THE PULSE · NO. 6
Tuesday 27 October. Open Sky, Mullumbimby.
Hot, humid and muggy, the air still electric after the thunderstorms.
Community clinic, Open Sky, Mullumbimby
After a storm like that, the air doesn’t feel finished. It’s thick and warm and still humming, as if the sky let some of its charge go and kept the rest. It’s the kind of stickiness where you can feel your own skin, and a couple of people told me they’d slept badly.
Ask most people what’s wrong with their energy and they’ll talk about a battery. Flat. Running low. Need to recharge. It’s a good image, better than the old petrol tank, and worth staying with a little longer than we usually do, because a battery has something a tank doesn’t.
It has two ends.
Charge on its own doesn’t make anything happen. A fully charged battery sitting in a drawer powers nothing. Put it in the torch the wrong way round and you still get darkness. Current only flows when there’s a path from one end to the other, running in the right direction. The energy is real. What’s missing is the circuit.
That was Tuesday. Eleven people, and looking back over my notes that night, very few of them were truly empty. Most were charged, some overcharged, with the circuit broken somewhere along the way. The storm outside was doing exactly the same thing: enormous energy, nowhere to put it, hanging in the air waiting to find the ground.
An old question
Chinese medicine has been asking about direction for a very long time. There’s a passage in one of its oldest classics, the Suwen, that has stayed with me all week. Rising, sinking, coming in, going out: there is no living thing, it says, that doesn’t have them. Stop the coming in and going out, and the spark of life comes apart. Stop the rising and sinking, and life is left stranded.
Not “stop the supply”. Stop the movement.
The old texts call this qi ji, which roughly means the workings of life’s energy, the way it turns. Health in that picture isn’t a full charge. It’s a working circuit.
What came through the door
Two people had come straight off long-haul flights, their bodies in one time zone and themselves still somewhere over the Pacific. Someone weeks out from surgery was eating well and taking good things, and none of it seemed to be landing. Appetites wouldn’t rise to meet the morning. Food went down and then sat there. One person said she felt as though she’d been “lifted out of her pelvis”. It’s the most exact description I’ve heard of energy that has floated up and lost touch with the ground, and I’m going to borrow it.
Health isn’t a full charge. It’s a working circuit.
The wheel in the middle
In this medicine the middle of the body is a pivot. The Spleen lifts. It draws what’s clear and useful out of food, and out of experience, and sends it upward: to the chest and the head, to the part of you that thinks straight. The Stomach does the opposite, carrying what’s left down and out. Up and down, one turning, like a waterwheel.
When the wheel sticks, you tend to get both problems at once: fog at the top, heaviness at the bottom. What should rise sinks, and what should sink rises. Feeling foggy and feeling heavy in the same body often aren’t two separate stories. They’re one wheel that has stopped turning.
So I kept reaching for pairs on Tuesday. A point on the foot that lifts, a point below the knee that settles. Not one or the other. Both. You can’t fix a seesaw by sitting on one end of it.
The other movement I kept coming back to ran up the back. There’s a channel that climbs the spine and crosses the crown, and the classics call it the Governor, the sea of yang: the gathering place of the body’s warmth and get-up-and-go. Two points, one on the outer edge of the hand and one just below the outer ankle, open it. I used them three times before lunch. People whose yang isn’t lifting rarely say they’re tired. They say they can’t get up, can’t get going. Someone else said he still wasn’t “kicking the floor”. Listen closely and the complaint is about direction, not amount.
Why more doesn’t help
This is the part that runs against instinct. If the circuit’s broken, charging harder doesn’t light the torch. Pour good food into a stuck wheel and it sits there. Give strong tonics to a system that can’t take them in, and you’ve bought very expensive compost.
So more than once on Tuesday, the right move was restraint. Work the middle first, so that whatever comes later can actually be received. Leave the most depleted place alone, rather than draw on reserves that aren’t there. Steady someone who has spent a year in upheaval, rather than open them further. Sometimes the most useful thing you can add is direction, and you get it by doing less.
In and out
That’s the rising and sinking. The other half of the old passage is coming in and going out: what crosses the boundary between you and the world. A long flight scrambles both. The body clock points the wrong way, and the protective layer at the surface, which this medicine calls wei qi, wears thin, so things get in that would usually bounce off. Morning light on the face and dim evenings are the cheapest acupuncture point I know.
The night before, the full moon rose in Taurus, the most earthbound sign there is: the body, appetite, the slow work of turning food into flesh. The Sun had just crossed into Scorpio, which is about what goes down and under. A sign of the ground facing a sign of the depths, with a thunderstorm in between. I don’t build treatments from the sky. I do notice when it rhymes.
The way down
Here’s where it gets bigger than the body.
In the Daoist tradition I trained in, there’s a teaching that sounds backwards the first time you hear it. Left to themselves, fire rises and water sinks. Heat drifts up to the head, the deep reserves drain away below, and over a lifetime the two slowly separate. That drift is ordinary ageing. The work of cultivation is to turn it around: to let the warmth of the heart come down, and the cool of the deep reserves come up, until they meet in the middle. The Book of Changes has an image for this, water sitting above fire, and calls it After Completion. Picture a pot on the stove. Fire below, water above, and between them, something cooking.
I think about that a lot in this part of the world. Plenty of us, me included, came to the Northern Rivers looking for up: expansion, light, the big view. That reaching is real, and it’s often what gets a life moving in the first place. It’s also half of a circuit. Many of the people I see have no shortage of vision or sensitivity. What they’re looking for is somewhere to bring it down to. The light has to land in a body that can hold it, a belly that can digest it, and feet that can carry it into an ordinary Tuesday.
You find versions of this in a lot of traditions, told in different words. The climb is only half the journey. The other half is the coming down: back down the mountain, into the kitchen, into the relationships, into the parts of yourself you were hoping to rise above. That’s where it becomes yours.
So spiritual maturity, as I understand it, isn’t only about going higher. It’s a working circuit between heaven and earth, with you as the wire.
At home
None of this is complicated. Eat warm and eat early, so the middle doesn’t have to heat cold food before it can lift anything. Move for five or ten minutes before breakfast, enough to turn the wheel. Get light in your eyes in the morning and keep the evenings dim. After a storm, take your shoes off and stand on the wet grass for a minute. It’s how the sky earths its charge, and it’s not a bad idea for us either.
And when you feel flat, ask the direction question before the quantity one. Is this empty, or is it disconnected? They usually call for different things.
So, one to carry through the week. What in you is trying to rise that keeps getting held down? And what’s trying to come down, to land, that you keep holding up?
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Related reading: The cough that hangs around · I don’t want to calm you down · Get Your Feet Off the Cold Floor
Community clinic, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Open Sky, Mullumbimby.
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