories. It’s a process and it isn’t easy and it can be very scary, but part of the beauty is that you can always edit and revise, you can rewrite a paragraph or paint another painting, or dance another dance, or sing a different song. It’s all ephemeral anyway, it’s all changing, and each time we make art, we get a little better, we hone our skills and we gain new insights.

But there’s another piece: we can’t create art without the help of others. Someone else is makes the brushes and canvasses, someone else is playing the music we dance or sing to, or acting out the play we wrote, or printing our story. And even if we could make art all by ourselves, it wouldn’t be worth much without having others to share with.

I happened to watch the latest Woody Allen movie “Midnight in Paris” last night, it’s quite excellent and I highly recommend it. There was a quote that seemed to echo what I’m trying to say here, so I’ll leave you with that:

“The role of an artist is not to succumb to despair, but to find an antidote to the emptiness of existence.”

To me pain and suffering are potent raw materials that we can turn into art.

Let’s all make some art.

Happy Artful Holidays! May we all be gifted the opportunity to share our stories with loved ones this Holiday season.

Refinishing

Yesterday I refinished our dining room table. It’s a project that’s been on my to-do list for over a year now, so it felt especially good to do it. It was also fairly meditative, and created a good space for me to think and reflect. Refinishing a table is pretty simple; you sand off the old, and then you paint on a few fresh new shiny coatings and voila! If only life was so simple.  Then again, maybe it is.

What if you had one of those “bad days” and you’re feeling a bit low. If, at the end of the day, you sat down and thought about 3 things you were grateful for, wouldn’t you be “refinishing” your day? Maybe you’d be going to bed with some of those negative feelings sanded off and replaced by a slightly shinier coat. Maybe we should all have Thanksgiving every night.

Mid-semester reflections

I’m just more than half-way through my first semester here at SWAC (http://www.acupuncturecollege.edu/), and so far things are going well. It turns out that as part of the transfer process I ended up in a few classes that are for the most part review. Initially I was some what frustrated and bored, but at a certain point I started to put more into the so called review to make the most of it. It turns out I learned a whole lot of new things and now have a much more nuanced understanding of things I thought I already knew. Why this surprises me, I don’t know.

These mid-terms happen to be falling right after a  yearly fun-filled Jewish Holiday called Simchat Torah. It’s a celebration of the fact that we finished reading the whole entire Torah (Pentateuch) and get to start it all over. Why would be excited to start rereading the same book over again from the beginning? Why would be excited to re-celebrate the same Holidays over again? Well, there’s something nice to the familiarity, but I don’t think that’s what it’s about. It’s about a deepening of our relationships and understanding. The idea is that maybe there’s something new to learn, even where we thought we already knew everything. Maybe we missed something the first time around. It fosters an attitude towards life and towards learning that implies a certain amount of humility, an awareness that though we may have come far, there’s plenty more to go, and it requires us to cultivate curiosity and interest, even in the seemingly familiar.

Wait a second, what did I miss the first time around? What didn’t I notice? What don’t I remember? How does where I am right now and the knowledge I already have change and contribute to relearning things a second time around?

For me this all stands out the most in the arena of the Acupuncture points – who are they? where are they? and what do they do? By now, I’ve learned them all once through, I’ve been tested on all of them once through, why again? Well, it turns out that there are more than handful that I didn’t really know all that much about. There were a few that I could locate, but wasn’t all the comfortable needling them, and there were some that were just shrouded in mystery (plenty of them still are). But after relearning a handful (and we’ll be reviewing another handful the rest of the semester), I have a much better understanding of all of them and a deeper appreciation for what they do and when to include them in a treatment.

Just as important as a deeper understanding of the material, I experienced a valuable attitudinal shift with regards to my learning process. Instead of resisting “relearning things I already know,” I can eagerly approach familiar material to get deeper into it and expand my relationship with it. If I see the “information” as static, than my relationship with it is static, but if I hold onto an awareness that this medical material is a dynamic body of living knowledge, my relationship with becomes alive. A living relationship still involves ups and downs, frustrations and confusions, but it also creates space for more enrichment and growth.

Whether you’re a cook or an engineer, a manager or a lawyer, an artist or a mechanic, you can consider your attitude about your learning process and where you’re at, and examine your relationship with body of knowledge that’s out there and how it may contribute to your practice. The fall, is a wonderful time for refinement and enrichment!

Meat is on My Mind

A few weeks ago I participated in the slaughtering and butchering of quite a few organic pasture-raised chickens. The idea was to get closer to my food. I figure if I eat chicken, I ought to have the experience of preparing them from the beginning. This isn’t a new or novel idea, it seems to be one that’s stems from a large food movement of people trying to reclaim agency over their food and have a stronger connection to its source.

Slaughtering and butchering a bunch of chickens no doubt got me thinking about meat consumption and it’s implications on our environments, psyches, and health. I was a vegetarian for about 3 years in college. While working on a farm one summer after college, I grew to understand animal’s role in healthy sustainable farming (and that eating dairy and eggs involves me in the meat world indirectly) and perhaps because of all of the hard work, I found myself craving meat. I decided that my body needed it, and started eating meat again, but in a very reserved way, maybe once or twice a week at most, doing my best to make sure when I do eat meat it’s from a good source (it’s easier to afford more expensive meat because of the infrequency with which I eat it).

When I started acupuncture school, I was confronted by new attitudes about meat once again. In general, the Chinese diet would encourage a semi-vegetarian diet. Meat in traditional Chinese cooking was used more like a spice, in very small amounts, to add a bit of flavor and nutritional value, and even then somewhat infrequently.

Certain pattern imbalances, most noticeably “Blood Deficiency,” strongly encourage the consumption of meat (especially red meat) to help “build blood.” Blood in Chinese medicine, in some way correlates, but does not refer to the Western Biomedical substance of blood. Blood deficiency can be (but is not always) the root the cause of a number of symptoms, from insomnia and anxiety, to dry skin and hair, itchy dry eyes, poor night vision, dizziness, and constipation. Things like poor diet, overwork (physical or psychological) and poor digestion can lead to blood deficiency. I noticed that many people exhibited symptoms of blood deficiency (myself included, often attributed to a history of vegeterianism and/or overwork) and were encouraged to eat red meat to help build blood, but this challenged other values I have, and led me to explore other options (vegetables and herbs – basically red foods are good for blood: beets, tomatoes, goji berries, and dark leafy greens – chlorophyll is the blood of plants ), and try to understand this whole issue much more.

I also just started reading “The China Study” which is a book about diet and how eating a vegetable based diet greatly decreases our risks for many diseases, from cancer to heart disease. It’s very interesting and very well researched and I highly recommend it.

Then of course there’s the cultural issues surrounding the meat and when it’s eaten and how much (what’s Thanksgiving like without a turkey?).

In Chinese Medicine there’s a saying “Food is medicine and Medicine is food.” Many of our culture’s diseases come from improper diet, and strangely enough the “Standard American Diet” (SAD) is very similar to the Chinese medicine list of “What not to eat.” But it’s a complicated issue, and it’s challenging to figure out how to walk the line of sharing information about food and health, encouraging people to make changes, and making people feel bad for eating the way they do.

Unlike the chickens in my freezer, this is an issue I’m still dissecting, still working my way through.

A short video for a non-binary solution: “Weekday Vegetarian”

The Hara

It’s always interesting when a few different classes all line up and teach and talk about the same thing from different angles. I’d say the theme of the past few weeks has been “the belly” or “Hara” in Japanese. In our culture, we have an interesting relationship with our bellies. There are plenty of media outlets showing us what a “pretty/sexy belly” looks like and if our belly doesn’t look like that we may have trouble liking our belly. So, we either try to change it, or ignore it, or oscillate between the two – either way, we don’t love our bellies as they are. We also generally spend more time trying to tell it how we think it should be rather than listening to what it needs and wants.

Perhaps not surprisingly, we store a lot of our stress and tension in our bellies. Sometimes it shows up in symptoms (acid reflux, belly aches, loose stools, indigestion, gas, bloating), but sometime it doesn’t, and most of our stress alleviating practices don’t really focus on on stressed out bellies. When was the last time you had your belly massaged? As strange as it may sound, that’s an integral part of many Chinese and Japanese health treatments, and while it’s not always entirely pleasant while it’s happening, it usually feels great afterward and makes a big difference, and it happens to be the first thing we’re learning how to do in my Shiatsu class. There are plenty of other things we can do to make our bellies (and thus our whole bodies) happier that don’t involve direct contact for those of us who aren’t comfortable with that, or who are at a loss about where they can find a belly massage.

There’s the obvious thing of choosing what how and when to eat. There’s so much out there about what and how to eat, that I hesitate to add the echoes of the often contradictory advice. A couple perhaps indisputable suggestions I can make are to try not to eat while stressed out or in a hurry, try not to eat late at night. I’d also recommend eating warm foods more often than cold foods (warm foods are easier to digest, cold foods constrict the stomach and require extra energy to bring them up to body temperature) – especially as we move into the colder months.

In my differentiation of disease class we’ve been talking about how much of our immune system is in our gut. While we tend to thing of our digestive track as inside of us, however the whole length of our alimentary canal from our mouths to our anus is technically outside of us, and we have to keep things in our guts in check. There happen to be billions of microorganisms living in our gut, and when things are in balance, we’re living symbiotically. They break down some of the fiber we eat into short chain fatty acids (SCFA), which are an essential nutrient for the cells lining our intestines. When things are out of balance, bacteria and yeasts can live like parasites inside of us, sapping some of our energy and nutrients and weakening us and our immune systems and thus making us vulnerable to other diseases. A few simple things we can do to help our guts out are eating probiotic foods (like yogurt or sauerkraut) or taking a probiotic (such as acidophilus), and making sure we get enough fiber (preferably from a natural source like fruit and vegetables).

Hopefully, we can all bring a little more attention to our bellies, and send them some love, regardless of how they look or feel, and maybe start listening a little more to what they need and want.

Acupuncture Song!

Need I say more?

Sad Soup

It’s been a while since I’ve written for this blog, and getting this out was is as much about breaking my silence as anything else. I’m days before a new semester at a new school in a very different environment after an vast summer of life altering experiences.

Writing has always been a way for me to integrate the many things going on in my life. Separate experiences, seemingly un-related friendships, scattered thoughts and emotions get woven together into a cohesive story that helps me imbue all of the different pieces with an overarching meaning. Sometimes this happens spontaneously and sometimes with much thought and effort. Often it pours out of me at intense times of major transitions or transformations. I’ve come to realize that this is a part of my puzzle of personal wellness and a self-healing activity that helps me be whole – and that’s what health his – wholeness.

This summer for me has been a particularly transitional and transformational period of my life. First, I left Brooklyn, my home for the last 3 years, a place where I have many friends and a special community. At the time, any sadness about leaving was covered up by excitement about the open road and new experiences on the horizon. The summer continued with a couple months of traveling around the Southeast visiting family and much preparing. Preparing for the moment I united my life with my soulmate’s amidst a loving and warm community of family and friends in one of the most beautiful places on our earth. The two of us then embarked on a 5 week honeymoon journey through Central American, learning to scuba dive, climbing volcanoes, and experiencing other cultures. We’re now just about finished setting up our new home in Boulder, CO, caring for a new puppy, and trying to figure out life in this new place.

Months later unprocessed sorrow from leaving Brooklyn arises, as the realization that life far from a community isn’t as rich and that building and becoming part of a new community takes time. The sadness arises, asking to be honored. Mostly, I’ve been trying to avoid it, but  now I’m finally trying to give myself time now to process the droopy soup of emotions that sat on the back-burner all summer simmering. And it’s good now to digest my emotions. To take from them what growth and learning they supply me with and let go of the stuff that isn’t good for me. The soup is good, full of sweet, sour, bitter, spicy, and salty moments (all 5 flavors balanced quite nicely). The soup is nourishing. But it isn’t exactly tasty. It’s a medicinal soup, the kind that you know is good for you, even though it’s not pleasant (there are yummy medicinal soups out there too and I hope to share some recipes this fall).

With that, I’d like to express my gratitude to all of you out there bearing witness to my personal story. I think a major part of the healing quality of writing for me comes from the ability to share it with others. I believe a major component of our ability to heal is our ability to honor all of our emotions – I honor my emotions by giving them a voice and sharing them – by admitting to myself that they deserve to be heard and shared. It isn’t always easy, it requires a certain level of vulnerability, but I find that it’s worth it.

I’m looking forward to being back in somewhat of a routine, more formally engaged in my healing education, so that I can share more (perhaps less stories about myself and more about medicine – though I do promise that storytelling is a form of medicine, and I’ll be explaining more about that soon).

Acupuncture is not Magic

I find that some people (myself often included) want to believe that acupuncture can magically cure everything right away. Perhaps this is due to the curious way acupuncture works, perhaps it’s due to a lack of familiarity, or maybe it’s just because we so badly want a quick fix. This goes back to a previous post I wrote with a case-study where we saw someone’s IBS be completely resolved  over the course of 3 months.

Maybe it’s an injury we want to get over, maybe it’s reoccurring headaches, maybe it’s acid-reflux or emotional depression, regardless of the malady at hand there’s a good chance that acupuncture can help. But it’s not a silver-bullet one-treatment-and-you’re-fixed modality of healing. It’s a healing process where slowly but surely, your body moves back into a healthy balance.

An analogy that came to me this evening over dinner with a couple of my roommates was one of a renovation in your house. Sometimes your sink is leaking and you call the plumber and he or she comes and fixes the same day and you’re all set. But say your kitchen just isn’t working. It hasn’t been thoroughly cleaned in a while, the cabinets are all creaky and get stuck all the time (some of the shelves have fallen), most of your dishware is broken, the stove will only turn on half the time, and one of the lightbulbs is out. It make take more than a day to fix all of those problems. So maybe the first day you do a solid job cleaning, and then another day you go buy more dishes, and meanwhile you get new cabinets (which take a week to install), you get the drift. It might take a few weeks before your kitchen is up and running. Hopefully, you feel better after each progressive step. Regardless, patience is key.

An Acupuncture Case Study

Recently I’ve been reading what may be the best Chinese medicine textbook I’ve read thus far: Applied Channel Theory in Chinese Medicine. This book is superb both in terms of how it is written and its content and has been upgrading my understanding of the meridians, their functions and how to use acupuncture points therapeutically.

One of the great things about this book are the case studies, and one of them stood out to me as worth discussing on this blog. I want to look it at is less as a way to explore the details of theory and techniques used, and more to illustrate how acupuncture works and what patients can expect in terms of the rate and quality of their healing process.

The patient at hand is a 50 year-old male with chronic intestinal inflammation (colitis). The patient had been experiencing fatigue and diarrhea for 5 years, but in the past year they became worse and accompanied by weight loss. The patient was treated for 12 weeks; twice weekly for the first 3 weeks and once-a-week after that.

“His appetite started to recover by the 3rd treatment. The diarrhea decreased in frequency and volume throughout the first month, with stabilization of bowel movements by the fifth week. The patient showed considerable weight gain by the end of the second month of treatment, and was able to discontinue treatment 12 weeks after initial presentation.”

One of the main things I wanted to show was how acupuncture worked for something akin to IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome), aproblem many Americans suffer from with little support from Western medicine. In fact Robertson and Wang exclaim that this case “represent one of the most effective disease categories for acupuncture treatment.” However, it’s also important to note that it took 12 weeks (3 months) for full recovery, and he was going twice a week for the first 3 weeks. Is that a long time? It depends what your expectations are, and what your point of view is, and how you choose to weigh in the fact that the patient had been experiencing symptoms for 5 years. It’s also worth considering that during and after the treatment, the patient was not dependent on medication, and that the issue was fully resolved, he was truly better.

My impression is that many Americans don’t necessarily have the patience (or the financial resources when unfamiliar with community acupuncture) to follow through with a complete treatment and see full results. I’m not trying to make generalizations or put blame on anyone, I just want to explore a different cultural paradigm and how whether or not Acupuncture has a chance to work is influenced by that. If somebody is familiar with how acupuncture works, knows what to expect, and is willing to be patient and committed, one can see results. However, if somebody expects one or two treatments to fix whatever ailment their experiencing (like taking a pill to make the pain go away), they may end up disappointed (this of course does depend the on disease at hand, some problems can be resolved in one or two treatments). That said, one should see some improvement within 2 or 3 treatments, and if they’re not, they may want to consider another acupuncturist or a different modality of healing.

Hopefully this is helpful to those of you out there wondering what to expect from acupuncture and trying to decided whether or not it’s for you.