“Every adversity carries with it a seed of greater benefit.” If anyone knows me, they would tell you that this is my daily tag line. I read it for the first time 10 years ago in a book written by Napolean Hill but didn’t really understand it until adversity slapped me in the face, knocked me to the ground and dragged me through the streets of NYC’s financial district on September 11, 2001.
I entered the twisted, internal psycho-emotional world of Dante’s Inferno, otherwise known as Post Traumatic Stress. It wasn’t pleasant to be afraid of the sounds of trucks backfiring, or having panic attacks while sitting on a subway train or contemplating how I might stop my scalp from forming bloody plaques of psoriasis brought on by stress.
I had no idea that the beneficial “seed” of a 5,000 year old origin was taking root in a classroom in the middle of the same great city that imposed on me my biggest adversity. One day before 9/11, I began my official academic quest into the eastern healing art of Oriental Medicine. The words art and medicine are rarely ever found in the same sentence however I learned early on in my career as an eastern practitioner that there is indeed a need for creative interpretation of someone’s symptoms of complexity. The human landscape is complicated, diverse, highly individualized with each of us beings holding our own unique set of blueprints.
It is quite fascinating to learn that Oriental medicine is an intricately woven thread of philosophy, culture, mysticism and empiricism. What appears to be as simple as the insertion of one needle into an appropriate acupuncture point on the skin, it could become the actual compass that points you on the direction of internal balance. When a mind-body and spirit-mind are equilibrated, the dance of life is rhythmically in tune with being healthy and well.
So, I ask you, could you be open to finding the calm in the middle of your chaos? Could you allow yourself to become the architect of your own life by being ok with the scaffolding and infrastructure that you were given? Could you welcome the needle that might in fact direct your very own “true north”?
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