Maps, threads and the heart-ear

Last month I had the opportunity to see Stephen Harrod Buhner give a three-hour long lecture at my school, National College of Natural Medicine. Buhner is a long-time herbalist and scholar who has written a multitude of books ranging from understanding the ways that plants "think" and communicate to healing lyme disease with herbs. The metaphors that most stuck with me were those of maps, threads and having the ears to listen with one's heart.

MAPS are not the experience, but they point to the experience. Buhner demonstrated this by showing the audience a piece of sheet music and asking what it was. "Music," someone called out. Then Buhner sang the song to us with a certain tenderness. "What you just heard," he said, "is music. This," holding up the sheet music, "can never be music. It is just the map."

I relate this to my schooling, where we are being given many maps for becoming Chinese medicine doctors. However, it is up to us to cultivate kind-heartedness, integrity and respect, the kind of learning that happens outside of the classroom, in the seats of our hearts.

THREADS are opportunities. Buhner calls moments of inspiration "golden threads" that we can choose to follow, leading us down our own flowering destiny paths.

It was a golden thread I picked up and put down ten years ago that led me to this medicine. It took another thread years later to bring me here.

THE HEART-EAR is the sense organ that listens to what others may not be able to hear. Buhner talked about listening to plants and the songs they sing, which may not be the songs they were singing hundreds of years ago when the planet was in a different state. He took it one step further to consider listening to our own illnesses, such as the spirochetes in Lyme Disease. In a culture that is so bent on attacking that which harms us, what would happen if we slowed down to actually listen to what it may have to tell us? This may be the radical future approach to medicine.

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Pick up a golden thread in your own life. Draw its path back to where it began. Perhaps a story that you weren't aware of before starts to take shape.

Sit quietly, breathe deeply into the place just under your belly button in your lower abdomen. Feel into your body and your emotions. Is there a place that feels discomfort or pain? Send your attention to this place and breathe. What comes up? Any images, thoughts, memories, or emotions? This can be a very powerful exercise, so be gentle with what comes up, give it thanks, let it go. This may be an ongoing practice for you. I encourage you to write it down and try it over and over again.

Living the questions now

Here I find myself, on the eve of my beginning as healer, self-investigator, scholar, listener with more than just the ears. I hearken back to the moment Rainer Maria Rilke found me, huddled in a corner of the high school library, skipping class, book in hand. This is what he said:

I tell you that I have a long way to go before I am—where one begins…

You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Resolve to be always beginning—to be a beginner!

A decade and a half later, I find just as much spring in these words as I did then. It's the kind of feeling you get in upstate New York when the snow is melting and the birds are flying back north.

And so we begin! With the resolve to keep beginning...

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Write a letter to your future self - 6 months, 1 year or even 5 years from now. Ask her the questions dangling over your heart, tell her your doubts and hopes. Seal your letter and put in a special place where you'll remember it. Mark a future date on your calendar to open it. 

I've been writing letters to myself for almost 20 years now. They have been an amazing way to reflect on the continual questions of life, and to embrace the unforeseen.