.jpg)
“The sacred is not a category of things; it’s a category of relationships.”
~Douglas Brooks
Because I love to study vitality, aliveness, and wellbeing from across many viewpoints and traditions, I’ve also been studying some Hindu philosophy which supports and enhances my training and teaching in yoga.
My last post was about medicine as philosophy. Medicine as a way of thinking, as action. I’ve continued reflecting on this theme by thinking about the importance of context.
What is valuable to one person might be completely meaningless, or even harmful, to someone else.
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
During a recent webinar with Sanskrit and yoga scholar Douglas Brooks, he pointed out that context is everything. When we’re outside in the forest or even our backyards, we identify the earth as soil, but when that same earth migrates indoors, tracked in on our garden boots perhaps, we consider that same soil to now be dirt.
Thereby coming back to the quote at the beginning of this post:
“The sacred is not a category of things; it’s a category of relationships.”
~Douglas Brooks
What might be dirt to someone in one context might be deeply nourishing to someone else. That’s why I spend so much time talking with patients. In being with each person I’m taking care of, I have a chance to be in the sacred with that person.
This sacred relationship helps me to better understand how each human I spend time with differentiates waste from nutrients, dirt from soil.
We all have different sources of nourishment and those differences should be supported. Only you truly know, and only you are empowered to decide, which thoughts and actions are soil (a fertile base for your life) and which ones are dirt (to be swept away/discarded or composted/broken down to be made new).
This process of discernment, of inner knowing, must begin in sacred relationship with yourself.
Acupuncture provides a resting place, a sacred pause, where you can soothe your nervous system and plug back into yourself. To rediscover who you really are at rest.
To learn more about how acupuncture can help you heal, please contact me to schedule a free phone consult. During that time, you will tell me a little bit about what you are looking for, and I will let you know how I can help you heal.
May each of us find a sacred context to help us discover who we are at center.