Category Archives: healing

Lo these many years ago, when Brian Huwe L.Ac. and I were just beginning to round the corner into becoming silver-haired and were both still far more peppered than salted, we volunteered at a hospice facility in our fair city.

The mandatory training for this volunteer work was thorough, touching, and — speaking of salt — showed that those fine folks were worth theirs. We watched videos, read stories, and widened our understandings of healing and dying. Many parts of this training have stuck with me throughout the ages that have since passed, but the pertinent one at present is:

The hospice patient’s bill of rights.

Correct. There’s a nationally accepted hospice patient bill of rights. Now, we here at Huwe Acupuncture are big, big fans of bills of rights. In fact, they are our favorite kind of bills, which might sound like faint praise until you recall that this earth has duck-billed platypi.

In case you are unfamiliar with the term, a bill of rights is a tally of what we can expect as our due. Maybe you’ve even heard that our country has a Bill of Rights (woot to “the Article the third“)!¹

In our teensy-weensy Huwe Acupuncture corner of the world, we believe in transparently celebrating and upholding each other’s rights. Full stop. Also, we’re into healing. Ergo, we were intrigued by this hospice bill of rights.²

It includes things like dignity and respect, decision making, and privacy.

All good things. All critical things. All human birthrights, which are what we owe to our dying.

A child’s bill of rights

Years after first viewing the hospice patient’s bill of rights, I wrote a Children’s Bill of Rights for use in our family. This came to be as I was explaining the difference between rights and privileges to the small fry among us. I found there was considerable confusion in their developing brains when it came to naturally assessing the nuances.

(For example: No, unmetered access to Wild Kratts is not a right. Yes, I will still take you to the doctor if your eyes ooze out of your forehead from watching unauthorized Wild Kratts.)

Showing them a list of their rights was incredibly reassuring to their noggins and feelings.

Their bill of rights includes things like access to medical care, food, shelter, and love.

All good things. All critical things. All human birthrights, which are what we owe to our growing.

Your right to recover

But I also found — as is so often the case with writing in general — that it was incredibly reassuring to my understanding to create that bill of rights for my kids.

And then — as is so often the case with life in general — the themes began to merge. The US bill of rights, the hospice patient’s bill of rights, the Huwe family children’s bill of rights, and the Beastie Boys’ (You Gotta) Fight For Your Right all began popping up like road signs pointing me toward something that’s missing.

Y’all, we the people are overworked and under-rested. When we get sick, we do not get ample time to recover. And when we don’t get ample time to recover, we don’t actually heal. And if we don’t actually heal, little problems become big ones.

I believe, in fact, that this is very destructive. I believe we have the right to recover.

Sometimes people are resistant to this idea when it comes to bodies, so it can help to think about it in terms of money instead. Imagine a super freaky amount of debt, then schlep on a balloon mortgage, compounding interest, and other terrors. This is something like what happens when we are denied our right to recovery.

We pop the pills that keep us going and/or alternately sedate us so we can go to the job despite being sick, so we can maybe afford the health insurance that might sorta kinda cover the dialysis we’ll eventually need because our kidneys are shot. And that’s the highly-privileged-case scenario.

Neat!

And, look, I’m certainly not the first to point this out. I wish I could say it’s a brand-new problem that we can just lickety-split fix, but it’s a branded-old problem. It’s a problem designed to keep us hustling, sick, and scrambling in the street around a broken wine cask.³

Very specific groups of people benefit when very specific groups of other people are kept hustling, sick, and scurrying. If we think this doesn’t affect our physiology and psychology, we’re probably not reading this essay.

The road to recovery

So how do we exercise the right to recovery? How do we lay claim to it, enjoy it, and provide it to each other?

Well, dagnab it, it’s one of those things like breathing and exercise. It’s not one-and-done. We have to keep doing it. There’s also no one size fits all. The style of recovery road reclamation will depend upon the situation at hand.

But I do have some pointers. To help, I point us all to Tricia Hersey’s The Nap Ministry, which examines the liberating power of rest. I also point us to the YouTube channel of Dr. Glaucomflecken, whose hilarious videos on medical injustices keep the belly laughs coming.

Here in the US — and in lots of other places on planet Earth, besides — we have an addiction to productivity at the cost of… well… everything? We’re currently sacrificing our children, ourselves, each other, and piddly incidentals like soil, air, and water on the altar of productivity. And we’re calling it freedom.

Societal lurches and freedom propaganda aside, the things people need as a species don’t actually change that much over time. Most things fall into the categories of food, water, shelter, community, sleep, movement, and purpose.

The right to recover falls into a “community” problem –– and, thus, it needs a community solution. We (here in the States anyway) haven’t successfully created and defended a structure that provides paid sick leave for people who need it, while also providing access to medical services that provide those needs and social structures that make accessing those services possible.

It’s more advantageous for the few — and more accessible for the many — if we duct tape ourselves together with quick fixes that allow us to keep going. Until we can’t anymore. Until eating NSAIDs will no longer keep the blinding headaches away. Until that sprained ankle finally snaps. Until that psoriatic arthritis prevents that elbow from bending.

The gnarly problems of healthcare, access to it, costs around it, and who exactly benefits when most of us don’t, all boil down to one ongoing social issue: greed.

And that, for sure, needs our attention. On a large social scale, there is much greed to battle. For the right to recover to prevail, we must demand and vote for changes to our current insurance-based medical model. We must advocate for the healthcare and wages we ourselves want. We must contribute to actual discourse (if we can find it!) and create it when we can’t find it. Yes, yes, of course we must.

Here’s the thing, though. While absolutely necessary in a democratic society, this type of progress can be glacial, and glacial progress can cause despair.

So I propose an additional community-based solution to all that advocating, voting, discoursing, and demanding. I propose we effect immediate change within our communities, change that directly supports the right to recover.

How do we do that? By tightening up our actions and words around (1) our own experiences and (2) our expectations of others’ experiences.

What in the world does that mean? (Or, the Dos and Don’ts of Recovering Our Right to Recover)

So what does it mean to tighten up our actions and words around our own experience and our expectations of others’ experiences?

It means

1. Taking every moment we can to not rush ourselves through an illness.
2. Making connections with others’ experiences of illness.

Let’s break it down into dos and don’ts.

Taking every moment for you

This means giving yourself a break. And giving yourself a break about taking a break.

If you have the sick days, take them. If you don’t have the sick days, take the unpaid days if you can. If you can’t take the unpaid days, seize any moment that is yours to seize for rest. If you can’t find any moments to seize, drop anything you can that’s in the way. If you can’t drop anything, look again — maybe you can. If you look again and still can’t drop anything, don’t pick up anything else. Find whatever space is yours to claim and claim it for the good of your health.

This will mean asking for help. It will mean needing to rearrange some things. It might mean letting someone down or not doing a thing you said you’d do. Share your experience with the people who need to know, and the people who care. If don’t have any of those in your orbit, rotate on outta there. There are better galaxies.

Normalize recovering by talking about it with other people. Practice grace by asking for it.

Making connections with others

In addition to integrating your right to recovery by taking a break when you need it, you’ll also give others a break for needing the same thing.

Over the years at the clinic, we’ve seen firsthand that many-to-most people feel utterly isolated within their communities because of their health problems. And I promise you, this is not determined exclusively by race, gender, socioeconomic status, age, or any other demographic. It’s a human condition.

It’s because, way too often, we shut each other down. Sometimes when we hear about someone’s health problems — even if we really love that person — we are so uncomfortable with the reality of their suffering that we try to short circuit our discomfort. Perhaps we are worried about them. Perhaps we want to run from the idea that something similar could happen to us.

We might launch a series of platitudes, change the subject, compare apples to oranges, start a variety of sentences with “At least you…”, or otherwise minimize, invalidate, and distract.

This sucks. Let’s not do it to each other.

Instead, normalize recovering by listening to other people talk about their experiences. Practice grace by giving it.

by Mary Beth Huwe

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These writings are an exploration of what it means to be human – to be sick, to be well, and to heal – viewed through the lens of classical Chinese medicine. My words aren’t medical advice, and these essays don’t constitute a practitioner-client relationship. They also aren’t meant to be the final word on… well, anything. Rather, I hope they are the beginning of a conversation you have with someone in your life. Thanks for reading!

Footnotes:

1. The Bill of Rights: Transcription of the 1789 Joint Resolution of Congress Proposing 12 Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, archives.gov ↩︎
2. It was rather challenging to find a specific document, so after some digging I went with the Hospice and Palliative Care Federation of Massachusetts, which cites the Hospice Association of America in its reference to a hospice bill of rights. I could not, however, find a site for Hospice Association of America. ↩︎
3. A reference to A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, published in 1859. The link takes you to a free recording of relevant scene on librivox.org, free public domain audiobooks. ↩︎

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In the US, our collective interest in narcissism and its tactics of control, judging by YouTube video prevalence alone, is super high right now. A quick search into qualifying “super high” brought me a March 2023 news article, Gaslighting, narcissism are the most searched terms in the U.S.

People are interested in understanding narcissism, and thank goodness! Because that mess is destructive; the sooner we can recognize it and put in boundaries, the better off we are.

It’s one thing to recognize narcissistic patterns in family members, coworkers, celebrities, and/or real-life political nightmarish figures, but what about feeling like you’re a narcissist?

Do you ever wonder if focusing on healing is, ultimately, just narcissism? And maybe, just maybe, you — like — shouldn’t?

Let’s look into the yes and no of it all.

Healthy Narcissism v. Problematic Narcissism

It’s a very important truth that I am not a mental health professional. I have a graduate degree in Chinese medicine, not a PhD or an MD. The comments I make in this post about narcissism are either well-known generalities, come straight from sources I cite, or are questions I’m posing.

For more detailed information and to go down the narcissism rabbit hole with a (licensed!) digital guide, follow this footnote for some handy resources.¹ Please remember that unhealthy narcissism is a minefield of manipulation and gaslighting, y’all. Don’t go at it alone.

If you’re not familiar with the myth of Narcissus, from whence comes the term narcissism, the bottom line is that he was a gorgeous Greek man who fell in love with his own reflection when he happened to see it on the surface of a pond. He never left the pond shore, staring fixedly at his own beauty, where he died from — this is the best part — thirst. For the love of Pete, how perfect.

According to Britannica, narcissism as a mental disorder entered into psychology in 1898. Today, in 2024, it’s all over all the media.

But there is such a thing as healthy narcissism, meaning there’s a difference between narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). A basic way to understand this is to think of an intact self-esteem and self-regard as healthy narcissism. This is in stark contrast to problematic, pathological unhealthy narcissism.

The Narcissistic Spectrum

Dr. Craig Malkin, a lecturer at Harvard Medical School, describes narcissism as a spectrum. The left side of the spectrum is a lack of healthy narcissism, called Echoism. (Fun fact: He calls it Echoism as a reference to the myth of Echo and Narcissus. Echo is a nymph who falls in love with Narcissus. It doesn’t end well for her.)

Echoists are highly concerned about appearing narcissistic in any way, and as a result, they attempt to erase their needs. Spoiler alert, this causes problems.

According to Dr. Malkin’s Narcissism Spectrum Model, people with unhealthy narcissism on the right side of the spectrum have problematically high levels of narcissism. The Narcissism Spectrum Scale (NSS) describes these people as “entitled, approval-seeking, disagreeable extraverts.”²

That’s not to say that narcissists are extraverted by nature. Mental health professionals split narcissists into types. There are many classifications, but the most common ones I found were overt (also known as grandiose) narcissists and covert (also known as vulnerable or fragile) narcissists. Some mental health professionals consider covert narcissists to be introverted, while overt narcissists are extraverted.

Regardless of typing, Malkin asserts that disordered narcissists have an unstable self-esteem that’s incapable of creating a sturdy sense of self. Rather than turning to true connection, these people seek to self-soothe through feeling special or exceptional. They become addicted to that feeling. Other people (alas) exist in service to that addiction, to feed that need. The other bad news is that it’s an inexhaustible, bottomless, black hole kind of hunger. There’s never enough praise to fill it.

Thus, narcissists employ a number of psychologically manipulative and exploitative tactics³ to ensure that the people in their lives stay in line and feed that pervasive, unyielding, relentless need. Other people’s “feeding” of the need to feel special is called narcissistic supply. If a supplier leaves the relationship, the narcissist identifies and pursues a replacement supplier through efforts like love-bombing, charm, victimhood, or misleading self-effacement.

But, in the middle of Malkin’s spectrum is a balanced place. Here we find that “moderate levels of healthy narcissism are associated with many positive attributes and few indicators of psychopathology.”⁴

Unhealthy narcissism sounds terrible because it is. Yet in a high-performance culture like ours, narcissistic behavior can be rewarded. Pushy, competitive, demeaning, abusive behavior is often excused, especially in men. These traits can even be held up as desirable leadership qualities, despite the evidence to the contrary.

A fun 2018 paper on the NIH website states that individualistic cultures have more instances of pathological narcissism than collective cultures — another way, usually, of saying Western v. Eastern. And this brings us to the Dao.

The Dao, the Self, & the 10,000 Things

Chinese medicine has deep and wide roots, with any number of philosophies and trends affecting its shape over the course of its 6,500-(or fewer?)-year history. One of those undeniable influences is Daoism. Because we (the Huwe we, I mean) learned in a school that emphasized Daoist traditions in particular, much of our approach and style stems from this lineage.

Daoism values spontaneity, human nature, and non-infringement. It isn’t overly burdened by dogma; it doesn’t worship the written word; it looks askance at authoritarianism. Along with Confucianism, from which it is very distinct, Daoism is one of the most influential Chinese philosophies.

The Dao translates as the way, and what that means isn’t going to be pinned down like a dead insect on a collection board. There are lots of ways to understand these concepts, and I’m taking a light approach here. Essentially, the way means there’s a singular undercurrent, through-line, or path that may appear differently to different people, and is a harmonious orientation to (and through) the fabric of life.

We all come from the Dao, remain connected to the Dao, and to the Dao we return. It’s our source text, in a sense.

And speaking of source texts, Daoism has its own: the Dao de Jingand Zhuangzi. The Dao de Jing, in particular, is well-known in the West. Some people love it; some people are confused by it; some people find its seemingly simplistic language irritating and contradictory and annoying and vague.

It’s hard to write about the universe in any time period, and estimates place the writing of this text in 400 BCE. Yet despite the challenging nature of its content and the age of its commentary, the Dao de Jing continues to be relevant. An ancient 2013 Guardian article puts it beautifully:

“What the Tao Te Ching does, time and time again, is attempt to show us how we might see things if we could spend more time in awareness… [T]he central thing the Tao Te Ching asks us to be aware of is not the world, but our self. Self-awareness.”

The book consists of 81 single-paged chapters, which essentially read as poems that reveal an aspect of the Dao. For example, Chapter 1 says (among other things) Free from desire, you realize the mystery / Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.⁵

Chapter 42 states The Tao gives birth to the One / One gives birth to Two / Two gives birth to Three / Three gives birth to all things. (The all things here is sometimes translated as the 10,000 things, which I enjoy for its poetic universality and inaccurate specificity.)

In other words, we’re all individuals, connected to the Dao, and, as a result, connected to each other through the Dao. You’re special, sure, says Daoism. And so is everybody else. In this way, Daoism is the inverted opposite of problematic narcissism.

With that in mind, can people with unhealthy narcissism exist within Daoism? Of course. Sure. Any healing philosophy, profession, or modality is bound to attract power-hungry, emotionally abusive people looking for a birch rod to hide behind and smack others with. Whether it’s the Dao de Jing, the Bible, or the DSM, any book can transform from a tool of understanding into a weapon. It’s all about the wielding.

Self-Awareness v. Self-Obsession

We’ve uncovered, at least partially, what narcissism is. We’ve examined Daoism and its admonishment to become self-aware. So now let’s get back to our starting question: What’s the distinction between being devoted to one’s healing — being self-aware — and being devoted to one’s unhealthy narcissism — being self-obsessed?

In a healing modality like Chinese medicine, we encourage self-awareness at every stage of the operation. What that means and how it shows up ranges from the minimal to the revolutionary. Many, many people have been trained to deny, abandon, and/or completely ignore their own needs.

Whether it’s from a societal pressure, a family system structure, or both, some people feel guilt or hesitation around prioritizing their own healing needs.

Things like when (and how!) to say no, when (and how!) to ask for help, when (and how!) to back out of an unhealthy commitment, when (and how!) to insist upon accommodations are not second nature for most of us in modernity. Changing our habits is no small potatoes, and doing so will have a direct effect on the people in our lives. They may or may not like this effect.

Another aspect of self-awareness, especially at the beginning, is a feeling of novelty. Self-discovery is exciting. It can absorb a fair amount of our attention, and we can feel like new vistas of self-understanding are opening all around us. This is because they are.

For many of us, though, doing these things can feel very uncomfortable, as if — what was it Dr. Malkin said? — we’re “entitled and disagreeable.”

Walking the Line

The line, then, between self-awareness and self-obsession can be viewed from a variety of angles. True healing, supported by self-awareness and self-possession, usually looks something like this:

1. Things Calm Down

Should your healing experience become all-encompassing, rest assured that it usually calms down. As you integrate your initial revelations and update how you care for yourself, everything becomes more manageable. Your ability to focus on other things will continue to grow with time.

2. Needs Aren’t Bottomless

When you’re radically following your heart, the experience isn’t a bottomless craving that others must fill for you. It’s more peaceful than that. If you’re feeling insatiable or anxious, you’re probably not quite hitting the mark when it comes to your needs.

3. Coercion Doesn’t Arise

Healing is a claiming of the self. Truly taking care of yourself doesn’t involve psychological warfare to make other people do your bidding or soothe your fears.

4. Relationships Adjust

When we’re figuring out how to love ourselves or care for ourselves through an illness, we make changes. Changes don’t typically go unnoticed. They may ruffle feathers or shake up the status quo. In these cases, we find ourselves renegotiating relationships — and sometimes, reevaluating them entirely. Not all relationships survive these shifts.

This is an entirely different thing from actively destroying your relationships through narcissistic abuse.

by Mary Beth Huwe

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These writings are an exploration of what it means to be human – to be sick, to be well, and to heal – viewed through the lens of classical Chinese medicine. My words aren’t medical advice, and these essays don’t constitute a practitioner-client relationship. They also aren’t meant to be the final word on… well, anything. Rather, I hope they are the beginning of a conversation you have with someone in your life. Thanks for reading!

Footnotes:

1. Legit, credentialed, thorough, online resources regarding disorders of narcissism:
   –Dr. Les Carter
   -Dr. Ramani Durvasula
   –Dr. Emily Grijalva, University at Buffalo
   –Barbara Heffernen, MSW
   –Dr. Craig Malkin
   –Dr. Tracy Marks: Narcissism vs. Narcissistic (video)
   –Patrick Teahan, LCSW ↩︎
2. Development of the Narcissism Spectrum Scale: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pqUX9mitTH9ahEDqZveC3TBqPnBay19V/view ↩︎
3. See here for a fun, NSFW example of some of these tactics. ↩︎
4. Development of the Narcissism Spectrum Scale: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pqUX9mitTH9ahEDqZveC3TBqPnBay19V/view ↩︎
5. Tao Te Ching (S. Mitchell, Trans.). HarperPerennial. (1988). ↩︎

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There’s a lot to say about healing, disease, and Chinese medicine in particular. They’re big concepts with lots of nuance.

Despite the depth and breadth, sometimes we, the Huwes, find ourselves saying the same things over and over again. That’s one of the reasons for these essays — to have a place to point current clients, or to remind ourselves how we said it that one time in the way we liked.

Anyway, one such repeated sentence follows: Disease is the spilling over of all our unmet needs.

We can think of this in literal physical terms — the coronary arteries need more space, the brain needs more serotonin, the gut needs more acidophilus — and we can think of it in literal emotional terms — the heart needs more love, the brain needs more stimulation, the gut needs more trust.

Chinese medicine isn’t going to quibble over what’s physical and what’s emotional, chiefly because it’s not often an incredibly meaningful distinction. People waste a lot of time there, trying to separate interdependent factors into isolation, reallocating our energy into blame and categorization. Why bother?

If you’re still with me, let’s shift this to another angle. What we’ve noticed is that these unmet needs are — usually for a pretty long time — absorbed, managed, and accommodated by the body/mind. And I’d like to just pause here and say, Well done, adaptive and fabulous bodies/minds! After a while, though, these accommodations can cave. The proverbial soil can absorb no longer, and accommodation spills over into disease.

When we heal, we seek to meet those underlying unmet needs where we find them, and — hopefully — to resolve the imbalance that led to their existence in the first place. With that comes many things, two of which — fear and shame — we’re going to normalize today.

If you feel some fear and shame when you’re healing from something, don’t worry! Fear and shame can be normal parts of healing. That might sound terrible and not at all encouraging, but knowing what to expect can help these undesirable feelings do what they need to do, and move along.

Fear and Shame (and Probably Loathing) in Healing

Here in the US — and in lots of other places on planet Earth, besides — we have an addiction to productivity at the cost of… well… everything? We’re currently sacrificing our children, ourselves, each other, and piddly incidental things like soil, air, and water on the altar of productivity. And we’re calling it freedom. In the words of Wordsworth, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. If we think this doesn’t affect our physiology and psychology, we’re probably not reading this essay.

It will likely not shock you to know that US anxiety levels are through the roof. The World Health Organization (WHO) reported in 2022 that global incidences of anxiety and depression have increased by 25%. And that’s simply COVID-specific.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) cite a 10-year study of anxiety trends in US young adults, describing the increase as “rapid.” This rapidly increasing anxiety was from 2008–2018, so… need I say, before COVID. Meaning that anxiety levels were already on the rise, and then COVID increased them worldwide by 25%.

Also, US access to healthcare, including mental health services, remains woefully inadequate, though more accessible thanks to the Health Insurance Marketplace. But there seems to be a tacit national ethos that illness should be repressed, suppressed, and powered through so we can get back to work.

So, the situation is impossible. It makes us sick, and then we feel like failures for getting sick. It’s hard enough to admit that we have needs; to admit that we have unmet needs that have made us sick can feel tantamount to unconstitutional.

I’m going to call it: It’s weird. But it makes perfect sense.

There’s so much societal shame around illness, disability, mental torment, physical imperfection, cellulite, physiology in general, and stomach flus that it boggles the mind. We’re collectively sleep-deprived, lacking vital nutrition, and overworked. No wonder we don’t feel good. And on top of it, we feel bad that we feel bad. We should¹ be able to power through. We should be able to blah blah blah. It’s a whole lot of burden and noise, and guzzling energy drinks or booze or vitamin water doesn’t make it stop.

Healing means meeting our unmet needs. Meeting our unmet needs means facing ourselves, our disappointments, and our limitations. That can be, in a word, fuh-reaky.

Facing Fear

I’m going to paint a picture here, and I request that you hold it loosely. Let’s say healing is like filling holes. To adequately fill the hole, you can’t just throw any old item or trash in there. It needs to fit. If you have type 2 diabetes, it’s inadequate to fill yourself with oatmeal creme pies, tasty though they may be. You get the idea.

So it’s kind of like what Nietzsche said about looking into the abyss. You look in there, and you’ll answer yourself back. And sometimes, that’s great. But this essay isn’t about those times. This essay is about the times you freak yourself out.

In those times, you’ll think very intelligent, cogent, horrifying thoughts about the very particular ways in which whatever is going badly could get worse. And other times, your holey self will feel like a sinkhole, and you’ll resume the shame spiral that’s so trained into you that you mistake it for your double-helixed DNA. It’s not! It’s not DNA. It’s bologna.

What is this fear about? Is it nonsense? Should it be shut down? Shouldn’t you just get back to work?

We have a working theory. There is something primordial and survival-based going on during healing. I don’t know if it has a name, or if it is yet to be “discovered,” but it’s a certain state of survival that can feel scary. This happens even when we don’t have a strong emotional charge connected to the thing we’re healing from.

It’s the act of healing that I’m talking about. It can be as major as a brain injury or as minor and non-life-threatening as an infected splinter. It doesn’t mean you’re a disaster; it doesn’t mean you should shut this down because you’re no good at it. It doesn’t mean it will never get better. It means you’re figuring out new ways to live. And that feels weird.

Shushing Survivor Shame

It’s important to short-circuit the shame spiral whenever it threatens your healing. This is not the same as berating yourself or denying the shame. It just means learning to recognize that shame thing for what it is, regardless of how it shows up. It means trusting that no matter how many fake mustaches it puts on, it’s still bologna.

There’s another aspect to this shame piece that I want to touch on. It’s a type of survivor’s guilt that says, Nope. You don’t get to escape this suffering. You don’t get to heal. You don’t get to blah blah blah. Or, put another way, Who am I to be happy when there is so much suffering in the world? How can I possibly heal this aspect of my life and leave my fill-in-the-blank?

I’m not the first to talk about this, and it takes many forms. For more information I refer you to the inimitable Mary Oliver, and encourage you “to save the only life that you could save.” But you can also drop ladders and keys wherever you go.

by Mary Beth Huwe

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These writings are an exploration of what it means to be human – to be sick, to be well, and to heal – viewed through the lens of classical Chinese medicine. My words aren’t medical advice, and these essays don’t constitute a practitioner-client relationship. They also aren’t meant to be the final word on… well, anything. Rather, I hope they are the beginning of a conversation you have with someone in your life. Thanks for reading!

Footnotes:

1. If, somehow, no one has ever told you to stop shoulding all over yourself, allow me. Stop shoulding all over yourself. ↩︎

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Some of the best Chinese medicine advice we ever received was this: Learn what healing is; then learn what disease is.

This is the kind of statement that really riles listeners and readers. What does it even mean? How can we help people get better without knowing what disease is? Who DOES that?

Well, Chinese medicine does. It is, as we say around here, a little different. It takes some getting used to, and it benefits from context and explanation. The vast majority of our clients have never had acupuncture prior to coming to Huwe Acupuncture, and those who did experience acupuncture at another clinic didn’t grow up with it.

It’s not just the tools of treatment or the language of Chinese medicine that’s a little different; it’s the whole kit and caboodle. We do directly approach illness, but we also directly approach healing.

Healing ≠ Medicine

First things first. Healing, in fact, is distinct from medicine. Ideally, the two are related, overlapping, and intimate — but they are not one in the same.

Medicine is a tool that helps rid us of disease. Entangled with physics and biochemistry, biomedicine gives us chances to live longer and — we hope — more fully. But the focus isn’t healing. The focus is recovery and heroic intervention. And hey, that’s great.

Let’s say your appendix is rupturing. Biomedicine pulls it out and — yay! — saves your life. That’s a heroic intervention, a medical cure. The offending appendix is gone. But what about the underlying mechanisms? What about the resultant surgical wound? You still have to heal from those. Recovery and heroic intervention can be wonderful, but they aren’t the full picture. Anyone who has recovered or been pieced back together, but hasn’t healed, knows in their marrow what I’m talking about.

Just like biomedicine, Chinese medicine offers a system of recovery and intervention. If you have a shoulder injury with pain, your acupuncturist uses needles or gua sha to treat the problem. That’s a medical intervention that resolves the qi and blood stagnation causing the pain. Chinese medicine goes a step further than biomedicine, though; Chinese medicine’s interventions are not only medical, but also assist in reintegration.

The Huang Di Nei Jing Ling Shu, one of Chinese medicine’s classical texts, positions acupuncture needling as a kind of prompt to the body to remember how to reconnect to its own spirit — to something greater than its matter. This is how Chinese medicine connects mind/body/spirit without dishonoring any one of them.

This reconnection or reintegration is the healing part. In the above shoulder injury example, after acupuncture the shoulder returns. It not only feels better, it also feels like your shoulder again; it rejoins the whole. And while this can happen in biomedicine, it’s usually not a function of the intervention itself. It’s more of a lucky bonus or happy accident.

No medical practitioner can do something to you and leave you magically healed. So if healing isn’t medicine, recovery, or intervention, what is it?

Healing is an internally generated reintegration process. It’s not wrapped up in physics or biochem like biomedicine is. It’s also not entirely wrapped up in qi like Chinese medicine is. Healing is wrapped up in who you think you are. It’s entangled with your identity, which is why it’s so complex.

Healing as Learning, Treating as Teaching

All this to say, healingisn’t something a person can DO to another person. I cannot heal you any more than your first-grade teacher could learn you to read. A teacher doesn’t put the knowledge into your mind. However or whenever you learned to read, you learned that certain symbols — we call them letters — visually represent certain sounds, which we call words. You memorized some stuff with your conscious awareness. And then your unconscious integrated what you memorized and morphed you into a reader.

In other words, your memorization transformed into understanding. You integrated the symbols and their meanings. You now know how to read any words I write, and if you hit a word you don’t know, you can look it up and read the definition. BOOM. You’re amazing!

The teacher, in a certain way, didn’t teach you how to learn. The teacher engaged with your ability to learn. The teacher galvanized your innate capacity to learn. In another way, a teacher absolutely teaches students how to learn, by engaging and working with their conscious receptivity to learning.

This is similar to how healing and acupuncture work. The practitioner, like the skilled teacher, knows when and how to intervene, and can see where the pieces might not be coming together. In an acupuncture treatment, the practitioner chooses the treatment that will most stimulate the client’s innate healing capacity. The practitioner’s mind goes to work — consciously doing what it can, letting the body do what it knows. When the fit is right, the practitioner also helps guide the client to consciously discover more in-roads to healing.

Healing is both our birthright and grace, and it’s possible to shut it down or block it out. For healing to be at its most robust, we must be receptive to it. Receptivity to healing, while not the only predictor, is a strong indicator of successful treatment.

One of the most potent things you can bring to your own healing is an open, beginner’s mind replete with both curiosity and self-trust. The curiosity will keep you from becoming too certain of yourself and creating stony barriers between you and possibility. The self-trust will keep you from being overly bounced about by other people’s opinions — after all, you’re the only one who can know what you’re feeling.

Receptivity to healing doesn’t mean denying the reality of your illness, suffering, or pain; instead, it’s about working your receptivity muscles, knowing when to get out of your way, and becoming fluent in the language of your needs. And then meeting those needs.

Thus, the medical practitioner is never the healer. The healer is you.

by Mary Beth Huwe

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These writings are an exploration of what it means to be human – to be sick, to be well, and to heal – viewed through the lens of classical Chinese medicine. My words aren’t medical advice, and these essays don’t constitute a practitioner-client relationship. They also aren’t meant to be the final word on… well, anything. Rather, I hope they are the beginning of a conversation you have with someone in your life. Thanks for reading!

Listen instead:

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Implicit in the idea of healing from something is the idea of moving to something else. From a broken wrist to a mended one; from an ulcerated stomach lining to a smooth one; from a C-section to an intact core; from a traumatized self to an integrated self.

We’ll talk another day about what in tarnation healing actually is, the differences between healing and a cure, how healing is simultaneously a birthright and a demand, how it’s both sporadic and the work of a lifetime.

For now, suffice to say that healing has different modes and meanings.

Throughout those variations runs a central, powerful common thread: Healing is some of the most serious work a body/mind/spirit can do. So why is this post called “The Critical Importance of Playfulness in Healing”?

Because here’s the reality: not all serious things are heavy all the time. In fact, many of them aren’t even heavy much of the time.

Furthermore and finally, for something as serious as healing to be successful, a little lightness is required. If this sounds counterintuitive to you, you’re not alone. Please, allow me to peel back a few layers and explore the critical importance of playfulness whenever we endeavor to heal.

Playfulness: Healing’s Ruby Slippers

Hang with me here, because this might sound a wee bit counter-culture. There are lots of ways to understand our experiences, lives, and world — and, contrary to what various, extreme self-referential interests would have you believe, different does not mean wrong, stupid, or bad. (At least, not necessarily. I won’t dishonor reality by implying different is never wrong, stupid, or bad.)

One of the many ways to understand disease is to see it as a departure from homeostasis in a way that causes disruptive problems. Thus, in illness and disease, there’s a certain departure from integration — a shifting from the natural state of the self.

Similarly, then, healing is a return to homeostasis and a reintegration of the self. Healing is a type of coming back home — except that the house will be a little different this time. Perhaps a room will be added, or a hole patched, or that sagging porch will be gone.

The point is, there are lots of ways to heal. Many paths lead home. And the best news is, like Dorothy, you have the ruby slippers.

Lo, these many years ago when we were in acupuncture school — a four-year (summers included!) combination of Survivor and family Double Dare — part of our training was a two-year internship in the college clinic. This clinic provided low-cost Chinese medicine to area residents, and as a function of that, served some very ill people.

Some of these people didn’t get much better. Maybe they stabilized, maybe they even worsened. Some of these people got much better. As in, much much better — in a way that we might not have predicted from the outset.

I remember being surprised when seemingly simple processes were recalcitrant, while gnarlier patterns just — POOF! — disentangled. That doesn’t surprise me anymore. One of the single most important predictors of outcomes, I’ve found, is how a person is oriented to their imagination.

Oh, That Overwrought Einstein Quote

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ve all probably heard that Einstein quote, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Am I really going to dredge it back up?¹

Yes, friends, I am. And allow me to be clear that imagination in this context is not the same as pretending.

Pretending is an anti-healing quagmire when it combines with its nearby neighbor, denial. More on that another day, but for now let us walk briskly away from imagination as pretending.

Rather, we’ll take the view of imagination as a playful, creative interaction with reality— as curiosity combined with a loosely-held, ever-evolving vision. This is a mighty fine line, and I mean that in the literal and colloquial senses. It’s a thin and nuanced balance; once you learn to see it, you may be inclined to wolf whistle.

In terms of healing, this curious, nimble, imaginative frame of mind is like a booster for whatever treatment you’re undergoing. It allows you the freedom to own your healing process in a couple of ways.²

Firstly, scientific, technical knowledge about the condition happening to you is not required. You can pursue that knowledge if it’s helpful to you, but it may not be.

When you allow yourself to truly have the experiential knowledge about the condition happening to you, you’re engaging with healing in a very real way. That’s when you learn to read the language of what’s happening and of what you need. And maybe that’s what healing is: becoming fluent.

Secondly, the playfulness of imagination creates an opening for change. Because there are many paths home, it’s important both to pick a path to focus on and to abandon a path that isn’t working. That requires a good deal of flexibility and discernment.

Both flexibility and discernment are centered when we engage our imaginations. Visualizing yourself whole and healed is a powerful way to become whole and healed. But trying to visualize each turn you must take to reach that destination is powerfully distracting and even destructive.

The truth is, reality changes. A responsive, adaptive approach to healing helps us change, too, so we’re meeting reality as it changes. If we don’t do that, we’re meeting our denials and projections instead.

Countdowns, Games, and How to Play

As promised above, I’ve peeled back some layers. Now let’s pop ’em back into place and zoom out for a minute into the practical application of these ideas.

If you’ve ever been a child, which I’m fairly certain you have, you’ll have some recollection of playing. The example we like to give is of a (terribly cute) child we once knew playing in a large cardboard box in our living room. At first, the box was a spaceship. A great deal of the child’s energy went into the preparations required for flight. She needed to instruct her crew, load supplies, do lots and lots of checking, and any other number of Important Tasks simply beyond my comprehension.

She bustled and hustled and enjoyed herself immensely. Once everything was properly arranged, she climbed aboard and then jubilantly counted down to lift-off. Then something interesting happened. As soon as she shouted BLAST OFF, the game changed. The box ceased to be a spaceship; it was now a car.

The game wasn’t really about being in outer space. It was about preparing for space travel as if she could fly. She knew she couldn’t fly, and that reality robbed her of nothing. She was still happy to play until she bumped up against something that she couldn’t change.

So she changed with it. She changed the spaceship into a car, and then the car changed into something else. When the reality of gravity and cardboard boxes entered in, she was able to shift into another direction of play.

That cardboard box became many things in the weeks that followed, until it lost its shine for her. Then she moved onto magic wands.

Now, I’m not telling you to delude yourself into healing. But I am suggesting that suspending a little bit of disbelief can be a very healing approach. Accept that you don’t know every future twist and turn of your situation. Suspend the future. Explore it right now, whatever it is. Ask yourself, can I take care of this need, and can it be fun? Can it be like a snow day that cancels my plans and lets me rest?

This kind of playfulness allows you to meet your changing needs as they arise, rather than becoming overwhelmed and frozen. When we project into the future about things we don’t know as if we do know them, we miss the boat. And the spaceship. And the car. And the way home.

by Mary Beth Huwe

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These writings are an exploration of what it means to be human – to be sick, to be well, and to heal – viewed through the lens of classical Chinese medicine. My words aren’t medical advice, and these essays don’t constitute a practitioner-client relationship. They also aren’t meant to be the final word on… well, anything. Rather, I hope they are the beginning of a conversation you have with someone in your life. Thanks for reading!

Footnotes

1. I would also like to dredge up this J.B.S. Haldane quote. ↩︎
2. Probably more, but I’m a mere mortal here, just doing my best. ↩︎