Listen instead:
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
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!
