Luke, I sense a disturbance in the force...

Yesterday I completed my exit interview for my company and today I got my final check and paperwork concluding my relationship with them.

Today I volunteered at the Cherry Blossom festival open house at my school and helped in handing out horoscopes, herbal teas, assisting with body work realignment exercises, and helped out in t-shirt and produce sales.

Interspersed in these events where voicemails calls from my grandmother saying that she misses me, and calls from my mom informing me about a family member's surgery, and a text message from a friend stating that she dreamt that I was returning home to visit her.

Amongst these random events, three occurrences stood out amongst the most perplexing to my mental process of reconciling the great changes I've put myself into and my decision process about the future.

A visit with a re-invented friend...

I was contacted earlier in the week by a friend who was to be in Hawaii studying with a master of a lineage of Kahuna / Hawaiian Energetics down in Captain Cook. She invited me to spend Friday with her and her teacher. It was great to meet with them and escape from my routine to enter into a life so different and yet so familiar as that which my friend and her teacher are weaving separately and together in their personal journeys and practices of healing the world and themselves. The subject of the content of the discussions may be for another post, but suffice it to say - I am deeply thankful for the time we spent together and I am honored to have been invited to spend time with them.

Carol - thank you for you kind words, your advice, and your compassionate understanding - my dear kaikuahine and fellow traveller. May your stone arranging be happily thwarted by random acts of self-abandon!

No Regrets. Live! Live!! Live!!!

An email from my first Acupuncturist...

I had emailed Jeremy, my Acupuncturist friend from back in Maryland who inspired me to this work, and several weeks ago asking him to share his thoughts on his Tai Sophia experience. He give me some interesting things to think about including contact information for a friend who is attending the school Five Element school in Colorado which I was looking at, because Tai Sophia will not accept me without my bachelors. As many of you know, I've been terribly conflicted as to whether I am in the right place, studying the right thing, whether I should even be here on this island, or whether I should return home.

I know switching to Tai Sophia will not solve all my problems. Neither will returning home. There are fundamentals needs that that returning home would satisfy, and when compared with what I am actually learning here, Tai Sophia would not be able to compete with my apprenticeship with my Sensei. There are opportunities here which are unique and would not be replaceable - my Sensei who studied along side Kiiko Matsumoto in New England, and often collaborates on projects with Kiiko,and Shudo Denmei - two gods of the Japanese acupuncture world.

If I were to leave, I would be giving up an opportunity of a lifetime as a result of the pain and insecurity I am experiencing about my being here. And what would it be replaced with? Study of an unfulfilling bachelors degree for 2 years in order to attend Tai Sophia, or forging into another unknown community of Boulder, CO in order to pursue my desire of the Five Element philosophy.

Jeremy suggested I think about what is it that I really want to achieve, and that in many ways Tai Sophia provided him the means to attain the professional certificate he needed in order to pursue and practice several other healing modalities. A conversation with my roommates today further stressed the need to answer this question for myself.

What I Need, v.s. What I Want...

What I need is some peace in my life about these things. I do not necessarily need the right answer - for there may not be an answer in any school at all. What brings me a lack of philosophical fulfillment in TCM is the lack of viewing the person holistically, which I believe Five Element philosophy does.

I know that what I wish to work with the most is the Shen (the Spirit-Mind), for I believe and find that what makes any modality truly effective is the psychoemotional results that it produces in the present regardless of whatever underlying pattern, or physical problem a patient is manifesting. I.e, can you transform the universe an individual is experiencing surrounding their condition in the present moment, and assist their emotional healing by transforming the emotional stuckness they may be feeling through changing the energetic shift in their body? Ofcourse, the flip-side is also true. Healing the person's psychoemotional body is only one aspect of the healing. If you heal and do not know how to cure the underlying disease, the psychological transformation is the only result you have attained during your healing, and the physical healing with be slower to come.

My experience however is - if you heal the Shen, you heal the body. I've not seen evidence that the opposite is true. A person may be terminal, and at this point, that which needs healing is the Shen, and not the body.

A person can have a perfectly healthy body and still live in ignorance to the problems in their life being a disease pattern in itself - their dysfunctional attachments, their anger, their jealousy, their lust, their powerlessness, their greed, their despondency, their despair, their lack of meaning and purpose, their lack of willpower, their guilt, etc. The Chinese believe that normal emotional patterns are processed through the heart, but when the heart is stressed, these e-motions (or energy motions) spill out of the heart and affect specific organs - Anger, the Liver, Sadness and Grief, the Lungs, etc. It is normal for the Shen to process all of these emotions on a daily basis - it is the stuckness of these patterns that eventually show up physiologically. Similarly, physiological diseases of organs, or their physical compression due to improper alignment and lifestyle will generate the emotional correspondences reciprocally.

You can fix the body, but if you cannot heal the Shen, the body will revert back into the disease pattern or will simply not release the disease pattern, in order to perpetuate the sickness within the Shen.

But people generally do not come to an acupuncturist because they feel a little down about their life, feel a sense of lack of fulfillment, or simply are a little tired, and down and out. They come when they have problems that noone else seems to know how to fix. It is for this reasoning why a healer must know how to heal both Shen and Body.

The healing of the Shen is what attracts me to Five Element, and I know I am not getting that training here. With Five Element, perhaps I cannot cure their pain completely, but I can transform how they are about their disease. Or on the flip side, perhaps I can heal their body, but they're still am angry, melancholic. What good is that? I've just given them a body which is healthier so that they can continue to be a stronger and more resilient angry melancholic? Some have said that Five Element is excellent at healing emotions, but does not do a good job of dealing with acute conditions. This may indeed be true - as the focus is Shen based.

Perhaps what I seek is also beyond the scope of Tai Sophia's training. While I also seek the knowledge and tools to cure the underlying pattern, what I seek is to heal the person, and not just heal the disease the person is manifesting - to heal their confusion, to heal their sadness, their grief, their melancholy, their anger, their powerlessness, their helplessness, their many facetted emotional pains. What I seek is the ability to recognize and heal all of those things in myself.

I am learning tools at TCM, and especially from my Sensei that are phenomenal in how they handle pain management and relief through addressing the pattern clinically, practically, and efficiently. They heal the disease quickly and efficiently while also handling all presenting physical symptoms. The healing of the patient with truly chronic emotional issues, however, takes much much longer, or is staved off from deteriorating further. To date, I have not seen these conditions primarily healed with any acupuncture modality other than Five Element.

Sensei has stated, and other teachers at my TCM school have stated "You are not a psychiatrist. You are not qualified to psychologize someone and be their therapist or psychiatrist. You refer out for that, and help shift their emotions through acupuncture therapeutics as best you can based on how the pattern presents itself". I agree and disagree with this. I know what the healing presence, the healing touch, and the art of listening, and art of speaking are capable of doing! They are the magic of the work of transforming a person's experience of being alive. This is the very work that the Landmark Forum taught me is possible. It is also the very work that psychoemotional healing such as that experienced through Reiki is possible! I've seen it, I've felt it, I know it exists. I crave it because my disease patterns present themselves primarily through the Shen - through my life long battle with depression.

Perhaps this cannot be taught, and develops only with age. But then I hear the same TCM teacher say "Boy can those Five Element people pick out constitutional imbalance and address the emotional pattern.". Thats what I'm talking about!

My experience in clinic is so limited thus far, that I'm not even qualified to make these conclusions or assertions - but this is the intellectual fight I am fighting right now to win the battle in my own mind.

Patience is a possible for those who do not suffer, and a virtue of those who do.

Can my own emotional healing wait 4, 6, 10 years? Will what I learn here teach me how to heal myself? Will I know how to see the complex patterns of the Shen within this education, and learn how to flow with the seasons of change that Five Element philosophy embraces and embodies in its practitioners?

I can always study at a Five Element school after finishing my work here - this is true, but what I need is healing in the present, and assurance that my future will contain therein the power to heal emotions for myself and for others for that is what I need most of all. I live in confusion, information overload, and in depression. My yearning for Five Element is out of hope that that modality offers some peace. Perhaps its an illusion I have created out of anger, grief and frustration at my situation. The idea of quitting my life here and pursuing Five Element now instead of many years down the line is the only possibility I have seen thus far to control my own destiny in my healing.

In terms of community and support here - I do not have that, neither am I surrounded by people of like mind and sensitivity to these kinds of things. In many ways I feel like the island is testing me to a point of really trying to kick me off. And there are many days where I feel like an island adrift in a world that is not my world, a school that is not my school, and a philosophy that is not my philosophy, and modalities that do not heal what I suffer from.

The advice I am getting is to give this place a year, and to stay strong. I'm fresh out of that, so I'm gonna have to fake it till I make it, I suppose, and wait until an answer to my prayers for healing comes from heaven. Others have said, will say, and I have said in the past - if you want a miracle for yourself, you have to go out and get it yourself, rather than sitting and waiting, inert, waiting for lightning to strike you. Be the master of your destiny, take responsibility, and take action! It is through this lens that I can justify my lack of patience about this school, this program, and this life - and justify leaving, and leaving quickly to in pursuit of the healing of my spirit, and the tools to heal the spirits of others.

I found a short article on the differences between TCM and Five Element which sums up the philosophical differences. This is another good resource site which explains Five Element theoretical principles and therapeutics.

Immediate Wants...

Immediately I know I want rest, peace, silence, reassurance, and nurture. I do not know whether I will find what I want at Tai Sophia. I am therefore reserved about quitting this program to study a bachelors for 2 years on a very very strong hunch just so that I can go to Tai Sophia. I also know that the school in Colorado is small, and it would be yet another adjustment. Further, I know that I will not have the opportunity to learn how I'm learning from my Sensei in private clinic as I am learning here. I will be an excellent acupuncturist when I leave her clinic. That I know. I will be able to fix people's diseases problems from day one. I believe her.

After years of taxing my spleen with work, and months of dealing with grief, and sadness, and adding more spleeny work with starting school, I've driven myself into a state of exhaustion that I'm managing with some herbs, but only so far as preventing the bouts of spontaneous crying, and dyspnea. I hope to regulate myself and get the mental and emotional rest I need which I know I did not have between switching from my career to this field. My mind is not at peace, and after leaving my friends, family, career, and home, alas, I comfort myself with truisms of knowing that I'm human, this too shall pass, and all I need to do is find my still point amongst the chaos. I had that skill once, with time, it will return - but I'm not sure that it will as a result of continued mental gyrations, and certainly it seems it will not return soon if these gyrations continue.

When divining on the question of whether this is the place I should be, or whether my path lies elsewhere, the I Ching speaks "A swan lands on a tree, but lands on the wrong branch. Its position is not correct, but there is no fault."

I Am...

Exhausted
Trapped
Confused
Angry
Frustrated
Defeated
Resigned
Hungry

What Do I want?

To have my cake and eat it too
To know all the answers
To be home with my friends and family
Infallibility
Wisdom
To hear and sing classical music
To see the fall colors
To see deciduous forests
Indian food

What Do I need?

Reassurance
Faith
Confidence
Strength
Sleep
Quiet
Peace
Safety
Security
Nurture
Tranquility
Abundance
Patience
Fulfillment
Love
Joy

And probably therapy.