A new client comes to see me. It’s always such an honor. In the first few minutes, she is showing me a funny side, a self-aware side. Now she is hiding how deeply it hurts, that thing she laughs about on the wei, surface, level, as if it were something breezy like a scarf she holds up to the wind. And it is–this end of it, the end that she shows me–the wei level of it. It’s funny, self-aware, breezy, colorful, and we laugh and smile about it together. We have formed an alliance about the wei-level of her uneasiness. I used to think the superficial level was less important than the deeper layers, but I no longer think so. It’s a doorway into what is. Although sometimes this wei-level doorway is not the best door to enter because it can be a place of personality, charm, and fascination. Like most humans, I can get lost there.
The other end, of course, the deeper end of personality’s colorful scarves is the distress of a soul. The other end, wrapped around her heart, is what she wants unraveled. Even when I am liking my client and her scarves so much that I forget that a shift towards health is not a pretty scarf, I vow to remember the importance of unraveling it.
The ying level of it is wrapped around this list-maker’s heart filling up what should be an empty void of big Shen with lists– with precise and particular details of what she should be doing during each and every moment of her day. These lists of obligations and responsibilities are elevated to biblical proportion. She follows lists like some people follow a religion or a guru. She is a self-proclaimed perfectionist. She smiles. She feels as if she does what she does for some entity looking over her shoulder, not for herself. This clear self-reflection from her warns me to consider three fundamental questions: First, is there an entity attached to her shoulder? A gui (ghost)? Second, will I make the mistake of collaborating with the pretty, scarf-wearing, colorful, laughing persona instead of with the faceless soul who is magnificent sans scarves? And, third, is the entity the personality, the pretty scarf?
Who is the client? Who called me and asked,
Please! Let’s unwrap this together?
Her smile implies,
It was me. I’m in control here.
And the laugh she wears like armor around the soft tissues of her upper torso adds emphasis. Yet, I touch the concave emptiness of her hara, which is why she has come to see me.
Breathe here, all the way down. Put your breath in your abdomen. Feel your breath deep inside you.
She looks surprised, as if she has just realized:
Yes, I have an inside. A core, a place deep inside me that is in communication with the world…even when I myself feel nothing.
I will see in these first few sessions how easily she can visit shen in her belly. Can she inhabit her abdomen? Can she hang with the blood/shen of the uterus, ovaries, and zang-fu? Or will she resist the deep, fear the blood, feel hurried as she races outward to the outer edges of the scarf which she holds in her hands, and on which she has written all the organizing lists for her day. She is a hand-person, someone who does, performs, makes lists, keeps things in order. Let’s see if she can sink into her abdomen, inhabit herself, the one who simply is. If she will sink and be and, perhaps stop smiling, just for a moment to acknowledge her unsmiling self, the self she is here to serve…. .
She is still smiling. It has been a few sessions now and I have no idea what to do. The needles have asked her repeatedly to inhabit the abdomen, to fall off the page of her appointment book into the timeless river of blood that she is. Still, she lies with her eyes open, the knowing smile upon her face. Who is she smiling at? Me but not me. She is just smiling, constantly. And her blood pulses remain obscure, hidden. Acupuncture will not be enough in this instance.
After a treatment or two I realized that I was aligning myself with the smiler not the hara. I had been distracted by the scarves and the way she smiled, knowingly, as if we were sharing a secret. But as I realized my first mistake, I made my second mistake. I shut down. I said to myself,
Don’t go there, where the smile leads. Close your mind to the smile and go deeper.
But I was only half right. I was right not to follow the smile into the world of everything fine and cheerful. But going deeper, following the hara, can never occur with my own mind closed. I do my best work from an empty mind, not a closed one. I work best when I am paying attention. I had made the mistake of thinking of her constantly smiling self as false, as a pretender, like a poor immigrant claiming to be a descendant of a Romanov… . So I dismissed her smiling claim as a delusion. But of course, as soon as I dismissed who she presents her self to be, I was no longer paying attention. Dismissal kills attention. Instead of dismissing her smile, I will accept it as a younger sister. I will honor the younger sister, and tuck her lovingly in bed so that older sister will emerge from the middle. Like the alien that bursts out of Sigourney (as Ellen Ripley) Weaver’s abdomen in ALIEN, it won’t be pretty. Older sisters are so often guardians of little sibling’s pain.
I can’t explain how not-knowing flows into knowing or how knowing fails to announce itself or explain itself or otherwise leave a trail which we can follow and learn from. But it’s true that sometimes not-knowing flows into knowing and sometimes knowing fails to announce itself or leave a trail by which we can reconstruct how we came to know. And it’s also true that sometimes I might as well be following dust floating on a ray of sunshine because I’m getting no closer to the light.
It’s winter here in Maine. Even though today is warm and rainy, and yesterday’s snow has melted, tonight’s deep freeze is coming and tomorrow we will awaken to 2 inches of ice–if the storm predictions are correct. So I have to ask myself, why did this Fire person with the constant smile choose this contracted, inward month to make repeated visits to an acupuncturist for a jump-start to ming-men, the gate of vitality? Because that little bit of winter in her hara was easier to ignore in the summer? Or maybe, winter is more congruent with her true self and the smile, the fire, the joy is a mask. Maybe winter’s movement towards healing means that directly treating the abdomen will be less effective than emptying the bladder meridian of its hypervigilance. Maybe sinking into the abdomen has been impossible because of the false fire running through her bladder meridian, encasing her in perkiness. Maybe this is an example of the intelligent body imitating what it needs (fire) but doesn’t have. While I’ve been pumping energy into the abdomen, it’s been leaking out the back shu points. Close the holes first. Then fill the bucket.
The first thing I will do next time she comes is feel the water points on the fire meridians, and the fire points on the water meridians, and do what seems indicated in that moment…
December 12, 2008 at 6:13 am
Hi, nothing new to say … this is just yummy! I love your references to other media and modes to describe your point and your pelasing narrative style. It is something I tried with my own post this week but it doesn’t come close to the vibrancy of yours and ended up the same old essay stylee! Hey ho, good stuff, thanks!
December 12, 2008 at 11:21 am
Hi Rob, Thanks for your comments. Your approach to our subject works great. I loved your last post. Thanks for staying connected. Julie
December 12, 2008 at 1:21 pm
Lovely and elegantly wrought, again, Julie.
Accepting the persona — if that’s what it is — as a younger sister still feels to me like a way to locate the persona outside of the person. When I feel this kind of dis-location or dis-integration between persona and person, I think of the persona as a door that’s ajar, that’s been left ajar by the one inside, so that someone can stick their head in, or put a foot in, or maybe enter completely. It’s a portal that allows me in even as it keeps me out. It feels like a form of liminal space.
I think the three fundamental questions you pose are insightful: (1) is there an entity (possibly a ghost) attached to her shoulder? (2) will I collaborate with the persona or the soul? (3) is the entity (the one looking over her shoulder) the personality itself?
I esp. like the question about with whom you will collaborate.
I heard someone recently talk about ungrieved losses; one ‘ghost’ might be such ungrieved losses, fastened onto the body, absorbing energy.
December 12, 2008 at 3:31 pm
M. Yes! You took me to a deeper understanding of my own approach and its pitfall. The younger sister approach could put me in danger of fragmenting her in my own mind. This is dangerous in the treatment room, returning to the question with whom do I collaborate? I will be most effective if I collaborate with the undivided self. In this context the younger sister/older sister approach is just a trick, one to keep my personality from being overly attached to her personality.
But isn’t liminal space not just space in which the door is ajar? It is also disorienting, ambiguous, and therefore pregnant with possibility. Might she not feel that too? Might she put herself forward in liminal space in a way that is unfamiliar to her personality but resonant with her soul?. Yes, the possibility I am hoping for is that she will come out of the open door of my non-attachment in a way that is less about her personality and more about the soul. The ‘younger sister’ approach is a way of inviting liminal space, that disorientation of being not-here/not-there, as if I have spun quickly in one place and become dizzy. The trick is not to adhere to the dualism of younger sister/older sister but merely to allow the hidden one to emerge. Obscuring for a moment the brightness of her personality, not only for me but for her. Does this make sense?
And I think you are right about ungrieved losses, too. Thank you so much!
December 12, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Thanks for your thoughtful reply, Julie.
You wrote: “the possibility I am hoping for is that she will come out of the open door of my non-attachment in a way that is less about her personality and more about the soul.”
I struggle with this in many relationships: recognising or feeling that the persona I’m faced with is to some extent false — and yet unable to forget that even though it seems to jar or war with the deeper soul beneath it, it too emanates from that soul, and therefore it may be not only a sort of obstacle (to relationship, to living life most fully) but also a sheath that is wisely created to protect a vulnerability or a wound that still needs protecting, even as it needs healing.
In other words, I doubt whether I can really know where the soul ends and the persona begins, and to what extent the persona is a part of the healing of the soul. To look at another and say/think, “Oh, that’s not really you!” or “Please drop the mask and be who you are” feels presumptuous to me even in my closest relationships. I feel on firmer footing when I can formulate a way to inquire of the other how the personality/soul disjunction that I sense feels to her/him, maybe ask the soul to ask its own questions of itself, if that makes any sense.
I think I do understand what you’re saying about the trick of “little sister” — a way to create an attitude in yourself of invitation, but not something you hang onto as a fixed view of the client. It seems helpful in that way. I have some tricks like that, too, but I sometimes find it hard to hold them so loosely.
December 14, 2008 at 12:12 am
This is a fascinating discussion, and I thank you for that. I agree that where the soul ends (it doesn’t, does it?) and the persona begins is not easy to discern. But remember, when someone comes to my office they have asked me to identify and root out the source of their trouble. And they are paying me to do it! Sometimes the source of their trouble is in the way that the personality has removed the soul from it’s own life, has stranded the soul in a life in which it does not belong and cannot thrive. That is a kind of falseness that breeds disease, and as such it became my business when I was hired. I take that responsibility seriously in the treatment room. I also love not having the same responsibility in my relationships outside the treatment room!
Personally, I like a more Socratic method. It makes sense to me. Probably why I gravitate in friendship towards people like you, who can question me, and help me deepen my own understanding!
You raise a great point when you say that a persona is sometimes a sheath “wisely created to protect a vulnerability or a wound that still needs protecting.” I agree, and continually marvel at the intelligence of the human system in building protective barriers. But I would argue that the soul is invulnerable. What is wounded and needs protecting is not that. While barriers are protective they can become counter-productive easily. And unexamined barriers erected years ago for a danger long gone are almost always part of the unraveling of health.
December 14, 2008 at 11:28 am
I was thinking about this difference after I left the last post, Julie, that you are treating someone who asks for help and I am not. That is important. That gives you latitude and takes away some of the presumption I suggested I’d feel. I was going to say just now that it’s because you are invited in as a healer, but friends are implicitly invited in, too, aren’t we? There is a sticky place sometimes, though, or a potential power imbalance felt, when one friend “tries to heal” another friend. Resentment might enter, or surface. There’s a softer attitude available there, though — something like friends who “mutually seek wholeness” in each other, with respect, with honesty, with openness (all qualities I assume healers also hope to access in treating patients/clients).
You may be right about the soul. I’m not sure. Even if it’s the ego or something else that gets wounded, it can be so devastating to lifeforce, to relationships, to joy. And so can protecting wounds and protecting against further woundedness, as you say.
“And unexamined barriers erected years ago for a danger long gone are almost always part of the unraveling of health.” — Yes, for me this feels like the territory of ‘ungrieved losses’ again … The barriers can prevent, if they are very effective, the painful process of grieving, but the subtle underlying sense of grief and loss may persist, may flow into other channels.
December 15, 2008 at 7:47 pm
You’re absolutely right! Making sense of the soup that is created when overload flows into other channels is exactly the kind of detective work that occurs in a treatment room. Incidentally, for any acupuncturists reading this, Bl 60 and Kid 2, the fire points on the water meridians, combined with back shu points helped bring me and my client to a new place in treatment today. We both felt the shift and will continue to work on it. Next time Ht 8? We’ll see….
February 24, 2009 at 4:21 pm
this is why accupuncture is called a wholistic treatment form. it is about healing and balancing all levels of the being, not just any part of her.
January 17, 2010 at 2:20 pm
Has this person come back to your practice since? I’d be curious to see what effect this experience had on her.
January 22, 2010 at 12:14 am
Yes, she did return. We worked together for several months while she was dealing with a particular obstacle, which resolved itself during the course of treatment.