“All diseases are rooted in the spirit.”
--Chapter 8, The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic, Spiritual Pivot, 5th century BCE
This quote forms the foundation of Chinese medicine and how I think about disease and health. Our soul/ling has a curriculum in this life, and the living energy of the spirit/shen is charged with conveying that destiny/ming. In this way, illness can be seen as an opportunity to return to full wellness. The consciousness that contributes to disease is not the same consciousness that supports healing, says my teacher Jeffrey Yuen. Transformation requires a new sensibility, a new awareness, a new state of mind.
Our emotions, thoughts, beliefs and attitudes are essential components of this new state of mind. I support the evolution of your psyche by treating you as a whole person who is dynamically influenced over time by: a lifetime of experiences, your relationship to your self, individual anatomy and physiology, family lineage, society, history, place, environment and your sense of place in the world. This approach is relevant to our emotional state and to the fields of genetics, epigenetics, intergenerational trauma and inherited diseases.
I was really skeptical. I came to the conclusion that there are things that they don’t teach us in engineering school, and acupuncture is one of them. I can’t figure out how it works. I know that there’s a basis in thousands of years of Chinese history, but I don’t try to understand it. The bottom line here is that I feel a whole lot better.
