Dear Friends, Neighbors, and Family —
Last week I promised to tell you how I learned to manage my energy. I had never thought of my energy as anything that was in any way “manageable” at all. What I knew as a rheumatoid arthritis patient in search of better health was that there were things wrong with me at every level, and my regular doctors weren’t offering options I could live with. I was never without pain. Many of the activities I had once enjoyed were impossible for me. I had very limited energy — certainly not enough to manage, or so I thought. Even that small amount was unreliable, and most of this was getting worse, not better. Though I no longer felt hopeless, I was still clinically depressed over the loss of my old way of life and my old picture of myself as tough and self-reliant.
I knew that my physical state could affect my emotional state, of course. But I was also beginning to see, dimly, that in some mysterious way, my emotional state could affect my physical state. By now I was more than familiar with the doctor’s method of measuring pain. “Rate your level of pain on a scale of one to ten, where one is no pain and ten is unbearable.” Most days, I rated my pain at six or seven. If the weather was bright and the birds were singing, or if I had just received a piece of good news, it might be as low as three or four. If the weather or the news was bad, the number was high. Was it real, or was I just thinking about it more? Hard to say. One thing was certain. Pain was subjective, and had a lot to do with my mood.
I had begun to experiment with pain and attention. Later, I would discover that “being with your pain” is an actual thing, usually accomplished during meditation. As a newby to all this, and someone with the previously mentioned gruff attitude toward meditation, I approached it by applying Timothy Miller’s advice about judgment-free attention. That is, the fine art of simply observing without forming any opinions about whatever it is. I found I could look at my pain as just another feeling like heat or cold or pressure — neither good nor bad, neither fair nor unfair. Pain wasn’t detestable or horrible. It simply existed. This changed everything. Keeping it up for any length of time was a challenge, but I saw that it could be done, and that I might be able to get better at it.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but all of this was beginning to change my beliefs about what is possible and what isn’t. There were clearly approaches out there that worked, even though my doctors were unfamiliar with them, or thought of them as unsupported fringe systems they could not ethically suggest. Chinese Traditional Medicine was among these approaches. Practitioners of western medicine demanded evidence based on the outcomes of experiments. And these experiments had to be formulated according to an established scientific method involving double blind, reproducible studies. At the time, there were no double blind studies involving CTM. (There are now. Today, my insurance company will pay for acupuncture.) I didn’t understand how it worked any better than my doctors did. I did know that perhaps a billion people over thousands of years have tried what I had decided to try, and found it worthwhile. That was a fact I couldn’t ignore.
I had already taken the big leap of starting acupuncture treatments when, on the double advice of the acupuncturist and a good friend, I joined a Qi Gung class. Just to keep things interesting, most English versions of Chinese words are attempts to depict sounds that don’t exist in English. Which is why you might also have seen this Chinese exercise referred to as Qi Gong or Chi Gong, or even Chi Gung (and all variations such as qigong). It might also be why we used to call Beijing Peking. But I’m getting off track.
Now I’m going to shift into high gear, let out the clutch (you’ve heard of those, right?), and take you on a somewhat wild ride. Fasten your seat belt.
My Qi Gung instructor (the aforementioned small, bearded man with the golf cap and the twinkling eyes; we’ll call him Dan to protect his privacy) explained that Qi is the basic energy of the universe. It is all around us and inside us. We are made of it. This might sound like a claim that should be approached with caution; it did to me. But Dan asked if I’d taken any physics courses (I had), and then said, “Good. Then you’re already familiar with the idea that matter is composed of constantly moving charged particles, and charged particles produce electric fields.” I was indeed familiar with that idea, though as an art and English major, I had never thought much about its practical implications. Dan wanted me to consider one of them: If all matter produces electric fields, then there are electric fields all around us and even within us. The Chinese call this ubiquitous energy Qi.
You might also be familiar with the notion that objects are not as solid as they seem to us. Since everything is composed of moving particles, and there’s quite a lot of space between particles…well, you pet your cat and even though it feels solid and your hand feels solid, there’s a borderland where your atoms and the cat’s atoms mingle. And at the atomic level, it’s hard to say exactly where the cat ends and your hand begins. Most assuredly, it’s impossible to say where the cat’s energy fields end and yours begin. If we had the tools to detect it, we might well find that energy fields extend quite some distance from the center of an object. In which case, heaven help us, we have the cat’s energy, and the cat has ours. My energy is all mixed up with my spouse’s. Our energy is all mixed up with the trees and the grasses and the snails in our vegetable beds. If this theory is true, then quite literally, we are everything and everything is us. Everything and everyone is connected. Everything we do affects others. It explains a lot.
To continue down this road, which looked more and more curvy and intriguing, I would have to keep an open mind, at least provisionally. Though a little eccentric, Dan did not actually seem crazy. In fact, his ideas seemed rational. Okay, I thought, let’s assume all this is true. Then Qi is in the world and in me. Dan continued with an explanation of how Qi affects health. Ideally, the Qi in a person’s body flows freely, and there is an interchange between the energy in our bodies and the energy all around us — in the air, in the surfaces we touch, the water we swim in, etc.
But wait. There’s more. The universe has an underlying nature. I would say this “nature,” known among the Chinese as Tao, is what we think of as the basic laws of physics. But according to Lao Tzu, who wrote the definitive text on all this, Tao is not a concept that can be grasped intellectually. So that eliminates the basic laws of physics, though in my admittedly Grasshoppery opinion, it seems reasonable that the laws of physics might be part of the thing. (Just as an aside, my favorite translation of Lao Tzu’s definitive text, the Tao Te Ching, is Ursula K. Le Guin’s. In her hands, it is quite a wonderful book.)
The Tao tends to keep everything in balance. If we have properly intuited what the Tao requires of us and are living in harmony with it, the Qi circulates freely within us and around us and we are healthy. In a person who is not well, there are blockages — places where the Qi gets stuck. The in-out interchange of Qi between the person and the world may be out of balance, too. Traditional Chinese Medicine provides three tools for the adjustment, balancing, and cultivation of Qi. One is acupuncture. Another is Chinese herbs. And the third is Qi Gung. (Here I will mention once again Daniel Keown’s book, The Spark in the Machine, which provides a better explanation of these principles than I can manage.)
Needless to say, I had a lot of Qi blockages. There was something else, too. After years of living with the pain of arthritis, I had developed a strange separateness from my physical self. If my body were a house, it was as if I lived in only one room of it — the least painful one. The rest of the house was dusty and neglected. Muscles had become wasted and weak. Bones had become porous. My shoulders were hunched. Standing up straight felt odd to me. I couldn’t get up from a low chair without help. I could barely carry a bag of groceries up the four stairs from the driveway to the kitchen.
Dan seemed to understand all this just by looking at me. “You have a right to be in this world, and to carry yourself with confidence in it,” he said, by way of beginning. Over several months, he taught me to straighten my spine and plant my feet firmly on the ground. At first, it felt painful and unnatural, but over time I regained a more normal posture. We began to learn the various ways in which a human body can move. I rediscovered things I had forgotten. For instance, it was possible to raise my arms above my head. No kidding, I hadn’t done that in decades. A person’s upper body can turn independently from their pelvis. What, really? I’m not sure I had ever known that one before. It turns out arms can swing from the shoulders in such a relaxed way that they almost look boneless. We don’t have to lean forward when we walk. We can take our time. “Don’t over-commit,” Dan said. “Be sure of your footing. Walk like a fox on an icy pond in springtime,” and he taught me how.
Here’s how it looks. Imagine a classful of people doing this. Initially, it reminded me of “Night of the Living Dead.” But I got over that fast, because it definitely left me feeling alive.
All the while, Dan was also teaching me the various “gungs,” exercises designed to open the muscles, joints, and organs and give the Qi more space to move freely among them. It was frustrating, uncomfortable work, and I would sometimes rail against myself for getting it wrong. Dan was far more patient. He reminded me often to treat myself gently. There was no wrong way, he said. There were only ways of getting better at it. So it was that I very slowly learned in a physical way what I hadn’t been able to learn by thinking about it — how to give myself a little slack and celebrate my successes. Slowly but surely, I began to inhabit all the rooms of my “house” again. I also noticed that while doing Qi Gung there were times when the voice in my head became a mere whisper. It was still there, but further away, or weaker. Maybe both.
I’ll leave you here with another poem, one I wrote some time ago, in the fall as the air began to taste like winter. I like it because it’s about that sense of connection I mentioned, from the macro to the micro. Next issue, the transformation continues.
CHANGE
November.
The sky unblemished blue,
slower, deeper than a month ago,
headed for a new kind of winter,
mysterious, anyone's guess.
You walk an old path
through the woods.
Luminous leaves
converse in the wind
from a crow's wing,
drop and disintegrate.
You smell them rising,
set free by rain and rot,
and the pale heat of stars,
like the bare skin of your arms,
less solid than it seems,
a nebulous blend of air and blood,
a wave of atoms and chance,
exceptions all,
like the whole sunny world.