Japan Acupuncture, Phoenix, AZ （日本鍼灸、アリゾナ）
Japanese Acupuncture
(480) 246-0624
600 N. 4th
Street, Unit 147, Phoenix, AZ 85004
Japanese
Acupuncture Newsletter, Phoenix, Arizona
Volume 3, No. 1,
July, 2012
Oriental Medicine
& On Human Conditions
Chapter Four
Lung: Sadness*1, Courage, and Dissolution
I heard a fly buzz when I died;
The stillness round my form
Was like the stillness in the
air
Between the heaves of storm.
The eyes beside had wrung them
dry,
And breaths were gathering sure
For that last onset, when the
king
Be witnessed in his power.
I willed my keepsakes, signed
away
What portion of me I
Could make assignable, and then
–
There interposed a fly,
With blue, uncertain, stumbling
buzz,
Between the light and me,
And then the windows failed,
and then
I could not see to see.
Emily Dickinson
This
is one of my favorite poems by Emily Dickinson. It is a zen moment of an experience. She is contemplating suicide (she is
not talking about an experience of a physical death here, but more of a deep
meditative stillness), but at the moment of exceptional concentration, a fly
buzzed over, and she could not “see to see.” (why did she call the buzz
“blue”?) It was not her time to
die, but she was, in a way, resurrected to write this poem. Samurai longed for death, for his
fundamental purpose in life as a worrier was to die; the righteous death that
achieved his purpose with honor.
Since he was to face death ultimately, his disciplined life style was to
experience death, so that he was no longer afraid in a battle and the battle
itself had already been conquered.
Even if he was killed he knew having lived through a transformational
life, it was an honorable death.
This concept is important because this chapter and the next one (the
Kidney Element) will ask us how we deal with the Death and the Resurrection and
how we should live ourselves.
So,
how should we live ourselves? It
is in the balance. Samurai was not
a personal actor but as the force of life doing its course, and in it, to find
his honorable death. (How many politicians
today can truly say: I am not of I
but of
the People?) There is a greater
force, some call it destiny, is with us.
We as individuals rightfully should act as individual but with the sense
of greater awareness, of being something more than the self. The balance is between having an
individual self with a certain personality and having a spiritual self acting
on what the universe is offering (going up the charkas) through our body. As in a good marriage, the mutuality of
the opposites and the recognition and respect of each other as an individual
yet inseparable keeps the unity, and the balance is in the tension*2. The duality is perceived, but it does not preclude the
realization of the unity. Greater
sense or awareness of marriage is the egoless mutuality, a harmonious
relationship. As soon as we let
the ego in, we tend to destroy the other with our own righteousness. A dance of the opposites (of a married
couple) is a dance of the self with the Life.
Sadness,
which is the main emotion attached to the Lung Element of this chapter, throws
away the validation of the Life, dwells on the self and unbalances the
equilibrium. If you are a singer
all your life and it is the only thing you know, and the old age deprives of
the capability and its joy, you get frustrated and sad. It is a crisis to some. If you loose a loved one, you feel the
same way. Indeed, sorrow and love
go very well hand in hand in our daily lives. Keeping an individual self and a
greater self is a fine balancing act.
Only way to bring the equilibrium back into balance is to recognize that
it is not in an act or a consequence, but firmly understanding that it is the
Life that is the most important.
When
we are sad, the first sensation we feel is the compression of our breathing
pattern. We crouch as if the lungs
are compressed. We protract the
shoulders; the neck is brought slightly forward and downward as if we refuse to
see the peripheral; the jaw might be dropped a bit, and the mouth is slightly
open. Before we have tears in our
eyes, the digestive system is affected.
We wish to be in a quiet and darker room. It is a withdrawing pattern: a separation of the world
around us to the more inner realm of psyche. We dissociate from the Life and its meanings. Overwhelming emotions take over, and we
are no longer dancing in balance.
Like
Dickinson experienced, and as in a dragon slayer*3 mythology, only when we
experience the other side (or the other self), do we understand and transform
ourselves to higher level of consciousness. This chapter is about how to die and having courage to face
death.
*1: Spinoza
called sadness, the strive to promote what we imagine is joy and to avert is
sadness; whatever empowers us (active affect) leads to joy and whatever
diminish it leads us to sadness; or greater perfection and lesser perfection.
*2: Joseph
Campbell: Pathways to Bliss
*3 Siegfried
kills Fafnir the dragon and tastes
his blood (one with Fafnir) and hears the birds sing, saves his life from Regin’s intention.
© 2012 Dr. Y.
Frank Aoi (NM State)/Japanese Acupuncture, LLC
