Sorry to be out of touch. Right now it’s 5:45AM and Andrew is beside me driving in the dark while I write this very overdue missive as we return to the city from a day in the country. I’ll see eleven patients over twelve hours and Andrew will Zoomteach to Poland a dietary class in the Four Great Masters on the Song Dynasty. This drive reminds me of the years when I was writing the book down. Many weekends, the kids would be fast asleep in the back seat on our way to and from to their grandparents’ house in eastern Massachusetts. Andrew would drive and I’d be scrawling by hand in the passenger seat, or typing if it was nighttime.
I just got home to Manhattan a couple of days ago after several weeks away. Every time I go out the feeling of the teachings changes. Last blog, I had just returned from Hawaii, Australia and Scotland, and since then, on this second leg of the teaching tour, to Albuquerque, Chicago, Girona in Spain, Basel in Switzerland, Scotland again, Athens and the Greek Island of Evia, and Myrtle Beach, SC, with plane changes in Phoenix, Paris, Amsterdam and Istanbul. I’m so glad I love to travel. The only downside was that I didn’t see Andrew for six weeks. He was on a long tour of Europe himself, with the Philip Glass Ensemble. Our paths crossed in the air many times. Planes in the night.
There were additional highlights everywhere including a thrilling weaving ride through Athens on the back of a motorcycle with my dear student there, Efthymios. And in Chicago after an eight extra class, I gave a lecture on my paintings at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Some students and colleagues came to give beautiful support, and my son, Zohar, flew in from New York for a few hours to catch it, which was also very special.
I’m utterly blown away by how, in every successive class, the rate at which the teachings are absorbed by the students, increases. It’s as though the medicine is, on its very own, elevating awareness of itself, and it’s nothing short of thrilling.
On Monday, as I was painting, and after receiving so many messages that I should listen to it, I played a podcast of Calley and Casey Means talking about the state of health in the United States. They reeled off shocking statistics about the declining health of Americans in all age groups. For the general American population they quoted: 74% obesity, 50% with pre-diabetes, a tripling of young adult dementia since 2012, 50% likelihood of cancer, 1 in 36 with autism, (1 in 22 in California), 25% erectile dysfunction, 25% of women taking SSRI’s, puberty onset now six years earlier than in 1900, and most interesting to me as practitioner—lately there has been a 30% increase in autoimmune diseases per year.
Can it be that the channels are returning to their rightful place as foci of human attention? Is that a stretch? I think not. Listening to the Means siblings talking and insisting that we can get out of this mess, it’s clear that the public will soon become aware—if they haven’t already—of chronic degenerative diseases and their reversibility.
Our work has never been more important, and the demand for it will skyrocket as people realize that they can heal, a healing that requires massive change in agriculture, corporate structure, government accountability, diet, food commerce, and lifestyle choices.
The complement channels, and in particular the divergent channels will be, for many people, the path to a sense of freedom in the body, a return to health, and even a state of radiant health. In the Nei Jing, we are instructed to first learn not the primary channels, but the divergent channels. Why divergent? Because we must understand that in absence of sufficient resources to clear anything from the body, any attempt to do so will elicit a release of toxins or pathogens not to the exterior for expulsion—by sweating, urinating, defecating, vomiting or coughing—instead there will be a release of toxins to the interior; the pathogens will become systemic. This is what is happening to cause the dreadful feeling during cleanses or detox and chelating protocols in people who do not have the resources—the fluids or qi— to expel the freed up toxins. Just last week in Europe I saw a person who, when tested in February, had high levels of lead and mercury, and since the first chelation treatment had been suffering dizziness, pain along the gallbladder channel and inability to turn her neck. A divergent channel treatment was urgent and did bring tremendous relief, not due to releasing pathogenic factors, but due to the divergents’ function of preventing pathology from being systemic.
The time for classical acupuncture is here. All welcome. I’d love you to join us.
Love to all,
Ann
Ann Cecil-Sterman
Saw Mill Parkway, New York.
October 23rd, 2024