Mental Aether Update

A lot of things have been swirling around in there for a while. There are many, many posts I should probably write. There is a whole other health-related blog that I need to imagineer for my practice and soon-to-be-honest-to-goddess website. I'm feeling frustrated and somewhat rudderless trying to find my way and how I will fit into the larger world as a practitioner of TCM, like a woman without a country since I don't feel much affinity with what I've encountered so far in the "orthodox" TCM camps, but allopathic medicine by and large still has its head up its collective arse about incorporating anything new that isn't shiny and expensive and readily demonstrated by randomized, double blind controlled studies. Also, I went to an awesome functional medicine seminar in Boulder last week given by a former internist named Larry Dossey that was extremely interesting and thought-provoking, on the growing importance (and hopefully inevitability) of [allopathic] medicine's acknowledging the connection of mind, body and spirit when it comes to healing (and that each has the potential to affect the others, to which those of us trained in Chinese paradigms roll our bored eyes and mutter "duh!" while taking another swig of some elixir out of a highball glass).

In short, there's been a lot going on in my head, and I've been feeling a lot of frustration about wanting and not being able to zero in on the words to express it.

I need to review a couple of things, hopefully this week or next. One, there was a huge expose of Oprah and her great love of woo (fine, it's Oprah, whatever) but the privileging of that (with the complete abandonment of reason and science) over what we now practice and believe to be true about medicine is not okay. And I come from a long background of analyzing and criticizing bias, privilege, knowledge and knowledge production, etc. I am not beholden at all to the idea of science as some kind of church or holy sacrament for which you will be swiftly and surely punished if you dare to be critical. But I do see lots of parallels to work we did in women's studies and later in my career in education. So there's that.

And in my quest to begin to understand why I hate woo and have such a visceral reaction of anger toward it (and the pressure to accept it uncritically, even if it seems made up out of whole cloth), I came across yet another article this morning about how your poor health is totally, 100% your own fault for choosing to live a toxic life. It grew to be so long that it became it's own "I Write Letters" post. If you are reading this far, you've already hopefully enjoyed it.

So yeah, I have lots to say. Lots I NEED to say. As Gloria Anzaldua wrote that she was afraid to write, but she was more afraid NOT to write. She also wrote a shitload of righteous awesome in her book La Frontera and her other writings in This Bridge Called My Back, which should be required reading at some point. And please understand that I don't mean to appropriate her struggles and the risks she took to speak out about them or even consider them to be remotely my own, but they do help. They illuminate and inspire. And stress the importance that there has to be hope and vision for something different, and better.

As she and Cherríe Moraga once said, "To assess the damage is a dangerous act. To stop there is even more dangerous."

Now, if you'll excuse me I have some reading to go and do!