Metaphors, Qi and the Ethereal Soul Nick Pole, MA, MRSS(T)

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1 Metaphors, Qi and the Ethereal Soul Nick Pole, MA, MRSS(T) In the middle of a treatment, an elderly client winces when I lightly touch a certain point - woken from a gently snoring drift into unconsciousness, he announces loudly, That s an odd, hopeless pain. Another client, who has been told by her doctor that she has only a few months to live, says, I feel like I m rotting from the inside out. A woman who has spent several sessions focused very much on emotional wounds from the past, one day begins to talk about new horizons beckoning. A young man starting a new relationship is getting severe panic attacks, which seem to be bringing up a shitload of stuff from the past. When clients come up with such vivid imagery, what do you do? Acknowledge it with an understanding hmm and try to stay focused on working the Meridian? Wonder if their words contain some diagnostic clues? Analyse the image in terms of Jungian archetypes, shamanic symbolism or whatever form of cosmic divination you subscribe to? I frequently resort to all of the above, but first I remind myself that whatever the client s image may be, and however unwelcome or challenging it is to my attempts to concentrate on the matter in hand, I accept it for what it is a metaphor and allow myself to get curious about why it s made its appearance and what it may have to offer us both. Often these flashes of insight are preceded by phrases like, This is going to sound funny or I don t know where this comes from, but. As far as the everyday cognitive mind is concerned, such powerful and personal metaphors are an interruption, an intrusion, a message from beyond the land of logic, where things are neatly labelled and kept in separate boxes. Metaphors describe one thing literally in terms of another - usually something subtle or more abstract in terms of something simple or more concrete. In this way, they invite us to connect one thing to another: left brain to right brain, mind to body, cerebral to sensual, conscious to unconscious.

2 One reason why they seem to be essential to human thought is because metaphors allow us to condense information in a highly communicable way, rather like we condense information to send it over the internet from one computer to another. The difference is that if I pack my own subjective experience into a metaphor and tell it to you, the only way you can understand it is by referring unconsciously to your own experience of something similar. This works in most everyday conversations; for example if you say I got so angry I just exploded, I get a visceral sense of how you felt, but will probably not spend much time wondering how you have managed to reassemble your body parts so seamlessly. But metaphors can also be very personal, and have a richness and depth to them which can surprise both client and practitioner. One way to explore this is simply to pick out the key words and offer them back to the client in the form of a very simple question. For example, if I ask my client, And what kind of new horizons beckon? the first thing that she notices is that they still seem far away. Then if I ask, And is there anything else about those new horizons that still seem far away? she stares for quite a long time into the distance, hardly breathing, then sighs; something softens around her heart as she says, It s just nice to know they re there. Her Qi begins to shift proof that a metaphor is not just linguistic decoration, but more like the end of a thread which, followed carefully, with the simplest and most open kind of questions, can lead you to a greater awareness of the patterns of Qi that underlie both symptoms and possible ways of resolving them. What I find truly fascinating about this is that if you help a client explore a metaphor in this way, while staying as present and as open to the whole field of energy between you as you can, you can help them notice where they actually feel stuck or hollow or bubbly or crushed and often sense their Qi begin to move, as stagnation shifts or an empty place begins to fill up. Then when you begin to work with touch, you usually feel a much stronger connection between you than you d expect to feel at the start of a treatment.

3 As Bill Palmer pointed out (Shiatsu Society Journal, Winter 2009, Issue 112), Chinese Medicine is rich in metaphor and poetic by nature. Points have names like Cloud Gate and Bubbling Spring, the organs are described as government ministers, and each of the Five Elements provides a densely packed metaphorical landscape for both client and practitioner to explore. Of course, TCM also has a hard-nosed scientific side the sophisticated system of pattern recognition accumulated over centuries of more-or-less objective observation. There s not a lot of poetry in tongue diagnosis or the Eight Principles, but one of the great strengths of Chinese medicine is its ability to combine pattern and metaphor, to construct a natural science from the way the seasons and the elements interact with human Qi and to express it in language which has an organic connection to the way our minds actually work, rather than the techno-jargon or pseudo-latin of modern medicine. The poet Greta Stoddart [2], in a poem about the agonising frustrations of trying to get pregnant with IVF, puts this wittily and poignantly: O oestrogen, astrology, buseralin and cells, HCG, Day 14, the transmigration of souls! She evokes the bewilderment and the longing for reassurance that anyone can feel when faced with the uncertainties inherent in both Western medicine and Complementary therapy. Fascinatingly, or coincidentally depending on your beliefs after two years of unsuccessful IVF treatment, she summoned up the courage to tell her consultant that she d decided to give up trying. The consultant responded with a metaphor, explaining that the subject of fertility was like a great big house, and we in the medical profession are huddled in one small corner. As Stoddart walked home from that encounter the first lines of the poem came into her head with great clarity and, after working on it for three weeks, she discovered she was pregnant. This wonderful story of the interplay between medicine, metaphor, fertility and creativity is a perfect example of a key point Giovanni Maciocia makes in his latest magnum opus, The Psyche in Chinese Medicine [2], in which he

4 describes the Ethereal Soul as basically another level of consciousness, different from the Mind (Shen) but closely related to it and responsible for intuition, inspiration, ideas, life dreams, relations with others, and artistic inspiration. A keen student of Jungian psychology, Maciocia describes the Ethereal Soul as our link to the collective unconscious, and points out how in psychotherapy, the aim is to bypass the critical analysis of the mind and bring forth psychological material from the Ethereal Soul as happens in dreams. In Shiatsu and Acupuncture, just as in psychotherapy and hypnotherapy, clients can often find themselves in a relaxed, even trance-like state, in which unfamiliar images and feelings can arise. Freud had a couch, we have futons or treatment tables Maciocia s point is that it is in the nature of the Ethereal Soul to move in and out, to come and go - sometimes waiting invisibly in the wings, and sometimes taking centre stage to offer us intuitive, if puzzling, nuggets of insight or inspiration. Quoting Jung to emphasize the importance of allowing the client to explore that imagery, he adds his own TCM version in the square brackets: We learn to sit and simply observe (says Jung) without any attempt to guide, control or interfere. The aim is to let the image come to life of its own autonomous psychic energy [Ethereal Soul], our ego [Mind] letting go of all expectations, presuppositions or interpretations. Maciocia also mentions how his Acupuncture studies in China had included no training at all in patient skills. When he started practising with Western patients, this was a problem. If the patient starts to cry a few minutes after the needles have been inserted (something that happened frequently in my clinic and that, incidentally, I had never seen happen in China), what is the practitioner supposed to do? Should I ignore it and pretend it was not happening? Should I comfort the patient? In the same way, when a client comes up with a weird, vivid or even challenging metaphor, it can leave the practitioner baffled as to how to respond; not wanting to ignore it completely, but not wanting either to turn the session into some kind of amateur psychotherapy.

5 A good tactic is simply to repeat the client s key words back to them, with respectful curiosity and your eyebrows slightly raised, maybe with a How do you mean? or a What kind of (key word) is that? or And is there anything else about (key word)?. This will not sound like psychobabble. Just notice how their metaphor expresses itself in body language, voice tone, facial expression and the more subtle energetic ways, like which Chakra seems most or least involved or where the energy is in their field. If the client is uncomfortable with this, or if you feel you re getting out of your depth, just stop. They may well return to it spontaneously later in the session when they feel more relaxed. Remember that the purpose of acknowledging and exploring the metaphor in this way is to get a better sense of the underlying pattern of Qi, and even begin to loosen it up. This can start to happen simply through the client becoming aware of it. I heard a delightful example of this from a participant in a recent course I taught: her client was an elderly lady with a bewildering array of persistent and intractable symptoms, many associated with Liv Qi Stagnation, including the famous plumstone throat, in which it feels as if something is blocking the throat and constricting the breath. At first the client described this as an obstruction, but with a bit of gentle questioning and Shiatsu, it became first a dumpling and then a pastry moving downwards the symptom becoming metaphorically easier to swallow with each session, accompanied by what the client called an extraordinary sense of relaxation at the end of the session, which she d never felt before! The most important point of all about metaphors and health is that when patterns of Qi start to change, so do the metaphors, and vice versa. Thought, after all, is simply the most refined form of human Qi, and it can be really useful to encourage a client to notice what metaphors they use to describe a problem or symptom, and how that metaphor may have changed by the end of a session. By offering your client a chance to realise that their metaphor is much more than just a figure of speech, you allow them to listen to it, explore it, own it, accept it, and start participating more in their own healing process.

6 References: [1] Maciocia G., The Psyche in Chinese Medicine, 2009 Churchill Livingstone [2] Stoddart G., Want, Signs and Humours - the poetry of medicine, 2007 ed. Lavinia Greenlaw; Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation For details of Nick Pole s Clean Language for Shiatsu courses, see