04/18/2025
Interconnection Part 1: The Old Ways
Sitting in silence, I wondered about wholeness. A voice said “study the Ancient Ways”. I agreed, not knowing exactly what that meant. A few years later I was asked by a colleague if I would be interested in training in acupuncture to take over her role as a physician acupuncturist in the hospital. I jumped at the opportunity. Little did I know that this was the beginning of a deep re-membering.
My acupuncture training opened me up to one way of seeing how everything is connected. Eastern medicine like acupuncture generally follows eastern philosophy that sees the world and the individual as an interconnected whole. This is generally a philosophy woven across ancient cultures. The inside is like the outside surroundings. The outside world is an example of how the inside works. The same patterns of creation exist in both. There is deep intelligence at work inside and out.
The first acupuncture textbook is 4000 years old. In it the student asks the teacher, “Who is the best person to receive acupuncture”. The teacher says, “the one who has yet to shows physical symptoms. Once symptoms arise on the physical level that disease is quite progressed” (adapted from the Yellow Emperor’s Treatise on Internal Medicine). Older systems of medicine have diagnostic approaches that evaluate the system on a more subtle level. They look at the tongue, feel the mind’s influence through the pulse, and generally approach a physical exam with a more subtle magnification. To the untrained eye this seems primitive. Yet, I was surprised to see how these subtle exam findings were reproducible and verifiable once you learned a more universal language in the body.
Generally in the West we see physical symptoms as problems to be solved. We are fixers. We do not recognize the inherent intelligence of our system communicating with us. When I meet with individuals in my office I will share this different (ancient ) way of seeing. Your body is communicating something. This is more like a child who is asking for something by throwing a tantrum. Can we meet it with curiosity and compassion and develop a relationship to better understand the Why underneath? The answer is an invitation into a healing relationship.
Healing is about Wholeness. Wholeness requires re-membering - bringing back lost parts of our self into the interconnected whole. There are many ways to do this. Unfortunately, most pharmaceuticals are not working with but shutting up the problem. , There is a time and a place for pharmaceuticals, but they are not providing deeper healing because they are not actually addressing the root problem.
As my teacher Dr Mikio Sankey says “the journey of healing is a journey of nurturing”. Imagine a child who is afraid of the dark. This child needs to be met in his fear, but how do we do that? It is a process of connection and curiosity. It may be the child needs a night light, he may need reassurance that there is nothing in the closet or under the bed, or he may need the connected presence of falling asleep next to a parent. The symptoms within us also are asking for something.
The first step is opening to the possibility that there is purpose even in our suffering. This is the message of Easter. There is deep Intelligence at work. And the way out for each of us is through - finding our own way to re-member the
