Background Music

It is a beautiful late summer day, and I am fortunate to be sitting on a deck enjoying the warmth and listening to the crickets making noises in the nearby bushes. I find the chirping of crickets wonderfully illustrative of how to approach pulse differentiation. If you sit and really listen to them, crickets together do not make a continuous repetitive sound. They form an every-changing and harmonious background noise that is punctuated here and there by different whistles and peeps that come into the foreground for a moment and then fade away.

This is what the pulse is like, too. The beating of the vessel in the different positions makes a harmonious rhythm with small variations that come to the foreground momentarily and then fade back into the chorus. Unlike crickets, however, the pulse will almost always contain some persistent qualities that are disharmonious with the whole. It is these qualities that we use to diagnose and plan our treatment points. But when you first lay your fingers on the pulse, you are “listening” to what the harmonious pulse is right now for this one person. You have to discover the background noise first before you can pick out the different ways in which qualities and positions form a contrast to the characteristics of the whole. If you approach the pulse like listening to crickets, you can soften you focus and allow the general harmony to envelop your senses. Once you appreciate the whole, noticing the differences becomes easy.