This month we look into understandings and practices to uphold our physiological health in order to see clearly and befriend our mind—this feels important right now.
With so many inputs entering our mental landscape, together we’ll turn toward teachings and practices to bring us closer to a sense of equanimity in the body.
Helen Frankenthaler, Western Roadmap, 1991.
Each post this month will be instructive, informative and brief. My hope is that the explorations make sense to your body, open your mind, and bring some ease.
Paid subscribers, we meet tomorrow, Wednesday May 7th, at 12pm Eastern: scroll down to find our link at the bottom of this post.
Before we begin, tomorrow is your last chance for Yoga, Power, and Spirit. Uniting the traditions of yoga and shamanism, both intellectually and in practice, this course with Alberto Villoldo and me brings you forty-nine days of video teachings with both of us, several yoga sequences, meditations with me, a beautiful guide and other gifts from Alberto, all crafted to support your practice and studies.
Early reviews of the course are full of thankfulness from both students and teachers, citing efficacy and resonance, both for spiritual formation and professional offerings.
Explore with us—the course closes tomorrow.
For a touch of context:
Receiving almost-weekly acupuncture for more than half my life, still to this day, I always thought I’d attend acupuncture school in my fifties, once my son left for college. He’s gone, but two years ago, chaplaincy studies called to me. Overall, the teachings of Buddhism and Zen have me in thrall, the reading, writing, mostly the sitting. So I’m not in acupuncture school, at least not yet.
Remaining a humble student to TCM’s holistic approach regarding the sustenance of our well-being, I’ve asked Ann Cecil-Sterman to answer three questions for us this week, author of Advanced Acupuncture, required text in many acupuncture schools, derived from Ann’s decades of clinical practice. Her second and third books, The Art of Pulse Diagnosis, and Tongue Diagnosis are in use on five continents. Ann was a senior clinic supervisor at the school of acupuncture founded by Dr. Yuen in NYC, one of the few graduates from Dr. Yuen’s school. She’s also a painter, sometimes tours as a flutist with Philip Glass (!), living in NYC with her husband and their two teenagers.
Turning our attention to Ann to open this month, seeking answers to my brief inquiries regarding our experience of vibrant health. I had many questions based on my reading of her compelling book Becoming Healthy, Staying Healthy; narrowed down to three for today.
EB: Through what lens shall we look at disease and symptoms? Seems so many are falling ill, experiencing chronic conditions.
ACS: Symptoms, and later, diseases, are simply responses initiated by the body in a quest to defend the internal organs from pathogenic factors.
In our culture we view illness as being evidence that the body is acting in error, that it’s faulty or mistaken. But the body doesn’t make mistakes.
The study of TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) is the study of the myriad ways in which the body creates symptoms, or diseases, to stall or thwart the movement of pathogens to the internal organs. (Maybe re-read that sentence. -E)
What we are seeing is a chess play: you do X and the body must do Y to counter X’s negative influence. For example, the body will create arthritis in the presence of inflammatory assaults, in lieu of a terminal disease.
The way to avoid disease is to keep the body ready to meet any challenge… which doesn’t mean continually, artificially stimulating the immune system, a habit in our culture. Readiness comes with our daily choices, to keep the body profoundly hydrated by eating a lot of wet food: soups, stews, porridges, all of which are nourishing rather than flushing.
EB: What role does calibration or balance play?
ACS: To be calibrated, balanced, is to be in constant awareness of, and respect for, the body’s instruction. The body knows exactly what it needs, but as a culture, we’re not taught to cultivate that kind of listening.
Often, the messages the body conveys are ignored. We ignore messages to rest, to eat, to stop eating, to use the bathroom, to go for a walk to make art, read, and so on. When messages are chronically ignored, the body is forced to compensate and create a symptom, often involving discomfort or pain, and sometimes chronic.
Our usual response is eventually to take a drug to suppress that response, or the secondary responses. For example, a person who repeatedly delays urination will have urinary tract infections over time, and might end up taking many courses of antibiotics, deeming the body in error, when the body has simply responded appropriately, trying to burn up the accumulated toxins.
EB: Seems we are ignoring our innate capacity to heal as a SOCIETY; how can we shift that?
ACS: Our attachment to thoughts and beliefs needs to be addressed. Beliefs are always compounded by the mind. This attachment to thoughts keeps us stagnant, internally and externally. Which stops the body (the society) from doing what it does naturally—to move in the direction of healing.
The cornerstone of this philosophy of medicine is this:
Undisciplined responses to thoughts are strong emotions. And if these emotions are suppressed in the body rather than expressed, they create inflammation, ultimately leading to chronic degenerative diseases.
We can understand the direct connection between these principles and the channels within the body. Our consistent work is to keep the mind clear, in order to keep energy moving vibrantly through the system.
Dear reader: share with us so we can learn together:
+What messages do you typically ignore (I ignore the loo and the lunch, too often)?
+What do you notice needs to be expressed? Can you tie this to any inflammation in your body?
+How are keeping energy moving these days?
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