My acupuncturist studied martial arts in depth for 30 years, beginning at the age of nine. His personal teachers include Wong Jack Man in the Northern Shaolin style, among others. He has been my Tai Chi teacher for two years and is my personal acupuncturist/counselor. Below is a compilation of our recent conversations (to the best I am able to approximate them – admittedly clumsy at times) which I take and offer as starting points for meditation.
Me: “I believe life is always painful. It’s part of the program of living, we’re meant to be wounded.”
A: “Yes, there is pain around everything. The question is, can you yield the pain around the things you do not want, and withstand it for the things you do? When martyrs die for a cause it strengthens the cause, when they give up the cause weakens. If you don’t want something, yield, don’t resist. Resistance strengthens the thing you push against.”
Me: “If I try to do something it never works. If I don’t try and let the universe take care of it, it always works out. This has been my experience until now. Now I find that I’m letting the universe take care of things and I’m ending up places I don’t want to be, and feel trapped without any ability or power to free myself.”
A: “Two things are happening here. First, you are holding onto a belief about how life is or how your life has been. ‘The universe takes care of it’ is a story you tell yourself, as is the story that if you try to do it yourself you’ll fail. Track your beliefs, watch them arise and look at where they want to go, what they want to do. In this way you can ‘stalk’ your thoughts, and become a predator to them. That way you can separate who you are from what you believe, and are no longer controlled by your beliefs.
Second, you are actively creating your life as it is now. ‘Will’ creates what we experience, and exists on another level. If we try to engage with it from a place of ‘I want/need’ we step out of alignment with it and move into manipulation, trying to bend the universe to our desire, which weakens our ability. When thinking about what you want, focus on the feeling you imagine comes with it. Can you content yourself with the feeling? This is how we may engage will without manipulation, by allowing the feeling to be our focus, and working with the feeling rather than the idea of affecting an outside circumstance. Of the ways will operates, feelings are one of the most tangible ways to engage with it.”
Me: “There are certain things that don’t change, ever. Walls I hit into all my life and absolutely can’t affect, no matter how much personal work I do. I know I’m not powerless, but I feel as though I’ve tried everything and am unable to do anything about them.”
A: “Everything is in constant movement, constant shift. The feeling of being stuck is a way for the ego to protect itself. The fact is the ego is working very hard all the time to keep feeling stuck, and will find ways to make neutral events fit into its narrative. It insists on looking in only one direction, when there are infinite places to look. Anytime I start to feel like things are stuck and not moving, I know something big is shifting and the ego is trying to protect and hide from it. So I start looking around and asking, ‘what’s different’? Just looking to see how things are changing and making a note of it. In this way you check in with the truth – that nothing is ever the same one moment to the next – and let go of the idea of things being stopped or not moving.”
Me: “But every time I look, the wall is still there.”
A: “Of course it is! It will always be there if you look for it. Can you train yourself to not look for it?”
Me: “How do you define trauma?”
A: “Trauma is anytime something doesn’t digest easily. We are greeted at all times with thousands of bits of information, most of it flows through us without our thinking about it. Trauma is anything that doesn’t easily flow, too much information to take in at once. Or we believe it is. So we step back from it and try to create distance, analyzing and creating a problem so we can fix it. Trying to fix something is the essence of trauma, it’s the belief that something is wrong with you and needs to be fixed. To heal don’t concern yourself with how or why you are broken, notice how you are whole. Anytime you encounter something that feels difficult, don’t resist it. Focus on breathing and relaxing into it, allowing it to fully flow through you and digest. Remember, resistance enforces things, yielding lets them go.”
Me: “It’s easy to think about things – hard to do them!”
A: “Practice, practice every day.”
[…] an awareness of a mostly unconscious pattern that prefers to hide when we look for it. My acupuncturist calls this “stalking” a pattern, and says its a way to draw energy away from it […]