Last night I arrived home after a really lovely two days visiting friends at the beach in South Carolina. It was a treat to travel just for the sheer enjoyment of friendship. When I landed in New York I turned on my phone to type “landed 💕,” which is our custom, only to see a text from a friend letting me know that a colleague had taken his own life the day before. I immediately went to his last email to me—in a longing to connect somehow, I guess. It’s a surreal experience to read an email from a person written before that tragedy. After it, the same words speak an entirely different story. As I was leaving the plane I called the friend who broke the news and we talked for a while. She told me that she had heard that there was a suicide in his family in an earlier generation.
Ten years ago a patient came to the office and told me he intended to commit suicide. I explained to him how if he did, he would return in the following incarnation with exactly the same unresolved lessons to tackle all over again. He gazed ahead with a look of crystalline understanding and then turned to me and said, “I didn’t know that, but I really did know that, and it’s true.”
If we are to treat a person who comes to the office looking for help with suicidal tendencies specifically using classical Chinese medicine, we’re treating the attachment to the thought “My life is not worth living”. In Chinese medicine there are two broad approaches: first, the treatment of the attachment to the thought, and second, treatment of the imprint in the Jing of the energetic stance that life is not worth living. This imprint can be transmitted through the generations.
For patients who fall into the second category, it’s important to ask whether they feel that it is their destiny to break that cycle in the Jing and to change the energetic stamp of their lineage. This is where Chong Mai, the Penetrating Channel, comes into play. The practitioner needles or remotely activates Chong Mai and invites the patient to allow that shift to begin to occur. The practitioner has no hand in whether that change occurs—we are simply offering a space in which that change could happen.
Last year, 49,500 people committed suicide in the United States. The reasons are many and that is a very long discussion, including the loneliness that is intensified in a culture of connections made only through devices, attachment to material things and materialist thoughts, missing our own inherently beautiful humanity or divinity, feeling inadequate through hollow comparisons and judgments, the absence of meaningful encouragement, hopelessness in the face of cultural decline, a blueness in the Jing—yet all the while life has its magnificence. One can see it with eyes open if one also has periods of eyes shut, in silence, in nature. Meditation brings us home.
In our clinics, be they physical or virtual, we have the gift of being able to offer that space.
Ann Cecil-Sterman
Manhattan,
September 12, 2023.