3: Unraveling Into Harmony

The Shape of Tao, Metaphors of Illness-Health, and Thoughts on Master Zhu's Teachings #3

Note: Any concepts in italics are references to concepts laid out in the essay "The Shape of Understanding”.

The premise of this essay is that our lives become an entangled emotional and perceptional conglomeration, these entanglements can effect our health. That our physical and mental health is directly related to these conglomerations and the experiences we hold onto. These experiences shape our lives and manifest the direction of our lives and our realities.

Wu-Ji and Health

At the core of this understanding is an understanding of a relative state of health, a time when our bodies were healthy and disease free. A state where there was an absence of disease. This state is called the Wu-Ji of our health. From the essay “Human Metaphors”, we see the 5-element analogy as a Taoist idea of the aspects that make us human beings (Figure 1). When these five aspects or elements are in a state of balance with themselves, we see what a healthy human being looks like from a relative state of Wu-Ji:

• Our bodies are supple, flexible, and move unimpeded and pain free.

• Our energy base is strong, vibrant, and full. We feel rested when we wake up.

• Our strength flows through our bodies unimpeded by stiffness or pain.

• Our perception and senses are clear and unmuddied.

• Our minds are sharp and settled. The opposite of this is a state we call monkey mind, where our thoughts are scattered and bouncing around like a monkey in a cage.

This is the relative state of absence we can compare our current health to as diseases become present in our systems.

Figure 1

The Natural Arrangement and Our Lives

There are many reasons why our bodies change as we progress though our lives. As infants we grow larger, our bones grow and our muscles start to develop. As teenagers our bodies go through the hormonal transition of puberty, our bodies change as we develop from children, transforming into adults. As adults our bodies and minds become fully developed and we are in our peak performance. As we age past our prime, our bodies become more rigid and stiff, our energy base decreases and our strength recedes. This process is what we call the natural arrangement: The path of our lives as we grow and develop from children culminating in a peak and then our energy and minds decreasing into the physical demise of our forms.

The shape of the I-Ching (Figure 2), is a representation of this natural arrangement. It follows the path from Wu-Ji as we traverse our lives. The solid arrow represents our path of decisions or events, the dotted lines represent the possibilities and potential that lie outside of our paths.

Figure 2

From figure 2 we can see our life events and decisions we’ve made unfold bringing our lives into focus. These events and choices are represented as a Yin/Yang pair. Every decision or event changes our trajectory, depleting our overall potential along the way. Our decisions and experiences follow a binary path laying out the direction of our lives. Every decision I see in relation to the infinite possibilities from which we make our choices. For example, if I ask myself “Should I go to the coffeeshop or not?”, this appears as a binary question. In reality there are many options for me to choose from, I could go out to breakfast, go for a walk in the park, or the grocery store. The list is truly endless. It’s our patterns and beliefs that we’ve accumulated along the way that restricts our options, possibilities, and our lives.

Emotions Manifesting Our Realities

The examples given above show a simplified view of the natural arrangement in our day to day lives. Our lives, on another level, are varied and more complicated. I think the emotionality of our decisions is what shapes who we are, our decisions, and our lives. If we look at the natural arrangement (Figure 2) with the development of our personalities as we emerge into our lives, we confront all kinds of situations. These situations have emotional components. These emotional components are the voice of our bodies.

There are two directions in which we can look at the natural arrangement (Figure 2), towards the origin (Wu-Ji) or away from the origin (into the infinite). To understand who we are as individuals in the world we need to look back towards the origin to understand how we became who we’ve become.

If you’re reading this, you should know that writing has been one of the most challenging endeavors I’ve had to overcome. When I was in elementary school I liked to write, at some point I wanted to be a sportswriter for the newspaper. In sixth grade we were studying poetry, I wrote a poem about the stars being like pearls in a velvet purple ocean. We submitted our poems to the teacher and later that week she was in front of the class talking about our assignment, she wanted to read one of the poems to the class because she loved it. In that class I sat across from a girl I had a crush on. When the teacher said she was going to read the poem aloud I leaned over and told her “I’m sure it’s not mine.” but it was... As a shy kid I was embarrassed and traumatized by being recognized and singled out. After that experience I stayed away from English classes and writing for over 30 years.

If we look at that experience through the eyes of the natural arrangement (Figure 2) I was in a state of Wu-Ji with writing. I just thought about something and wrote it, everything flowed smoothly and I was in the zone. When the teacher stood up and gave me praise and encouragement I was confronted with a choice: I could accept the praise and grow or I could react how I did and do anything in my power to not have a similar traumatic experience. This is an example from my life showing how emotions manifest our realities.

This example lead to other questions about my experience, why did I react the way I did? Why do I have problems with receiving compliments (this is an ongoing theme in my life)? There were many decisions I decided not to make because of that one experience. There is a point here that I think is important, the decisions I decided not to make were not conscious, the decisions not made were defensive reactions made from traumatic emotional stagnations. As I dig through my emotional life I find other experiences rooted deeper down that led to my reactions in that classroom.

Our lives are filled with these types of experiences, some positive some negative. It’s these experiences and our reactions to them that manifest our realities, our personalities, and our lives.

How Our Bodies Change

If we look at a Human-Being from a Taoist perspective as being made from Heaven and Earth. We see the “Human” form made of the Earth and the “Being” or energetic/spiritual piece made of Heaven. We as Human-Beings are mixtures of these two aspects. As our lives manifest themselves and our shadows and personalities develop through the Natural Arrangement. Our emotions are the voice of our bodies and our thoughts are the voice of our minds. I think of our beliefs as being mixtures of the emotional voices of our bodies and ideas from our minds.

In the modern world there is an emphasis on the ideas of the mind and the voice of our bodies gets stifled. From Master Zhu’s understanding every layer of our emotional lives as we manifest our realities has a physiological effect on our bodies. Each stressful situation releases an array of hormones into our system. These hormonal emotional responses change our bodies causing our muscles to constrict, they become tense or excited. As the time from these situations dissipate our bodies change back into the state before we had become stressed. As our bodies process the stress and we return to “Normal”, there are residual traces of these stress hormones that remain in our tissues. Overtime the leftover residual effects from these stressful encounters change the shape and shorten our muscles, which changes the shape and length of our tendons, and which ultimately pulls and changes the shape of our skeletal structure.

From this perspective we have different levels of disease. Muscle level disease, tendon level disease, and bone level disease.

The changes of our bodies from these experiences follow the shape of the natural arrangement (Figure 2), with one experience being the root of other experiences along the same vein of our existence. For example, for me anytime I was confronted with a situation where writing was involved I would have the same physiological response as I did in the 6th grade leading to a fight or flight response. This behavior entrenched itself deeper and deeper over time, broadening it’s range as I encountered similar situations.

The Natural Arrangement and Disease

At the beginning of this article in the section Wu-Ji and health I talk about how we can define a healthy human being. As our bodies change from the stress from our accumulated experiences, and as our beliefs and patterns develop our health declines. The muscle tension that arrives from the stress of our day to day encounters accumulates throughout our lives and can be the cause of our health issues as we age.

The question arises of how this type of tension effects our health. From the Taoist perspective energy movement and the unrestricted flow of this energy is the central idea. The energy (Qi) flows unimpeded through a flexible body, this energetic flow is mapped out and can be seen in the acupuncture meridians. These meridians are like streams of energy and the acupuncture points are like river eddys along these streams. There are 12 principal acupuncture meridians that are associated with our internal organs. These meridians flow through our extremities, our bodies, and in and out of our internal organs. These meridians are named the lung, heart, pericardium, triple burner, small intestine, large intestine, spleen, kidney, liver, gall bladder, urinary bladder, and stomach.

As we age our health follows the natural arrangement (Figure 2). Here the natural arrangement is the slow accumulation of emotional experiences that shape our bodies and our perceptions. We lose flexibility do to muscle tension resulting in pain. We start with a vibrant full energy base, as we live our lives, that energy base is whittled away and shrinks. Our strength is dependent on a strong vibrant unimpeded energy flow, the tensions, kinks and bends that change the shape of our bodies restricts energy movement and diminishes the circulation compromising our strength. Emotional stagnations radiating from unresolved issues cloud our minds, tainting and jading our lives, skewing our perspectives.

From the “Human Metaphors” essay we see can see the emotional responses associated with our internal organs.

• The metal organs are the lung (Yin organ) and large intestine (Yang organ), these organs are associated with sorrow.

• The water organs are the kidney (Yin organ) and the bladder (Yang organ), these organs are associated with fear.

• The wood organs are the liver (Yin organ) and gall bladder (Yang organ), these organs are associated with anger.

• The fire organs are the heart (Yin organ) and small intestine (Yang organ), these organs are associated with joy.

• The earth organs are the spleen (Yin organ) and stomach (Yang organ), these organs are associated with worry.

While we live our lives and accumulate our experiences our bodies record and remember the events that define our realities. The muscle tension from residual emotional stagnations change the shape of our tissues, which restricts the energy flow through our bodies. I think these emotional stagnations emanate from our organs and though our bodies along these meridians.

Unraveling Harmony

The Taoist understandings I’ve learned from Master Zhu are based in the ideas of the I Ching (Book of Change). The central idea for me is that if you understand how something has changed you can understand how to unchange it.

If we look at our lives through the natural arrangement (Figure 2) we can see a map of our internal lives. We can see how we have developed and how and why we’ve become who we became. Our realities at the core are very simple, we have a body and an internal world. We have a voice of our mind that interacts with the voice of our body, we have a spirit that sees and an energy base that moves and flows within us.

There are different genres of illnesses, environmental, genetic, and infections to name a few. From this perspective we’re looking at illnesses that have to do with the imbalances of our internal worlds reflected in our bodies. When I think of these illnesses, I can see how chronic illnesses can be explained through these concepts. Depression and other mental emotional disorders, some of the auto-immune diseases, as well as some of the cancers I see can be rooted in these ideas.

My story is with the auto-immune disease ulcerative colitis. I was diagnosed in my 30’s but in retrospect I know I had symptoms most of my adult life. Western medicine didn’t have any real solutions, they recommended surgery and medication that had minimal success. Master Zhu looked at the shape of my body and told my partner I should do energy work (Qi gong) and my auto-immune disease would go away. This was the beginning of these ideas and the practice. When I figured out the logic of the understanding I remember thinking my disease was a toxic energetic pattern locked inside my body. The idea of the practice is to use stretching, meditation, and repetitive exercises using relaxation to remove the muscle tension in our bodies. As we follow this practice we refine our energy and remove the residue in our muscles and tendons.

I figured it out one morning. I was sitting on the bank of a mountain river on a summer morning listening to the roar of the river. I sat there thinking about the voice of the river, that summer the water level in the river was low and the river was louder than I remembered. It was the large rocks and boulders strewn along the river floor that impeded the flowing water that gave the river its voice. The larger the rocks the larger the roar. I thought about the disease I had and thought about the experiences in my life that had been toxic, the larger the emotional experience the larger the emotional responses. When I was younger and had a larger energy base, the roar of my internal world was less, the energetic level of my internal river was higher and the rocks had less of a voice. As I got older that energy base receded, the rocks and boulders of my internal world created a larger roar in my life. I realized those boulders in my internal world were causing the toxic patterns of my illness. I also realized that that the ideas of the book of change and the pattern of the natural arrangement held the key to my illness. I remembered a time when my body wasn’t sick and that if I removed these internal boulders maybe the patterns of my illness in my body would dissipate. These ideas gave me hope and I committed myself to the energy work and undoing the patterns and triggered responses I had accumulated in my body and internal world.

As I unraveled the trauma and shadows from my internal world my life got better, my disease dissipated. It was a long arduous path, turning over every emotional stone, rock, and boulder. Seeking resolutions to long time issues. It was like peeling away the layers of an onion. After years of searching, for me the issue that kept showing itself was that I thought there was something wrong with me. Like the story of my 6th grade poem. Why did I respond the way I did to the teachers praise and encouragement? I uncovered the idea that I thought there something was wrong with me. Everywhere I looked I saw the same idea, in my relationships, in my work life, in my family life. The root was I felt there was something wrong with me. As someone who was adopted as an infant, I felt there was something wrong with me because my mom didn’t want me. This was the root of my auto-immune disease, I had a deep organ disorder associated with my large intestine resulting in the ulcerative colitis. The large intestine from this perspective is associated with sorrow, it was a sorrow for the loss of my mom. I was in my 40’s when I tracked my mom and my family down, this has been the best thing I’ve done in my life. As I uncovered and unraveled the knots of my internal world my life began to come into focus, my life unraveling into harmony.

Up next ideas of Shao-Yang and theories of chronic illnesses.