We are the Keepers

 
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“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
— The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

 

In describing our inseparable connection to all of life, Thich Nhat Hanh talks about seeing the cloud in a piece of paper. Without clouds, there can be no rain, without rain, there can be no trees, without trees, there can be no paper. So within a piece of paper, there is a cloud. He calls this Interbeing. I’ve been thinking about Thich Nhat Hanh a lot lately, wondering how he is capable of seeing a cloud in a piece of paper after all that he has actually seen with his very eyes: the senseless destruction of his Motherland, the systematic murder of his friends, the bombing and poisoning of women and children. He has developed a sense of seeing beyond what we see with our eyes.


In some ways, the practice of Chinese Medicine is a practice of seeing beyond what is apparent to our eyes. This past month, when I was in the Navajo lands treating patients, many came suffering from layers of pain that burrows in their bodies. A Western doctor might see diabetes, obesity, poor food choices, slipped discs, insomnia and depression. My eyes are trained to see through the diagnostic principles of Chinese Medicine: yin deficiency, excess dampness, qi and blood stagnation. Beyond mere diagnosis, however, I look deeper. And in looking deeper, I see the effects of white supremacy: genocide, rape, poverty, and the systematic attempts to erase Native Peoples. Their bodies carry history of unimaginable pain and profound grief. If pharmaceuticals and surgery are the answer to what the Western doctors see, how do I respond to what I see? What is the medicine for the violence, isolation, destruction around us? Do I offer needles and herbs instead of surgery and pharmaceuticals? What is the medicine that takes into account the whole picture and what is the whole picture?.

For years I’ve advocated Chinese Medicine as not just a set of tools, but a way of seeing. A way of seeing that connects everything around us, much like Thich Nhat Hanh’s thoughts on Interbeing. If we don’t hold steady to that way of seeing, then even with needles and herbs, we may be just trying to fix a symptom. Without seeing deeper into all the connections that make a person, we are not truly practicing Chinese Medicine. To see the Whole person is the beginning of healing. To reclaim all parts and to see the body as not just a set of  symptoms but as witness to history, our shared history and to understand all the forces that are currently affecting us is understanding the Whole person. When we can see that, there is a natural healing response in both the patient and I. The patient’s response may be one of affirming and allowing the flood of held back emotions and in seeing clearly, engaging the whole self in self-care. Often, my response is as witness, to hold space for what comes forward for healing and then through the medicine to honor the body’s innate healing process.

Sometimes, when I see the injustice that gives rise to sick bodies, a great anger grows inside me. When I feel this rage, my response is aggression--to fight a system, a disease, a person that represents those things to me. I have to remind myself that although my response is anger, my responsibility is to heal. They are almost opposites and yet they inform one another. The former gives rise to greater pain, the latter gives rise to true peace. For a long time, I have been trying to figure out the best action as a response and a responsibility towards what I see. For me, when I see a piece of paper, sometimes I see deforestation more readily than I see a cloud.

After the second full day of clinic on Navajo lands and seeing pain and grief in so many bodies of all ages, I felt that I myself was becoming the embodiment of pain, anger and despair. My shoulders felt weighted, my ankles ached, my jaws clenched, and my heart felt like a stone. I took a walk into the desert to shake this feeling. I could feel that the heaviness inside me was going to make me sick if I didn’t do something about it. As I walked, I talked to the Creator and asked for help. The Creator’s response was silence. I suppose She was holding space for me.

I sat beneath the shade of a tree. The Navajo desert is bewitching in its beauty. The mountains and hills, brush and canyons transfixes me in quiet awe. The ball of despair and anger in my chest started to disintegrate and I started to feel the breath come back inside me. I felt the hard smooth rock beneath me and its unwavering support and I felt a great gratitude for the cool shade that sheltered me from the afternoon sun. My body became lighter and lighter, my mind became softer and softer, my heart grew bigger and bigger and I become as light as the clouds in the sky.

I can see the wisdom in seeing the cloud in a piece of paper although I cannot always see it where it is not apparent. To see the cloud is to see what heals. And as long as there are those that see the clouds in everything--the Keepers of wisdom, I believe there is hope for us. The Keepers of wisdom see the clouds, the desert, the mountains and rivers. They are people like Thich Nhat Hanh insistent on peace with every step. They are the Chinese sages who understand the rhythms of Nature and our place in it. They are the Navajo elders and Medicine People who hold onto Native wisdom and knowledge. These Keepers hold steadfast to the Truth for their people and for all of us.

Thinking back on the families that made the trek to see us for healing, I see beautiful people, open, curious and strong.  They trusted our Medicine and allowed us to treat them and listen to their stories. They brought their children, who weaved laughter in and out of clinic, played in the rocks and brush and grabbed us all by the hands, urging us to join them under open desert skies. Medicine is as much a way of seeing as doing. Healing is a coming together, making us Whole again. And the Keepers are not only the Medicine People and the Wise Ones. They are the Children and You and I when we have the courage to open our eyes and see with our hearts.

In Health and Community, 

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The Season of Renewal

 
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Everything happens in its own time.

At the end of last year, I returned from my latest trip to New Mexico. Unlike previous trips to Navajo lands, this time I left feeling demoralized. The message I received was, “Renewal.” I’d been told my ways had become routine and I needed to relearn and renew how I practiced medicine. It was a difficult message to accept. A symphony of confusion, shame and anger arose to meet me and instinctively I wanted to run and hide. But I know strong medicine can be bitter so I stayed put with all the noise and fight of a million voices inside me.

Back home, I went to work to figure out what Renewal was supposed to mean. Perhaps I’d become too philosophical about medicine and just needed to embody physical health - quit coffee, exercise more, renew my meditation and qigong practices. Aha, I thought, that’s it. I called my mentor, Justice Yazzie, and excitedly told him I had it all figured out. He listened quietly as I spoke. Maybe too quietly because at some point, I got the feeling that I was way off base. When he spoke, I felt my cheeks getting warm with his cautionary response “It’s not something to figure out, he said. It’s going to take you many many more years to begin to understand what was said to you. Just keep doing what you are doing. You are so young in your practice and only beginning to understand things.” Almost 20 years in practice, I thought, and just beginning?!

Patience is not a strength of mine. I want to figure everything out now. Around that time, my father fell seriously ill and my attention was redirected to him. I gave him acupuncture and herbs. Fall is the season of letting go and I contemplated the possibility that soon my father would drop away like a fall leaf. The cool crisp grief that lingers in the autumn air felt particularly acute. As fall became winter, I had a strong urge for hibernation. Winter is typically the season of deep contemplation, but I didn’t possess that kind of energy. I ate a lot, bundled up and slept. TIme went by. When the Lunar New Year approached, I felt a stirring. Incubating thoughts and ideas pushing to break ground. Plans for BCA’s pop-up clinic in New Mexico took shape gradually but steadily.

Today as I prepared  a self-care handout for Spring, a line caught my eye, “Spring is the season of Renewal.” Renewal… I hadn’t thought of that word since Fall. All the internal turmoil I went through at that time feels like a distant memory. And it makes me laugh inside. The way I fight with myself until I tire myself out, get distracted and then the thing I was trying so hard to grasp emerges as an ungraspable thing--as Life itself. Like when I was in first grade, I wanted so bad to be big like the 6 graders. I wanted to grow faster. For a time, I faked it and acted like my version of what a 6 grader acts like. Of course, it was hard to keep that up, I got distracted and one day I was a 6 grader.

So, what is Renewal? In Chinese medicine, the time of Renewal is Spring - emerging energy and expression, light and lightness. Spring (renewal) comes from Winter (rest) comes from Fall (letting go). Life is always in some stage of change and transition and there aren’t any short cuts. Everything happens in its own time. Now I feel inspired and lifted by Renewal, despite or because of the confusion and resistance that initially knocked me off my feet in New Mexico. Back then I was pleading, “I don’t know what I don’t know!” Then, sometime later in the ceremony, the medicine man responded, “She doesn’t know what she does know.”Medicine is so mysterious and never before have I realized that indeed, I am just a babe.

 

In Health & Community, 

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Healing the Small Self

 
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The BCA family will return to New Mexico to do acupuncture, sound healing, massage, cupping, gua sha therapy and teach classes on self-care and Chinese Medicine at the end of March.

Two years ago, I met an esteemed Navajo peacemaker, the former Chief Justice Robert Yazzie. I had read his amazing work and efforts to promote and revive Native peacekeeping practices and was excited to meet him at a luncheon sponsored by ServiceSpace*. I rushed to the lunch after giving my first talk at BCA** on connection and healing, only to realize later that he was in attendance at my talk. That serendipitous meeting began a friendship that has essentially changed the way I think about medicine and healing.

Since then, we’ve spent many hours discussing Nature, Connection, Healing, Medicine and Peacekeeping. As abstract as our conversations get sometimes, we always circle back to the question front and center of both our work: how to live and be this knowledge rather than only to grasp it conceptually. As our friendship grew, my curiosity about Native Medicine developed and with the support of friends from BCA, I traveled to New Mexico to experience what I could only conjecture from our conversations. The journey was mind blowing, but more profoundly, it blew my heart open.

My main healing was experiencing community in a way I’ve thirsted for--a natural unquestionable belonging. That belonging is a belonging to myself, to community, to family, to the Earth, to this life. I hadn’t realized that even my own sense of disconnection was fundamental to my work, inspiring me to seek out many avenues for healing. I carried my experience from New Mexico in my heart back home and watered the BCA healing space with it and watched it flower in my community, my work, my relationships and my understanding of Chinese Medicine. It was gentle but powerful, much like Chinese Medicine.

Last fall, I felt a call to return and I made another pilgrimage to Navajo lands with more conspirators from BCA. Once again I plunged a bit deeper into the infinite well of healing knowledge. A natural kinship developed between my BCA and Navajo families. We call each other brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and mothers. We are filled with gratitude for their support and healing prayers from Native lands in New Mexico to our little clinic in Berkeley.

On the drive home I shared a growing thought - a return trip to share Chinese Medicine with our Navajo family who had taught us so much about healing. The idea was met with enthusiastic support and we are now actively planning a Spring road trip. The BCA family will return to New Mexico to do acupuncture, sound healing, massage, cupping, gua sha therapy and teach classes on self-care and Chinese Medicine at the end of March.

I think back with wonder at the divine plan that created my first meeting with Justice Yazzie. At that time, I was struggling to express my understanding of the heart of Chinese Medicine. The root of Chinese Medicine seemed so breathtakingly simple, so overlooked, so misunderstood and so needed in this world but I was filled with trepidation and self-doubt about my ability to teach such startlingly simple yet profound ideas. Meeting Justice Yazzie was just the right medicine at the right time for me to grow in my work.

This healing journey has helped me overcome my small self, the source of my self-doubt, and re-connects me to the bigger truth of healing. Healing is the healing of the small self, the one that feels disconnected and therefore insecure, lonely and doubtful. This small self is both the result of and the creator of all kinds of pain and suffering. As this small self heals, she is reconnected to herself and her community which expands to new reaches as her own healing deepens. “Heal Yourself, Heal Your Community” is what we say at BCA.

In Health & Community,

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*ServiceSpace is an organization whose “aim is to ignite the fundamental generosity in ourselves and others, creating both inner and outer transformation. “ www.servicespace.org

**BCA is Berkeley Community Acupuncture, www.bcaclinic.com