On Healing Ourselves and Our Community: The Importance of Taking Care

“Go back and take care of yourself. Your body needs you. Your feelings need you. Your perceptions need you. Your suffering needs you to acknowledge it. Go home and be there for all these things. ”

— Thich Nhat Hanh   

There is medicine, and then there’s Medicine. There is healing, and then there’s Healing. There is community, and then there’s Community. What I thought I understood about these things, even after many years of studying and practicing traditional medicine and my lifelong search for community was quite limited. This past month, I was blessed with the opportunity to be a patient at a traditional Navajo healing ceremony. What I’ve taken back from that experience is a deeper sense of commitment to healing service and a renewed determination to integrate community and justice into healing.

My journey took me to New Mexico, the land of of painted deserts and painted skies. I was immediately taken by the beauty of the landscape, pulling over on the freeway at sunset just to stare in wonder. Taking in the beauty of nature is an inherent part of the medicine. On the night of the ceremony, seventeen of us settled on the floor in a circle against the walls of a hogan, a traditional Navajo dwelling. My eyes were trying to adjust to the light of the lanterns and the coal. I looked around me, taking in all the new faces that came that night to be in ceremony with me, to help me heal. I didn’t quite understand why thirteen Navajo people who didn’t know me would gather to support my healing in an all night vigil. My brain was trying to remember all the instructions that were given me, keeping them in the correct order so that I didn’t offend my hosts. Before us, in the center of the hogan, was a sacred crescent of red earth and a mound of burning coal that I focused my attention on when I felt lost or overwhelmed.

When the ceremony began, I was asked to announce my reason for being there. I reached for some rehearsed words, knowing that this moment would come. The words came, a bit stiffly at first, but as I spoke I eased into a deeper and more natural voice. I told them I was there because I want to be a better healer and in the work that I do, I know that I must start with myself. I spoke about some sense of disquietude that I felt inside me. I spoke a bit about my my childhood and the search for healing and community through my work. I could feel that I was heard as I spoke by the audible sounds that were uttered in return to punctuate and validate the words I was pulling up from deep inside me. From that place I asked for help and when I was done the medicine man, in plain speak, summed up my speech to say that I suffer from loneliness.

It was a bit jarring to hear his diagnosis: loneliness. I don’t think of myself as lonely, being surrounded by community, friends and family most of my day. In fact, in the day to day  busy-ness I sometimes crave to be alone. But the simplicity and accuracy of the medicine man’s diagnosis was indisputable.  As I considered his meaning, I understood clearly he was addressing a loneliness much deeper, not simply meaning to be alone, but a thread of loneliness that seemed to reach back eternal when I believed that I had to go it alone. After he spoke and the others concurred, I could feel the deep shard of disconnection inside the depths of my being make itself known.

Sitting up into the night, on a desert hill, in a little hogan before coal and ember, beneath the wide expanse of infinite stars scattered into forever with friends and community supporting my healing through song, medicine and prayer, the concept of loneliness disappeared and left a flow of tears that could’ve filled the canyons running through the dry earth.

“We have come to consider medicine to be a pill or procedure. Something that is done to us either by chemistry or instrument. Something or someone designated to take the pain and discomfort away.”

We have come to consider medicine to be a pill or procedure. Something that is done to us either by chemistry or instrument. Something or someone designated to take the pain and discomfort away. While I had known that healing is much deeper than that, my experience in New Mexico showed me the truly profound depth and breadth of medicine. Medicine isn’t about taking anything away. We are already ill from too many things being taken away from us. If we keep taking things away, there will be nothing left of us. Medicine is about reconnecting with all the things that were taken from us: reconnecting to one another and to community, reconnecting to the land and to the skies, reconnecting to all things that give us life, reconnecting to music and spirit and to our own voices and words, reconnecting to our grief and our loss, reconnecting to fire and water, reconnecting to our human hearts. Our pain, put in the proper perspective of the universe becomes a tiny glint of light in the entire night sky. And that light is there to light the way for others. We do not and cannot heal alone.

My eternal gratitude to the Medicine, to the Healers, to my Companions, to Community, to Mother Earth and to the Great Mystery. May we all light the way for one another.

In Health & Community,

-Thuy

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We are ultimately not in control

Autumn is the season of the lungs, the organ in Chinese Medicine associated with grief, sadness and letting go. Like the autumn leaves that fall naturally, the progression of our lives involve things, people and ideas that naturally pass on as we enter new and different stages of our lives. This continual cycle of birth and death is what life is, inspiration and expiration.

The ability to witness and experience the cycles of our lives with ease, without attachment or aversion, involves a deep yet simple understanding of the nature of our existence: we are not in control. Like breathing, we can temporarily control our breath, but ultimately we are not in control of our breathing. Something is breathing us even as we sleep. Inspiration, from the Latin word “Inspiratio,” refers to God breathing into us, putting breath, life and spirit into the human body. Expiration, refers to breathing out until the last breath, letting go. Breathing, like life, just happens. The more we can let this be, inspiration and expiration, the more we can move through life with ease.

When I say ease, I don’t mean to be happy go lucky and trouble free. I don’t mean we stop mourning and hurting and missing and longing. I mean we let our emotions and expressions be what they be. We resist running from it or holding on to it. We let life be life fully without acting on our compulsion to control it. The intention is not to let go of our humanness, but to let go of our desire for control, our resistance, our decorum, our hubris. In letting go, we are able to feel fully alive.

I had a patient last week. As I placed the needles in, her tears began flowing relentlessly. While she was trying to maintain some level of composure she was also just letting the tears come. Seeing this, I could feel that she was experiencing deep healing. After the treatment I checked in on her and asked how she was doing. She said, “I miss my mommy.” Her mother had passed away many years earlier. “You know,” she added, “It’s not even that I’m sad. I just miss my mommy. It’s kindda like if I feel like having orange juice. It’s just a feeling that comes and goes. Well right now I miss my mommy. That’s all.” I was taken by the profound simplicity and acceptance with which she grieved. 

In Chinese Medicine, feelings are natural and require the appropriate expression. If you have experienced grief, you know that it has its way with you. There is no clear path, no progression, no prediction, no beginning and no end. Allowing grief its full expression when it visits allows for the natural cycle of inspiration and expiration to unfold and connects us to the larger mystery of life that we are all a part of.

In Health & Community,

Thuy

The art of living and thriving

“Maintaining order rather than correcting disorder is the ultimate principle of wisdom. To cure a disease after it has appeared is like digging a well when one feels thirsty, or forging weapons after the war has already begun.’”

— Nei Jing, 2nd Century BC (Ancient Chinese Medical Text)

In modern medicine, there is no illness unless there is something measurable and seen. If a slew of tests come up negative for any known disease, there is little, if anything,  modern medicine can offer. We are considered healthy and sound even if we report discomfort and pain. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, most illnesses are considered in advanced stages by the time they are registered in our modern medical tests. Any feelings of discomfort or pain, physically, emotionally or psychologically are important information that indicates imbalance. These imbalances can often be detected in the pulse, on the tongue, through history, palpation and careful observation. The more sensitive and responsive a patient is to imbalance, the earlier the correction can be made, the better the outcome.

 I often have patients that are sheepish in their concerns. They say they experience headaches, or stomach woes or fatigue or difficulty sleeping and then they quickly add, but it’s not really a big deal. Just wondering if it’s something that Chinese Medicine can help. Often times, I sense that they feel some embarrassment to bring up such “non-issues.” They are surprised when I applaud them for their sensitivity and encourage them to tell me more about these minor ailments that they have. I tell them that if we don’t pay attention to the non-issues then they may develop into real issues--recognizable pathology-- and then it’s much more difficult to treat.

In modern life, we are encouraged to override minor discomfort in the name of productivity and busy-ness. We even consider many imbalances normal, such as,  menstrual cramps, fatigue, upset stomach, minor aches and pains, forgetfulness and anxiety--only to name a few. We accept these conditions as a part of modern living. Patients often refuse treatment unless what ails keeps them home from work or interrupts their daily life. It is only then, that something is considered wrong because productivity has been interrupted.

Part of my work is to re-connect and re-sensitize patients to their bodies. And a large part of that is helping patients prioritize feelings and sensations and to recognize them as important information for healing. It is no easy task, when one has overridden these feelings for a long time to begin to hear what the body is saying. To start, it may be important to follow some simple rules and rhythms that support re-connection such as, sleeping and waking at prescribed times, eating nourishing foods, moving our bodies daily and taking a bit of time off every day for relaxation. Over time, your body will feel respected and cared for rather than slave driven towards tasks and duties. And you can begin to develop a relationship of mutual respect, each listening and responsive to the other. Then when something feels off, you can recognize it and attend to it.

This harmonizing and balancing in daily life is the heart of what Traditional Chinese Medicine is about. It is about wellness, not illness.  It is the art of living and thriving.

In Health & Community,

Thuy