Perhaps we should stop eating sweets

A recent occurrence on ‘belonging’ to something made me think; specifically it happened at a Clinic where I rent a room for my acupuncture.  Without going into the details, I disagreed with a proposal that was approved by the majority of other practitioners.  What to do?

As you might have expected, this led me into thinking about us as individuals ‘belonging’ to wider groups – these are issues you’ll have to confront as you enter the world of complementary therapy.  For instance, you may have to give this some thought if you rent a room from a GP’s surgery, or support arguably suspect WM techniques such as IVF, Cancer treatment and the like.  To what degree do you compromise your own standards to ‘belong’ to a group and enjoy its benefits, or take the arguably opposite view of ‘to thine own self be true’?

Groucho Marx opined: "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member."  You could argue that the BAcC’s drive for Statutory Regulation could fall into this camp – I’m not sure that being part of the ‘big boy’s club’ is necessarily a good thing if the restrictions it brings with it negate the very principles that underpin our discipline.  Discuss ……….

But I suppose that belonging to a society, club etc obliges me to go with the majority, limiting my own personal freedom and giving power to whosoever leads that club.  Living in the UK makes me a member of the UK Government’s club; and what a responsibility that puts upon us!  The leaders of this particular club can impose conditions on me such as taxes, laws of the land etc, and can act in my name even though I violently disagree with them such as going to war in a Muslim country or borrowing £178 billion.  Short of leaving the country, MY country, I have no choice but to comply.

But it is this issue of choice that is fascinating - it the instruments of Government, which we cannot ignore because of retribution from the law, that are the most strident in demanding that we meet their requirements; for instance, IR demands are much more virulent than those from private companies.  And law-making (especially the plethora of legislation created under the current administration) is reaching the point of stupidity – take the ‘No Smoking’ law which, in addition to it being legislated, demands that we put a notice declaring it on every building – murder is illegal, but we don’t put a notice on every building saying ‘Murder prohibited here”.  It’s almost that our leaders are paranoid that we won’t follow their directives.

And now you can get stopped, searched and arrested for photographing the Houses of Parliament – such a Police state is reminiscent of the Eastern Bloc countries under the old Soviet Union or modern day North Korea etc.  Would someone tell me the logic of this?

It is interesting to hear what the Tao te Ching Chapter 17 says on Government (and Chapter 18 if you want guidance on how to vote in the next election):

The highest form of government is what people hardly realise is there.

Next is that of the Sage who is seen, loved and respected.

Next down is the dictatorship that thrives on oppression and terror.

And the last is that of those who lie and end up despised and rejected.

Where do you think we are at the moment?

…………………………

So “what’s that got to do with the price of tripe?” as one of my Tai Chi students asked me recently.  Well, does this apply to us as acupuncturists - to what degree do we ‘belong’ to a culture or how close do we adhere to our own values?  Can we recommend courses of action to our clients whilst, at the same time, not observe them ourselves? Shantanad Saraswati in his “The Man who wanted to meet God – myths and stories that explain the inexplicable” tells the story:

There was a certain holy man who was visited by an elderly lady and a small boy who was addicted to eating sweets. She wanted the influence of the holy man to remove this bad habit. When the holy man heard about this he asked the old woman to come back in a fortnight. After a fortnight when the old woman returned, this holy man simply said to the boy that eating sweets was not a very good habit, it would result in some sort of disease later on: "So, my good boy, you should give them up." The old woman said, "If that's all you had to say, you needn't have bothered me to come back after a fortnight."

The holy man said he could not have done this the other day because he himself was in the habit of eating sweets and had no authority to ask anyone else to give them up. So he had to give up eating sweets for a full fortnight and control his own desire, because if he did not control it he could have no authority, and even if he had said the same thing to the boy it would have had no effect.

In fact just these few words did the trick.

You will already know of Ghandi’s assertion that: “you must be what you want the world to be”.  So do we avoid Damp foods, nurture our Yin over the Xmas time, avoid emotions that create Liver Qi Stagnation, keep our lower backs warm, maintain personal fitness and so on?  Or do we take Douglas Bader’s assertion that  ‘Rules are for the guidance of wise men and the observance of fools’ and apply the ‘do as I say not do as I do’ option? 

I would suggest we don’t abuse the power you have over our clients by recommending something we don’t do ourselves.  Our way, therefore, possibly is to guide rather than force  - ideally we should apply Wu Wei and allow things to happen naturally, to nurture the ‘tendency’ of change, or at least do just enough and no more (as Einstein suggested) and generally avoid becoming ‘holier than thou’.

And I’m as guilty as anyone – it’s just that I have to be reminded, now and again, that we don’t have all the answers and that we should practice more tolerance – with ourselves as well as with others.

Metta

When the Solution is Part of the Problem

By now, if you have read any of the previous blog entries, you will realise that I’m a firm believer in the Yin Yang concept of circularity – namely that everything, eventually, turns from one extreme to the other and each has the seeds of the other within it.  But in this concept there is another aspect to which I’ve haven’t alluded before.

For those of you born in post-wartime years and grew up during the Cold War, you will most probably have realised that when Fascism goes to the extreme it meets with extreme Communism coming the other way; when religious extremism goes too far it defeats the very religion from which it arose.  Inventors of the machine gun and, more lately, nuclear weapons believed that their inventions were so terrible that they’d stop wars for all time.  And so on.

I think the reference was to the process of nature when T S Eliot opined:

What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from ...

But humans have a tendency to take things to the extreme - we’ve all seen many instances when human intervention in a problem only serves to make it worse; when a solution is so ill-thought-out that it becomes part of the problem.  And so the cycle starts again …….

This recently came home, during the Remembrance Day events, when attention was focussed on Afghanistan.  Notwithstanding the rights and wrongs of the war, history has shown that a foreign invading army (and one that is predominantly from a Christian culture) is unlikely to succeed in that part of the world.  It can be compared to a splinter that worries away at the host which, in turn, worries away at it – a Yang response often only pushes the problem deeper (witness the frequent benefits of Yin cupping over Yang massage).  So the aggressive impulsive reaction is seldom the solution to a problem and, generally, only serves to defeat the solution that it sought in the first place.

Nearer to home we see the vast proliferation of CCTV cameras on our streets and shopping malls (possibly more than any other country in Europe).  This initiative was (possibly) aimed at reducing crime and, although crime figures may have fallen, people’s fear of crime has risen because of the number of cameras looking at them.

Still on our streets, over-reflective roadside hazard warning signs, overly-aggressive speed humps etc actually endanger road safety.

Social and welfare benefits have had a similar effect; by providing a ‘free’ NHS then people have become more reliant upon it, thus causing it to expand in size, expense and influence beyond all reasonable measure, feeding the appetite of those who ‘enjoy being ill’.

In our clinics we see how drugs, which are aimed at specific diseases, cause side effects that often far outweigh the original problem.

and so on and on and on  ……..

However, as we sit in a glow if self-righteousness do we, as therapists, ever recognise this trait in ourselves? Do we ever stop and think “Is this treatment/ diagnosis/interaction/intervention, or whatever, only making the client’s problem worse?”   Quantum mechanics has shown us that the observer affects the observed – so clearly, our whole experience affects the treatment outcome.  At this point I recommend you read and inwardly digest ‘The Therapeutic Relationship in Complementary Health Care’ by Mitchell & Cormack.

With this in mind, I want to return to the circularity point – in my previous existence I was involved for a time with a ‘hack’ of the old journalistic school.  He had, at some point been an editor of (I believe) a national tabloid.  I don’t know how we got onto it, but he gave me a piece of advice that has proved to be invaluable in the years since.  He told me that if he had a script to review or edit, he would go home, sink a pint of Gin, and then read it applying the ‘SFW’ rule.  Naive, as I was, I asked, “what is the SFW rule?” 

“So F*@”>$% What?” he replied; at this point I apologise to the more sensitive reader but the profanity does give it appropriate emphasis.  Apparently, he would apply the SFW rule to each sentence he read and, if it didn’t answer the SFW question, it got deleted.   It is amazing how this one rule can simplify your life.

For example, only this morning, I heard that the Government was to make the Banks tell us how many of their employees earned over £1m per year, but they weren’t required to name them.  Instantly, I applied the SFW rule and dropped the story out of my consciousness (except to write it here as an example).  In doing so I helped to reduce the meaningless clutter that fills my head on a daily basis.

I have since realised that the SFW concept takes journalism to the extreme, only to meet up with the Taoist extreme of Wu Wei coming the other way - the ridiculous to the sublime - and so the circularity principle is proven when two seemingly opposite disciplines meet at their respective extremes.

So I urge you to apply the SFW rule to your lives, but also to your dealing with clients.  By all means utilise the models you know or have been taught, such as TA, 8 principles, 5 elements etc, but don’t get so far up your own conclusion that you forget the common sense approach of dealing with vulnerable people trying to lead normal lives.  Applying SFW to both what you do and say, as well as what the client presents you with, may just help.

Indeed, your response to the above may be “SFW”.  If so, well done.

At the 11^th hour ...

At the 11^th hour on the 11^th day of the 11^th month, I can do no more than reproduce Yehuda Amichai’s poem ‘The Diameter of the Bomb’:

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making a circle with no end and no God.

Metta

The Inmates have taken over the Asylum

“What is to be done for prosperity today,

and what is to be done for justice tomorrow

 - this is easily said.

What is to be done for justice today,

and what is to be done for prosperity tomorrow

 - this is hardly known”

Lessons of the Masters of Huainan (2^nd century BCE)

I realise that the media spin everything in order to get sales and exposure for themselves (for instance, by simplifying then exaggerating), but a number of stories have come to light recently which makes me wonder if it’s me or whether the world is slowly going mad.

• We are told that the Earth’s population will have increased by 50% by the time we get to 2050; this, in a world that is grossly overpopulated already.  Then, in the next breath, we are told that genetically modified (GM) foods will need to be introduced to accommodate this explosion in the number of mouths.

• The next item is that of Swine flu which, similar to the recent scare on cervical cancer, necessitates mass vaccination; a process which, by by-passing the body’s natural defence mechanism, damages the long-term integrity of our immune system.  Dr Stephen Gascoigne (pg 62 of The Clinical Medicine Guide) opines on vaccination:

“It is clearly not the best way to minimise a person’s susceptibility since other levels (… other than the creation of antibodies …) need to be addressed at the same time.  We only develop an infectious disease, and indeed any disease, if we are susceptible”

• Lastly, we have been told that enormous strides (forgive the pun) have been made in the development of materials and technology for the replacement of knees and hips; the need for these is more than often a lifestyle issue (see previous blog on ‘death comes through the legs’).  Tom Bisio, in his “A tooth from the Tiger’s mouth”, tells us:

Modern medicine has a tendency to view as normal dysfunctions that stem from an unhealthy lifestyle. If the average fifty year-old has some arthritis in his knees, this is considered normal.  He is told to take anti-inflammatories or painkillers and he goes back to jogging. By masking the pain in this way, further damage is often done. If the knee is too bothersome, a knee replacement is always an option. Viewing average health as "normal" combined with the intensive specialization of the modern physician has led modern medicine to a philosophical approach akin to that of a high-Ievel mechanic. Parts wear out and are jury-rigged or replaced. Each patient is not so much an individual as an identical model that will undergo exactly the same procedure for the same problem.

Now, is there a theme here?  Could it be that we are allowing harm to come to ourselves and then rushing to pick up the pieces – ‘breakdown maintenance’ as it’s called in engineering.  Would you let your car engine seize through lack of oil and servicing before trying to fix it?  No, of course not; so why do we do it to our own bodies or our society?

Surely the solution to the food problem is to reduce the world’s population to one that the Earth can sustain (and maybe taking the Gaia hypothesis more seriously).  Maybe damaging vaccination programmes could be avoided by improvements in lifestyles.  And, although I realise that replacement joints are a God-send to many people, surely these could largely be avoided by preventative techniques such as in diet and exercise.  I realise that this view is not very PC, but these news items are symptomatic of the mentality of fixing the problem once it has occurred rather than preventing it in the first place. 

The ancient wisdom of the Tao te Ching tells us that it’s ten times easier to prevent a problem than fix it, and Sun Tsu was a great believer in ‘occupying the ground before moving into it’ – so we are taught here that a little thought, before rushing headlong into a lemming-type rush (in technology advances, medical science etc) might just save us a lot of pain and misery downstream.

And, lastly, the other side of this ‘leaving it too late’ coin is the ‘starting it too early’ aspect – ie. the medical world’s preoccupation that ‘normal’ things are, somehow, illnesses (see Gascoigne, pg 343, on Women’s health as an example of society’s ‘underlying agenda that there is something inherently dysfunctional about female physiology’).  A recent programme, entitled ‘Medicalisation of Normality’, gave this:

Health journalist John Naish asks if we are turning normal human behaviour and normal stages in human development into medical conditions. It is estimated that 10 per cent of British people take anti-depressants and 10 per cent of American children take Ritalin to control their behaviour. It seems that a new mental illness is invented every week, covering every potential quirk in the human condition, such as Restless Leg Syndrome, Social Anxiety Disorder, Female Sexual Dysfunction and Celebrity Worship Syndrome.

And you wonder if the inmates have taken over the asylum?

Therefore, sages reduce desire and follow nature”

Metta

Death comes through the legs ….

Old age comes to us all – if we’re lucky.  Certainly it comes to us in our clinics in the shape of many of our clients.

I was given to thinking about this thanks to a number of items on the news:

The first was that state pension age is going up to 70.  There’re so many things that can be said about this piece of news, but I self-censor at this point.  Suffice it to say that it reflects so much that isn’t right in our society.

The second was that drinking coffee helps ward off dementia – if that’s the case then why is it that when I make a cup of coffee, I can never remember where I’ve left it?

And lastly, the simply comical.  Apparently, someone has come up with an idea for Alzheimer’s sufferers.  It consists of an arm-chair with a build in tape message that can be played when activated by a pressure sensor in the seat.  So the patient is seated there in the care home and, for whatever reason, decides to get up – the pressure sensor then activates the tape (pre-recorded with the voice of a loved one) that tells them to sit down again and wait for a nurse.  Now these are people with little grasp on reality in the first place without burdening them with the concept of a talking chair.  I sometimes wonder …..

So, as I get older, I start to think more about my own mortality; Benjamin Franklin said that in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes – I do so agree with him. 

But it is the old Chinese adage that ‘death comes through the legs’ that keeps coming to mind.  Clearly, this is allegorical and not meant to be taken literally; the T’ai Chi Classics say we should ‘walk like a cat’ but, unlike the literal interpretation applied to this by children I was teaching as they dropped to all-fours, it means we should move as carefully and mindfully as a cat.

So ‘death comes through the legs’ can have many meanings.  The most immediate that comes to mind is that we should continue to exercise as we get older.  But legs also provide our connection with the Earth.  We come from the Earth and return to it, with it providing our nourishment in between; so it seems reasonable that the Earth influences our cycle of life and death.  I believe, therefore, that much greater emphasis should be placed on keeping our legs active especially as we get older and, not surprisingly, Ta’i Chi has been shown time and again to be wonderful for this.

Thus if we lose our ‘get up and go’, and metaphorically allow our legs to atrophy, then we shall experience systematic decay – and none moreso than in later years. 

Metta

PS.  My grandmother stared walking 5 miles a day when she was 60 - she’s 85 now and we haven’t a clue where she is.  Boom boom!

The Autumn of our Years

Here we are again in Autumn - John Keats’ ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’.  But the world is different from when he wrote that nearly 200 years ago; the seasons haven’t effectively changed but we, and our environment, have.

In the West, we tend to lump the Chinese ‘Late Summer’ in with ‘Autumn’ and consider it all as the bit between Summer and Winter.  In 5-element terms this is Earth and Metal, which respectively equate to Spleen/Stomach and Lungs/Large Intestine in our TCM world.  And if we look at these two organs systems we find that they are closely linked in generating our post-natal Qi (the original being in the Kidneys).  Also, with their dislike respectively for Dampness and Dryness, it’s not surprising that we consider them together.

Thus as a season which has such a profound effect on Qi, we can see it is vital in the nourishment of all organs and its protection of the body from climatic changes.  And don’t think that because we live in centrally heated houses, travelling about in warm transport, and so on, that the seasons don’t affect us; millions of years of evolution have made sure that we’re at one with the seasonal changes, just as is a barometer, regardless of the fact that we don’t spend much time out in the weather.

I see it in my clinic daily – Dampness, although endemic in our society, really kicks in at this time of year, as does Wind Cold/Heat invasion of the Lungs (and don’t just blame the latter on kids going back to school!).  

Earth and Metal have particular qualities; Tong Chung-Shu, a philosopher who lived in the second century BCE described the Earth element’s role:

Earth occupies the centre, and is called the heavenly fructifier.  It is the assistor of Heaven.  Its power is abundant and good, and cannot be assigned to the affairs of a single season only.  Therefore among the five elements, and four seasons, earth embraces all.

So Earth ‘pulls together’ all the other times of year – it is a time to take stock, to position your plans (equivalent to nature’s seeds) correctly so they will be nourished through the Winter; a time for pause, reflection and a breathing space in which to consider your next move.  Now is the time to distinguish between the external and the internal, between the body and the mind, between the transient and the eternal, between the ego and the centre.  Have we wrapped ourselves with the peripherals of life, only to discard them like used clothes, or have we created seeds the fruits of which will endure forever?

Metal is associated with substance, strength, and structure.  Using this structure we can give our plans meaning and strength; yet we must be careful not to be too rigid in this – metal needs also to be flexible.

But returning to clinical practice, I am amazed how we, as a culture, swim through a sea of Damp.  We eat Damp foods often hurriedly, we don’t exercise our Lower Burner, we worry incessantly (not to mention frustrations causing the Liver to invade the Spleen), we don’t wear appropriate clothing, and so it goes on.  Dr Nick Read, in his book ‘Sick and Tired’ talks of modern day illnesses that medical science really doesn’t have an answer for:

Literally millions of people are racked by back pains, tormented by abdominal gripes, alarmed by ringing in the ears, tortured by headaches, exhausted with sleep deprivation, frustrated with constipation, debilitated with nausea or faintness or anorexia, overwhelmed by the burden of obesity, terrified by shortness of breath or palpitations or just too sick and too tired to cope. And while, for many people, such everyday illnesses constitute an inconvenience that does not seriously disrupt their lives, they should not be dismissed as trivial. Medically unexplained illnesses can undermine people's comfort, mobility, happiness and sheer quality of life as much and sometimes more than life-threatening conditions, such as diabetes or renal failure. 

Although I’m sure you could list many pathologies that would account for the above, as I read this I kept thinking ‘DAMP’.  We have a lot to do if we are make any headway against this quiet pandemic; and this is the time of year when we can strengthen our own (and others’) personal resources to combat it. 

One of the biggest issues concerning this at the moment is the worry and anxiety that people feel, stoked by the politicians and the media, over our economic future.  This over-thinking compromises our Spleen function and is a prime generator of Dampness, and the often concomitant attitude of not ’letting-go’ damages our Lungs.  Older people, many of whom relied on interest linked-linked pensions and interest from their savings for income, have seen their future threatened by recent economic events and it is they in general who are most prone to Damp and Phlegm related pathologies and Qi deficiencies.  How interesting it is to see how society’s changes have a direct effect on people’s health – and how sad.

If only we could put our worry aside – a recent Sunday Times report (13 Sep 09) reported that a drug that will wipe out troubling memories has just been developed; but a chemically induced fug doesn’t really seem to be the answer for any of life’s problems.  Maybe a little mind-training to be in the ‘present’, such as with T’ai Chi, would help; Jane Hope and Borin Van Loon in ‘Buddha for Beginners’ put it very nicely:

We are pre-occupied with the past, which has already happened, and we are pre-occupied about the future, which does not yet exist. We worry about what will happen and we think about various things that make us feel anxious, frustrated, passionate, angry, resentful, afraid. While we are so preoccupied, our awareness of the here-and-now slips by and we hardly notice its passing. We eat without tasting, we look without seeing and live without ever perceiving what is real.

Here it may be interesting to see how a couple of aspects of the above relate to a wider context.  Take the concept of ‘stuckness’ in body and mind, for instance, which results from a Spleen imbalance; and then link it to the ‘connectedness’ felt from well-balanced Lungs.  If you are ‘stuck’ to something, then you are ‘attached’ to it.  So to follow the mantra in T’ai Chi and Buddhist circles, etc, to ‘connect, not attach’ (both physically and mentally), then you will nourish both your Spleen and Lungs and greatly benefit the creation and maintenance of your Qi. 

So, in conclusion, this time of year is considered by the Daoists to be the most ‘present’ of the seasons in all of the physical, mental and spiritual terms.  It pulls all the other aspects of the year together and provides a balance that provides an awareness of, and an appropriateness to, life.  This living in the ‘now’, as manifest by the myriad importance of our breath, provides a connectedness for us both with the outside world and within ourselves.  In a balanced state, changes are not resisted and movement is unrestricted; when unbalanced blockages and accumulations in both the body and the mind/emotions will result.

Daverick Leggett in his ‘Recipes for Self-Healing’ expresses his thoughts as to how to nourish yourself appropriately during this time of year:

The Spleen loves touch. To receive bodywork, to cuddle friends and family, to touch oneself lovingly: all these are ways to strengthen the Spleen.   The Spleen loves to stretch. Other ways include learning how to fall, crawl and roll around on the ground. This playful approach reconnects with the earth.  In the touch-deprived, over-sedentary and ungrounded lifestyle typical of modern culture, the Spleen has a hard time. Of all the organs, the Spleen is the most commonly deficient.  Just as it is helpful to stretch and exercise the body, so it is helpful to train the mind. Learning study skills supports the Spleen's function of sifting and sorting information. Clearing out mental clutter, simplifying involvement with the paperwork of modern life, finding ways of working with the perpetually encroaching chaos: these are all ways of supporting the Spleen.

The Lung is nourished by breathing. The best way to amplify Lung energy is to take plenty of fresh air, develop the physical capacity of the lungs through exercise such as swimming, and to consciously bring awareness into the breath. The skin, as part of the Lung system, can be nourished by brushing.  Rubbing with a good cotton towel or scrubbing the skin with a brush will maintain the skin's health and support the immune system. Finally, the Lung's role as boundary-keeper may be metaphorically extended to the boundaries we keep in our own home. Well-maintained fences, sensible security, clean windows and a well-kept exterior are domestic expressions of Lung energy.

So, therefore, it seems that any exercise that involves touching, rubbing and heavy breathing would be good for you at this time of year; but draw the curtains over your clean windows first!.  Enjoy

Metta

Is Life a Venn Diagram?

I’m assuming you know what a Venn diagram is.  Essentially it is typically three circles which all overlap each other and is often used to denote the relative strength/size and degree of interaction of a number of components within a whole system.  Wikepedia gives the example:

Venn diagrams normally consist of overlapping circles. For instance, in a two-set Venn diagram, one circle may represent the group of all wooden objects, while another circle may represent the set of all tables. The overlapping area (intersection) would then represent the set of all wooden tables.

So it was some time ago I had cause to examine my life and the dynamics of its various components; I came to the conclusion that I could do this with a Venn diagram of  three overlapping circles, representing the following:

• ‘Turning the handle’  -  this is essentially all the things that go in to make the daily grind, such as going to work, washing the dishes, etc

• ‘Relationships’ – clearly this was where I interacted with other people – wife, children, parents, colleagues, friends and acquaintances etc

• ‘Me’ – my own personal space – my thing (meditation etc).

Now, my view was that a  balanced lifestyle meant that each of these circles should be the same size – ie. that I should ascribe to them equal importance.  And if one of them were to enlarge, then I should attempt to bring it back down so that they were all the same size – and hence lead a balanced existence.  That was the theory ………

At the time, I was working very hard at my (stressful) job and both my relationships and personal space were suffering; and this had been going on for some considerable time.  So I undertook to reduce the ‘turning the handle’ circle (by not working the hours, logging onto work email from home etc), and spend more time with the family.  But this then made me realise the crucial law of Venn  diagrams:

The longer you leave the priorities out of balance 

(maybe one circle being larger than the other two)

the less elastic the walls become

and the harder it is to redress the balance

I had gotten used to working the hours etc and found it extremely hard to change them – and (I pompously thought) the organisation I worked for would suffer if I didn’t bust a gut – then I was reminded of really how invaluable I was to the organisation by the old saying “put your hand in a bucket of water and, on removing it, look at the hole that it left”.  So I reduced the hours and, strangely enough, not only did no-one notice, but also my productivity actually went up!  I spent more time with my family and even had extra time to spend on MY pursuits.  So it worked.

This is not dissimilar to the constraints that any Project Manager will tell you that they have, namely:

And In Which Direction

Do you Think You're Headed?

Here we are. In the Summer ‘break’ from your studies, and an ideal time to take stock.  You may be between academic years, recently graduated, or even, on reading this, thinking of joining the course.  Whatever, do you ever stop and wonder in what direction you’re headed?

Well, here’s some musings ……

Generally speaking, as an acupuncturist, you need to know a number of things when you stick in a needle.  Broadly, these are:

• Location of the point
• Direction of flow of the channel
• How to manipulate the needle (even, tonify, reduce etc)

In vector mechanics, there is a similar concept that to know the state of a force, at any given time, you need to know:

• Where it starts from
• Where it’s going
• It’s strength

(often denoted by an arrow originating from the start point, with a direction and an arrow length which denotes its strength; for overall system balance all other forces, when added to the end of this arrow, need to end up at the start point - ie. a ‘closed system’ or a balanced set of forces – a metaphor for life!)

‘All very interesting’, I hear you say,

but what that got to do with the price of bread?

In Taiji, my teacher tells us that there need to be 3 basic and key qualities to define your "posture":

• Position
• Direction
• Proportion

Do you see any common threads here?  And isn’t this all about life, as we live it?  In other words, get these three things right and you live life in an ‘appropriate’ manner.  Let’s think about this in more detail:

·        Position (are you too far forward or back; are you stable, or ‘rooted’ before moving etc)

·        Direction ("where are you going?" - eg. as, for instance the martial sense, a push should be down the centreline, and not out to the side as applied – otherwise you just spin round like a top)

·        Proportion (hitting the note - not sharp or flat. But if you reach the note, then you must move from it otherwise you become vain and you resisting natural change). This is the most meditative of the 3 qualities

But there is another dimension to this, I would suggest.  And I was reminded of this recently, sat atop Malham Cove with a long drop below me - a bird flew past me, over the edge of the cliff, and didn’t fall to the ground (as I would surely have done if I’d moved much further in the same direction); one moment it was only feet above the ground, the next it was hundreds of feet above the ground.  And apart from maybe a correction due to a change in updraft, it didn’t change its ‘position’.

The point here is that this vector way of thinking is all very well, but we live in a wider environment. The effectiveness of sticking a needle in relies upon many other external factors other than your intention, and possibly not even the ones that seem obvious (some would say that the metal of the needle is superfluous and that Qi can be generated by thought and intention alone).

The bird that passed me was dependent, at that point, on the medium of air; only when it landed did its dependency change to that of the ground.  If I go canoeing, it may be above 18 inches or 18 fathoms of water; apart from some boundary drag or not, it doesn’t make a difference – until I capsize – then my position becomes largely dependant on the height of the seabed.

So we are dependant upon the nature of the environment we’re in (as a fish is dependent on water) and when that nature changes we likely find ourselves to be unstable.  By looking at your environment, therefore, you can see past the mechanical aspects of the day-to-day functions – for instance, the likely development of the economic climate over the next few years should inform the position, direction and proportion of anything that you do now.

But as current or prospective students, perhaps ‘Direction’ is something you should concentrate on – remember it isn’t necessarily linear, it can be in all directions at one; the Sun giving off its rays, ripples from a stone dropped in a stream or the Taoist meditative practice of breathing into the Tan Tien are examples of this.  So the ‘direction’ you choose can be anything – but it’s not a bad idea for you to have a clear view of what it is so that you have at least an inkling of whether you’ve ended up where you hoped you would.  Those of us who have been in practice for a number of years would maybe argue that our direction has changed markedly since the heady years of being at the NCoA.

or you could take the Zen route and leave it up to Karma but that, in itself, is a direction:

“He knows not where he’s going

for the ocean will decide.

It’s not the destination,

but the glory of the ride”

One of my more elderly clients commented recently that she would prefer to “be diagnosed by Western medicine and treated by Eastern Medicine”.  Clearly she had her direction sorted out!

 Metta

The Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve

I recently tuned into Channel 4’s “Inside Nature’s Giants” because I was interested in how different species work, albeit the discussion and dissection of the Animal (as it happened it was a giraffe) was very much along western medical science lines.  As a bonus, I was also interested because Richard Dawkins featured prominently and he’s always good for a laugh – and he didn’t disappoint!

Coming out of this programme was a wonderful piece of scientific argument – it goes something like this:

“Animals have certain bits, the result of millions of years’ of evolution, for which man can’t find a reason or purpose.  Ergo, nature has made a mistake”. 

How arrogant is it that man, in his wisdom, believes that he knows better than the whole evolutionary cycle?

In particular, the programme highlighted the recurrent laryngeal nerve – what one commentator described as an ‘evolutionary enigma’;  like you, most probably, I’d never heard of this until the programme but the discussion of it was mindblowing.  This nerve essentially connects the brainstem to the larynx (voice box), thus controlling muscles that make sound, as well as assisting breathing and swallowing.  But, in both man and giraffes as it turns out, instead of going straight there it actually goes from the brain down to the thorax, wraps itself around the blood vessels of the heart and rises again to the throat.  Dawkins calls this an “historical legacy” and  “not an intelligent design”.  Because it doesn’t go straight from the brain to the larynx, a matter of a couple of inches, it is therefore “not sensible” and that “evolution has no foresight”.  It was described as a “ridiculous detour” and that “no engineer would have made such a mistake” (all the above quotes are straight from the programme).

Thus man (in the shape of Dawkins) deduces that these “imperfections” are therefore “useless” and are purely “accidents of history”.

Instead of taking this deductive view (by inferring particular instances from a general law – that the laryngeal nerve is simply there to activate the muscles of the larynx), should we not approach it inductively (by inferring a general law from particular instances – that at least man and giraffe have it running recurrently)?  Thus maybe there is a good reason for nature to have routed the nerve as it has done, a reason we have yet to work out?  This means we accept that something can exist even though ‘science’ is unable to explain it – a heresy to scientists, but common sense to the less arrogant.

So is the voicebox linked to the Heart? We know that in time of great alarm or apprehensiveness, one can ‘have one's heart - in one's mouth’ but from a TCM viewpoint, we know that the Heart ‘opens into the tongue’.  Both "the tongue is the sprout of the Heart " and "the tongue is the mirror of the Heart" are common expressions when referring to this function.  Disharmonies of the Heart may lead to disturbances such as a lack of speech or stuttering and incoherent speech.  So is it unreasonable that the laryngeal nerve should pass by the heart on its way to the voicebox?  No, it’s perfectly reasonable and not a ‘ridiculous detour’ as the scientists would have it.

And isn’t a wonderful paradox that the very mechanism by which Richard Dawkins can speak with such emotion and eloquence is the one that he labels ‘useless’ – maybe in his case it is!

Metta

Life

As a keen canoeist of wild water in the past, I can fully appreciate that the Tao, the T’ai Chi and hence all life can be likened to water.  The T’ai Chi is ‘like a great river rolling on unceasingly’ (T’ai Chi Classics), ‘returning’ as is the only motion in the Tao (Tao te Ching Chap 40).

So it is not surprising that the Zen master, Shunryu Suzuki (‘Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind’) likens life to a waterfall that temporarily interrupts the smooth flow of our ongoing being.  In a waterfall, he opines, “water comes down like a curtain thrown from the top of the mountain”.  He continues, “It takes time, you know, a long time, for the water finally to reach the bottom of the waterfall. And it seems to me that our human life may be like this. We have many difficult experiences in our life. But at the same time, I thought, the water was not originally separated, but was one whole river.”

Richard Reoch’s take on this (‘Dying Well’) is that “… before birth and after death we are like the water of the flowing river. It is only after birth that we experience this sense of separateness, of difficulty and all our feelings. Not realizing that we are still one with the river, we have great fear.  But at the bottom of the waterfall, at the end of its journey, the turbulent water returns to its original oneness with the river and continues its inexorable movement to the sea.”

So we can see that our life is like a waterfall; some of our journeys last longer than others each with its own turbulence and difficulty.  But the consolation is that we all return to the unceasing river of the Tao.  

For the last word we return to Suzuki:

NIRVANA, THE WATERFALL

 "Our life and death are the same thing.

When we realize this fact,

we have no fear of death anymore,

nor actual difficulty in our life."

Metta