The Gift That Keeps Giving

My birthday was last month, and my wife and I went out for a lovely brunch and a movie. It was a splendid day, which sadly ended with me contracting food poisoning at the restaurant (we are pretty sure it was the hollandaise sauce). This led to a… shall we say, “eventful” evening and night for me. I have been jokingly referring to it as ‘the birthday gift that kept on giving.’

And yet, there is some truth in this title. On a deeper level, getting sick can be a wonderful and informative experience for a practitioner, and one that should be, dare I say, relished. It is one thing to read about symptoms in a book. It is quite another to feel them firsthand. Besides the increased compassion gained for what a client is going through, being “sick” is an opportunity to pay attention to subtle changes going on in one’s own body during the progression of the “illness.”

The food poisoning also gave me a fascinating look into the mechanism involved in Dramamine. At about 3am, when the food was completely gone from my system and yet I was still vomiting, we decided that it was time to take an anti-emetic. I am not a huge fan of taking strong medications, but as the prospect of visiting the ER for a fluid IV appeared before me, I decided to take the pill. Almost immediately, I felt a line across my abdomen, around the level of Ren 12. Below this line, there was a sensation of downward pressure – the potency of the drug yielded a heightened feeling of the body’s action of separating the pure and impure and moving the impure Qi down as waste. This was extremely interesting, and has given me a visceral understanding of this function of Qi, and also a new appreciation for the mechanism at work in anti-emetic herbs and drugs.

So what to do with this? Well, I have no plans to start tasting all the medicines I can get my hands on and finding out what they do to my body. I tell you this story as advice to stay present as much as possible, and to get as much personal experience about how your Qi moves in all stages of health. Your own difficulties in life will be invaluable in helping you understand the problems faced by your clients.