I always have so many thoughts and observations going in my practice, sustained quite magically by what appears in my treatment room. Sometimes at the end of the day I long to describe to someone the magic that unfolded, the things that took place that were so beyond my expectations or imagination, and then most of the time I end up not talking about it at all. Of course, there is the privacy of the patient to protect, but it is also difficult to capture what exactly happens, because there is so much that can happen! What I want to be able to describe, however, is the dialectic of the treatment’s intention with the patients’ own ability to change and go places. That relationship is extremely dynamic, and if the practitioner is willing to hold a space for the possibility of change that goes beyond the limits of our imagination or knowledge, there IS room for just that, and we witness what unfolds. It’s quite challenging to document and lately I have been wondering how to write about this. It’s one of the most important things for people to know. Soon I will be bringing a friend in to photo-document a series of treatments; I wonder what that will be able to reveal. For some years, I have kept a journal with patient information kept out, simply detailing what kind of healing takes place, the details (small or dramatic) that astound me. I’m not sure I’m capturing much but I am working with the desire to do so! We will see what comes of it.
What is healing?
Q: What is healing?
A: Ten years of practicing medicine, and I find this hard to articulate. Which is why I am interested in asking myself this question. I am interested in asking myself a complex question and then needing to answer in a short amount of space. Impossible. Take two opposing concepts and place them together—a Daoist practice, so that’s nice. I don’t know what is healing. This is the thing. It is not one thing. And neither is illness, sickness, pathology. A serious can of worms. Worms! They can make your soil nice, or they can take residence in your gut and wreak havoc. Or more distinctly, they can live in your gut and make you happy, or they can live in your gut and render you host of a possession. What’s the difference? This is one key. In understanding. Can we understand healing without understanding illness? You can be ill without being ill. And not ill while being ill. What’s the difference? You can heal while remaining ill. You can get over it while remaining afflicted. It’s all possible and what’s the difference. I began my career caring very much about illness and being able to do something about it, becoming able to do something about it. If I am being honest, it goes back to the terror I experienced witnessing my mother die within 6 months of a cancer diagnosis, when I was young. She died almost symptomless, it advanced so quickly. It seemed no one knew what they were doing. It seemed I could have done it better. I learned medicine because I wanted to know where the edge was. I wanted to touch life and life, making something happen. And I think I have done that: I have learned to make something happen. The year I began to practice as a healer, I became sick enough that I was only able to lie in bed and be with myself. All other activities, including activities that were supposed to be healing, made it all worse. I laid there for a long time. It lasted longer than I believed I could tolerate. I waited until god lifted the boot off my neck, and I healed, and I died, and I prepared for death. Some illness is life threatening and you end up living. And some illness leads to, ends with death. Life is not guaranteed with healing. The only thing guaranteed is that we die. And I think healing has something to do with that. Am I authorized to say more, make a statement?
This was first published in Scene Report, a publication out from Dominica Publishing in L.A.
How does remote acupuncture work?
Q: How does remote acupuncture work?
A: When you receive acupuncture, needles are inserted with careful thought to location, the purpose or intention of each needle, and to how they are relating to one another. The acupuncture channels (both primary and complementary channels) are simply part of our anatomy. They are our anatomy. They are there without the needles, functioning on their own, seamlessly united with the flow of our body/mind/soul matrix. The needle does several key things: 1) it allows the infinite potential that exists in each moment and breath to be focused and moved through the space of that needle and to have a conversation with the acupuncture point or channel where it is placed (we call this conducting qi) 2) it assists in the communication between multiple acupuncture points, 3) it “holds” an intention, a refined purpose and instruction to infuse into the shared space of needle, point, and patient (it also encompasses the practitioner). Once the needles are inserted the practitioner stands back, while the needles hold that vibration. The vibration resonates on, like a note that continues playing long after a note has been played. The needles continue to hold the intention and the practitioner keeps part of her attention on the work at the needles, and part on seeing the healing completed, and part on holding infinite possibilities for that patient. From there the treatment unfolds.
What’s happening in a remote session is actually almost entirely the same. What is different is the absence of the needles, and the fact that there is distance between us. We are in different rooms, different buildings, perhaps even different countries, but somehow still we can feel qi moving, building, dispersing. Sometimes the feeling is even stronger than when there are needles. This is what we call resonance. Just as musical instruments or voices can resonate together, we can intone specific resonances for the purpose of healing.
The very incredible thing about distance healing is that without the needles we realize the needles are one tool for affecting change or cultivation in the meridians, but the true tool is within the body. The acupuncture channels have their own brilliant mechanisms unto themselves. The needles are like tuning forks, or lightning rods. Technically speaking, acupuncture is the placement and holding of needles, but more accurately, acupuncture is a medicine of resonance. The needles are just assisting with tuning and holding that resonance, but this is just one way.
In a distance healing session, we connect enough for me to get a sense of the vibration of what we are working with, then we choose a place to work - which channel and points, and then we go into a state of meditation together, just as if you are laying on the treatment table and I am standing there with you. There are many ways to resonate with the points. When attention goes to the acupuncture points, qi follows. (I learned this from my medical qi gong teacher, Paul Fraser, before I learned to hold a needle.) With focus, I may write down the names of the two points and draw a line between them. I may hold the points in my own body, and request that the universal wisdom of those points be transmitted to the patient. I may hold two pencils, or discarded insertion tubes, or metal poles, one in each hand, and see them touching those specific points (thank you Ann Cecil-Sterman for that!). The energy of the points exists within your body, and it exists universally. The qi of the universe also exists within your body, just as it exists universally. And incredibly, the direction of your mind, held in your mind and body, at the same time as the acupuncture points, catalyzes the possibility for great, great healing. For the aspect of our minds that love the concrete, it is easier to put our faith and belief into the needles, but what if we place our faith in the universal and built-in healing technology of our own bodies?
*[For more on this topic, please see Chapter 9 of The Web That Has No Weaver, by Ted Kaptchuk -- the story about tong shen ming, or the Penetrating Divine Illumination, hit me like a lightning bolt and the next month I was enrolled in Chinese medicine school.]
What is wind?
This piece was written for Scene Report, a publication out of Dominica Press in L.A. edited by the artist Rocket Caleshu.
Q: What is wind?
A: Wind is one of these concepts that takes into assumption a whole cosmology of the human being existing somewhere in the universe--standing on planet earth, and looking up at the sky and the moon and into the space of this galaxy we are a part of. As humans, we are microcosms of our universe, and so ‘wind’ is going to involve the weather that goes on inside and outside us. Of course you are familiar with windy weather - which often comes with a change in season or big change in weather - or is found at the tops of mountains or in deserts or on big wide manhattan avenues. And in medicine, there is both the idea of wind invasion and internal wind. Wind invasion refers to “catching” something, as in something contagious, or something brought on by the environment, as in walking around on a cold, damp, windy day without a scarf and waking up the next day with a stiff dull neck, or developing a headache after being in a “heady” environment. Internal wind describes all sorts of tremors and tremulous motion within the body, anywhere from a stroke, to a severe migraine, or any other undisruptive or disruptive spastic movement. This just gives you a picture of how to think about it, in terms of wind as pathology. But conceptually, and also in my practice as an acupuncturist, I prefer to frame ‘wind’ as an agent of change, as an aspect of the constant changing and fluctuating of our environments, contextualized within a causeless perfection of everything. Wind does not really possess a linear pathway. It’s more something you get caught up in. At least once a week, I witness, within an acupuncture treatment, wind moving from an internal place to a more external place in the body, to then exit the body. Bones, muscles, skin tremble and twitch sometimes very dramatically or often quite gently. This manifestation of wind is always accompanied by a change in the person, in their health and or their life. Wind is change. I often notice that externally contracted wind seem to be perfectly timed with a massive change that the person is seeking to create, in other words not accidental at all. The resolution of the injury or cold is concurrent with a transformation that would not have happened otherwise. What initiated that accident or cold to penetrate and cause us to become ill or have to lie down and stop at that moment and not another? It’s hard to answer that question, because it doesn’t seem to come from anywhere in particular. But when there is wind, there is certainly a change happening, or wanting to happen.