sense bodily energies

Energy is a familiar concept. Central in physics, it is key also to understanding biology. And we use it regularly in daily life, for instance when we talk about feeling energetic or lacking energy.

Energy is neutral, neither inherently good nor bad. Think of thermonuclear fusion. In a hydrogen bomb, fusion energy is horribly destructive. But if fusion power plants became a reality, we could reduce greenhouse gas pollution and stabilize our climate. What energy does depends on how we engage it—on our behavior. 

Luckily, behavior can be trained. Let's consider mental energy. Every day we rely on our minds, which can do so much. Consider all humans have accomplished with the mind's ability to analyze, ponder, imagine, strategize, reflect, etc. Have you ever felt driven by the power of mind? Think of creative projects or romantic obsessions. The mind can and often does grab hold and drag us along. I find it helpful to look at the energy behind all that activity. Just as energy motivates dandelion seedlings to grow up through cracks in concrete, it motivates the actions of mind, whether healthfully diligent or destructively deranged.

The Thai Buddhist master Ajahn Chah said, "Untrained minds are moving and restless, hard to control and manage." Certainly my own mind moves. It jumps from thought to thought, image to image, past to future, and so on. Unless I work to stay present in the moment, in sensation and perception, it is restless in the extreme. Restless mental energy can be helpful, but it often leads us to limiting, unhealthy places.

In my early contacts with Buddhism, I was drawn to its focus on the mind. Disordered mental energies had caused me childhood hardship. I'd watched psychiatric turmoil wear down my mother as she moved from postpartum depression, to post-divorce grief, to suicide. Family members and psychiatrists did what they could, but it wasn't enough. A decade later my beloved older sister suffered a psychosis triggered—in part—by LSD. My world lurched she gazed at me with shining eyes and quoted spirits only she could see. I felt a little flattered hearing I was an old soul with big work to do. I felt deeply afraid of the intense, chaotic energy storming through my sister's mind.

My own mind led me to limiting, unhealthy spaces as early as grade school. Destructive energies drove outbursts, dishonesty, and prolonged isolating daydreams. As I grew older, I suffered disciplinary and legal consequences. Substance use began with occasional alcohol and marijuana in my early teens. By the time I left home, it had progressed to daily drinking and five-times daily pot smoking. I wasn't blind to any of this; it fed a deep sense of wrongness and shame. Yet despite many resolutions to change, the same internal energies continued driving the same outward behaviors. I was on the verge of suicide by the time I sought care. 

The delay came from fear of my father's scorn. He blamed my mom's death on her psychiatrists. Surprisingly honest about his alcoholism, he saw no reason to do anything about it and made fun of support groups like AA. He believed himself tough and smart enough to solve his own problems, so counseling struck him as dumb and pointless. Seeking help meant a kind of rebellion, and I wasn't ready until...

One fall day during my first term as a graduate student, I rode the elevator up the bell tower on the UC Berkeley campus. Looking west from the viewing platform—temporarily without a suicide barrier—I gazed at San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge, miles away across blue-gray water. Looking down, I saw 300 feet of empty air above ash-gray cement. I yearned for the swift fall and sudden extinction my position promised. But as I prepared to jump, I thought of my grandfather. The moment I did, he felt near, loving and concerned. He had died not long before, and losing him was a big part of why I felt so lonely, enraged, and hopeless. Now I felt him next to me, firmly encouraging me to give life another try. Tears and stress poured out of me. I slumped against the railing, head in hands, drained and relieved. When strength returned, I rode down the elevator and walked the short distance to the Student Health Office. 

The experience of visitation saved me from suicidal energies that day, but it didn't exorcise them. So I began a long journey through the mental health system. To his credit, my dad never criticized me for seeking help. For a man of his generation, he proved exceptionally supportive. He never changed his opinion about psychotherapy, but he saw my struggles and wanted me to overcome them. Counseling seemed the only option. 

After a few months of short term therapy through Student Health, I used my dad's family health insurance policy to start therapy with Jesse, a highly regarded in the Berkeley psychotherapy community. He helped me see my advantages in life: I had attended a good college, was capable of getting good grades, and liked people. After a year of helping me get back on my feet, he started coaxing me to apply to medical school. Although I'd never given the idea any thought before then, I decided to take his advice.

Why did I? Looking back, it feels as if Jesse's energy redirected my own. I'd gone to college for just one reason: to learn about nature. Med school meant abandoning that core value so I could, as Jesse said, "help people while making a lot of money". Helping people is surely a worthy value, but it wasn't a central one for me at that time. And prior to Jesse's coaching, nothing in me cared about accumulating wealth. Yet Jesse, a seemingly wiser and more forceful man, redirected my energies. I adopted his values as if they were my own.

The untrained mind is weak that way. It jumps about, grabs hold of new ideas without regard for core values, natural gifts, or personal limits. Its energies are easily hijacked. I see this clearly now, but at first my view was obscured the therapy I was getting, the science I was learning, and the models of life both relied on. 

In my early years of mental health treatment, I acquired many diagnoses: "Major Depressive Disorder", "Cyclothymia", "Adjustment Disorder", "Bipolar Disorder Type II", "Manic Psychosis", "Bipolar Disorder Type I", "Generalized Anxiety Disorder", "Personality Disorder (not otherwise specified)", "Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder", "Social Anxiety Disorder", "Chemical Dependency Disorder", "Borderline Personality Disorder", "Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder", "Autism Spectrum Disorder". Each of those diagnoses was applied to me at some point, and there were probably others I've forgotten or never knew had been attached to me. 

At first I refused medications, having seen them do my mother no good and—ultimately—enable her suicide. But as years passed my resistance diminished. And in my thirties I accepted a single prescription for Prozac. It worked really well for several months but then grew less effective. Another drug was added, and another, and so on. By my mid-forties I was taking an ever-changing cocktail of antidepressants, antipsychotics, anxiolytics, mood stabilizers, opioid analgesics, and sleeping pills. Additional drugs were prescribed to treat side effects: anorgasmia, erectile dysfunction, constipation, hormonal imbalances, etc.

With that much assessment and treatment, one might expect improvement. But I did not improve. At times I deteriorated. I spent a lot of time in therapy groups and waiting rooms, where I met many patients who, like me, were heavily diagnosed and heavily medicated. Also like me, they still felt awful. I began to doubt the value of this entire system of care, Maybe, I thought, my father was right after all.

It was tempting to blame the clinicians, but as a former physician I knew medicine is an imperfect discipline. Many conditions are difficult to treat. Yet for both patients and clinicians, the desire for treatment remains strong. We could say there's so much energy behind that desire, treatments are provided even when they're ineffective. 

It's hard to let go of one approach until another is available. Thankfully, mindfulness provided one. One of its main advantages is how it focuses on energy rather than symptoms. 

The Ajahn Chah quote above is part of a talk that also includes this key reflection:

Sense impressions come and trick [the mind] into happiness, suffering, gladness, and sorrow, but the mind’s true nature is none of those things. . . The untrained mind gets lost and follows these things; it forgets itself. . .  We must train the mind to know those sense impressions and not get lost in them, to make it peaceful. 

What he calls "sense impressions", I'm calling "energies". Within Buddhism, the mind is a sense organ, so thoughts and other mental content count as sense impressions. I prefer to focus on the more general idea of energy, because we will later apply it to all sorts of experiences, not just those classically thought of as mental.  

As I just said, the mental health system treats symptoms. My diagnoses amount to a list of them. For instance, the diagnosis of major depression is made when patients suffer five or more symptoms from a list of nine. Other diagnoses are established similarly, according to symptoms. Thus, the symptoms are the problem, and treatment aims to reduce them. But from the perspective of mindfulness, symptoms are not the problem; they are mere energies. Trouble arises when we don't manage them skillfully. The untrained mind gets swept along by them; the trained mind holds steady in their midst.

Once I internalized this message, my mental health issues grew a lot simpler. Gone was the idea that I was dragging a list of diagnoses and symptoms through life. I quit focusing on emotions like sorrow, fear, and anger, as if they were the enemy. I learned to separate energies from responses. I gained the ability to feel the power of strong emotion while choosing behaviors with presence, reflection, and from a place of deep values. I gradually trained my mind to remain steady while strong energetic currents flowed by.

I need to be clear: a person can suffer a lot because of mental illness. The root problem may be the mind's relationship to symptoms rather than the symptoms themselves, but the result is debilitating either way. I spent a quarter century on disability because of my own untrained mind. I don't want to minimize the difficulty.

Yet, if we can learn to live with difficult mental energies rather than struggling against them, our lives improve. By watching energy rather than pushing against it, I am able to get on with life. Sure, sadness, fear, and anger are uncomfortable, but they needn't debilitate me. For example, most days I feel a substantial amount of grief—for both personal and collective losses—but by not resisting them I am able to also experince surges of joy. To feel both with calm presence seems, to me, like true living.

I still use mental health services. I take lithium for mood stabilization. I occasionally undergo Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) treatments to ease the weight of depressive energies. But things have changed since the early days of uncritical acceptance of labels and treatments, since before my mind became better trained. I get by with much less treatment, and the ones I use seem far more effective. 

Hearing all this may be helpful, but it's better to experience it. I invite you to try this meditation [link to follow]. 

As years passed, Jesse's advice seemed further and further off base. When I asked for help around my heavy marijuana use, he suggested I use cocaine instead. When I complained about my dating experiences, he set me up on a date with another of his clients by telling me, "you'll either marry each other or kill each other". Of course that should have been a bright red flag, but I went on the date with high hopes. Monica and I neither got married nor committed murder, but we spent five years together in frequent intense conflict.

It's easy to denounce Jesse's unhelpful and unethical behaviors. But the real problem was my lack of connection with a stable, value-rich interior. I let his immature energies around status, wealth, and power overwhelm the wiser energies of my own soul. As if to drive this point home, a quarter century later I was treated by a very wise and competent therapist. Michael listened patiently as I bemoaned the loss of my surgical career. He was empathic and supportive when I complained about boredom, fear, and shame. He wasn't prone to giving advice. Yet I wanted his guidance and one day asked him, point blank, for a suggestion. Without hesitation, he replied, "It would be good if you could work again as a doctor."

I'd already tried returning to medicine. Entering psychiatry seemed an obvious choice, but when I began applying for a residency, I sank into a debilitating mix of anxiety, overwhelm, and shame. If the application derailed me, how could I complete training? I started a graduate program to design computer systems for clinical work, but in my second term I grew so agitated I nearly required hospitalization. While working a part time job with the California Department of Public Health, I grew ever more depressed, until my psychiatrist advised me to quit. Yet Michael's observation, which wasn't really advice, spurred me to try again. 

I don't blame him, or even myself. But it seems obvious I wasn't listening to my inner knowing, what my own living energies had already made clear. Besides, a lot of good came from his remark, just as a lot of good came from Jesse's pushing me into medicine. 

Someone I knew from medical school was using acupuncture in her family medicine practice, and she gave me information about the training program she'd attended. I entered the world of Chinese Medicine. 

The earliest lessons centered on Qi, often translated as "energy". From the beginning, I connected it with my unruly mental energies, that chaos in my head that caused such problems. As the months passed, I devised plans to use acupuncture to stabilize the chaotic energies that cause symptoms I knew well: anxiety, depression, mood swings, emotional reactivity, chronic pain, etc.

My graduate field had been biophysics. I was familiar with technical definitions of "energy". Mechanically, it refers to the capacity of a system to do work. Biologically, that capacity begins with sunlight, which nourishes photosynthetic organisms, which support complex animals like ourselves. Because energy flows through the biosphere, we are able to sense, move, evaluate, socialize, and alter our environment. Beyond all that we have Einstein's famous equation, E=MC2, which says matter is—amazingly—a concentrated form of energy.

For me, Qi seemed connected to all these definitions, but I mainly hoped it would help me work with mental chaos in new ways. To that end, it seemed important to sort out the relationships between Qi, mental health, and the mechanical, biological, and physical definitions of energy.

The training program made parts of the job easier. The director taught acupuncture in a tradition that had woven together Western and Chinese medical systems since the 18th century. There was a lot of emphasis on how illness of mind connects to illness of body. When the body is sick, our mood sinks. And when the mind is stressed, the body suffers. Meanwhile, both mind and body respond to the surrounding world of society but also biology, physics, and technology.

A personal example will help. What is this "chronic depression" I experience? It must be an inherited tendency, given how my mother succumbed to it. Yet it is also, surely, a result of losing my mom in first grade. My life circumstances feed into it: chronic pain, disability, and isolation have weighed heavily upon me. There is also a contribution from global events, which are—many would agree—depressing. We can add in ancestral issues, like the way my grandmother's infant sibling died in a fire while she babysat. Or the way many of my Quaker forebears fled Europe, and later the East Coast, to escape persecution. Then there is the history of Western Civilization, with its many wars, oppressive empires, the exclusion of commoners from the land during feudal times and consequent impoverishment by the aristocracy, and so on. My depression's list of causes seems endless.

And it doesn't stop with my history; it also involves my physiology. We're familiar with the idea that brain chemistry 'causes' depression. The truth is a lot more complicated, but there is little doubt that moods are shaped by neurochemicals such as serotonin, dopamine, and endorphins. It's shaped too by circulating hormones such as cortisol. It relates to dynamic interactions between brain regions, such as the emotionally charged amygdala, the memory-consolidating hippocampus, and the integrative prefrontal cortex. Meanwhile, regions of the brain that generate and interpret language drive obsessive thought cycles that deepen the sense of hopelessness so characteristic of depression. 

Prior to thinking of mental chaos in terms of energy, I thought of it in all these terms—personal, ancestral, historical, physiological, and so on. I thought of it in terms of all those diagnoses. I thought of it in terms of medications and therapeutic options. Perhaps you sense how confusing that old approach could be.

The concept of Qi, of bodily or life energy, simplified everything. My work as an acupuncturist proved short-lived; my health soon collapsed beneath the burdens. But using energy as unifying concept continued. It both motivated and informed my efforts to weave biology into contemplative practice. Skipping past the twists, turns, and sidetracks, let's get to the point: what's a useful way of engaging  bodily energies?

To begin, it is skillful to focus on sensations in the body rather than ideas in the mind. Though this is basic mindfulness, it helps to consider how I finally built some confidence that it was both possible and helpful. During acupunture training and my later work in a yoga institute, I struggled to reconcile Eastern pictures of energy channels, points, and centers with the Western pictures I'd learned in medical school. I read journal articles purporting to align the former with the latter, but they never convinced me. As supposedly objective, observable maps, they could not be superimposed. 

I admit to bias. The Western anatomical maps truly seemed objective and observable. The cadaver lab in medical school had proven to me that actual arteries, muscles, and bones can be found that correlate with textbook diagrams. Neither acupuncture points and meridians, nor yogic channels and chakras, can be found as easily. This fact troubled me at first, causing me to devalue Eastern relative to Western pictures. 

In time, I saw the problem.  Western structural anatomy is indeed more directly observable in material terms. But Eastern energetic anatomy is observable in a subjective, internal sense. The flowing, vibrating energy in my body is at least as real in my experience as was the flesh in the cadaver lab. 

Given how my main interest was the psyche, it seemed obvious that these psychic, subjective, internal experiences must matter at least as much, if not more, than material, objective, external findings. Awakening to this truth took decades. But as I did the benefits of feeling energy (rather than thinking about it) grew obvious.

The list of diagnoses lost relevance. The need for medication lessened. My sense of confusion and overwhelm were transformed into feelings of awe and reverence for the richly complex and ever-changing energies of Life. Each moment is a product of personal, ancestral, and historical events. It's a product of neurotransmitters, brain structures, hormones, and the myriad activities of the body. But I don't need the details. I can simply swim, or float, in the amazing swirl of being.