Slow Down, You Move Too Fast
In the years before I became an acupuncturist I was working in the field of architecture building residences in New York City. It was high-pressured and demanding and as much as I loved designing, I was overwhelmed and unfulfilled by the work. At a point during this period, my office was on the east side of Central Park and the project I was managing was on its west side. Everyday I rushed across the park to and from the job site. The project had a very tight schedule and there was a great deal of tension between the design team, contractor and client. I was always in my head, racing through to-do lists as I raced across the park.
Central Park is a magical oasis amidst a bustling, loud, concrete city. Even the most direct path across it will take you through vistas of incredible beauty. Months into this project, on my daily dash across the park, I stopped in my tracks. I spotted tiny clusters of white flowers emerging from the branches of a tree. The air was wet with humidity and loud with an orchestra of birdsongs. I dumbly realized it was spring. Though I had crunched through leaves and trudged through snow, I couldn’t remember actually seeing anything around me in months. I felt a sadness emerge that I had neglected to notice the subtle stirrings leading to this moment, and had neglected the vital part of me that was capable of and longing for this kind of devotional attention. I felt a deep, deep longing for presence. I wasn’t aware of its impact at the time, but this moment was a powerful catalyst. Although nothing shifted externally in that instant, internally I had stepped onto a path of seeking that would ultimately culminate in my going to acupuncture school a year later.
What’s interesting about the seasonal delineations in the traditional Chinese calendar is that they begin long before you can see them. If you live in the Northeast US, could you believe that spring actually begins at the very beginning of February? That summer has already given way to autumn in mid-August? Throughout the seasons, scales are slowly see-sawing between light and dark, and energy is pushing up and out and then drawing back in like a long, slow breath. Each season is not a fixed and static period, but an exchange of arrivals and departures. These movements are the roots of the season to come, gestating in darkness, far before anything becomes visible and obvious.
In Chinese Medicine we talk about disharmony in the body in terms of root and branch. Roots and branches are reflections of each other, one hidden the other visible. The branch is what we notice, the signs and symptoms that cry out for our attention. This is what causes most people to seek treatment. But, the root of the issue is the hidden foundational blueprint of what ultimately becomes the branch. It is the quiet habit, tendency, or imbalance that is easily overlooked and ignored until it becomes some kind of tangible discomfort or dysfunction.
Healing often begins before it’s recognizable too. During this stressful period, I was experiencing strange dizzy spells on my way to work. Though nothing was clinically abnormal in my body (beyond chronic muscle tension), I was experiencing the physical effects of racing ahead of the present moment and working at a dizzying pace. Despite my fear of needles, I ended up trying acupuncture. The most memorable part of that first treatment was feeling attuned to the subtleness of my body— the quiet currents of energy in an invisible network of communication that had been outside of the field of my awareness. The sense of peace and calm that followed was no coincidence. It did resolve my physical symptoms, but acupuncture also eased me into deep presence with myself, which was the root of what I had been missing.