Читать книгу The Mad Monk Manifesto - Yun Rou - Страница 13
ОглавлениеThe seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes launched centuries of confusion about neuroanatomy and the reality of material existence with the famous dictum: “I think, therefore I am.” Daoist experience instantiates a contravening notion, namely that all distinctions between body and mind are specious. Some years ago, I attended a traveling exhibit called “BODIES: The Exhibition,” which revealed human structures in their full glory through the injection of liquid plastics that filled up and fleshed out all our systems. Perhaps the most startling revelation of the exhibit was the fact that the nervous system is not merely the brain and spinal cord, but rather, a vast, jellyfish-like array of tissue that pervades us from top to bottom, innervating our organs, including our digestive tract—where a second brain, the size of a cat, gives us our so-called “gut feelings”—as well as the skin on the very tips of our fingers and toes.
Beyond anatomy, proof that the brain and body are inextricably interdigitated comes from both anecdotes and experiments that demonstrate the mortal effects of either fearing or wishing for impending death. Most recently, experiments in the field of epigenetics—beginning by stressing colonies of bacteria and progressing to examining changes in human DNA pursuant to various forms of stress—illustrate definitively that our emotions play a key part in gene expression, turning up and down the “volume” on the expression of genetic characteristics, ranging from a predisposition to cancer to the course of puberty and other developmental changes. Given the inseparability of the body and mind, the Daoist axiom that heightened consciousness and increased awareness depend upon a strong body makes perfect sense.
The body may or may not be the temple of the soul, but we completely rely upon it either way. In the Daoist ideal, a healthy body is relaxed, soft, pliable, and yielding. Like a palm tree bending in a storm, our softness allows us to endure life’s harsh winds and strong storms. There are passages in Laozi’s Daodejing that exhort us not only to recover the simple innocence of childhood but also to find in adult life the physical suppleness we had as infants, when our limbs could be led, naturally and without training, into postures to rival any yogini’s. In contrast to a palm tree, an oak can grow a fine and showy canopy but, by virtue of being rigid, will snap when assailed by weather or even by climbing children.
Once the body is relaxed, we can begin to rectify it. Rectification of the body means setting things straight by implementing new and positive changes. We fix our posture, straighten our spine, and treat physical inflammation or dysfunction primarily with diet and exercise. We integrate the body from hand to foot, meaning that any work done with our hands while standing is subtly felt in every part of the body, all the way to the feet. We gain that sensitivity through relaxation, meditation, and the cultivation of simple habits, like moving back as far as possible in our chair while sitting, so as to work the abdominal muscles that give us the strength to maintain this position.
Our next step is to rectify the mind. This means inspecting our habits, our preconceptions, tendencies, foibles, beliefs, and whatever limitations we unnecessarily accept. By carefully considering so much of what we all take for granted, we move off the stultifying platform of certainty and comfort and into the realm of healthy questioning and unease. This is a healthy place, despite the challenges, and good prescriptions naturally arise from dwelling in it.
The magnificent Daoist sage, Zhuangzi, is generally believed to have lived during the fourth century BC. His short stories, together comprising one of the earliest works of Asian literature, are well known to every Chinese schoolchild. In one of the most famous passages of Eastern philosophy, he meets a friend at an inn for tea and recounts a dream in which he was a butterfly zooming across the landscape, flapping his beautiful wings and enjoying the power, freedom, and perspective of flight. He tells his friend he isn’t entirely sure whether he is a man who has just dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who is now dreaming he is a man.
This preoccupation with identity—the nature of individual existence and the rectification of the self—is a hallmark of Daoism. Indeed, the great preponderance of Daoist practice is focused on the self—not in a narcissistic way, but rather in pursuit of consciousness, service, and immortal Dao running through all that is. This practice is done primarily through physical and meditative exercises, which expand the mind, sharpen the senses, and increase longevity. There are also rituals, including chants, arcane sexual practices, and reading of the classics, all of which encourage the light of truth to enter even the darkest corners of the mind.
I knew quite a few exercises but not so many rituals, at least until the day I became a monk. On that day, South China steamed. The temple, once a rural property but now lodged squarely in the middle of the huge city’s garment district, was such a walled-in hotbox that even the trees begged for a breeze. The day-long ordination ritual began in the relative cool of morning but, as the day progressed, the wooden beams in the high-ceiling temple chambers in which we chanted, bowed, prayed, and rang bells began to sweat.
Unlike many ancient systems of thought, which have remained fixed inside static, “primitive” societies, Daoism has grown and deepened over time, gaining sophistication and texture alongside the culture that spawned it. This means adopting and integrating ideas from other traditions as needed. In the glaring eyes of hundreds of deities set in alcoves around me, I saw evidence of Confucian ancestor worship and Buddhist beliefs in statues brightly painted in yellow, gold, blue, green, black, and red, and rendered in half-man-size, seemingly swollen with tears. In their midst were more than a few renderings of the Buddha himself and of his female counterpart Guanyin, Goddess of Mercy.
Some water was available, but not more than a sip here or there. My fellow monks seemed less uncomfortable than I was, perhaps because they had long ago acclimated to wearing robes in the tropical heat. As the devotional ritual unfolded, they watched me, took care of me, led me from chamber to chamber and building to building. My command of Chinese was not nearly good enough to quickly and precisely read the characters before me, so I mostly mumbled and stumbled through hours of chants read from texts rendered in ancient, thick-paged books.
The texts before me were specific to the somewhat newer branch of Daoism in which I was being ordained, which differed from the older branch I’d been raised on through Master Yan’s martial arts. My first and strongest loyalty was to Master Yan but I knew I was lucky to have Master Pan, and through him, a second lineage in which to study and to grow. Historically associated with poets, artists, merchants, and hermits, Daoism is also popular with China’s intellectual and power elite, and I’d seen such people floating in and out of Pan’s private office.
Serene, sedate, rotund, and blessed with a breeze from the flat bamboo fans of acolytes attending him, long thick black hair tucked under his square, Daoist hat, Pan looked on. I worried I was disappointing him, but I needn’t have. When it was time to receive my certificate at the end of the day, I found myself bowing prostrated before him, hands and knees on a maroon pillow, thumbs hidden so as to evoke the yin/yang symbol known as the taijitu. When the signal came, I stood and bowed three times, paused, did the same again, paused, and did one last set of three, for a total of nine gestures of obeisance. Halfway through, despite downcast eyes, I caught a glimpse of Pan’s expression—an admixture of curiosity and affection, conveying without words the question, “Crazy foreigner, what are you doing here?”
The last time, however, he gave me a smile I can only describe as beatific. I felt his positive energy, his encouragement and affection, as clearly as a laser beam from his eyes. Daoist masters have for millennia provided a wellspring of wisdom based on close study of nature and, in that capacity, have served as influential advisors to China’s rulers. I thought about the long road I’d taken, from a New York City apartment to this incense-filled Chinese temple. I bathed in the light of Pan’s approbation and felt a rise of satisfaction at having followed my path of self-cultivation to this memorable and marvelous time and place.
Tuning in the World
To really understand the flavor of classical Daoist wisdom, it’s best to open the mind by reading regularly from the Daoist canon. Some of the major works therein have been translated from their original Chinese. These include the divinatory, philosophical catalog of natural unfoldings, the Yijing, the famous Daodejing (The Classic of the Way and Virtue), the Zhuangzi (The Classic of Master Zhuang), Huangting Jing (The Classic of the Yellow Court), Taiyi Jinhua Zongzhi (The Secret of the Golden Flower), the Qing Jingjing (The Classic of Purity and Stillness), and the Huainanzi (Master Huainan, a wise, encyclopedic collection of instructions for ruling a country that employs the very same root-and-branches structure as this manifesto). Daoist adherents find the principles and ideas in these books so compelling they adopt Daoist choices, priorities, diet, and values. Using intellection, meditation, and physical practice, they develop calm, clear minds and an abiding sense of the rationally unfathomable fabric of which our world is made. Why not take a stab at one and see what insights it reveals?
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Airline safety announcements counsel us to put on our own oxygen mask before assisting others. The Daoist version of putting on the mask is the process of growing healthy, calm, and clear, balancing our urges so as to grow wise, realize our potential, and become a sage. A sage is a person who deeply senses the flow of the world and moves with it, not against it. Sages recognize the inherent wisdom of nature, the long-term genius of universal forces. We have gone beyond book-learning to a different kind of knowing. Quintessentially wise, we seem to do nothing, yet somehow get everything done. At any given moment, we may appear fools, maybe even idiots, and yet, in the fullness of time, we are revealed to be anything but. We are soft, yielding, and relaxed, yet often triumph; we covet nothing, yet have all we need; we seek to control no one but ourselves, yet are sought out for counsel; we consider ourselves nothing special, yet are in primary and constant contact with ineffable Dao.
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Exercising the brain is as important as exercising the body. Despite the digital training currently in vogue, the best kind of mental exercise takes place neither in front of screen nor in front of printed page, but with eyes closed, ears guarded, safety assured, and with clean, fresh air without wind. This exercise is called meditation, and there is an increasing body of literature pertaining to its myriad of health benefits. One of these is that meditation improves the physical condition of the brain, just as exercise tones and strengthens the body. While meditation can be used as a tool to accomplish a number of different goals, Daoists use it to bring mind and body into harmonious union. Sitting or lying-down meditation will do, but standing meditation most strongly encourages the flow of energy up the back and down the front of the body in what we call the Great Heavenly Circle. Folding our hands over our navel (left hand on top for men, right hand on top for women), we position our feet shoulder-width apart. Relaxing the torso, we settle into the support of our pelvic girdle, our knees slightly soft, eyes gently closed, tip of our tongue comfortably resting just above and behind the front teeth. Suspended between Earth and sky in the classic natural position for the human animal, we breathe through our nose and concentrate on progressively relaxing our body from top to bottom, in horizontal cross sections, like the rings on a stalk of bamboo. Let’s try it today for a minute, tomorrow for two, and then the next day for three. Let’s keep adding a minute per day until, at the end of the month, the session lasts half an hour. Substitute this exercise for a meal three times per week. The benefits include a calmer, less reactive mind and a stronger, healthier body—all qualities of the rectified body/mind.
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Many of the ills of the world arise from our fundamental inability to simply stand quietly and wait for the next unfolding. Before committing to any consequential action, let’s wait, be patient, take a breath, and reconsider.
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If there is a single beneficial thing we can do for our body and our mind that utterly transcends any system of beliefs, any spiritual, religious, cultural, or social context, it is to learn to breathe. Breathing is the first thing we do upon entering this existence, and the last as well. The fact that most of us don’t know how to do it, that we breathe about as well as a one-legged man in flip flops runs a marathon, is, indeed, a sad sign of the effects of modern living. We know how to breathe when we are born, of course. As babies, we breathe with our bellies. In goes the air as the belly expands, pulling the diaphragm downward and creating negative pressure in the lungs. Out goes the air as the belly contracts, the diaphragm lifts, and the air is squeezed out of the lungs. As the stresses of our speed-and-greed world begin to intrude, sometimes as early as kindergarten, we forget about the belly and resort to using the chest muscles, a short term, emergency tactic our ancestors used to flee from saber-tooth cats and like predators. All this breathing with the wrong muscles prolongs our stress response and exhausts us. Let’s start paying attention to our breathing today. Let’s notice if we are using our belly or our chest, and if it’s our chest, let’s move all the action down lower, where it belongs. This is the first step in learning to relax.
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Because we are complex biological and spiritual beings, we are subject to the effects of countless, constantly shifting inner and outer forces. Sensing the world around us with trained eyes, ears, touch, and tongue, we can everywhere see yin and yang in an intimate dance. The binary on-off position of switches is what makes our digital world possible, for example, and the gradual swap of winter and summer defines our yearly cycle. While we might be tempted to focus on the simple duality of this setup—the existence of opposites in all things and the tension between them—it is actually the way the two opposites change positions, like kings on a chess board defecting to the other player’s side, that defines this universal game. There is no yang without yin, no yin without yang, and one is constantly in the process of becoming the other. Thus, in noticing what causes us stress and what helps us relax, who supports us in our work to grow and improve and who holds us back, we can create our own balance and move ourselves forward. There is yin and yang to relaxation, see, and to rectification as well. Embracing this truth, we can create harmonious lives filled with compassion, wisdom, and awareness of resources.
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The more “real” technology makes the virtual world feel, the more it diverges from the Daoist experience. Videogame headsets shaking with the bass notes of gunshots and bombs disconnect us from each other at a time when connection is precisely what we need to heal the rifts between us and save the world. Love is the antidote to environmental Armageddon, yet we daily withdraw from nature and spend more time attached to artificial worlds. Let’s rekindle our relationship with nature instead of upping our game score. Let’s joyfully experience the natural world, the oceans, the jungles, the forests, the deserts, the salt water, the steaming vines, the tall trees, the cactus spines, the glorious sunsets, and the sand between our toes. How about we log out of the game and get back in touch with our one, true home?
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Before the dawn of agriculture, people didn’t see that much of each other, at least by today’s standards. They hunted, gathered in groups for a time, then dispersed and went their merry way. Today, people are crammed together. The result is that the tangible, biological need for solitude and quiet goes unanswered. Time spent alone in the wilderness is essential to human health and an integral part of the Daoist rectification process and lifestyle. This does not necessarily mean rigorous hiking or camping trips, nor does it require expensive travel to exotic destinations. A simple walk in the woods will do, and if no woods are available, then time spent in a park. Finding parks crowded, we may wish to venture out early in the morning or late in the evening, so long as it is safe to do so. Such restorative forays are a wonderful addition to our routine during any season of the year, and often provide the distance from our problems needed to generate fresh ideas and solutions.
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Sound is a form of energy and can affect the molecular bonds that cohere solid matter. In extreme cases, like when an opera singer shatters a champagne glass by singing a high C, sound may be disruptive. Yet sound can also be beneficial, as when ultrasound is used to penetrate tissue and treat chronic pain. Many religions utilize chanting to generate a meditative state of mind, and the idea of music as therapy is accepted widely enough to have generated a medical discipline. Kung Fu styles, notably the one originating at the famed Shaolin Temple, even incorporates loud and deliberate vocalizations into martial arts practice.
In addition to techniques such as acupuncture, herbs, meditation, and qigong, Daoist medicine uses vibrations created with our vocal cords to benefit our organs and organ systems. Such functional and energetic benefits are propounded by Daoism’s Five Element Healing System, which describes the way our body works in metaphorical terms, with wood, metal, earth, fire, and water as the currency of change.
The Six Healing Sounds comprise a simple and manageable set of prescriptive techniques to benefit the liver, heart, kidneys, lungs, spleen, and digestion. It is worth noting that, from the Chinese medical point of view, the spleen is a function rather than an organ, and the benefits of sound-making to digestion center around an organ system known as the “Triple Burner,” which has no direct analog in Western anatomy.
As is true with many Daoist healing techniques, the Six Healing Sounds take into account not only the cycles of growth, aging, and healing in the body, but also the larger natural cycles of the seasons. The sounds are quite fun to do and will produce results if practiced over a period of weeks and months. To start, practice making the sound aloud, to refine clarity and accuracy. Once mastered, try making it more quietly, letting the breath do as much of the work as the vocal cords. This means that the second set of six should be done more as a whisper than a shout. I have found it best to practice each sound six times, adding an additional six repetitions when the organ system is “in season,” or to address a particular health problem in the relevant area. The sounds are:
1.Liver. Spring Season. Wood. “Shhhhh.” Wood grows in spring and the liver is more active during that season. If the liver is weak, illnesses such as hepatitis may arise at that time.
2.Heart. Summer. Fire. “Kuhhhh.” Fire happens in summer and the heart is active during that period. Same medical logic as above.
3.Spleen. Transition between seasons. Earth. “Hoooo.” Same medical logic as above.
4.Lung. Autumn. Metal. “Sssszz.” This sound has a buzz at the end. Same medical logic as above.
5.Kidney system. Winter. Water. “Chuaay.” Same medical logic as above.
6.Triple Burner/Heater/Warmer (digestion). All seasons. “Ssss.” All elements.
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Noise pollution is an oft-overlooked culprit in the chronic, lifestyle-based diseases of modern society. Even those who are accustomed to noise, and temporarily uncomfortable with quiet, eventually experience lower heart and respiratory rates in a tranquil environment. Rectification requires some silence, for in silence, we confront our true nature and the sources of our stress, finding within ourselves creativity and spirituality, too. There are all kinds of things we can do to make our lives quieter, including the use of earplugs while flying, sleeping, and working, closing windows to reduce street noise, and reducing the volume on our speakers and headphones. We might also lobby to outlaw blowing car horns in urban areas, and levy fines on drivers who modify mufflers or don’t repair damaged ones, introduce nighttime fly-over legislation for communities near airports, enforce construction bans at night and on weekends, and encourage replacing leaf blowers with rakes. While we’re at it, let’s diminish background music in public spaces like malls and elevators, and reintroduce soft, courteous speech, too. Let’s go back to considering loud people boorish instead of encouraging them by paying them extra attention.
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A great deal is made these days about the electrical nature of our bodies. This may be a direct consequence of our obsession with digital doodads and the unfolding of virtual worlds we have created in order to escape from the dire mess we’ve made of this real one. In addition to electricity, however, there is another form of energy with which we can express ourselves, and which is an integral part of who we are. That energy is light, and its units are photons, not electrons. Photons saturate our world, originate in the sun and distant stars (long burned out, by the way, but still sending us their celestial glory), and enter our bodies through both our eyeballs and our skin. The great fabric of existence is bolstered by the ongoing exchange of these photons—the fact that every time we look at each other, every time we so much as share visible space, we share photons instantly and pervasively. We give them to each other. They are gifts that knit together space and time. What we feel, intend, and do are all part of, and are actively contributing to, a vast landscape of light. Seen this way, photons can even be considered building blocks in the creation of a new self.
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When considering relaxation and rectification both, let’s remember that we are not a single coherent entity, but instead a lively festival of worms, protozoa, molds, amoeba, bacteria, virus, and fungi—all cooperating over the course of our lifespan so as to simply survive. In fact, only 43 percent of the cells in our bodies are human! Each of the billions of organisms living within us has a role to play, and many are absolutely essential to the life of the host. Recent research into the wide-ranging importance of the flora and fauna in our gut is an example of how we are reordering our understanding of what it means to be human and what it means to be alive. More research into the genetic variability of this microbiome will likely lead to breakthrough treatments for a wide range of diseases. In the meantime, why not turn our meditative attention to the divine cacophony of tiny agendas, all being exercised upon our will and our well-being, so as to better understand who and what we really are? We can do this by experimenting with our microbiome through the use of food and supplements, but in seeking profound growth and change, it wouldn’t hurt to mentally ask for permission and assistance from all the little beings who make us who we are.
The Way We Feel
We must often yield so as to gain greater understanding and ultimately triumph; sometimes, on the way to both relaxation and rectification, it’s to our advantage to sometimes invest in loss, meaning give up some ground to gain some later or accept the loss of a battle the better to win the war. We must be willing to let go of people and things and ideas. We must never directly fight force with force, but rather spiral around obstacles. To see spiral movement in action, one has only to look through a good telescope and see what happened when the detritus from exploding stars and the rushing material of creation crashed together eons ago, leaving us spiral galaxies. It also happens that spiraling is the most effective way to move liquid through a solid matrix, which is why authentic tai chi is remarkably effective in aiding the circulation of blood and lymph through our body’s matrix of soft tissue and bone. The spiral, in short, is nature’s way of managing conflict.
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Letting go is simultaneously the easiest and most difficult thing in the world to do. Easy, because it is simple, effortless, and natural; difficult because grasping is inherent in our lifestyle. We are commanded by corrosive religious traditions that tell us we are imperfect and must constantly strive to be godly or even worthy. This manipulative and twisted lie causes us to prize obstinacy and obedience over sensitivity, and to collide with difficult people and situations rather than circumnavigate them. If we are to evolve to the next stage of consciousness, we must relax, quit struggling, and accept ourselves as microcosmically flawed but macrocosmically perfect.
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It is often hard to relax when we feel assaulted by daily stresses and pressures. These forces arise from a limited and often negative life narrative, one we have learned the way we learned language and customs and culture. The narrative is at best the partial truth about ourselves and our lives. Our planet is only a tiny speck in the cosmos and yet, even here, we miss so very much because of the limitations of our eyes, ears, noses, fingertips, and tongues. Lacking sonar, for example, we cannot detect bugs on the fly in a dark cave the way a bat can. We cannot feel the water column above us the way a deep-sea lamprey does, nor sense the electrical discharges of prey after the fashion of sharks, skates, and rays. We will never hear songs sent our way through thousands of miles of water by our cetacean kin. We will never hear the ultra-low-frequency vibrations of other elephants in our herd. Despite the revelations brought to scientists by computers, sensors, telescopes, and microscopes, on a daily basis most of us remain oblivious to the larger workings of the cosmos. Accepting how little we perceive of our world and how little we can therefore understand of it, we can abide in a place of wonder and respect for the world rather than attempting to dominate it.
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We don’t all look like supermodels, think like geniuses, earn like moguls, own like sheiks, and rule like kings. Thinking that we do, indeed, thinking that we should, distances us from the bitter struggle that is life for billions of people around the globe. So distant, we become lost to greed and self-importance. We become graspers, forever discontented with what we do and what we have. This creates stress, which precludes relaxation. Let’s get real: Each of us does indeed have our place and our role in the world, but beyond rights and freedoms and the meeting of our biological needs, we don’t deserve a thing! The idea that we deserve anything at all is obnoxious, New Age, politically-correct puffery, and comes at a high price to those around us. It is high time we abandoned self-congratulatory narcissism. Instead, let’s frankly appraise our achievements and contributions in the context of a world flattened by globalization and imperiled by thoughtless human domination. When regarding ourselves, let’s focus on compassion and community instead of on gratification, self-aggrandizement, and excess. In this way, we rectify ourselves, and restore harmony and balance to a world badly in need of both.
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Energetic exchange is the overarching principle of all human interaction, and there is far more energy in feelings than there is in facts. The sooner we accept emotions to be more powerful (not better or more important) than facts, the sooner we will achieve beneficent government, realistic and effective politics, and a frank understanding of what makes us tick. This represents a move away from the doomed, rational way we try and define ourselves, towards the hot, wet, feeling creatures we actually are, passions and insecurities and ambitions and all. The trick is to judge ourselves less, because we are not the machines some would portray us to be, but rather to accept that we are creatures born of an organic planet and living in an unpredictable and often dangerous world. Rectification is organic; it is not the stuff of stiff, sci-fi cyborgs. When we embrace our own emotional irrationality during the setting of policy and the charting of courses, we actually cleave most closely to nature, finding balance, and relieving our changeable selves of the burdens of unrealistic, rigid, and unchanging strictures and rules.
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If our culture has one defining characteristic, that characteristic is anger. Americans have the dubious distinction of being amongst the angriest people on earth. Anger doesn’t just lead us to kill each other, it also kills each and every one of us. We see the evidence every day. High blood pressure, blown arteries, refluxing digestive systems, insomnia, and more. How can the wealthiest and most privileged society in human history be so angry? The first answer is the sense of entitlement we get from media messages about material abundance and excess: the gap between our lives and the lives we see on television, in movies, and on billboards. The second is the unequal distribution of wealth, healthcare, and education, and the opportunity gaps across racial and socioeconomic divides. The third answer is an all-pervasive lack of awareness of our own good fortune. A dose of reality can lead to gratitude, and gratitude is the best antidote to our individual and collective rage. Grateful, we can begin to relax. Relaxed, we can begin to rectify. Rectifying, we can channel anger into energy for positive action.
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It is long past time to erase the stigma of mental illness. Advances in science and medicine have demonstrated that depression, schizophrenia, and substance abuse are diseases every bit as organic as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. We should no more discriminate against someone with a broken mind than we would against someone with a broken leg. The cure to mental illness starts with compassion and forbearance on the part of the patient’s family, then proceeds to placing the highest priority on their care. Compassion is a key element of the awakened, rectified life.
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While there is a definite role for certain traditional hallucinogens—particularly those from the shamanic tradition—in advancing the growth of consciousness, the dark side of hallucinogens is a bad trip, enduring psychosis, or worse. While Daoists have traditionally availed themselves of nature’s toolkit for the maintenance of health and the expansion of consciousness, these days the most popular Daoist methods for achieving these goals are meditation and qigong under the guidance of a qualified master. Too, psychotropic drugs are so widely abused these days and, when abused, can so ravage families and communities, that their use must be weighed carefully against their risks. Addiction is a personal and public health issue. As part of a compassionate society, addiction-avoidance education, ongoing support, and therapy for addicts is the responsibility of government. It must be provided without cost, and funded by corporate profits, consumer taxes, and social programs.
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Feeling entirely certain of our own motivations is a strong sign we are deluding ourselves. Pretty much nothing we do is based on a single, pure emotion or concern. Our feelings are never one-dimensional, our reasons for what we do never simple. Yet understanding our motivation is a big piece of understanding ourselves and an absolute prerequisite to real rectification. As always, step one is to relax. During meditation we have an opportunity to really ask ourselves why we’re doing something. In the peace and quiet of the meditative stance, we can find the space to discover the layers of truth in our lives. Experience, perspective, mood, and circumstance lend different shades, casts, and insights to what we see and how we see it. Let’s recognize that even feelings or convictions we consider fixed and inviolable may well change or become irrelevant one day. This is because we are subject to cycles, contracting and expanding, rising and falling. The more extreme the highs we reach, the more compensatory the lows will be. The farther to the right we move, the more we can expect a shift to the left, and vice versa. Let’s come to see ourselves not as steel but as water, shifting, changing, evolving, reversing and being flexible enough to bend and fold with the times. Daoist rectification is all about being like water.
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Passionate enthusiasm is the greatest source of energy but can also be the antithesis of relaxation. Ramped up, we may think superficial thoughts and make irrational decisions. Instead of becoming lost in feelings of optimism and personal power, why not use the energy passion provides to explore the yin and yang of our emotional register, the inevitable falling away of a positive mood in favor of a dour one? Can we find reassurance in that cycle? Can we find the passionate times all the more precious because they are fleeting? Can we remember them when we feel down and know they will return? When we feel low, can we relish the opportunity to rectify ourselves in the solemn focus of the moment? When it is time to rest and recuperate, let’s do that. When it’s time to go crazy, let’s do that, too. High or low, let’s sense the sublime all-pervasive breathing of the universe—in and out, standing for happy and for sad. This sensing is a passion itself, a passion for Dao.
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The more predictably we behave on the outside, the less likely we are to be in tune with nature. This is because—large forces like magnetism, gravity, and the cycling of seasons aside—the progression of natural events is generally chaotic. Therefore, let’s not worry if our desks are messy. Let’s not fret if all our tools are not lined up inside drawers. Let’s not waste time ordering all the books on our shelves or the songs on our playlists. Let’s not take the same route to work every day. Let’s not always insist upon the same table at our favorite eatery. Let’s not fixate on one brand of shoe to the exclusion of others. Let’s not squander our energy attempting to order a fundamentally disordered universe. Instead, let’s use meditation and exercise to rectify ourselves, to find what is constant and true within, and thereby create internal coherence and stability. In this way, we will be able to effortlessly flow with the vicissitudes and challenges of life while growing inside in harmony with the ever-expanding universe.
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In groundbreaking research in the latter part of the twentieth century, Nobel laureate Dr. Wilder Penfield attempted to map the connections between specific parts of the body and particular areas of the brain. He wanted to see, for example, where the “wires” from the hand led, and where the connections to the feet ended up. To produce his map, Penfield had to be able to talk to his subjects while working on them. A needle stuck in a particular part of the brain might make a patient feel hungry or make her feel as if her fingers were on fire, but Penfield could only know this if the patient was awake and communicative. Fortunately, while the skull has sensory nerves in it, the brain does not, so Penfield could numb the skull, and go ahead and poke away without causing the patient pain.
Penfield’s poking and talking routine gave him the information he was after along with an additional surprise, namely that the patient was able to announce what he was experiencing. Rather than simply saying, “Yum, mustard,” for example, the patient was able to say, “When you use that needle, I taste mustard on my tongue.” Penfield got to wondering who was speaking and who was the “I” to which the speaker was referring. Put another way, what person was it who was watching the experiment from afar and reporting on the effects of his needle? He realized that in order to phrase things that way, the patient had to be watching the experiment unfold from some place deep either within or high above.
There’s more. When Penfield stimulated a place in the brain that made the patient clench his fist, then said, “Look, I’m going to do that again, this time try to resist the clenching,” the fist clenched to a lesser extent. Because of the way the patient reacted, Penfield inferred that the person whose hand was moving, and the person who was trying to stop the hand from moving, were in some fashion not one and the same. Penfield called the person he was talking to the “watcher.”
Depending upon how much experience we have meditating, we soon discover that we can watch ourselves watch ourselves watch ourselves, and so on. Daoists make the same observation Penfield did and take it a step or two further. In our tradition, the first level of occurrence is the external, objective fact—there is a table. The second level is the sensory register of that fact or event—seeing the table, for instance. The third level is interpreting what we see—“Ah. That’s a table.” The fourth level is the emotion that arises—“What a beautiful table!” The last, fifth level, applies to our response to the previous four—“I move that table so the puppy doesn’t chew on its legs.”
Once we understand that there is a watcher, many previously impossible tasks become trivial. Moreover, experiences we may have had, like time slowing down during a mortal encounter of a car accident or shoot-out, make a new kind of sense. Given this hygiene of distance, keeping our equilibrium becomes much, much easier. Dangerous and stressful events have less immediacy, leaving us free to respond rather than react, and to stay calm and make better decisions. Last but not least, we can, at any moment, find new coaches in our efforts to relax and rectify ourselves. We have only to check in with our watchers.
Cycles and Motion
Many Western exercise programs emphasize the way the body looks as opposed to the way it functions, isolating muscle groups with specific exercises and sometimes even puffing us up with artificial nutrients and stimulant drugs. This method appeals more to vanity than to good sense, benefiting appearance over function. Instead, let’s see the body and the way it works in terms of systems, not individual organs or anatomical structures. Tai chi, qigong, and the herbs and acupuncture pull together organs, muscles, ligaments, tendons, and bones. Linked properly to the mind, the entire body becomes healthier and stronger, and performance improves. This is real rectification.
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The burgeoning field of epigenetics tells us that our DNA is not a life sentence written in stone, but more a loose guide to our characteristics, health, and disease. As we interact with our environment, our lifestyle, feelings, and thoughts switch our genes on and off. In this heady respect, we literally are what we think and feel. Interactive genetic mutability has health, longevity, and spiritual enlightenment resting upon a foundation of a calm mind and a life lived in harmony with nature rather than one in opposition to it. Unquestioningly accepting stereotypes limits us in so very many ways. The narratives we tell ourselves about our physical abilities, the inevitability of our genetics, the limitations of our circumstances and educations, are all wrong and needlessly constrain us. Relaxing turns off dangerous genes. Rectifying ourselves means understanding that while our genetic code may be written, how it is expressed depends upon our reactions to stress and what we do to reject what others have told us are our limits. The first step in growing past old boundaries, breaking old bonds, and rejecting stories we tell ourselves and stereotypes others apply to us is to understand that we are changing and evolving in each moment of our lives. The step after that is to take conscious and deliberate control of that change through the various suggestions offered here.
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The inevitability of aging turns out to be a fallacy. Despite popular belief, older people’s brains don’t become slow and weak but rather more densely packed with information. Experience does this to us. It creates new webs of association, and links recollections and connotations together in strange and wonderful ways. A pause to gather our thoughts is not a sign of our decrepitude; it’s a sign of the richness of our understanding. Also, scientific research shows that the more competently we mentally adapt to changing circumstances, the less rapidly we physically age. Adaptation requires relaxation. The more we honor ourselves as wise, experienced, and emotionally flexible, the younger we stay. Healthy aging is just one more way we come to understand the world more clearly and more deeply.
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Sitting is the new smoking. Spending hours at a desk or computer is an act of self-destruction. Our circulatory, lymphatic, immune, and endocrine systems all require physical exercise to function properly, and the more we get, the better. Our bodies evolved to move, not to sit. By remaining stationary for too long, particularly on chairs, we interrupt the natural workings of our body, many of which occur beneath our conscious awareness. What’s more, the air indoors is often polluted and full of mold, dust, and industrial pollutants. Set an alarm to remind you to get up, stretch, take a walk (outside if possible) every twenty minutes or so. Make it a habit, and you will live longer, suffer fewer afflictions, and have more energy, too.
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Extreme exercise—indeed extremes of all kinds—is best left to entertainers. While very much in vogue in a culture that embraces risk and requires constant titillation, extreme exercise is incongruent with health and longevity. Despite generating short term pleasures, seeking thrills by flirting with injury and death reveals a numbed, desensitized state, completely contrary to a quiet, harmonious, awake, aware, and sensitive mind and body. Life-affirming pursuits such as swimming, traditional Asian martial arts, yoga, walking, or jogging are better long-term rectification options. Beyond that, or perhaps even better, how about vigorous sex with an enthusiastic partner?
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Dependent upon artificial energy sources and confined in buildings that insulate us from both the elements and natural light, we lose touch with the circadian rhythms upon which a healthy body depends. If we cannot live in an unadulterated natural environment—and both the burgeoning need for sustainable agriculture and the communication options opened by the Internet make this more feasible than ever—at least we can make healthier lifestyle choices. Work when the sun is out and sleep under the moon’s watchful eye. Slow down in winter, relax when it rains, and take advantage of brisk temperatures to exercise. These habits put us in better accord with natural cycles.
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My teacher’s teacher, Chen Quanzhong, seventeenth-generation teacher in his family’s line, may be the greatest living practitioner of the martial art of tai chi ch’uan. In his nineties at the time of this writing, Great Grandmaster Chen lived through some of the toughest times in modern Chinese history, including the so-called Great Leap Forward (1958–1962), during which as many as fifty-five million people were murdered or starved to death. During the inaptly named Cultural Revolution, the Maoist government expropriated his factory and reduced his position there to that of floor-mopping janitor. Despite this, and at times nearly starving while raising seven children on a handful of dollars per week, he managed to lift his personal practice to dizzying heights. To this day, Great Grandmaster Chen strides about with the gait and the physique of a healthy, powerful, much-younger man, eclipsing his rivals in the martial arts and setting an example for us all.
Decades ago, I interviewed him for a leading martial arts magazine. One of the first questions I asked him was about cross-training, as exercise gurus and advocates then and now continue to advocate the practice.
“Cross-training?” he asked.
“Using weights, running, swimming, rowing, bicycling.”
“Ah,” he said, as I scribbled his response on my notepad. “Very, very important. Wonderful. Useful. Popular. Don’t do it.”
It took me a while to sort out that what he meant was that tai chi, being a Daoist practice, was all about creating connections inside the body. This is achieved by recruiting both stabilizer muscles and connective tissue so as to engage the entire body whenever any part is moved. Such connection also requires relaxing and sinking to embrace the effects of gravity, as opposed to fighting them in the way of a ballerina. He went on to explain that, once we learn to do so, we can bring that particular skill to bear during any activity. The emphasis, of course, was on creating the right mindset and physical attitude before doing external work.
Later, while critiquing my own practice, the great grandmaster reminded me that slow, correct, fully-relaxed tai chi is major isometric work and requires good nutritional support.
“Eat more beef,” he suggested.
I couldn’t bring myself to tell a man for whom beef was an almost unheard-of luxury that I was a vegetarian. I could not explain to someone who had experienced starvation that the world had changed, that the torture chambers we called factory farms were far more destructive than they are beneficial. I could not bring myself to tell him that I felt unnecessarily killing animals was morally wrong and that a balanced, plant-based diet was both ethical and healthy. Instead, I chose to take to heart the underlying message that if we want to achieve great things, we have to begin by taking great care of ourselves.
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Thousands of years before the field of epigenetics was born, Daoism considered the environment’s power to affect our mood, as well as the connection between mood and mental state. One of Daoism’s key precepts is that, in order to reach an enlightened state of mind, we must have a strong body; with both we can weather life’s most violent storms. No practice builds the body/mind—while simultaneously training us in conflict resolution—more perfectly than authentic, original tai chi ch’uan. Moving in natural spirals, cleaving to no plan, going with the flow, and embracing one’s nature are the building blocks of the art, and are present in every movement. Tai chi is a path to both longevity and enlightenment.
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Because we are complex biological and spiritual beings, we are subject to the effects of countless, constantly shifting inner and outer forces. Sensing the world around us with trained eyes, ears, touch, and tongue, we can everywhere see yin and yang in an intimate dance. The binary on-off position of switches is what makes our digital world possible, for example, and the gradual swap of winter and summer defines our yearly cycle. While we might be tempted to focus on the simple duality of this setup—the existence of opposites in all things and the tension between them—it is actually the way the two opposites change positions, like kings on a chess board defecting to the other player’s side, that defines this universal game. There is no yang without yin, no yin without yang, and one is constantly in the process of becoming the other. Thus, in noticing what causes us stress and what helps us relax, who supports us in our work to grow and improve and who holds us back, we can create our own balance and move ourselves forward. There is a yin and yang to relaxation, see, and one to rectification as well. Embracing this truth, we can create harmonious lives filled with compassion, wisdom, and awareness of resources.
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Dreams reveal important insights and truths, yet one of the most pervasive plagues of our time is sleeplessness. People brag about how little sleep they need, some even taking it as a badge of honor or machismo to stumble blearily through the day or rely on stimulants to function. Scientific research now shows that sleeping less than nine hours per night costs us brain cells. Sleep is the time when the brain’s version of the lymphatic system actually cleans brain tissue, removing (among other toxins) the plaque associated with Alzheimer’s Disease. Why not reprioritize and spend less time pushing so hard and more time in rejuvenating sleep? If we do, we’ll live longer, enjoy our lives more, be able to discover true relaxation, and have more opportunity to contribute work of meaning and quality.
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All creatures above a certain phylogenetic level need to sleep. This means that once the nervous system develops a brain and reaches a certain level of complexity, it shows the obvious yin/yang of wakefulness and sleep. Daoist theory, which presaged binary theory, thus applies directly to our state of consciousness. I’ll call sleeping yin and waking yang, because from a Daoist point of view, the former is quiet and dark, and the latter is loud and bright. This same concept applies to the rational versus the intuitive mind, as well as to the left and right sides of the brain.
One of my students had a long term sleep problem. She tried pharmaceutical sleep aids, aromatherapy, craniosacral therapy, massage, exercise, professional talk therapy, anti-depressants, white noise machines, and more—pretty much exhausting the gamut. In a Daoist training session, we discussed the idea that her yang, conscious, waking mind was somehow intruding on her yin, quiet, sleeping mind, and rousing her repeatedly in the middle of the night for no apparent reason.
I suggested that she might try to address what’s bothering her. She said there was nothing in her conscious mind that seemed an issue. I asked about her work, family, relationships, health, finances—all the usual suspects. She replied that, although no life was ever perfect, she did not feel she had any big, pressing problems. All the same, I could tell her yin and yang were not in balance, that something that belonged on the yang side (wakefulness) had migrated over.
We practiced wuji meditation together as a solution. Standing quietly under a large oak tree, a light, sub-tropical wind blowing and the salty aroma of the nearby ocean enveloping us, we sank deeper and deeper into a relaxed state. I felt the energy flow up my spine and neck, over the top of my head, down the line of my nose, across the frenulum of my upper lip, and then turn in to meet the tip of my tongue where it rested on my hard palate, against the backside of my front teeth. From there, the energy traveled down my throat and followed the center line of my body. Visualizing that flow, feeling it, gave my mind something to do.
My focus was interrupted by the sound of my student weeping. I allowed her to feel what she needed to feel, to release her emotions without comment. After our session, she shared that her husband had taken a job in another city and was insisting they sell their house and move, something she had no wish to do. More discussion revealed her overall dissatisfaction with her marriage and other, deeper feelings of dissatisfaction with her life. Talking about them helped her decide on a course of action—confronting things rather than running from them, sharing her feelings rather than hiding them. Her meditation sessions grew more frequent after that, and she learned to go deeper and explore herself ably.
She started sleeping like a baby, too.
Nourishing Ourselves
How can we rectify a malnourished body? Contrary to popular opinion, a healthy diet need not be more expensive than an unhealthy one—it does require mindfulness, though, and careful selection of plant rather than animal protein sources. Historically speaking, human beings began to gain weight and get sick when we stopped preparing our meals from fresh and raw ingredients and came to rely on processed food. These days, agribusiness has trained us to accept fruits, vegetables, and grains packaged in plastic and transported long distances, sometimes thousands of miles. When we harvest directly from the garden rather than the package, we eliminate preservatives, additives, and genetic modifications that may have untoward consequences. The idea of growing local hasn’t yet caught on big-time yet, but it must. New, small-scale agricultural technologies such as hydroponic tanks and computer-controlled plant nutrition, lighting, and watering, now make it possible for us to grow food in new ways and in places never considered suitable for farming before—vertically, in urban warehouses, for example, and in converted office buildings, patios, and small, green spaces. Growing our own vegetables, fruits, and herbs can be anything from a fun, healthy, and satisfying hobby to a small business. So can growing and harvesting certain species of seaweed, which are increasingly recognized as important, sustainable, and viable food sources. Such enterprises can save us money, improve our health, and conserve energy. Too, complementary growing strategies—you grow corn, I’ll do tomatoes—unite communities. Let’s all join the movement and grow!
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A plant-based (vegan) diet is now the only environmentally sustainable option we have, and it lends us the mental clarity for our self-cultivation, too. Most people greatly misunderstand veganism, believing it to represent a paucity of choices; in fact, it is a far richer and more varied diet than any meat eater can embrace. Eliminating meat, poultry, eggs, dairy, and fish, a mere five-ingredient group, leaves us with a vast array of foodstuffs. Plant-based eating is a creative and marvelous lifestyle embraced by millions around the world. Paired with the elimination of refined sugar, it is also nutritious and enjoyable, and counters many degenerative diseases, including dairy-fueled cancers and the malignant effects of pesticides and hormones concentrated in meat. As if that were not enough—and, of course, it is—veganism also encourages foraging, a growing trend in rural areas and an opportunity to both spend more time in the woods and to learn about the nutritional value of local plants. Last, but by no means least, when we choose not to eat animals, we make a stand against wholesale cruelty and institutional torture. Veganism represents an awakening of compassion. Those who still eat animal products often resist admitting they are harming themselves, and live in denial about needlessly causing suffering. Let’s all try this diet, despite our varying protein needs, preferences, and genetics. Even if we need supplements such as vitamin B12 to make it complete, most of us can make it work.
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Dairy products are morbidly unhealthy. How appealing would it be to put your lips to a cow’s teat? Yet, a maleficent industry drives our appetite for milk, cream, butter, cheese, yoghurt, and dairy desserts, convincing us in a ubiquitous, daily, high-budget blitz that the secretion of an animal species evolutionarily and phylogenetically distant from our own is essential for our well-being. Dairy-industry-funded studies on the necessity of milk for bone density and calcium color the way even nutritionists see the role of dairy, while millions suffer from calcified arteries, lactose intolerance, joint and auto-immune diseases, and obesity, all to keep Big Dairy rolling in profits. As if all of this were not enough, the life of a dairy cow, trapped, penned, artificially fattened, injected with antibiotics, and milked, is a fate far worse than death. Add the looming human health crisis associated with antibiotic-resistant organisms, killing more of us every day as a result of consuming so many drug-tainted foods, and we have a real house of horrors. Let’s boycott dairy products and eliminate these poisons from our diets.
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It is believed that sugar cane was cultivated back in New Guinea in Neolithic times. When European explorers came across sugar, they brought it back to their native lands as an intoxicant, as a sculpture medium, and as medicine. Nobles of the European courts carried it around in little boxes and used just a pinch—like snuff or cocaine—for the rush of taste and energy. Now sugar is in absolutely everything, from our bread to our cold cuts. Yes, that’s right, it’s in our hotdogs. Don’t believe it? Take a look at some labels. It has proven to be the most dangerous plant we have ever domesticated and has given birth to one of the most pernicious industries Planet Earth has ever seen. Not only is it a dirty and destructive crop in the sub-tropics and tropics, evidence points to sugar’s links to cancer, obesity, diabetes, and, most recently, Alzheimer’s Disease. Make a life-saving change and beat the Big Sugar lobby at the same time: boycott any and all products containing added sugar. Not buzzing from sugar all the time, we can begin to relax.
The role of the so-called “bonesetter” in China is sometimes compared to that of the chiropractor in the Western traditions. It is actually different, and arguably more important. The advent of regional hospitals is a recent one in China, a country so vast and lacking in infrastructure that, even today, large swaths of the population do not have reliable access to modern medical care. For millennia, village healers were the only medical resource for rural populations. Because these individuals might see anything from diabetes, venereal disease, amputated limbs, anaphylactic shock, cancer, heart disease, breach births, to skin lesions, they were trained to offer a wide range of medical services. They couldn’t cure everything, of course, but then neither can even the best doctors in our own cutting-edge hospitals.
During one of my frequent visits to the south of China, I went with my tai chi master to rural Guangning county in Guangdong province. Traveling with us were a few of my master’s other students, and a few of my own as well. The purpose of the trip was to visit a relative of my master, the latest in a line of bonesetters, stretching back many hundreds of years. Some healing lineages are noted for herbal potions, and others for treating chronic diseases such as asthma or ulcers. My teacher’s family is known for being good at literally setting broken bones.
The family clinic was a modest four-room affair located in an older building on the outskirts of a small village. It was equipped with a rudimentary x-ray machine and some triage tools distributed between two treatment rooms. Nearby, the town mayor had recently invested in a series of townhouses that looked like they belonged in Beverly Hills. Because we were honored foreign guests, the mayor gave us one of these townhouses to use during our stay. I was astonished by the marble floors, the Western toilets, the chandeliers, granite countertops, and modern appliances.
On the second day of our visit, while having wonderful Bamboo County Clean Scent Green Tea served to us in traditional fashion, a sixteen-year-old boy was ushered into the clinic. He had just suffered from a motorbike accident. He was sweating and pale, and his arm was dangling at his side. Bones protruded from his arm, clear evidence of compound fractures. The bonesetter immediately inserted a few acupuncture needles. The moment they were in, the boy stopped trembling, and his breathing slowed. Relaxed, he thanked the bonesetter for stopping his pain. At that point, the bonesetter sat with the boy’s arm in his lap and began to play his fingertips up and down along the boy’s arm as if it were a musical instrument. I asked my master what he was doing.
“Feeling the bones, of course.”
“I’d like to see an x-ray,” interrupted another of my master’s students, a medical doctor from Florida.
The bonesetter smiled, said an x-ray wasn’t necessary, but agreed to do one anyway.
The picture showed not only compound fractures but a myriad of other smaller cracks, with numerous bits of bone floating about. The boy hadn’t merely fallen off his bike; a car or truck had run over his arm, crushing it.
“Big surgery,” my doctor friend said. “Lots of pins. Long recovery. That arm will never be the same.”
The bonesetter jiggled the acupuncture needles and returned to work. He continued working the boy’s flesh, pressing here, pulling there, his eyes closed, his concentration trancelike. We all watched silently as the protruding bones, lightly swabbed with antiseptic, slipped back into place. After half an hour, the arm appeared normal. A lot of the initial puffiness was gone and the patient was obviously far more comfortable. The bonesetter wrapped the arm in gauze and then applied a mustard-colored plaster. He then gave the boy extensive instructions, which my master translated.
“This plaster cast will not dry but will seep into the bones through the skin and help them heal. After three days, the boy is to take it off and rewrap it with fresh bandages and the second bag of herbs, which will dry harder and keep everything in place as it heals. There is a third bag of plaster for him to use in a final cast for an additional two weeks.”
“A wet cast,” the Florida doctor muttered. “How can that work? I’d like to see another x-ray.”
Again, the bonesetter willingly led the boy to the x-ray machine. When we examined the images of his work, we were all stunned. The bones were so perfectly aligned that only the faintest lines revealed the breaks. We compared the before and after films. Even the small fragments of bone had been eased back into place.
“This puts anything we can do to shame,” my doctor friend declared. “We’d have used pins, general anesthesia, antibiotics, sutures, and more. And to think, this is a vanishing art.”
“One of many,” my master said sadly.
Greed rather than compassion has become the primary motivator in our health care system. Physicians and other healthcare providers must remember they are in service, not in business. They deserve our respect, and often our gratitude, but not mansions and yachts. They are primarily mechanics whom we pay to fix what is broken, and in most countries, are treated as such. How were they crowned the High Priests of American Society and who thinks they should be? Their own lobby, that’s who. Adversarial, lordly, and condescending phrases such as “against medical advice,” “patient compliance,” and “take as directed” have no place in the cooperative dance that medical care must become. Commanding rather than convincing patients, physicians who use such words appear more interested in power and profit than healing, more driven by ego than humanity. Medical care is a right. It must be a mandate of government and community. Assuming the leading role in fostering our own good health, rather than relying primarily on others to do so for us, is a key step in rectifying our body/mind. A healthy lifestyle and a self-reliant attitude are our best hedges against the degenerative diseases associated with aging. We have the right for our physician’s undivided attention during an office visit, and to leave that visit with our questions answered. Let’s remind our insurance agents and healthcare providers—kindly but firmly—that we are the customers, and the customer is king.
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