Another East/West Difference

As a westerner who believes that talk therapy can be extremely useful to "turn the light on in the darkened soul" I find myself, as an acupuncturist, at odds with the modality that permits clients to perseverate on their illness, repeating the damage done to them in the past and re-living it with each telling.

The client who undergoes therapy and somehow finds himself "stuck" in the past ("My family is to blame for how I turned out"; "I can't be different because of what happened to me," etc.) often wants to share with me the etiology of their suffering. While it's interesting from a human-to-human, compassionate point of view, as an acupuncturist I find that repeating the story of their hurts is NOT useful in my treatment room since my work is geared toward helping them discover their own potential and finding ways to change their lives and their emotional experiences.

Imagine a person on a clear, linear trajectory that gets "bumped" off his/her path by a life event. Abuse: bump!--off target. Hurt or loss: bump!--jolted off again. By now, the person is "lost" and desperately trying to be back on the original path to the divine. With each verbal repetition of the events, especially without some kind of resolution in the immediate telling, then the body experiences the assault or loss as having occurred AGAIN! If the telling happens often, the body believes it to be true NOW just as much as it was true THEN. But NOW is not "THEN": it may be 20 years later, and the person isn't moving on as an adult, but is re-living "past-life" again and again. Energetically, that's STUCK!!

As an acupuncturist, if I permit the client to tell, re-tell, and essentially re-live it all, I am permitting illness to deepen right in front of me. I must stop the conversation, AND I have to look for a healthy moment in which to needle---to ask the body to find its way BACK to the divine path that the universe intended. I have to help the client find ANOTHER WAY. I feel that if I put the needle in while the patient is living in the past (during the re-telling) I am anchoring the past into his/her body.

I expect to encounter anger, sadness, grief and all the other emotions. Those are normal and, believe it or not, fleeting and ephemeral. To "solidify" them with a STORY about the past-- a time that does not exist anymore-- is to ask the body to return to that time and place and re-experience it. Acupuncture asks the body to find it's way back to the ideal, to health, to a path of destiny where the client isn't stuck, but is moving toward their future in a balanced, easy way.

This is really the meaning behind the title of this blog: moving the qi. Not "getting stuck." (That was an acupuncture joke.)