Who is there who does not have the fleeting sense—here for a moment and gone again—that once, long ago, we were told a story that now forever eludes us? What was it? Who told it? Why is something known and then not known? Where shall I look for what I have lost? Perhaps we come to realize that if a thing is to be remembered, it has first to be forgotten. The mind had to lose its knowing to the bloodstream in order that there it could be digested, simmered as in a crucible, suffer the sea-change and be given back.
—P. L. Travers, What the Bee Knows
Who does not remember a time of wholeness? Perhaps it was that moment just waking from sleep or meeting a lover on a rainy street or hearing the song of crickets in the Summer twilight.
For me, it was when I was very young. My family had just moved to our new house in the country and my parents were head over heels in love—not only with each other but with their garden filled with lilac, mock orange, and roses in the sun; hosta, sweet fern, and lily of the valley in the shadows; and magically, at the center, a lush, full-grown Macoun apple tree.
It was a Sunday in Spring. The three of us were at a nursery, walking along the paths outside the greenhouses. I was in the middle. My father held my left hand, my mother my right. In my memory, the grass was a carpet of emeralds and above our heads the sky opened to an infinite blue that left me breathless with amazement. There were no edges to the world that day as my parents sang out, “One . . . two . . . three . . .” and in effortless unison lifted me by the hands and swung me up into a perfection of flight, my whole body buoyant and filled with happiness.
Although I have had many moments of deep connection, mystical insight, and inspiring beauty since that day, this is my last embodied memory of divine perfection. I treasure it as an affirmation of what I firmly believe as a human and as a healer: despite all appearances to the contrary, each one of us arrives in this world reflecting the integrity, beauty, and perfection of our source.
This source is the original unity that existed before the creation of the universe as well as the undifferentiated chaos that continually generates the new possibilities of the world. Although invisible and ungraspable, source energy animates every aspect of creation. Its power is reflected in the cycles, rhythms, and forms of the natural world. Alchemical traditions from disparate cultures have come up with different ways to name and symbolize this mystery but it is recognized wherever alchemy flourishes. European alchemists called it the “One Thing” or the “quintessence.” Egyptian alchemists referred to it with the hieroglyphic kh.
Figure 1. Egyptian hieroglyphic kh
This hieroglyphic makes up the first letter of the Egyptian word khem, which is the root of our word alchemy. The hieroglyphic has a dual meaning, on the one hand tangible and material and on the other hand intangible and divine. Kh is translated as dark soil, referring to the fertile black earth left by the receding tides of the Nile from which all vegetative life emerged. This dark soil was also the source of the metals and precious ores that the early Egyptian alchemists worked with in their laboratories. Alternatively, kh is translated as placenta or uterus, the rich inner matrix of the mother's body that shelters and gives life to the developing embryo.
Further, the hieroglyphic kh also refers to what alchemists call the “First Matter,” a primordial undifferentiated spiritual substance, a chaos, without gender, weight, or form that gives birth to all things and to which all things return. Kh is the origin of Heaven and Earth. Endlessly pulsating, creating, and destroying, kh is the matrix, the Absolute, and the gateway to the infinite.
Later European alchemists used the symbol of the ouroboros, the mythical serpent who continually devours and emerges from its own being, to graphically express the endlessly regenerating power of the source.
The ancient Chinese alchemists called it Tao. They regarded Tao as the origin of all being, the gate to the essence of everything. From the Taoist as well as from an alchemical perspective, at the beginning and the end of every journey is Tao—this perfect, unknowable wholeness. The Chinese character is a symbol made up of two parts.
Figure 3. Chinese character for Tao
On the right is a picture of a head with a plumed hat. A plumed hat is worn by a leader, a military general, a priest, or a shaman. The feathers on the hat reach up to heaven and bring down the messages of the stars. With guidance from above, the leader begins the journey. On the left is a picture of a foot, indicating a person walking, going somewhere on a path. Without the foot that walks on the Earth, the Way of Heaven cannot be followed.
Tao is the all of you, from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet, from your conscious sun-lit mind to your unconscious lunar instincts. Tao is spirit and matter and all that lies between. The poet Lao Tzu describes it as “The breath that never dies.” From this endless breath comes all the living and dying beings and forms of creation. This infinite, formless breathing cannot be known directly and yet you know it through its impression in natural form, its reflection in the world of darkness and light.
Tao eludes the conscious mind but if you quiet the thinking mind for a moment and open the eyes of your heart to your inner world, Tao can be known by the messages of your dreams, your body symptoms, your particular longings and emotions, the impossible coincidences, and strange twists and turns of fate that shape your life. In this way, your small, limited sense of who you are expands until, once again, you are joined with the cosmos.
Living your Tao means living in alignment with your own divine nature. This is the definition of health according to the ancient Chinese. Over the years, I've found that it is also the most accurate definition for me and for the people I work with. Living your Tao has nothing to do with your ordinary ideas about happiness or health. It is not about how much money you make, how beautiful or youthful an appearance you project, or even how long you live. It has to do with whether you are going somewhere, whether you are on your path with your head and feet connected. Living your Tao reflects that you are following the guidance of your inner knowing and not someone else's ideas about who you are supposed to be.
It turns out that following your Tao can look pretty weird from the outside. In fact, “The weirder the better,” says Chuang Tzu, one of the greatest Taoist sages of all time. He says to check out that “hunchback catching cicadas with a sticky pole,” or that one there with “two toes webbed together and a sixth finger forking off,” or that old tree “with trunk distorted, so full of knots, no one can get a straight plank out of it.” Strange as these examples may be, Chuang Tzu reminds us that throughout many years of focused practice, the hunchback has come to know the nature of cicadas in and out, and through that has discovered a skill, passion, and singleness of purpose that completely satisfies him. The gnarled tree, which cannot be rounded with a compass or cut with a T-square, has escaped the carpenter's axe and lived for centuries contentedly offering shade and shelter to creatures in the forest. Webbed Toes has stopped trying to be like anyone else and has learned to dance on her own strange feet.
The question is: What is the medicine that ultimately allowed these beings to accept their Tao and become who they were meant to be?
Throughout history, the quest to distill an infinitesimal drop from the source, to gather the primordial power and underlying wholeness of the cosmos, has been the central focus of alchemy. Alchemists regard this distillation as the essential medicine and believe that even a drop would be able to heal the world. As modern-day alchemists, it is our task to discover this source and bring a drop of its healing water back to our ailing world.
From One—the Source—Two naturally arises. The arising of Two gives birth to the possibility of polarity. Like the positive and negative poles of a battery create an electrical flow, the space or field that exists between all polarities generates life. Whether you consider the first division of the maternal egg after fertilization, the cracking open of the seed in Spring, or the division of a single sprout into the twin leaves of the dicotyledon, you see that the movement from One to Two is the beginning, the first prerequisite for embodiment and growth. From the divine marriage of these two polar opposites, the world is born and Tao becomes manifest in the infinite forms of creation.
Five thousand years ago, the Taoist sage Fu Hsi recognized the pivotal moment when the two life principles emerged from Tao as the beginning of time. He named these principles ch'ien, the creative or spirit power, and k'un, the receptive or power of matter. Together, they form the basis of China's greatest alchemical text, The I Ching or Book of Changes. Fu Hsi created two graphic symbols for these two principles:
Ch'ien: Heaven or the Creative
K'un: Earth or the Receptive
The energy of the receptive principle came to be called yin. The earliest character was a picture of clouds or something shaded from the sunlight. Over time, the character changed and came to represent the shady side of a hill. Yin represents the principle of matter and the Earth. It is associated with water, coolness, lunar consciousness, inwardness, darkness, and the power of gestation, process, and manifestation. It is also associated with the feminine or uterine aspects of being.
The energy of the active principle came to be called yang. The earliest character was a picture of the sun with rays coming down from the sky. Later, the character was redrawn to represent the sunny side of a hill. Yang represents the principle of spirit and Heaven. It is associated with fire, heat, solar consciousness, outwardness, and the power of initiatory impulses. It has also come to be associated with the masculine or phallic aspects of being.
Figure 4. Ancient Chinese graphics for yin and yang
From the Taoist alchemical perspective, yin and yang are mutually arising and sustaining. They emerge simultaneously from Tao and one cannot exist without the other. Like two partners in a healthy marriage, one is not better, more necessary, or more valuable than the other. Without both partners, the marriage cannot exist.
Like the sunny and shady sides of a hill, yin and yang are not fixed but are relative. As the sun moves from east to west, dawn to dusk, what we know as the yin and yang sides of the hill shift in response to time and the changing position of the sun.
The alchemical notion of Two is beautifully expressed through the Taiji symbol, an ancient depiction of yin and yang. This symbol expresses in graphic form the dance of the opposites as they mutually arise from Tao.
Figure 5. Taiji or yin-yang symbol
The distinguishing feature of the alchemical view is that Two emerges from and retains its connection to One. In his book The Mystery of Human Relationship, Nathan Schwartz-Salant writes,
All of alchemical thinking is concerned with opposites . . . Somehow the alchemist had to recognize opposites inherent in any process and then to unite them. A spiritual sense of Oneness plays a vital role, for a kind of illumination is often necessary to “see” opposites, an act of discovering order in chaos.
The goal is not for the two principles—spirit and matter, male and female, mind and body, activity and rest—to radically split apart but rather for them to polarize, to separate just enough to come into life-giving relationship.
An imbalance between these two fundamental energies is at the root of many of the psychosomatic and emotional symptoms I treat. I also believe that the severing of connection between these two forces by the dualism of modern consciousness is at the root of many of our most pressing global problems. This split is aggravated for my patients and the planet by our culture's overvaluation of the yang—mind, activity, productivity, speed, expansion, and a more archetypally masculine approach to life—and an undervaluing of the yin—body, rest, idleness, reflection, conservation, cultivation, and the more archetypally feminine approach to life—which has left us devoid of connection to the renewing, gestating, and sustaining power of the inner world.
The ancient Chinese understood that the marriage of yin and yang engenders life. Their divorce leads to death. All alchemists share the view that the miracle of life arises from the interplay of these two cosmic polarities and that their separation inevitably leads to a destructive loss of vitality, generativity, and potency. From an alchemical perspective, the separation of these two principles should only be undertaken with the utmost care, for a brief amount of time, and within the safe confines of the alchemical laboratory. Carelessly or unconsciously isolating them from one another will ultimately lead to a dangerous waning of the life force.
However, for the past four hundred years in the Western world, the Cartesian dualistic view of reality has severed the connection between these two polarities. To this day, we create dichotomies that separate yin and yang, matter and spirit, feminine and masculine, the sensing/feeling body and the thinking mind. Spirit has become an abstraction that exists distant from our embodied life, while matter has been relegated to inanimate stuff that can be objectified, used, and discarded without concern for its innate subjectivity.
Today, we see the positive outcome of the great divorce of rationalism in the increase of our capacity to analyze and manipulate the physical world around us. This has led to tremendous gains in the domains of Western science, mechanical engineering, and technology, as well as great strides in the physical aspects of Western medicine, including surgery, diagnostics, and disease prevention and control. When my good friend's son wrapped his car around a tree, we were all deeply grateful for the pinpoint accuracy of the tests and technology, the targeted medications, and the cool, rational minds of the doctors who saved his life.
However, who will be there to support him as he recovers from the shock and emotional trauma of the near-death experience? Who will guide him as he learns how to live a satisfying, self-sustaining, and meaningful life with severe physical limitations? And who will offer him alternatives to alcohol and opioids as he grapples with the chronic pain resulting from his injuries? In the words of my doctor friend, it is important to know what our different kinds of medicine are meant to do.
Despite all the gains of our mastery of the physical world, there have been losses in the domain of human spiritual and psychological well-being as the nonphysical aspects of our lives have been increasingly marginalized and denied. In addition, the splitting off of matter from its “other”—the spiritual essence of life—has led to a lack of respect for the innate divinity of the natural world. As a result, human beings have come to regard nature, as well as their own bodies, as commodities, products to be bought and sold for profit, stuff to be manipulated solely for human gain. The outcome of this divorce is a culture that is unwell and a planet that is seriously threatened.
Given the intricate complexity of the issues currently confronting humanity, black and white thinking no longer offers adequate solutions. We are faced with the crucial question of how to repair the marriage of these severed cosmic principals—in our own being as well as in the world around us.
My father developed a brain tumor when I was ten years old, and my sun-lit world came crashing down in pieces. Although it had been many years since my early experience of original divine wholeness, I had remained a kind of magical child, closely connected to my own imagination and the nonhuman world of plants and animals. The shock of my father's illness was the final death blow to my childhood, the cracking apart of my original integrity.
I felt lost, alone, and responsible for alleviating my father's suffering. I had no way to understand this experience in relationship to the rest of my life. When I look back, I realize that the worst of it was not my father's illness but rather my family's response to his illness. My parents did not talk about it with me. I had no idea if my father would live or die. I was left alone to deal with my own fear, grief, and all the unnamed and unspoken emotions rushing through my home.
I responded by going numb, putting on a mask, and acting “as if.” I pretended I was okay in order not to be a bother to anyone. I now know that there are names for what happened to me. Western psychologists call it dissociation, by which they mean a detachment from reality as a way to cope with an overwhelming experience. Chinese physicians call it a shen disturbance, by which they mean that a person's shen or spirit separates from the physical body in order to protect itself in the face of shock or trauma. Alchemists call it the cracking of the vessel, an event that is inevitably followed by a nigredo, a darkening, dissolution, or depression that is an essential phase of an alchemical process of transformation.
For me, that darkening was a depression and withdrawal from relatedness, ambition, and my own creative fire that lasted throughout my adolescence and well into my adulthood. What I eventually came to understand is that from an alchemical perspective, the cracking of the vessel and the subsequent nigredo is actually a moment of great potential. It is the first step on the journey, the beginning of the Great Work of embracing embodiment as a means of remembering and reclaiming our wholeness, our Tao.
Alchemists have always held to a different view of embodiment than that of mainstream Judeo-Christian religious doctrine. They do not accept the idea that matter and spirit are separate, or that transcendence of the body is the ultimate goal of spiritual development. They reject the denigration of the body that began with Plato's argument:
The body is a source of endless trouble to us . . . and is liable also to diseases which overtake and impede us in the search after true being; it fills us full of loves, and lusts, and fears, and fancies of all kinds, and endless foolery, and . . . takes away from us the power of thinking at all.
To alchemists, the yin domain of earth, matter, and the body is the laboratory where our spiritual work gets done. Without the containment, resistances, and often frustrating challenge of embodiment, transformation is impossible.
I see now that the early traumatic experience of my father's brain tumor, the numbness that followed, and the amnesia around my own divine wholeness was the beginning of an unfolding process. I believe that my choice to become an acupuncturist and healer was an expression of my Tao. But more importantly, that inherent nature was born in response to a need to heal from my own wounding. As I've healed, I've come to help others learn to respond differently to illness and the inevitable sufferings and challenges of embodied life. My attitude toward healing is shaped by what I lived through in my own family but also by the alchemical idea that the parts of life you resist, the painful experiences you reject or deny, the parts of yourself you hate or are ashamed of, are actually points of growth, places where your soul is invited to incarnate more fully.
It took many years, the help of many gifted teachers, and long practice with the tools I am presenting in this book to bring me back to the place where I began, so that my early memory of wholeness could be, in the words of author and mythologist P. L. Travers, “[d]igested, simmered as in a crucible, suffer the sea-change and be given back.”
If you consider the root of the English word health, you find there is an ancient, implicit understanding about the purpose of the healing process embedded in alchemical ideas and principles. The word health comes from the Anglo Saxon hal, which is also the root of the words heal and whole. In addition, hal is the etymological ancestor of the word holy. From this perspective, healing is much more than fixing the cracks in something broken so it can work the way it did before. Instead, healing is a process that brings a new, more inclusive and efficient wholeness to a living system that has fragmented, a system that has lost its integrity, its purpose, and its vital connection to the divine.
This same connection between healing and wholeness is found in the Chinese character hé, which forms part of the word yùhé, to heal or to cure. Hé is a picture of a lid fitting perfectly over the top of an opening. Hé implies the idea of coming together, the combining of parts that result in a safely closed container or wholeness.
Figure 6. Hé, the Chinese character used in the word yùhé, to heal or to cure
The roots of these words reveal that the archetypal concern of the healing process is not alleviating suffering but rather bringing parts back together and mending the brokenness that is the source of suffering. Healing, at its root, is the path that returns you to wholeness and brings you back to your innate and imperative relationship to your source. Healing is a return to the holiness that is your origin.
