Anger Anyone? Spring is Coming!

February Buds

I don’t care what Punxsutawney Phil saw–shadow, schmadow–spring is coming soon. This morning my son pulled on my daughter’s sleeve, sending her into a rage. Her hair is matted like would-be, white-girl-dreadlocks from lack of combing after swimming at the Y yesterday, and she won’t let me brush it–she prefers to glare at me instead, while snot drips from her nose. Is this not the death of winter and the labor pains of spring? I think it is. Please, God, let it be so.

Spring is the season of surprises–when pale green shoots break through the frozen earth, or poke up between broken pieces of asphalt, to claim their places in the sun. Such brazen, bold, and unlikely beginnings give way to the overwhelmingly lush greenery, unpredictable winds and growing warmth of the season. Just as my daughter’s anger gives way easily and naturally. She sat down at the table in her hateful huff, and began to draw and cut. 10 minutes later she had her just-made paper-crown atop her head. “Now,” she proclaimed in her best voice o’ royalty, “I’m Queen of the house!”

Queen’s Crown.

Anger is a much maligned emotion. But take away all the bad things people do in anger–petty acts of revenge, screaming matches, murder–and anger’s quick moving-power can be a refreshing burst of energy. What I’ve done with anger has, at times been as stunning as what the little green plants, those first to poke their heads out of winter’s wasteland, have done. Like the time I was running on a bike path and a man lurked in the bushes up ahead. No one else was on the path. I was angry, and instinctively showed him some attitude. I started growling, loud and low, and I made my stride strong and fluid. He took off through the woods away from the path.

Wang Pi (226-249, greatest commentator on the Lao-tzu) is reported to have said

…what the sage has in common with ordinary people are the emotions. The sage has a superior spirit, and therefore is able to be in harmony with the universe and to hold communion with Wu [i.e., the Tao]. But the sage has ordinary emotions, and therefore cannot respond to things without joy or sorrow. He responds to things, yet is not ensnared by them.” (Commentary, Chapter 28).

[From A Short History of Chinese Philosophy by Fung Yu-Lan.].
While it is easy to be ensnared by anger, it is also easy to learn useful information from it. Disentangled from anger, look at it’s value as information-laden energy: Anger tells us

• About ourselves: what we like and don’t like, what we are comfortable with and not-comfortable with, how important something is to us, etc.
• About our world and our people: can we trust this situation or individual, do we feel valued and respected in this situation or by these people?
• About how well our boundaries (or lack of them) serves us: Is there something I can do to respect and value myself which will alter my relationship to situations or people with whom I am angry?

My daughter’s simple rage told her: She is uncomfortable with sensory stimulation (sleeve-pulling, hair-brushing) that she is not ready for, that younger brothers and mothers with agendas (I didn’t just say, brush your hair! I started brushing it for her without so much as a “may I…”) don’t always respect her need to prepare for sensory stimulation. And finally, her art project was just the thing she needed to do to affirm her “queen-ness” in her own home (read, body).

Healthy anger is like wind. When it comes, it helps us to readjust our course, re-establish communication where it has broken down (such as when your mom attacks your rats’ nest hair with a brush instead of asking), and then it is gone, like the wind. For me, the winds of anger that swept through the house this morning were a reminder of that delicious spring forcefulness so useful for new beginnings. That same forcefulness is pulsing right now beneath the piles of melting snow outside. It’s that energy that I am counting on as it rises to give me the violent, surging energy of a new green shoot pushing up to the sun, as I continue working on my yearly Abundance (read, business) plan.

P.S. I’ve already had one burst of spring-like exuberance in my thinking, which luckily for me has trickled like the melting snow into small rivers of creativity in my mind. In that sudden burst of creative thinking I jumped out of the deep solo contemplation of my project, (in other words) my isolation (appropriate for winter, not for spring), and I have made two important contacts with people who should be helpful to me as I move forward on the cake project. More on that in my next Sagely Living Post!

 

Less Ego, More Light

Prism glass 1Originally uploaded by tanakawho

I got into treating skin rashes with acupuncture and herbs because my son developed a nasty, itchy rash when he was only 5 months old, while his only food was breast milk. I intuitively knew that gluten (which can be very damp) played a role, as I had been hungrily devouring the bagels my brother sent from Zabars and not cooking my beloved greens because of the demands of mothering a kid under three, and a five month old, while also working (as an acupuncturist)–I know, excuses, excuses. I knew better, I just lacked the resources or drive to do better. So I got myself off gluten (and back on greens and garlic and rice). I had already been dairy-free for a number of years. And I gave my son Chinese herbs, which I cooked up in my kitchen and froze in ice cube trays. I used a pipette to shoot the watery, warm concoction into his mouth. He got better. To this day, we periodically test him with gluten or dairy to see if he has outgrown this sensitivity, but he has not. I have also stayed off gluten as I had my own problems when I reintroduced it. The body sends such clear messages when it is relatively clear of toxins.

In a macrocosmic way, the clinic “body” sends clear messages, too. What I have to offer, based on experience, energetics, or knowledge makes its way to people who need what I have to offer, in ways I do not pretend to understand. I merely marvel at it. I marveled when people started coming to me for help with eczema, psoriasis, shingles and chronic itching, undiagnosed celiac, and food allergies. I have not helped all of them, but I have helped most of them.

…So ends my (egocentric) lead in to the topic at hand: less ego, more light….

One of my first clients with eczema (after my own son) was an 11 year old boy who also had severe asthma. His parents had both been allergic as kids, with histories of asthma and eczema. But they showed few symptoms if any as adults. This young kid was an athlete and at every game he frequented the team’s snack hut, chock full of junk food. He and his mom weren’t willing to prepare herbs in the kitchen which smells up the house, nor was he willing to drink a bad tasting herbal concoction made by mixing powdered herbs with hot water. He was willing to take tea pills. He couldn’t swallow larger capsules. His eczema was very dry and very itchy. His asthma responded to acupuncture very quickly and his frequent attacks dwindled to zero almost immediately.

But the rash held on, only mildly mitigated by patent herbal formulas I prescribed. I spoke to the mom about my son’s experience, and explored her willingness to control her son’s diet, but it seemed impossible to her at the time. Not surprisingly, they stopped getting acupuncture, stopped taking herbs, and continued with an unstructured diet full of common allergens for atopic individuals. I ran into the mom recently and learned some very distressing news: her son continued to struggle with eczema, and it only got worse. At 19 he became intolerant of almost all foods, and required hospitalization due to severe malnutrition. Mom didn’t seem to remember our conversations about diet eight years earlier. I refrained from reminding her. But I thought about it a lot later, about my approach to people when discussing lifestyle choices. I am gentle and understanding. I don’t expect people to make huge changes right away, just small ones, one at a time.

But this doesn’t work for everyone. It didn’t work for this family. Some people respond better to a stronger hand. This family found a strong hand to school them in the shape of a feeding tube. Could I have altered my approach 8 years ago, in such a way that I would have been able to intervene in this dire course of events? The Worsley 5 Element style of Acupuncture excels at this sort of flexible approach to clients based not on the practitioner’s strength but on the practitioners ability to read the client’s “Causative Factor” or CF, described in terms of one of the 5 Elements. The practitioner then adapts her approach to the client, even in the way she speaks to the client, in an effort to reach through the client’s barriers of self to a deep connection with each individual’s innate desire for healing. Had I reached that deep place with my client and his mom, and fired up their desire to do whatever it would take to heal–even if it meant no more greasy fried cheese tortillas, and Mounds bars–maybe he wouldn’t have ended up in such a severe state of toxic overload. And she wouldn’t have ended up stooped over with worry, overly pale, and herself way too skinny–as she was when she described her son’s condition to me. But I wasn’t able to filter out myself, my way, and approach her in a way that worked for her.

The deeper I get into Chinese Medicine the more I see it as a pervasive intelligence as simple yet majestic as light. The different schools of thought–TCM, Classical, Japanese Meridian, Kiiko, Toyo Hari, Medical, Worsley–are merely prisms, which can refract the light in spectrums visible to the human eye. The important thing isn’t the prism, it’s the light. Each practitioner is also a little mini-prism. What is important isn’t how gentle and compassionate I am “as a healer,” it’s how much light is actually getting through to my clients. Less ego, more light.

 

What is Happiness?

Winter PeaceOriginally uploaded by ancientartizen

This month, Alex Shalman started the Happiness Project. He’s interviewing notable bloggers, asking them all the same wonderful 5 questions. He’s also asked other bloggers to answer the questions on their own blogs. I was taken by the simplicity of the questions and the deep thinking they inspired in me. Here are my answers:

1. How do you define happiness? Happiness is… Hmm. Not the same thing as happy. No, happy is an adjective, it describes something else. Happiness is a noun–it’s a about being. So this is the key, for me. Happiness is rooted in being. Since I can’t “be” anything other than what I am, happiness is merely a full expression of my being. I believe we are all here on the planet with unique fingerprints (physically and spiritually) to make our presence here sing with uniqueness…i.e. happiness? Is happiness the same as uniqueness? No, no. Happiness is the same as being in a state of deep resonance with one’s unique fingerprint. This body that we have, in which we live–it’s a tool. A temple of a tool, to be sure, but still just a tool. The measure of any tool is what you do with it. Happiness is living your life in harmony with your ‘spiritual fingerprint.’

2. On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your happiness now, versus when you were a child? Interesting question. I think as a young child I was more enveloped in exploring the world than I am now–which was a happy experience. Learning was so accelerated. Have you watched a baby watching dust particles floating on a stream of sunshine? It’s an amazing time of exploration, finding the boundaries between self and non-self. But then childhood, for me, as for many, was also the time in which I came face to face (heart to heart) with the shock of loss, grief, and fear. Not happy experiences. As an adult I have integrated my experiences (happy and not happy ones) into a place of peace in which happiness grows daily. Therefore, I’d say that on a scale of 1-10, I have moved from a childhood 4 to a mid-life 6. While that might not seem like a big spread, I think each increment is a quantum one. I love my life now, in progress, and I’m optimistic that my happiness quotient continues to grow.

3. What do you do on a daily basis that brings you happiness? (and how consistent is the feeling of happiness throughout your day)? I kiss and hug my kids and my husband, and tell them I love them. I write. I eat healthy, delicious food (healthy yumminess is a kin to happiness). I stretch. On most days I exercise. On “work” days I have the distinct pleasure of serving the health of our planet, one hurting human at a time. My happiness is not absolute; So, if I were to give a number to it, I’d say that I’m aware of inner happiness for about 25-50% of my day. Reflections like this will ultimately help me to increase that percentage of time in which I’m in the happiness “zone.”

4. What things take away from your happiness? What can be done to lessen their impact or remove them from your life? I don’t usually clean the bathroom or vacuum with a feeling of happiness, nor do spats with my husband, tantrums from the kids, or tax time come and go with my happiness intact. To counter the potential loss of connection to happiness, I try to detach (lovingly) from the emotional ups and downs of others, (the trick is to detach from the emotions but not from the person). As far as chores go, I try to change my outlook on them, and to take them lightly. I may not be able to do them joyfully, but I can take them lightly, as if they were as natural and organic a part of my day as breathing. I also can’t ingest much mass media– poverty, cruelty, war, and environmental degradation tends to lodge in my body like a sickness. To counter the latter, I do two things: first, I regularly engage in media fasts. When not fasting, I strictly limit my intake. I can still stay abreast of world events by discussing them with trusted family and friends who are less beaten down by the news, and by limited use of google and other on-line sources; second, equally important to controlling the influx of bad news, I have to seek out good news, and invest in the good things happening in the world. For instance, check out Working Villages International. Their’s is a story of food, economic sustainability, hope and empowerment in the face of poverty, hunger and war. Supporting “good news” projects like this one helps me to lessen the impact of “bad news” on my consciousness.

5. What do you plan on doing in the future that will bring you even more happiness? It is important to increase the time in my day in which I am experiencing happiness, but I think I’m on track with that. This is a long term project to bring my awareness and consciousness into more and more moments in my day. Living by the principles I’ve described–loving my family, taking care of my health (right food, right exercise), doing the “chores” I have to do with a lightness of heart, detaching from roller-coaster emotions of others (maintaining loving connections with them, ideally), limiting how much I “eat” at the feast of depression offered by the mass media, and sharing my energy (monetary or otherwise) with groups that offer feasts of hope and empowerment instead–is a practice. I’m not good at all of them yet, and as I practice, I’ll get better, and as a result, my happiness will expand. The other thing to keep in mind is that not only will happiness expand (fill up more of my day), living by my values (as I’ve described) will also deepen my happiness. In other words, I look forward to an evolving, deepening understanding of the first question: what is happiness?

 

Acupuncture, Trust, Trauma and Boundaries

veins & capillariesOriginally uploaded by kreativekell

Acupuncture treatments can provide a safe and effective outlet for the release of traumas that have become lodged in the body. I know this because a significant number of clients who come through my door for acupuncture are folks who identify as trauma survivors. And some of them have experienced a release of trauma in a very physical way, as a result of acupuncture. I’ll tell you of one such instance in just a minute. First, I have to give a shout out to Michael Given who recently posted over at Deepest Health. In his article he said:

classical holism is a dynamic interplay between function and matter, internal and external, time and space. It is based on the concept that matter follows energy, and energy follows consciousness…

Thanks, Michael! Those words got me thinking about writing this post. I would just add that consciousness sometimes follows energy, just as energy sometimes follows matter. The interplay is bidirectional! The example I’ll give in a minute illustrates this.

Before giving the example of a release, here’s my take on how trauma gets lodged in the body in the first place. Trauma, broken trust and boundary violations cause (imaginary but nonetheless energetically strong) boundaries in the quiet spaces of the heart –the netherworld of dream, myth and archetype, where the lively, constantly changing, evolving and engendering energies between form and function naturally “play,” or “interplay.” Perhaps those boundaries are an instinctual attempt at protecting what in Chinese Medicine we sometimes call, the Emperor–the heart (without which we do not live). The energetic effect, however, is to prevent some of the spontaneous interplay of form and function. Thus, integration of experience in the life-blood of being becomes an enormous challenge. The life-blood which should carry that wisdom of integrated experience to the rest of the body, carries instead blood that is stagnant with non-digestible energy.

I always imagine that blood burdened by the non-digestible energy of trauma is “sticky,” almost as if it contains little velcro-like points looking for another sticky surface to grab onto. This is how I imagine trauma gets stuck in the body. Sticky blood! Now, I confess, I completely made up this term–I’m not using the language of Chinese medicine here, as I think most clients don’t get that much out of it; instead I’m using images that my clients seem to respond to. When sticky blood is carried through the blood stream it either finds a sticky spot to which it is naturally attracted just as velcro attaches to itself. The sticky spot is an area of the body that may already have been weakened by some sort of a pathogen (and trauma can be an example of a pathogen in this sense). It there are no sticky body points (or sometimes even if there are, if there is an abundance of this sticky blood, it can travel in a circuitous loop of negative emotions and thoughts, and never become resolved or integrated. What follows such a state of irreconcilable energetic information is, inevitably, illness.

Here I have to give another thanks to a writer at the Helfgott blog, Michael McMahon who posted an article about an English country doctor who believed that the nature of illness was related to a person’s inability to find ‘confirmation of oneself in’ the outside world. The book about this doctor, which Michael quotes, is called “A Fortunate Man,” and a book I definitely look forward to reading. That beautiful quote just brings to mind that unending circuitous loop of emotion and thought I’m talking about. The loop is a closed and exhausting circuit which could be interrupted by “confirmation” of one’s self in the world. That confirmation is not easy to find for traumatized people.

That doctor lived in the 60s, a traumatic time for our country, war time, and a time of great upheaval and change. I think the cultural phenomenon of identity politics, which arose in the 80s, arose out of a deep need within individuals for “confirmation of self” in a world that had not regained it’s equilibrium since the widespread unrest of the 60s. Identity politics was exemplified on college campuses by the diverse identity-oriented groups that were popping up all over the place. I was in college and living in Northampton Massachusetts at the time, where there was an explosion of Gay and Lesbian groups, followed soon by Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Groups, followed a little later by Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered groups! These groups played a large part for many people in interrupting a closed circuit of isolation–however, the identity groups (I believe) often became an albeit larger, but nonetheless still closed circuit– which failed to find confirmation of itself in the outside world. Some of the groups were in fact somewhat based on keeping out the outside world. I think identity politics (at its height in the 80s?) is giving way to a cultural politics more comfortable with sharing space and dialogue among people of vastly different experiences– a healthier, more open system, in my opinion…but I digress.

Oh-oh, reign me in…OK, I’m back…Here is the example I promised to give:

A few years ago I had a client who, among other noncritical ailments, suffered from constipation. On one day in particular she felt her “midsection was blocked.” I did a very simple treatment (St 25, Cv 4, CV 6, Liv 3, Liv 14) and the client experienced an unexpected phenomenon–whole body trembling. She asked me not to take the needles out but to sit with her while she described to me the memory that had suddenly flooded her consciousness the moment the shaking began. I will always remember the gist of what she told me about her experience. When she was a very young woman, a teenager, she became pregnant and received an abortion in a manner that can only be described as cruel and unusual punishment. Saline was injected into her womb, and then she was left alone in a room, experiencing excruciating physical and mental anguish, for 18 or more hours. She wept as she spoke but again asked me not to remove the needles as she felt that they were facilitating a final exodus of this trauma from her body.

As in this example, the potential exists for acupuncture treatments to spontaneously dislodge stored trauma from the body without requiring the patient to undergo lengthy sessions in which she holds the trauma in her consciousness, as is required of many psychological approaches to healing such as psychoanalysis and other talk therapies. Nothing wrong with those therapies, and if fact in the given example my client not only had engaged in significant therapy in her life, she was also a therapist by profession; who is to say if the combination of therapy and acupuncture is not what lead her to the readiness of that moment to release the trauma. But it is also true that it was the release of the trauma in her case, which brought the trauma to consciousness. It wasn’t the other way around. The body, not the mind was the initiator in the letting go process. The consciousness that followed was accompanied clearly (as described by the client) by a new sense of the trauma as something exiting the body.

The realization that this sort of healing is possible with acupuncture led some acupuncturists to New York City after 9/11, to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and to Southern California after the recent wide-spread fires. These compassionate acupuncturists have been on the scene to provide stress-relieving auricular acupuncture treatments to survivors and aid workers alike. For more information about the work of one organization dedicated to this sort of service, and teaching other acupuncturists how to set up mobile acupuncture clinics visit Acupuncturists Without Borders. According to the AWBs home page,

Acupuncturists Without Borders’…vision is to foster the creation of stable, peaceful global communities through its community-based acupuncture services and training which interrupt the cycles of unresolved trauma.

I went to one of their trainings in Portland Maine. They do good work. If so moved, please donate to their organization (Besides attending one of their trainings I am not affiliated with AWB). Peace!

 

Sagely Living: Before We Get to Business, Let’s Talk Money

It’s the 2nd month of Sagely Living, in which our focus shifts to business and strategy. For previous posts about this topic, click on the category, Sagely Living, on the right and you’ll arrive at a page with my previous posts, or check in with Eric Grey at Deepest Health.

Before I lay out my approach to Sagely Living: Strategy and Business, let’s talk money. I know I’m not the only one who had to shift psychological gears in order to get to a place of peaceful welcome around money (which had always seemed little more than “hard, cold cash” to me). For many years I thought money was a shallow, materialistic pursuit, which caused people to act badly even if they weren’t bad people. Good people did bad things merely because it was profitable, either for themselves or for their chosen few. As an observer of human nature I was confused by this seeming duplicity. As a child who often fell outside the ranks of my father’s financially chosen few, I felt hurt and rejected, which engendered a significant psychic connection within me between money and shame.

If you’re shaking your head and feeling that vibe because you’ve been there too, my heart goes out to you. If you haven’t already excavated that negative attachment–do it, now. You’re worth it. For me it’s been a long process, helped no doubt, by the fact of simple necessity–it was OK to have money-ambivalence when I was just supporting myself, but when I had a family to support it was critical to excavate the demons and come to terms with my absolute, God-given right to abundance and prosperity.

I’d like to thank my friends in the ‘Money and Spirit’ Life Circle hosted by the faith community at the United Church of Christ in Bath, Maine. Over the course of 40 days last winter we each committed ourselves to daily meditation and writing about the spiritual aspect of money. For me, it deeply resonated with the central theme of Judaism, exemplified by the daily prayer, the Shema, that God is One. To me, God is One doesn’t mean God is one dude (or deity). It means God is everything. There is nothing that is not God. Nothing, not even money!

The group met once a week to individually and collectively affirm our intention to change our relationship with money to one based on a belief in abundance, not scarcity. It was a phenomenal experience, which I recommend to anyone. We used a book called The Abundance Book by John Randolph Pierce as a focus point for our meditation. Many people in the group took issue with the book, and for different reasons: some found it too religious, others found it too hokey (I was somewhat in that camp), others found it strayed too far from the Christian bible. If you get the book, remember, it’s just a tool. The measure of any tool is in what you do with it.

If it hadn’t been for the shift in my consciousness about money, I would never have begun to explore ways to make more of it. But that is exactly what I have been doing, and feeling good about it, too. In this month of Sagely Living I’ll be creating a bare-bones beginner’s business plan for an income-producing project which has been stewing in my consciousness (and literally baking in my oven) for some time now. If I’m ever going to get my awesome gluten-free, dairy-free chocolate cake out of my kitchen and into yours, it’s going to take some serious strategy. Stay tuned.

 

A Strange Correspondence? Non-Being (Wu) and Gluten Intolerance

As an acupuncturist and a gluten-free mom raising a gluten-free child, I have wondered quite a bit about gluten from the perspective of Chinese medicine. Of course, Chinese medicine has no monolithic perspective on gluten intolerance. But I enjoy this sort of cross-cultural musings, and reflecting on commonalities among different aspects of my own experience.  Nothing much came of my musings, until…

…today, while riding a stationery bike at the YMCA, while simultaneously reading a book (I know! Terrible multitasking!), the point of connection occurred to me suddenly and without warning (and me on a bike without a pen): Wu, which translates as non-being is the point of connection between Chinese medicine and gluten intolerance.

If you haven’t snorted, rolled your eyes and left his post (post-haste), bear with me while I try to tease this little insight out into the light of (a now dwindling and snowy) day.

Gluten is a protein in certain foods that makes the food puff up, swell and become sticky.  It’s a primary ingredient in all mass-produced baked goods–breads, crackers, muffins, cookies, pies, etc. as well as an ingredient in many unexpected places:  vinegar, salad dressing, soy sauce, and others.   In metaphorical psychology it is kin to egotistical and arrogant thinking,  to a “puffed up” view of one’s own self-importance.

You have to have a little perspective on Wu (non-being), if you’re going to follow this strange correspondence all the way there. As I understand it non-being (Wu) is a fundamental underlying principle of Chinese ontology, which informs both Chinese philosophy and Chinese medicine.  Ontology is the study of being.  In the ancient text of Taoism, the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu says

All things in the world come into being from Being (Yu); and Being comes into being from Non-being (Wu).

(Chapter 40).  I read something quite funny the other day about the Neo-Taoists (many of whom thought Confucius a greater sage than Lao Tzu or Chuang Tzu).   This is from “A Short History of Chinese Philosophy” by Fung Yu-Lan, a book I bought back in 1978 or 1979 when my high school boyfriend, Jeffrey, and I used to go to Samuel Weiser’s bookstore in New York City.   Years later, after Jeffrey and I lost touch we simultaneously graduated from acupuncture schools on different coasts.  It was a number of years later when we learned of our similar paths.  Here Fung Yu-Lan is quoting the Shih-shuo Hsin-yu (Chapter 4):

Wang Pi [226-249], when young, once went to see P’ei Hui.  [P’ei] Hui asked him why, since Wu [Non-being] is fundamental for all things, Confucius did not speak about it, whereas Lao Tzu expounded this idea without stopping.  To this Wang Pi answered: “The sage [Confucius] identified himself with Wu [Non-being] and realized that it could not be made the subject of instruction, with the result that he felt compelled to deal only with Yu [Being].  But Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu had not yet completely left the sphere of Yu [Being], with the result that they constantly spoke of their own deficiencies.

Fung Yu-Lan adds, “This explanation reflects the idea expressed by Lao Tzu that “he who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know.” (Lao-tzu, ch. 56).”

But what does this have to do with gluten intolerance?  Gluten intolerance is growing like wildfire.  It’s almost as if this near epidemic is a canary in the coal mine, warning us of a major weakness in our microcosmic system (the body) and in our macrocosmic system (American culture).  We’re too full.  We need more space, more emptiness, less puffed-up-ness in our lives.  One of the basic healing principles of Taoist-informed acupuncture is that proper insertion of the right needles allows a person to recede from the complicated, often messed-up experience of being, and to journey, if only for a short time, into that realm of Being and Non-being.  Just as Lao Tzu said, “reversing is the movement of the Tao,” so too is going backwards to one’s source energy a movement which will heal.

Abstaining from gluten–that which fills, expands, makes sticky and full–can be a similar reverse movement towards an emptiness that is resonant with the deepest origins of being–Being, and deeper still with the origins of Being in Non-Being.  This is an idea that is also resonant with the school of thought in Chinese Medicine which arose sometime during the Jin/Yuan Dynasties (1115-1368 A.D.) with the Treatise of the Spleen and Stomach by Li Gong Yuan, in which the origin of disease is believed to lie in deficiencies of these organs.  It’s also resonant with current nutritional wisdom in which fruits and vegetables are the key to health, and with another fact established by Western medicine:  The single dietary feature proven to be linked with a long life is merely the low calorie diet; In other words, if you experience a little less fullness, you will live a little longer.

There is an acupuncture point a few inches from and on either side of the navel called Tianshu (translated as Celestial or Spiritual Pivot).  This name (and location of the point at the center of the body) reflects the cosmology underlying Chinese Medicine in which the person is the conduit or meeting point between heaven and earth. The relationship between person-heaven-earth is not just a theoretical construct but something that is embodied in the structure and functioning of the meridian system, of which Tianshu, the Celestial Pivot is a part.  The human body is a map not only of personal experiences and relationships but of cosmic ones as well.

Could the growing prevalence of gluten intolerance (including but not limited to celiac disease) be a symptom of something out of balance not only in the afflicted guts of so many individuals but also in the relationship of all humans with heaven and earth?  Is there a connection between gluten intolerance and global warming, massive pollution, depleted uranium and an overall lack of respect for the living planet on which we live?  If there is (and I believe so) then until we are comfortable as a society with reversing these deadly trends (reversing is the movement of tao), then what we eat and how our individual digestive systems react to what we eat, will be the least of our planetary survival concerns.

 

Sagely Living: Scholarship Revisited

The first month of A Year of Sagely Living –an experiment outlined by Eric Grey at Deepest Health and Abdallah B. Stickely at Even Unto China–has come to a close.

In this month participants have focused on scholarship. I came into the month of scholarly pursuits late, when I discovered Eric Grey’s site a few weeks ago. Rather than set myself some new scholarly goals I examined my current project–to develop a blog, and proposed to invoke the power of intention: To take what I was already doing and “become scholarly” about it.

Now, in retrospect I see that intention, while quite possibly the mother of cultivation, is no substitute for the acts and practices of a cultivated life. In other words, to do what I’m already doing, and envelope it in an aura of scholarly intention misses the mark in that it did not challenge me to engage in specific practices to cultivate a deeper understanding of my subject. I have continued to do what I was already doing, prior to my announcement to do it with a scholarly intent. Nothing really changed.

Well…maybe one thing changed. Participating in the project of two other bloggers means I started to approach blogging more as a participant in something greater than myself. Prior to that I had basically just been the mastermind of my own (controlled) environment. By connecting my blog to other blogs I actually did something scholarly.

One of the richest aspects of scholarship is the ability of focused learning to form a bridge between people. Anything worth studying just naturally engenders a yearning to be shared. That is why good scholarship involves more than just private study time. It also involves team-building, creating a community with whom to share the fruits of one’s studies. Blogging is a natural conduit for such connectivity. I decided to take it a step further, and started emailing people I know with my blog address. I’m beginning to post a few comments on more blogs, and recently offered to host the Carnival of Healing on March 22nd. (Just getting those words to light up and actually link to another page on the web is a major scholarly accomplishment for me).

Tomorrow begins the second month of Sagely Living, in which the focus of our intention turns to strategy and business. I recently happened upon a blog by an acupuncturist who offers business advice for other acupuncturists. Check out her site here.  She has a great sense of humor.  Her section about naming her business is hilarious.  This month I’ll set some specific goals, above and beyond what I’m already doing!

 

Food Versus Food Products: What about Supplements? Plus, Another Crock Pot Recipe: White Beans and Beets

It’s well known that food is better for you than food products. People are advised to shop the perimeter of the grocery store where you’ll find, most notably, real fruits and vegetables. You’ll also find meat and fish on the perimeter, as well as eggs and dairy products. In the center aisles, for the most part, you’ll find food products: processed combinations designed to attract taste addictions rather than savvy nutritional shoppers: sweet things like candies and cookies and cake mixes, salty things like chips, crackers and pretzels, and greasy things like frozen chicken nuggets and frozen pepperoni pizzas.

What about supplements? Aren’t they, in a way, food products? Should they be given the same caution as other food products? While we should be able to get our daily dietary needs through the food we eat, there are some concerns. First among them is that most of us don’t. We make bad choices, and eat less nutritious foods, and foods even doctors are warning against these days. That aside, there is also concern that the quality of our soil is depleted (by pollution and over-farming) and the nutritional value of the plant foods we eat is decreased from what it was in times past. Thirdly, the chemical and hormonal pollution we consume with our food (because our food has been “treated” with it to maximize growth), could arguably put us in greater need of supplemental nutritional protection– just to neutralize the deleterious effects of what we have just eaten for breakfast (or lunch or dinner).

That being said, there are also some real concerns about supplements–quality, ingredients– including processing agents, side-effects, long-term effects, etc. In the logic of Chinese Medicine isolating parts (vitamins and minerals) which occur in complex, living foods necessarily lessens the potency of the isolated part–because part of anything’s potency is based on the synergistic quality of its wholeness. The fractional concept of isolating “active ingredients” in plants –which are then removed from the plant to create a pharmaceutical product (which can make the company that patents it millions if not trillions of dollars)– is a concept that makes no sense to an herbalist. It makes sense to an economist, of course.

So, what to do?

1. Eat Locally-Grown, Organic Foods. Find a local farmers market and/or a local farm with a community supported agriculture program allowing you to buy a share in the farm’s future harvest, which you collect, and eat, throughout the season. I’ve mentioned my farm of choice here in Midcoast Maine in previous posts: Goranson’s Farm in Dresden Maine. In this way, you know your plant food has been grown in the best possible soil, without contamination from chemicals, and your meat did not come from some sickly animal squeezed into a space half its size, nor fed a constant diet of antibiotics and hormones (can you tell I’m a vegetarian?).

2. (This isn’t meant to be as ridiculous as it sounds): The 2nd thing you can do is actually cook and eat the food you bring home from the Farm. I know how hard that is. We’ve let a few bags of brussel sprouts and more than a few potatoes sprout before we even noticed they were gone. I’m constantly trying to go through what I have and in the spirit of creative cookery I outlined in a previous post (Slow-cooked Lentils…) to find new ways of using what I have on hand at any given time–as that varies depending on the season and the crop yield at the Farm.

3. Know Your Weaknesses and Find Foods that Heal. If you’re concerned about bone density, infuse some mineral rich herbs such as oatstraw, red clover or nettle. Drink daily. A recent study in New Zealand found that postmenopausal women who took calcium supplements may have more cardiovascular events (heart attacks, strokes, transient ischemic attacks, angina) than women in the same age group who did not supplement with calcium. Further investigation along these lines may change the 3 billion dollar industry that is calcium supplementation (not all supplements–just calcium supplements!).

Need help finding whole foods to treat a particular weakness? There are plenty of resources out there. Don’t just find someone to sell you $600 worth of “pharmaceutical grade” supplements that will last a month, find someone who can tell you how to infuse oatstraw or how to cook collard greens and what makes quinoa such an outstanding grain (its high protein content).

Slow-Cooked White Beans and Beets

This is a delicious, sweet and savory dish, which I created because we get a lot of beets from the farm.

What you’ll need:

• White Beans
• Beets
• Vegetable Broth
• Tamari (I use Wheat-Free Tamari by San-J)
• Thyme

Soak the beans overnight. Use between 1/2 and 1 Cup of beans. Quantities are all flexible here.

The next day, put your pre-soaked beans in the crock pot. Add 4-5 Cups of Organic Vegetable Broth. Chop your beets into larger than bite-size pieces (so they don’t completely break down during the long cooking time) and add them to the pot. Cover and cook on low for about 6 hours, or until the beans are soft. You’ll have a nice red broth, sweet of course, due to the beets. I wanted to temper the sweetness with something salty and something aromatic. I chose Tamari and thyme. Add these during the last half hour or so of cooking time. Quantities of these last items should be to your taste. Add a little at a time until it tastes just right–to you.

This recipe is great for women after menses as beets are very nourishing to the blood. Both beans and beets are high in potassium, making this a good recipe for people with high blood pressure, too. I hope you enjoy it.

 

Familial Trends in Health, the Wisdom of Pathology, and Autoimmune Disease

Just the title of this post has my heart racing with excitement — at times like this I marvel at how I, of all people, became such a geek.

It’s no surprise that medical problems run in families just like body types, the shape of one’s nose, and the color of one’s hair. But could genetics be simply an expression of an overwhelmed system? According to the 5-Channel system of acupuncture as described by one of the greatest living teachers of Chinese Medicine, Jeffrey Yuen,
that’s exactly right. During one of his many continuing education conferences, which I attended, Jeffrey Yuen said genetic tendencies towards certain diseases can be thought of as a particular type of pathology that one or more ancestor was unable to resolve within his or her 5 channels, and which therefore descended into the next generation. The way I understand it, the 5 channel system of Acupuncture is the only medical paradigm to understand a mechanism for how genetics can be trumped by internal or external environmental factors.

It’s recognized in western medicine that people with a genetic predisposition (genetic markers) for a particular disease may or may not suffer from that disease in their lifetime. But how or why that expression remains latent or becomes manifest is not understood. The 5 Channel system (particularly the Divergent Channels) provides a way of understanding the mechanism of latency. I’m no Jeffrey Yuen, and would not attempt to teach (or even report more deeply) on this subject. If you’re an acupuncturist, get thee to a seminar taught by this amazing teacher. His teachings resonate for me so deeply because my own experience as an acupuncturist has shown me, time and again, the wisdom of pathology.

From my experience as an acupuncturist, I believe that early warning signs of a distressed system are the wise pathologies of an intelligent being. With a little training anyone with the capacity of self-reflection can learn to be a better listener and a more active responder to the wise direction of our own pathologies. Many of my clients who continue to receive regular acupuncture after a medical crisis has been averted do so because they feel that the experience of acupuncture makes them more receptive and responsive to the lessons of small pathology which the body uses to school us in how to take care of ourselves.

Small examples of what some of my clients have learned from their own experiences: eczema is related to food allergies, back pain is related to intestinal problems, acne and migraines in women and girls is related to hormonal changes. There is one more complicated example of the wisdom of pathology which involves a young woman diagnosed with autoimmune hepatitis.

She came to me for acupuncture after receiving a diagnosis of autoimmune hepatitis from a doctor of natural medicine. She was looking for help to restore the healthy functioning of her liver, which according to liver function tests had not been functioning well for at least a year.

What unfolded was an example of something I wrote about in an earlier post (The Number One Problem in American Healthcare: No one is Listening). By sitting with this woman for as long as it took (about an hour and a half) I learned a great deal of important clues from her medical and family history. The first thing to be revealed that perked my interest was that she had had one episode of severe eczema on her hip about one year ago. She had been given a topical steroid and it “went away.” I put that in quotations because I believe that while the rash may have disappeared from the skin, the problem went deeper, and found another post from which to stand on its soap box and scream, look at me, look at me. The new post? Her liver. I immediately shared my son’s story (gluten free because gluten intake results in eczema, whereas abstinence from gluten means no rash), and the stories of others I’ve worked with (including a 12 year old boy who would not explore dietary triggers to his eczema until he became unable to tolerate almost all foods and had to be treated in a hospital for massive food intolerances at the age of 19). Her response was immediate: “That’s interesting,” she said, “my sister was diagnosed with Celiac disease when she was 2!” Bingo. I told her of the tendency of diseases to run in families and urged her to get tested.

Unfortunately her doctor was misinformed about Celiac, and didn’t realize it ran in families, and counseled her against the test, reiterating that she had autoimmune hepatitis. Celiac disease doesn’t cause liver disease, he said. Luckily this woman is someone who feels comfortable thinking outside the box. I shared with her my own belief that the body’s intelligence should not be underestimated. Celiac disease goes undiagnosed and is misdiagnosed so often (average time between sickness and diagnosis is something like 10 years!) because the “typical” celiac presentation (diarrhea, malnutrition, weight loss) is perhaps not so typical afterall, rather just one way that the illness sometimes manifests–just so happens it’s a way that western medicine thinks is sensible for a disorder effecting the small intestine.

So, she got the test. Positive for celiac. After being on a gluten-free diet for a short time her liver function tests returned to normal. Which, for me, is proof enough that when it comes to an autoimmune disease (such as celiac) anything is possible. When dealing with autoimmune disease, the whole concept of cause and effect is turned upside down and shoved down the rabbit hole. A does not lead to B–it might lead to C, instead. We need a paradigm, such as Chinese Medicine, that can enter a dialogue with the bodymind from any one of many multi-faceted entry points, a paradigm that can contemplate multiple correspondences between organs and multiple relationships between functioning parts and whole systems. Western medicine is great at what it does. But it doesn’t particularly shine in the world beneath the rabbit hole.

 

Sagely Living: Scholarship

I found a great blog called Deepest Health written by a man named Eric Grey, a student of Classical Chinese Medicine. He proposes a year of Sagely Living for himself and others, in which we will all follow some sagely practice for each month of the year, write about our experiences, and share our writings with one another. The first practice in the first month of the year, in which we Mainers are sitting by our wood stoves, hunkering down anyway, is scholarship. I am studying like crazy this month, as it turns out. Not about acupuncture or Chinese philosophy or medicine. No, this whole thing, this blogging thing. I am studying this new (to me) art form and science of blogging. In this month I have started a blog, started reading other people’s blogs (yes, for the first time!), and started researching ways that blogging can enhance my life. So far I’m having a blast, which I very much appreciate. I strongly value fun, but don’t get enough of it–like most working moms, I suppose (except for the kid-centered kind of fun, which is great, of course, but which tends to involve lots of not-as-fun clean-up afterwards…if only I could always remember the words of my wise friend Bruce who says, “celebrate the task.”). So I’m having fun blogging, but it’s also definitely requiring of me a foray into a kind of scholarly attention. It’s nothing like the spleen-wasting memorization and whole paradigm shift of graduate school, perhaps, but it is a whole new language (RSS? Backlink? SEO?) and a vast network of relationships (yet another “web that has no weaver” –sorry, couldn’t stop myself–that’s an inside joke for acupuncturists, The Web that Has No Weaver is the title of a book about Chinese Medicine by Ted Kaptchuk). So I’ll be participating in this project, and reporting here on my progress. For now, in the month of January, my scholarly efforts are devoted to this new energetic domain–the other web that has no weaver.

One of the challenges of any scholarship is to integrate the subject studied into one’s life. I’ve been blogging for a few weeks now and have not integrated it in my existing networks or sought connections to other bloggers which could mutually enhance our virtual community. This is the next step in my scholarly blogging: to let people know I am here. In the language of the 5 phases this step, making something manifest in the world is a function of the Heart, and the province of the shen. The inspiration (Earth, Yi) to blog came to me, in part through conversations with my Brother, who thought I should blog about my awesome gluten-free desserts (more on that elsewhere, perhaps). I put some intention into the idea, began to say to myself, yes, I’m going to become a blogger… and before I knew it emotion and instinct (Metal: Po) drove me forward (or down into the rabbit hole). I applied my will (Kidney: zhi) to the project, and began blogging, and as my experience took shape, so did my vision (Liver: Hun). And through that vision I came to see that the kind of bloggin’ that will suit me is the kind that makes connections with people. And to do that I have to share it. Participating in another bloggers project is all part of that process, from my heart to yours, Eric.