* BOUNDARIES and HEALTH
* GHOST ARROWS
* LOVE and BEAUTY
* SOMETHING FROM THE SPRING
* WORLD ON FIRE
* LIGHT on BOG MYRTLE
* PINE CONES at the THRESHOLD

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* BOUNDARIES and HEALTH

Perceptual boundaries between people arise from trust based on spirit within each individual. Through perceptual boundaries it is possible to communicate normally, real agreements can be forged, and it becomes possible to be kind, gentle and naturally just with others, since there is a sense of relationship with them. This sense of relationship is a lifeline which ensures a healthful and peaceful society.

From someone looking over one's shoulder during an exam to a neighbor obsessived with peeping into others' privacy and then compelled to imitate what they see to 'keep up with the joneses,' -- the inability to respect the boundaries of others is a symptom of core weakness in oneself, when we feel compelled to 'look' we have lost our own center and no longer respond to our own conscience within.

A loss of perceptual boundaries produces social chaos, since there is confusion where one person begins and the other leaves off -- one's neighbor's possessions become our possessions. The basics of normal communication have vanished and what remains is disputation, argument, anger -- then blame, spite, resentment, -- finally revengefulness and violence.

This whole chain of pathology can be offset by from the beginning following certain basic practices in human relations which restore the integrity of community. It takes a certain moral effort to hold to one's own center and not "look" or compare with others. This is the respectful perception of boundaries, responding to signs of other's visible and apparent discomfort with our peering, by accomodation and returning to one's own center -- the moral courage to forbear from appropriating to oneself what someone else has worked to develop in their own life.

* Boundaries in Growth and Evolution *

In childrens' development perceptual boundaries begin to appear around age 7, when they first become aware of themselves as an entity separate from their emotions. They begin to choose what to express, and begin to develop relationship to their own inner feelings instead of either venting the emotion, or repressing it. As they choose how to respond to their perception of others they are also evolving conscious relationship toward other people.

In Asian Healing Arts many conditions are believed to take hold on a body only because that person becomes susceptible to them-- external cold may exist all the time, but only foster disease when a person's boundary of protective Qi, which surrounds them like a bubble, is weakened. There are social pathogens one can catch--group anger at school, socialized habits of perception--these can take hold on a susceptible body and become a habit, a physical disease process. This can be prevented by promoting clear and strong perceptual boundaries, what acupuncturists call the life-gate of perception (ming-men of the eye). Asthma is one condition that can result when a child's perceptual boundaries are ignored or not perceived by their social context.

One of the paradoxes of acupuncture is that by apparently penetrating physical boundaries at the skin the bubble of protective Qi is strengthened. This happens because acupuncture activates the spirit-self at the center of each person, that point from which the protective bubble emanates. In this way acupuncture particularly between ages of 7 and 12 can nurture the moral stamina and physical wellbeing that flows from lively perceptual boundaries.

* GHOST ARROWS

"Padmasambhava said to her: 'The basis for realizing enlightenment is a human body. Male or female, there is no great difference. But if she develops the mind bent on enlightenment, the woman's body is better.'"

The chinese medicine name for the shrub euonymus alatus is Gui Jian Yu: 'ghost arrow feathers.' The name describes the flat flanges like small wings on either side of each branch. It is these branches which are gathered in bundles resembling arrows, for medicine.

One of the methods for treatment of the seven emotional passions, is to disengage the emotion from its external targets, and redirect the feeling inward toward the Spirit aspect which is always oneself in essence, yet also free and independent from personality. The Spirit-self can receive arrows of Anger, of Passion, and not be hurt by them. Instead, it can receive and return them back transformed into streamers of color and light, into wisdom and insight.

"Wounding of the hero is seen as a symbolic piercing of self in which the libido turns inward to replenish itself, as if returning into the mother." *

So, this ghost arrow medicine, can be applied to abort the heart-children of anger and hate before they can take form in real words or actions in a person's life. By cooling Liver Blood, ghost arrows can release from the bow of the body as it works to turn itself toward the inner Spirit and engage there.

May our world of weapons all become ceremonial ghost arrows, very soon!

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* "this internalizing is characterized as occurring whenever a woman faces a difficult phase in her struggle for personal independence (from the mother and from the entire atmosphere of infancy)."
Collected works of C G. Jung. VOl. 5. 2nd ed. p. 274.
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An eroded hill of white stone near Abiquiu elementary stood out in this light of day, its rounded towers like some asian temple.

"I pray at your white Wat," muttered the girl at the wheel, and a smile slowly appeared as she bent her forehead determinedly to view the road ahead. When she smiled, a finger of golden hair fell in front of her ear and tickled; the smile increased.

The rearview mirror showed where clouds, grown dark and fertile, bit the desert periodically with a ribbon of light. But where Jefta drove it was dry, and the tiny fur in her eyebrows stood erect. She drew a deep breath and sighed. Another hillside of rocks came into relief. "The Grannys," she said-- "what are the granny's talking about...?"

She passed Tsankawi, passed Tyuonyi, and soon she was in the dry, raised plateau populated by stones, pinon and hundreds of golden flowers. She took a curve and went by the LANL dish--an immense white parabola fixed on space--that gathers whispers from the edges of time. She drove windingly into the mountains; shreds of cloud lingered in the fir and let through shafts of light.

At Ysewa it was easy to find the springs. Automobiles filled the lot in front of the long adobe house that had the sign "Hot Springs Therapy" over the front door. Jefta went in.
"Why do you call it "'Ysewa'?" she inquired carefully to the woman at the desk. Jefta noticed her skin was unusually smooth. The woman's forehead was like an oiled stone.
"Ysewa is from a word in our tewa language," she explained. "It means bubbling water-- an ancient name for this place."

After massage and a soak in the healing spring Jefta wandered out to poke at the huge dome of multicolored mineral where the spring itself rose, smoking with heat.

Then it was time for acupuncture.

The acupuncturist puttered with needles and tape at a table in the corner of the room and looked over the evaluation sheet Jefta had briskly checked off. He put his fingertips at the edge of her wrist to sense the pulses, and looked down at the floor.

Jefta smiled and resting back she recounted things that had occurred recently in her body and mind--and soon the silvery needles were placed in the points where they stood, and the acupuncturist left the room.

Jefta looked up at the ceiling, then closed her eyes and thought of the spring she had seen in the hills close by, its stream running underground. She felt tiny rivers of the channels along her arm where needles were placed, and the great body-vibrations as distant areas within her came into synchrony. She thought again of the streams from the spring, where they rise deep under the faces of stone shelved over the forest brook close by. She tipped her head back, her heart opened wide and she went out....

After awhile she came back. She had to raise her arm (they had told her to keep moves minimal while the needles were in place) to draw the edge of her hand across her eyes where it was damp. "Something from the spring," she spoke softly.

Outside, breezes banged strings of ristras together, as thunderstorms rolled up the valley. She looked on as the child played at the edge of the garden. "Teesh! I have to take you to your mom!" Teesh threw the bits of bark into the garden and approached the white car.

"Goodbye!" they were gone in a spray of pebbles and red dust.

Through the desert Jefta drove with Teesh asleep at her shoulder, and the clouds created a geography of heaven ahead of her. Taking time off from bursts of hail, they quietly mimed the shapes of the mountains around her, and changed as the landscape changed as she drove through it.

"Y-se-wa... Y-se-wa," she said, "Y-se-wa." The tiny point of her tooth showed as she smiled again, and far down in the darkness of an adidas shoe, Jefta's big toe scrunched.

* ...toward the One... *

* WORLD on FIRE

Confusion over rapid changes in our world find our culture drenched in anger. This anger is everywhere evident in a combative lifestyle. Anger and all the seven emotions are normal, yet when they overwhelm and dominate experience they become pathogens, injuring health and poisoning society.

Emotions in themselves can become self-indulgent. But as spirit purposes act upon them, emotions lose their selfish qualities and become more related to other people-- they become feelings, which carry healing qualities and connect people with each other.

Peace is usually portrayed as a passive state. But action can be dynamically peaceful -- an action neither confrontative nor non-violent. This is possible through the seven spiritual qualities which in asian healing arts are viewed as the guiding stars of the seven emotions.

These spiritual feelings are as rooted in the physical self as are the seven emotions. Yet as they are awakened, they act upon the seven emotions the way sunrise acts on the mists and fogs in the valleys of night - the emotions gradually lighten up and yield their life-giving qualities.

Anger is based on the flawed perception that people cause each other to do things, so that someone is always to blame. (Tibetan medicine, for example, speaks of the 84,000 diseases of the disturbed and unsubdued mind and its karmic actions). It is one result of subscribing, collectively, to a mechanistic paradigm as a behavioral guide.

But when experience is viewed very carefully it is possible to see - no one ever causes another person to do anything, and no one is ever to blame. Where group anger has locked up society into dysfunctional repetition - this one perception can free people to immense resources of creativity.

When the source of strength comes from within, external controls and external stressors lose their disease-causing grip on a person. Many illnesses develop as a kind of external dependency. Acupuncture is a method which works by helping people slip free from external damage, and draw on sources of health that spring from within.

A better world begins from within each person. From this starting point, love and happiness can flow out into the world as a forceful, life-giving activity.

...treatments have a cumulative effect...

* A NEW CIVILISATION....of Love and Beauty

It is believed there is a new civilisation appearing and becoming established in the world, across barriers of nation and culture. It is a peaceful civilisation, founded on spiritual values expressed through beauty and the fine arts.

Some leaders have consciously initiated this trend, such as Mokichi Okada, a 20th century visionary who founded the Johrei teaching. One of the principles of art in the Johrei teaching is to not dominate over nature, but work cooperatively, as in certain types of gardens or landscaping where the natural trend is cultivated in ways that express even more beauty, but without suppression of the characteristic quality of nature in itself.

Spiritual ideals can be expressed through the physical body--not as beauty which is exploitable or a marketable commodity--but through principles of harmony, rhythm, timbre of voice. These things often find expression in the fine arts such as in dance. But, they are qualities which cannot ever be turned into a marketable commodity, then they vanish and are replaced by something that is like a counterfeit, since the shining-outward of the inner spiritual principles is no longer active.

There is a branch of asian healing arts concerned with beauty such as facial rejuvenation treatments. The asian saying about 'losing face' can denote the social circumstance where a person is induced by necessity to forgo ways of relating to others which are for that person are authentic, which flow from their true spiritual nature. The result is engaging in interactions that do not confirm a person in their soul-self, but sort of steal their soul. This can result in physical changes in appearance, 'loss of face.'

The interest in protecting and keeping the grace and loveliness of the body is not just superficial, vanity or exploitive, but true loveliness is identical with a state of health, and with keeping to one's inner voice or conscience in the choices made during life in relation to the people one meets.

Acupuncture can work with these concerns since the physiology of acupuncture includes the functions of soul and spirit and their role in health. These insights are a healthcare tradition not just new age for today, but from origins in very ancient times where acupuncturists studied spiritual influences and cultivated them in the fine arts of dance, music, literature, astrology, calligraphy, painting, to find better ways to understand and help people through their treatments.

...red eft blending in...

* MYTH OF CLIMACTERIC

Anyone who has wakened, heart pounding and sweat pouring off, or endured sudden redness and heat flushing up while talking with a friend would never say climacteric was a myth. Yet one researcher at UMass Amherst discovered indigenous Mayan women experience cessation of the cycle uneventfully. Her study did not extend on to causes, but an acupuncturist might see a difference between the herbal-based, slow, easy pace of life in the hills of the Yucatan, and the 'type A' perpetual panic of American culture.

Acupuncture and herbology correlate the rush and push lifestyle with yin depletion--'running on empty' in common language, and yin depletion characteristically results in bothersome syndromes at climacteric time. Could they be prevented through changes in lifestyle and through judicious use of herbs over time? One of the medical issues is thought to be absence of estrogen. A millenially-used Asian herbal formula has been found to nourish the body to both produce estrogen and to generate more estrogen receptors, so utilization of any available estrogen increases.

Ovulation and periods may cease permanently, and significant hormonal changes occur--yet why does this have to reduce viability? There was a time before when there were no periods and no ovulation; why does this particular life-gate have to be conceived of as a loss anymore than adolescence was considered a lessening of the benefits of childhood?

The more public form of Asian traditional medicines portray a person's life like the skyline of Mount Fuji--a peak or 'climax' of activity followed by an inevitable decline. Yet the esoteric, or closely held form of traditional medicine emphasizes the continuity of a body's functioning, and its capacity at any chronological point to renew itself, even physically.

How people interpret their experience to themselves can influence what happens in the physical/emotional self. Though periods and ovulation leave off, why does this have to be construed as a decrease in functioning, and why could it not be seen instead as a shift in emphasis in the body's physiology? If climacteric were viewed and anticipated in a new way, it might lead to a lessening of physical liabilities currently seen as necessary and appropriate fate.

There is a subjective experience in the body--a feeling of pure vital forces coursing through body channels, that is somewhat independent of the physical self. This may be another name for the 'wise blood,'--that when menstruation ceases, it goes inside to become a kind of spiritual substance. Sensation of this wise blood can be developed long before climacteric; a part of acupuncture and its physical medicines--(the peaceful exercise of Qi Gong and T'ai Chi)--are to nurture this inner 'liquid light' which is like an 'elixir of life,' because of the sense of vitality and viability associated with it.

Many illnesses of later life develop because they're expected as inevitable and almost planned-for over many years. If life were lived in a consciously different way perhaps much of 'climacteric' would remain myth.

* LIGHT on BOG MYRTLE

In Asian Herbology these functions are described as clearing away 'phlegm that mists the Portals of the Heart.' The five senses are described as the portals or openings of the Heart (Mind/Psyche). These can be misted over by phlegm the way fog can cloud a window pane. Phlegm in herbology is understood not only as a productive cough, but as tough and sticky substances that clog the normal workings of the body. A protein named lipofuscin has been found to coat neurons obstructing their electrical function, corresponding with memory loss, depression and conditions such as Alzheimers. This may be a biological instance of "Phlegm misting the Heart Openings."

Some herbs have this property of being able to clear away this misting or clouding of the senses. This is equivalent to the experience of loss of contact with one's own spirit, so the demeanor loses its brilliance and sparkle, and a person feels dull. Herbs which can clear away the clouding of the sense-openings can restore clear perception.

Other herbs have a similar function. Pine oil has been used in baths to help restore the spirit. An american herb called Field Balsam or Sweet Everlasting has been used in a similar way by stuffing a small pillow with the herb, so it's healing scent surrounds a sleeping body. Sweet Everlasting or Life Everlasting herb has also been associated with communication from spirit beings -- when the plant is seen in the wild it is pale and white in contrast to surrounding brush, giving it a spectral appearance.

It is interesting all these herbs bear the form of a cone. And, all these cones show the mathematical pattern of the golden section (fibonacci series), which is an infinite number.

life everlasting (left), bog myrtle (right)

Bog Myrtle, even though it is not a kind of evergreen but a shrub, bears small clusters of tiny nutlets along the stems which look like tiny pinecones. Life Everlasting's flowers start out as conical buds, with the petals arranged like a pinecone, before they fully open as a blossom. Like pinecones-- Bog Myrtle and Life Everlasting are not just fragrant plants, but sticky with an essential sap.

In the human body the equivalent is a 'sap' or hormone exuded by tiny glands such as the pineal gland (named after pine cones, since it is shaped like a pine cone), deep inside the brain at the top of the spine. The pineal gland is active in modulating wakefulness and rest through the effects of light on the sleep cycle, and it has many other functions as well.

articles Copyright © 2011 Acupuncture Womencare. Laughing Woman artwork by Abigail Burns.
This page created by Sarah E. Pratt (sepratt@mtholyoke.edu).