Waiting in one of the softly lit rooms over at Woven Bodies, an integrative wellness clinic near the Kingston city hall, one can play a game. Collect all the bad experiences of life. Then set them among the stars of the imagination like ugly constellations.
There’s the constellation of Loss, a bag with a gaping, ragged hole in the bottom. Or there’s the five stars of Guilt, a dog water bowl left dry. The Pit is up there too, with a child inside trying to climb out. That’s a fable of nihilism if the child gives up and grows old without ever climbing out. The constellations of Disappointment, Shame and Regret wheel around so closely together that it’s hard to see them separately. Blending together into one depressing starry cloud, it leaves a no-good, icy feeling on the eyes. Search the skies somewhere else for relief. But wherever one searches, intertwined like incestuous twins, there’s no avoiding Fear and Death, the brightest constellations of all.
“So, tell me why you’re here,” says Sarah Heslip. Thirty-something acupuncturist, hair tied back, she wears a sort of business-black lab coat. Awarded a doctorate in Chinese medicine from what used to be called the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine in New York, she takes the therapeutic purpose of her healing art seriously. The desired effect is what you get, but only if you communicate.
She asks a barrage of questions. Am I getting enough sleep? Am I eating? Do I have any addictions, allergies or aversions? What is my emotional state like? Do I have salty or sweet cravings? Do I run hot or cold? Do I sweat easily? As the list grows, she does not ask about loneliness or fear of death but she leaves the door open by asking about sadness. She looks at my tongue.
“Acupuncture addresses the nervous system,” she says, “in a musculoskeletal way.”
Chinese medicine posits that there are twelve pathways along the body. Along those pathways are different points – the number of which originally corresponded to the 365 days in a year – where the acupuncture needles should be inserted to affect change.
“It’s not always related to the body part that we’re working on,” says Heslip. “A good example of this is here,” Sarah pinches the purlicue, that skin between the thumb and forefinger. “That’s really amazing for headaches, and tension in the neck and the jaw. But if someone comes in with TMJ, I would also very likely put needles in the affected areas, in the masseter muscle in the jaw.”
The idea appears to be that Ch’i, a sort of current similar to electricity, travels around and around the body on pathways known as meridians. Ch’i needs to be kept moving. When the spiritual plasma stagnates, physical or emotional problems begin to crop up. Getting needled aims to address this.
“Back in the day, they were not nearly as tiny and not nearly as sterile,” says Heslip, speaking of the needles. “Even maybe 40 years ago, it wouldn’t be completely unheard of to have a more rural doctor with their needles in a jar of alcohol.”
There’s a type of needle called a Plum Blossom, a little circle with needle-teeth, which is tapped on with a small hammer to stimulate blood flow. And alongside, the burning of mugwort to stimulate an acupuncture point on the skin – this is Moxi. Then there are also the little lancets for bloodletting. For the professed therapeutic effect, the practice maintains some small celebrity. For the treatment of anxiety. For restoring energy. To ensure a good night’s sleep. Guilt need not actually resemble a dry dog water bowl. Loss need not actually resemble an empty bag. Everyone has their own constellations. Whatever shape they take, for anyone who can learn to recognize their influence, it can be a comfort of a kind to know that to greater and lesser degrees everyone else is also stumbling around trying to keep a fire burning in the same dark labyrinth of suffering.
“In Chinese medicine, we focus on the physical. We focus on the hormonal. We focus on the psycho-emotional. But, and here’s the thing, acupuncture is never a one-shot deal. It’s usually weekly. If [a symptom] is really intense, I have people come in twice a week.”
Heslip says any given treatment she decides on usually continues along for four to six weeks, a window of time at the end of which the efficacy of the treatment will be evaluated. Lacking a spiritual understanding of existence, discounting the influence of the stars out of habit, Science with a capital S remains stubbornly hazy on the mechanics of how, or even if, acupuncture works.
Studies and meta-studies currently available for review do support the contention that acupuncture can be an effective ritual for pain reduction and management. August institutions of medical learning, the John Hopkins University and the Harvard Medical School both communicate as much. And there’s a famous German study recording that both acupunctures administered in good faith, as well as acupunctures administered willy-nilly, produced measurable results of decreased pain in chronic lower back conditions. This may be more than just a placebic result. In the New England Journal of Medicine, the article ‘Acupuncture for chronic back pain’ noted that “acupuncture has been shown to induce the release of endogenous opioids in brain-stem, subcortical, and limbic structures.”
That is, getting stabbed elicits the drug factories in the brain to send the body feel-good chemicals. Any portion of euphoria which can be received, at needlepoint, body as pin cushion is worth it.
Interestingly, in experiments where local anesthesia had been administered ahead of the needle prick, all analgesic effect is thwarted. When the nerves are put to sleep, the needles have no effect in summoning chemical relief from the brain. Again, the desired effect is what you get, only if you have communication. And suffering. The needles used in modern acupuncture are so small.
Among us, there are those bastardly souls who, monk-like, smiling into the abyss, point out that the function suffering serves is to ratchet the bonds which tie us, each living spark ever tighter to the other.
But those are cackling outliers. Among the bonafide monks of Eastern tradition, the consensus has been for a very long time that to escape the wheel of death, birth and then re-death again, suffering must be left behind altogether. Life, and everything in it is temporary. Let go.
Acupuncture is not all Heslip practices.
“I also do cupping a lot,” Heslip smiles, her teeth white, “which is also really helpful for pain and promoting tension release and blood flow.”
She didn’t have her fire cups on hand so instead she placed 14 suction cups made of glass, their shape suggestive of flower bulbs, along my spinal cord. What looked like little spark plugs protruded out of each for the attachment of a hand pump to create the suction.
“The fire cup feels pretty much the same, except you have a little bit of the added heat, because the air inside the cup is warm. The heat is really nice, actually,” Heslip admits. “Basically, it’s forcing the blood to come to this area, because fresh blood is coming to where we’re making these cups. Blood and lymph coming to repair and refresh.”
Fallen out of vogue in modernity, an older practice saw the skin stabbed with lancets and fire cups then placed over the cuts to create suction. The practice is bloody and requires a lot more clean-up. Potentially it also exposes the practitioner to a biohazard. But anyway, I’ll take what I can get. First stabbed with needles, then cupped, I’m just a tourist.
In amongst the synaptic vesicle pools and enkephalin seas sloshing inside our brains, there grow dopamine receptors. Dopamine is that king feel-good neurotransmitter chemical found all along the mesolimbic pathway of the brain’s reward system. Beneath the drearily rising and falling constellations of negative experience, entire forests of receptors wait to soak in any reward.
Brambly and tangled, thorny and dense, or maybe sparse-like, afflicted by blight, there’s no telling how the dopamine trees in the forest of our synapses have grown. The only thing for sure, is that like terrestrial forests, they grow towards the sun. Or, put another way, according to one study: “triatal dopamine receptor availability is significantly greater in subjects with high sunshine exposure”.
Swim in an Enkephalin sea. Lay beneath a passing cerebrospinal fluid cloud burst. Soak in a hot spring of Dimethyltryptamin. Endorphins. Adrenaline. Serotonin. Endogenous psychedelics. Our brains are neurochemical storehouses and one can spend their lives figuring out how to get the chemicals dumped into the bloodstream. How to self-prime the pump.
As children, we begin to learn that the pathways are legion. Dancing. Laughing. Laying in the sunshine and falling asleep. Excitement, arousal, pleasure, exhilaration. Happiness.
When the sun sets and the music stops, when the laughter finishes and drab times between set in, what then?
To generate dopamine, risk-taking behavior will do in a pinch. Shoplifting, gambling, closing your eyes while driving against traffic on a two-lane highway. But there are other ways to chase the next peak of the oscillating wave. Chemicals acquired outside the body, introduced to hijack the reward system.
Chocolate and coffee, for instance. A sort of dopamine eucharist, quiet spikes too pastoral for some. But the chemical orchard is vast. Stranger trees offer stranger fruit.
Larger spikes of dopamine are released with the consumption of alcohol. Sprinkle in a reuptake inhibitor like the kind harvested from a coca plant and any dopamine is trapped, forced to linger longer. Add a stimulant to release adrenaline into the slurry of the blood.
There are street drugs constituted with industrial waste byproducts that produce many times over more dopamine than generous sex and make your teeth fall out in the bargain. Euphoria, toothless, tied to a tree. We are chemical machines.
Like a new canon of concupiscent Greek muses set free to wander the earth, the contributions of the global pharmaceutical cartels are ever increasing. Oxycontin. Codeine. Morphine. Tramadol. Fentanyl. Different flavors of Euphoria all, each impossible to maintain for a long enough timeline.
At the end of indulgence, repetition takes hold. Chemical returns diminish. The branches and limbs in the synaptic forest wither, reducing the number of receptors to which dopamine can be delivered. The drug factories of the brain themselves inevitably cut back on dopamine production. As pleasure is redefined as the absence of pain, the situation grows desperate. Because one would rather forget than remember, memories are no longer formed.
Struck by the arrow of Karma, the god plays a game and breaks himself up into a thousand pieces to forget himself. And he forgets.
Stealing pleasure from the future self, the present self wanders like a gibbering ghost through a poorly constructed nirvana in shambles. Happiness recedes. A bastardly monk asks a rhetorical question. What is happiness?
This far do addicts and bastardly monks agree: In the end, the goal is to feel nothing at all.
It’s the day of the Autumnal Equinox and somewhere out past the end of Hurley Mountain Road, out in a converted barn called the Sound Temple, twenty-one people lay supine on yoga mats, covered over with blankets, while the vibrations of a gong bath wash over them.
Outside some windows, the High Point mountain can be seen, 3,080 feet in the air.
Encircled with rough, textured rinds of brown, polished bright in the center, gongs hang in the air like hammered brass suns while Theresa Lyn Widmann summons the healing roar.
“It started through my yoga practice,” says Widmann, “and I trained in Kundalini Yoga. Playing the gongs was a big part of that practice. And I used to have a studio in uptown Kingston above Half Moon Books, but then in Covid that closed.”
As with acupuncturists, gong bath facilitators also consider the possibility that disease may be caused by stagnant energy in the body – the ubiquitous Ch’i, pent up again. By working with sound, so the theory goes, the vibrations can penetrate the body and dislodge or dissolve blockages.
“I personally don’t think that the sound industry is evolved enough to know at this point exactly how it’s doing that,” says Widmann. “It’s kind of a blunt force approach in a way that’s just bringing a big wash of energy that can penetrate the body. If there’s a resonance that’s meant to shift something, the idea is that the gongs can potentially do that.”
Widmann says there are people that are doing some research in that area which she likens to a car inspection.
“There’s a little computer system that says, you know, this is off, this is on,” says Widmann. “There are some tools out there that you can kind of plug your body up into to know what the
different vibrations of the different parts of the body are. And then you can apply vibration in a specific way to address a specific part of the body. I think it’s an imprecise science at the moment, but that is, in theory, what can happen.”
She started with crystal singing bowls, some tuning forks and a glass harp. Then she led into the gongs.
Near thirty minutes in, the shimmering volume increases. With closed eyes it sounds like an enormous space freighter, city-blocks-long, having arrived over immense distances, arriving overhead. There are voices inside the gong song, inside the wash and swell which are by no means comforting. It’s a haunted, threatening song which communicates a chromatic, atonal sensibility. Minor, major, augmented, diminished, all four modes play concurrently.
“The thing with the gongs is we call them a living instrument,” Theresa Lyn Widmann, facilitator of the gong bath says, “because the gong, in every different moment that it’s struck, is creating something different. It is creating a living sound, because the overtones are happening organically… Creating that kind of white noise crescendo, which is the place that we think about like piercing through the physical form into another realm and almost like a release. Release doesn’t always feel good.”
Watching nature show documentary footage there are these moments recorded where the animal pursued- the running deer, the terrified antelope- all at once gives up, kneels down and passively waits to be ripped apart by the tongue-lolling, fangy predators surrounding them.
The loud gong song is apocalyptic in that it reconciles the prey with the predator as siblings. Smiling to see one of his children fed to the other, this too is the face of God.
The loud gong song is apocalyptic in that it reconciles the prey with the predator as siblings. Smiling to see one of his children fed to the other, this too is the face of God.
“Ritual in itself is one of these elements that’s largely lost in our Western culture,” Widmann says. “I mean, you look at death. Death is an opportunity for deep ritual and it’s something that we struggle with in our country. I see a ritual as being a feminine practice that is a dance with ourselves and a dance with nature and the cycles of our lives and honoring transitions we don’t do that very much in this culture.”
When Widmann finishes conjuring the brassy revelation she walks among the laying bodies carrying Koshi chimes with her suspended from her fingers.
“I feel like I’m sprinkling fairy dust on everyone at the end of everything,” Widmann says. “Everyone likes my little fairy chimes.”
The significance of holding the gong bath on the Equinox for Widmann is as much psychological as metaphysical and she explained that any spiritual element to the ritual was on an individual basis. For her own spiritual practices, they are very much connected to the material world.
“It’s the transition into a new season and so it’s a good time for us individually to be thinking about, ‘how is my life going to shift or how do I want my life to shift?’ Every new moon, I used to do a juice fast. And it was an opportunity for me to always check in with myself. Am I making the right decisions to support the path of my life? What are the things that I need to reflect on? The equinoxes, the solstices – I use them in a very similar way, as an opportunity to check in. And the checking in is incorporating the seasonal energetic principle of it. So with the equinox being the balance of light and dark, thinking about my own relationship to light and dark, it’s like an outward expression of my shadow self and the balance between the head and the heart, right? Am I out of balance someplace?”
Only after the fact did I learn that Widmann’s purpose was working against my own intention. The gong bath, she said, was supposed to bring the levels of dopamine and adrenaline down, not up.
“It’s helping the nervous system go into a state of relaxation so the body can go into its own restore and repair mode. In today’s busy world, most people don’t really allow for time to relax.”
Right. Relax. Let it all happen. Actively passive, turn down the noise. Flesh abraded, needles inserted, washed in vibrations, wrapped in the cloth of memory, Euphoria watches from a remove. The most beautiful constellation in the nighttime sky. For now, it’s enough to stretch out and bask in the sun, picking from a bowl of cherries and swallowing in between the raw substances out of which the brain builds dopamine. The amino acids Tyrosine and L-Theanine, vitamins B5 and B6. Curcumin. Magnesium. Fish Oil. To ensure the druggy storehouses of the brain remain filled to the brim over the winter, operating at full capacity for whatever is coming and that the dopamine receptors are growing towards the sun.
For more information about sound healing get in touch with Widmann at: anahatakingston.com
For more information about acupuncture, and cupping, get in touch with Heslip at: wovenbodies.com
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