I am no scholar of the Five elements or the Five spirits models of Chinese medicine. I have read about them and integrated them into my acupuncture practice. I remember when I was first trying to grasp Five element acupuncture, my teacher said that you have to recognize how the elements feel not just have an intellectual grasp on their qualities. I spent years after that sitting by fire and investigating how it felt or feeling the earth under my feet and noticing which senses it conjured up in me. I still practice these exercises.
The longer that I work in this field, the more I understand that it is about seeing the truth, not just with my eyes, listening with my heart space and feeling deeply with my whole self. The healing process is about being alert, sensitive to subtle movements of energy, remaining grounded and being able to communicate information with language and skill.
Healing work concerns being receptive, generous, and loving whilst having boundaries and good self care techniques. Sometimes I have to challenge someone and other times I just have to be there and listen to painful content, and stay with the tears. Sometimes I evoke anger in my clients and sometimes I let them talk too long, use up too much of my own energy.
Often I drag myself home to my own children exhausted and spent by the day, the weeks of work. I wonder if I am really helping. There is probably no one definite way to answer this last question, because people are very dynamic and healing can take time. If I look back through the people that I have worked with in the last decade, I see so much transformation.
I once counted on my fingers how many people I had worked with that had experienced unquestionable positive growth from our work together. I think I stopped caring about the literal number once I got past 50. I do not say this to fluff my own ego and flaunt my talent.
This is hard work and each client that changed their patterns earned it with their own blood, sweat and tears.
The acultural experience that we are living within, does not support a stable balanced and paced healing processes. We are trained to get a quick fix and to self soothe with outside intervention. A better understanding of honest recovery would serve us and our communities well. We could use more secular programs, activities, that foster healthy growth, connection and maturation in the population. If there were more accessible affordable simple models, we could benefit greatly.
Change takes time and lots of cultivation energy. I have spent a lot of my energies working on what is within me in hopes of contributing to balance around me. This is slow and tedious work with moments of elusive clear abundant transcendence. I do not invest in the concept that this work produces linear results. It is more like I am trudging through the wilderness for a long time and instead of planning to go a certain direction and getting there, rather I stumble upon a nice meadow and sit down and rest or come upon a view that just takes my breath away. There are different routes to healing recovery.
The five spirits are a ancient and deeply rich model representing the movement of energy. Only working with a snapshot of a much larger landscape, I thought it would be amusing to highlight the different components of consciousness energy and how they relate to each of the five spirits.
Shen- The little Shen represents the light of consciousness intelligence, the orientation of identity self in the physical world.
Hun- Is the consciousness that comes through our dreams, through vision and prophecy, through inner knowing.
Yi- Is the center field and represents the ground at which we nourish ourselves and quench our thirst.
Po- An examples when you are sleeping and you half wake up and you can feel your breath connected to something greater then yourself. The consciousness of death and the connection to what would be called God, Goddess or other. This is also felt within the connection to animals.
Zhi- This is survival consciousness. In the lower abdomen, in the dark watery depths is the will to live. The transmigration of spirit.
These states of consciousness are shifting in and out through the day and night, through the years of life as we age. Nothing is really fixed but they are tools of identification and help us grasp our spiritual discovery. The ideas and models give us frame work but the results still have to be experienced first hand.
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