Healing is Rethinking Old Narratives; and a form of Activism

Read along for an experiment with me. 

Let's use the imagination to see your body in a creative way. You know what you look like from the outside. Now imagine that you can see inside your body and let's pretend that inside is all darkness and space, that you can see your body as hollow. What if the hollow of your body was a cave? A long meandering cavern, with all the crooks and crevices of your fingers, your ankles, the arcs of your hips. What if it was peaty, and you could taste the minerals in your mouth and feel the dark cool cave air on your arms and feel the dirt under your feet, the quiet stillness all around you? Imagine a small thumb-sized hologram of yourself, lantern in hand, meandering through your caves. Hear water trickling, feel the heat of the lantern as the tiny-you travels through your body. Imagine the hands of the hologram brushing against the caves walls, bringing warmth and light to the inside of the shell of you, like matchstrike, your fingers leaving traces of orange glow along the walls. 

Can you feel it? Does your body feel somehow different? 

What got me interested in Chinese Medicine was anxiety, and specifically, anxiety as physiological and psychological pain brought about by the imagination. In my twenties, I was working in the arts in New York as a studio assistant to various artists including a man I adored who was living with advanced AIDS. I could all too easily imagine his sudden death, or a sudden illness or a devastating accident happening to anyone I loved—and instantly, the dread took over my entire body like a quick infection. Worries sped through my mind, a bristling tension fevered into my muscles, and panic sharpened against my heart. I’d felt this feeling my entire life, and I was creating it with my thoughts.

My therapist at the time reminded me patiently that worry is the misuse of the imagination. What, I wondered, is a better use of the imagination for the body? The artist I worked for at the time, Frank Moore, gave me many ideas through his body of work. 

In my thirties, I’ve come to understand that my mental state greatly affects my physiological one. Get on a downward spiral of thinking, sinking into negativity and doom, and I can bet that my neck will tighten, my blood pressure rise, my heart feel leaded and my hip go out. Certainly, anxiety isn’t the only reason for these issues, but I’ve known it to be both a contributing factor and a causative spark. 

If our imaginations can make us feel so sick and negative, then what if we repurposed them, used them to serve us: to help us feel safe and calm and embodied? 

I’m passionate about helping people revise their imaginations to be of salutary use. When you come in for a session, I offer you a creative visualization, tailor-made to fit your health and our work together.  Whether or not I speak the words aloud, creative imagery informs the way I work with your body. I believe in engaging the imagination as a form of radical creative activism. This is a profound revision of self, a shucking of the old narratives that hold us stuck in discomfort. Re-thinking and re-imagining is way to create a place in your own body that is immediately safe. A design that gifts you in the moment your body as your refuge. 

In Spring we are the Dreamer and the Achiever

Spring is the season of growth and renewal, the hotspot of the Liver and Gallbladder, which are understood in Chinese Medicine to shape our visionary selves at the junction of the dreamer and the achiever, the designer and strategist for making one’s own path. We might be asking where we should be or what we should be doing to bring about the best possible life.  Do you? I think about it a lot. And I try to remind myself that if I’m thinking about it so much then it wants to be seen, so, it’s useful to really look at it, sharp-eyed and curious. Not to try to simply or impulsively solve the ‘problem’ but to really look and see what it is that I’m hungry for or seeking. What’s behind the urge to be or have something different? If we have one thing, but seek another, can we have both? I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately because I am an artist at heart, while professionally, I’m an acupuncturist.

I found Chinese Medicine at a time in my life when I had been struggling with debilitating anxiety and depression for a while and it was getting out of hand. I was in my mid-twenties, in the black ash grit of a post-911 New York City. One of the painters I worked for passed away that Spring. He was one of those magical people, with a bright zeal for living. When he died, I determined that the life I’d been building in the arts was untenable for me; I had to find a profession more directly of service. I started researching various holistic medicines. My first time getting acupuncture, the insides of my body sprung to life like a hive of bees. A needle in my palm sent what felt like a bolt of pink lightening from the tip of my smallest finger into my armpit where it detonated with light. I reported the bizarre sensation to the acupuncturist and she said I had just traced the channel of the heart. I took it as a sign.

I was drawn to Chinese medicine for the metaphor, the poetry, the symbolism. It is an understanding of the body built on associations, where everything is mapped out within the body in a way that is predictable and fitting, a microcosmos of the natural world.
 

Each organ is a system, a season, a smell, a color, a sound, a flavor, a river in the body’s map, an hour segment on the clock. To me, it is more art than science. Poetic language and imagery rule the principles, theories and applications. They engage the imagination. I practice Chinese medicine with my imagination engaged, as an artist. 

The heart is an emperor, a fire, a red berry, a flower, a mountain. The liver is a forest, an oracle, a tangle of briars, a verdant scent, a brine of vinegar and marrow, a strategist.

Chinese medicine resonates with me because it understands the psyche to be an emotional body, which is subject to injury, damage, and illness just like any other part of thephysical body, and thus, like a physiological ailment, is subject to change, to healing and resolution. Mental illness, in this Taoist-based medicine, is not an end-all-be-all diagnosis, nor is it a stamp of stigma. It is simply a hitch in the system, a tangle in the threads, a fold in the fabric of the body’s sky. It can be attended to holistically, and the symptoms are seen to have the same potential for improvement as any other illness.

Life leads us. Sometimes we trip upon a vocation. At other times, we have lifelong dreams calling to us, tugging at us to be shaped into form. I am both lucky and challenged by both those experiences. What about you? What drives you forward? What holds you to yourself? Do you have dreams that you need to attend to? Have you found a vocation that suits you right now?
 
Here’s a visualization to get into that investigation, if you like.

Bear in mind, it’s all just imagined, you can’t do it wrong, and you’ll get different information each time.

Use your imagination to see your body like a giant map, its own landscape. Take some inventory on which areas you know really well, and which ones are undiscovered and still wild. If you peer into those secret gardens, what do you find? Maybe an image or a memory or a word or a thought comes up. What does it tell you about yourself? What’s kept in your wild places?

 
Wishing you all the best,
always,
Liz