Healing the Small Self

“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,

*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

We're still in Hibernation

“Winter is a time of resting and returning, a time of quiet and sleep, moving slowly and nourishing deeply. ”

The New Year arrives in winter, when the Earth is incubating, quiet and still. Frozen in some places. Naked trees, wetness, cold. Night stretches her arms further into the morning while she pulls up her darkness and twinkling toes even before the first smells of dinner. Plants and animals are slowing down and going inward, lying dormant, hibernating and conserving energy until warmth returns. Can you feel winter?

In our modern world, it’s hard to feel deep into winter--to touch the silence through the noise. Winter beckons us to slow down as the Earth does. Be still, go deep. Travel into our darkness and re-evaluate, re-consider and re-member who we are. It’s a valuable time to reconnect to Nature by reconnecting to ourselves and to reconnect to ourselves by reconnecting to Nature.

Nature is the Creator and Sustainer of life on Earth, some four billion years old. There is infinite and incomprehensible wisdom in Her. Our bodies, grown and nurtured from the Earth - food and water, air and light - are responsive to the Earth. Our bodies are Nature herself. We are Nature and so when winter comes, we are winter.

Seasons are not just happening outside of us, they are happening inside of us as well. When cold comes, where is it? When dark comes, where is it? The extra layer we put on, the extra hour  we wish to sleep, the extra helping of lasagna that calls to us is winter happening inside us. The deep reflections on life and death, the melancholia and memory of departed ones, the dimming of lights and the urge to curl up in a corner with a book is winter happening inside us.

I have patients who come to me during this season worried about how they feel. They tell me they want to stay in bed all day, they don’t want to hit the gym, they want to sleep, they feel slow and sluggish. They tell me they feel melancholy and brooding. They want me to fix it. They want to be energetic, motivated, light and bright. But I can’t fix winter. I tell them maybe it’s ok to take it slow. Maybe it’s okay to stay with the dark. Maybe it’s okay to go to bed early. Maybe it’s okay to think about things deeply. Maybe what we feel is a healthy connection with Nature and maybe it’s good to respect that feeling rather than to try to override it.

We can respect winter’s cold and dark by respecting our own body’s desire for warmth and rest.  We can respect winter’s quiet by giving room for our own quiet contemplation. We can respect Nature’s unconditional and untiring support of us by supporting and nourishing our own bodies, the Earth and one another. In this way, we learn how to live with Nature and we can learn how to live as Nature.

Seasons reflect time. Not linear, but divinely circular. With activity comes rest. Winter is a time of resting and returning, a time of quiet and sleep, moving slowly and nourishing deeply.

Winter is a time for careful contemplation, not linear but poetic, like dreaming. To meditate with our entire being our oneness with Nature and to reconnect with the wisdom of existence. Then when Spring comes, we will naturally emerge to meet the warmth and we can blossom as Spring.

In Health and Community, 

Journey Back to New Mexico

“Just like Love, Medicine is a force. ”

Deep medicine is almost always unexpected. It shakes you from your expectations and desire to control. It asks you to surrender the things that may have made you sick to begin with. To surrender doubt, fear and limited notions of self and others.

Last month, I found myself in New Mexico, the place I received Native medicine a year ago. It was a medicine that cured me of my persistent belief in my sense of separation. Since then, I can barely remember what it was like to have believed that I am separate and alone, like trying to remember the feeling of believing in Santa Claus.

This time, I returned to support a friend with an advanced cancer diagnosis. Along with her daughter, we arrived to New Mexico in search of deep medicine and healing. At midday, we were summoned to the ceremony. The medicine man and his wife arrived in overalls, dusty from working in the fields. He explained they were busy and could only fit us between moving cattle and running errands. I was taken aback. The container I expected was something akin to my last journey--a blanket of ancient darkness, a community of medicine holders, instruments, food, formal dress, ritual. By comparison, this seemed more like a hasty lunch break.

I felt my doubt and concern rise up. I glanced over at my friend, wondering how she was taking everything in. We had been informed that each ceremony was unique and tailored to the needs of the patient, but this was so far from the experience I had described to my friend-- literally and figuratively  the difference between night and day.

The sun was shining and the wind was blowing hard. We held on to our skirts as we entered the hogan. After we settled down into our seats, the medicine man began to speak. I could feel a change in my awareness, as if I’d stepped through a portal to another dimension. A healing dimension that is always accessible, but can only be summoned by one who understands its power and who inhabits it with reverence and sincerity. The dimension of Sacred present time, Nature, Truth, Love and the honoring of invisible Forces.

In that Sacred place, I experienced the unraveling of my friend’s story. The medicine man helped her search for the right thread to tug on so the story of the cancer was revealed and laid bare, a thread that connected her ancestors, her mother, her daughter and herself. Sitting next to her daughter, I could feel the power of the medicine man’s words enter her and leave her through tears--connecting dots, turning on lights, affirming and supporting. I felt his words reach back to my own stories of my own life and realized deep medicine connects all of us in healing.

I know enough about Medicine to know it comes in many different forms. But until then, I didn’t really understand Medicine is not a form. Just like Love, Medicine is a force. And like Love, the best response to such a force is to take it in and let it nourish us. The form that the force of medicine takes reflects the culture. In a society that is disconnected from Nature, from Spirit, from Femininity, from Ancestors, medicine will be disconnected, sterile, aggressive, perfunctory and robotic. In a culture that honors all of Life, Nature and the Feminine, Medicine will call upon these powerful forces to reconnect us to Wholeness in a seemingly mysterious way.

In Health and Community,