The Season of Renewal

“
Everything happens in its own time. ”

At the end of last year, I returned from my latest trip to New Mexico. Unlike previous trips to Navajo lands, this time I left feeling demoralized. The message I received was, “Renewal.” I’d been told my ways had become routine and I needed to relearn and renew how I practiced medicine. It was a difficult message to accept. A symphony of confusion, shame and anger arose to meet me and instinctively I wanted to run and hide. But I know strong medicine can be bitter so I stayed put with all the noise and fight of a million voices inside me.

Back home, I went to work to figure out what Renewal was supposed to mean. Perhaps I’d become too philosophical about medicine and just needed to embody physical health - quit coffee, exercise more, renew my meditation and qigong practices. Aha, I thought, that’s it. I called my mentor, Justice Yazzie, and excitedly told him I had it all figured out. He listened quietly as I spoke. Maybe too quietly because at some point, I got the feeling that I was way off base. When he spoke, I felt my cheeks getting warm with his cautionary response “It’s not something to figure out, he said. It’s going to take you many many more years to begin to understand what was said to you. Just keep doing what you are doing. You are so young in your practice and only beginning to understand things.” Almost 20 years in practice, I thought, and just beginning?!

Patience is not a strength of mine. I want to figure everything out now. Around that time, my father fell seriously ill and my attention was redirected to him. I gave him acupuncture and herbs. Fall is the season of letting go and I contemplated the possibility that soon my father would drop away like a fall leaf. The cool crisp grief that lingers in the autumn air felt particularly acute. As fall became winter, I had a strong urge for hibernation. Winter is typically the season of deep contemplation, but I didn’t possess that kind of energy. I ate a lot, bundled up and slept. TIme went by. When the Lunar New Year approached, I felt a stirring. Incubating thoughts and ideas pushing to break ground. Plans for BCA’s pop-up clinic in New Mexico took shape gradually but steadily.

Today as I prepared  a self-care handout for Spring, a line caught my eye, “Spring is the season of Renewal.” Renewal… I hadn’t thought of that word since Fall. All the internal turmoil I went through at that time feels like a distant memory. And it makes me laugh inside. The way I fight with myself until I tire myself out, get distracted and then the thing I was trying so hard to grasp emerges as an ungraspable thing--as Life itself. Like when I was in first grade, I wanted so bad to be big like the 6 graders. I wanted to grow faster. For a time, I faked it and acted like my version of what a 6 grader acts like. Of course, it was hard to keep that up, I got distracted and one day I was a 6 grader.

So, what is Renewal? In Chinese medicine, the time of Renewal is Spring - emerging energy and expression, light and lightness. Spring (renewal) comes from Winter (rest) comes from Fall (letting go). Life is always in some stage of change and transition and there aren’t any short cuts. Everything happens in its own time. Now I feel inspired and lifted by Renewal, despite or because of the confusion and resistance that initially knocked me off my feet in New Mexico. Back then I was pleading, “I don’t know what I don’t know!” Then, sometime later in the ceremony, the medicine man responded, “She doesn’t know what she does know.”Medicine is so mysterious and never before have I realized that indeed, I am just a babe.

In Health & Community, 

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,