I just finished reading this book that was on a recommended reading list for my Intro to Shiatsu/Intro to 5 element theory class this last semester.
It's written by two acupuncturists (who were also among the founding members of the Black Bear commune in CA in the 60s and early 70s) and is a really brief and simple overview of how traditional Chinese Medicine works.
The Afterward shattered my heart into 1000 pieces....
The ending sums up what I've been searching for in terms of how I achingly wish how the world I live in was and the deep primal yearning in myself to get back to my true self and to feel the interconnectedness between myself, others, and all things. It also resonates with some of the ideas I've come up with, within myself, in regard to my own spirituality and what it means to be human.
"The Paradigm of Chinese Medicine engages us because of our discomfort with "the way things are," socially as well as personally. We face environmental, political, economic, and health crises that are challenging our core perceptions, values and beliefs
We realize that cigarettes and alcohol cause major health problems, an accident in Chernobyl impacts on dairy farms in Norway, pesticides sprayed on grapes injure the children of farm workers, military aid to El Salvador encourages the violation of human rights, eliminating steamy rain forests alters the temperature of the entire planet, and toxic chemicals dumped upstream poison the people downriver. But our ability to deal with these problems is handicapped by maintaining a worldview that ignores what we know. We name isolated problems, reducing whole puzzles to a segregated pieces, ignoring the relationship between the bits. We worship nouns (things an and of themselves) and snub verbs (process).
That fifty-million children are at risk of perishing in this decade from lack of food and medicine could be remedied. That one in six children in the United States, the wealthiest country in the world, could be amended. That missiles that deliver nuclear arms are designated "peace keepers" deserves serious questioning. Our priorities (values) and our conceptual models (paradigms) are ailing. Confronted with the dangers of war, destruction of the Earth, and inhuman practices toward each other, we have global as well as personal healing on our minds. Chinese Medicine represents the remembrance of a world made in a different image.
Today, as civilization escalates in complexity, our daily lives are compartmentalized. We are mandated to keep our emotions under cover at work and trained at an early age to keep our bodies hushed. Our spiritual lives are often preempted by the urgency of economic survival. Isolated from a community of support, families no longer run households or raise children collectively. Many fathers do not live in the same home as mothers, and many do not share in the lives of their children. The meaning of family and community has become elusive, its integument fragile.
We are readily herded into compliance, discouraged from drawing the road maps to guide ourselves toward the cooperative pursuit of fundamental change.
Education focuses upon teaching children to accept, compete, and conform rather than question, collaborate, and invent......
By choosing between mutually exclusive either-or options, we splinter our world into winners and losers, masters and slaves, superiors and inferiors, haves and have-nots. Such hierarchical divisions are reinforced by a self serving morality. We choose between what's good for body or mind, me or you, my business or environment, my national security or yours, means or ends, swaggering and swearing, to defend what we arbitrarily decree as the righteous side of this tissue paper wall. Rather than honoring our gender and ethnic differences with mutual respect, we confuse equal opportunity with homogeneity, crushing our diversity and imposing upon ourselves the banality of a mass monoculture.
Instead of perceiving the world as a living organism, we see it as a machine that exists for our short-term profit and convenience. We experience ourselves as cogs in the machined rather than cells in a breathing organism. Instead of recognizing the interdependence of all living things and pursuing partnerships, we set up institutions whereby one species, race. or nation overcomes and dominates another.
This fragmentation in our outer world is echoed by our inner life, by how we experience ourselves. We lack interpretive systems that connect our deepest aspirations with our personalities and the shape and performance of our bodies. We lack a language for appreciating our physical, emotional, and spiritual life as one seamless, uninterrupted story...
Feelings of being disconnected exist inside us, between us, and above us, as human beings in relation to the cosmos. Over the last centuries we have ruptured our felt connection with Nature- Heaven- and Earth-depriving ourselves of the sense of belonging we once held sacred."
