Light

The last few years have been punishing – they took a big bite out of our strength and challenged our relationships with other people, with some of our friends and with our patients.

Covid created a collective trauma. Trauma hinders our relationship to our inner harmony. It creates tension in our tissues and breaks the balance between fire and water: between our hearts and our kidneys. Trauma is like a shift in our earth – or you could say, it unearths us.

On top of all that, we can add to our overall insecurity a war in the Ukraine, Great Britain’s Brexit and the more and more obvious signs of our climate crisis. These combined external pathogens will have unbalanced not only our patients, but to a bigger or lesser extent, ourselves also.

Because we too are part of the system, we can easily become oblivious to the dissonance we feel inside. We are the imbalance ourselves – therefore we cannot see it. We need to make ourselves aware that this is happening within us and around us. Otherwise, we cannot heal!

The biggest horror of corona was the social distancing part. Everybody going into seclusion – turning inwards, stuck in our own living rooms in the company of Netflix.

For us practitioners this was even more disturbing because our way of treatment relies on us being able to interact with our patients. We need to see, feel and touch them. We need to get into a relationship with them. And this can only truly happen in person: everything else is a surrogate. (By the way, that’s another really interesting movie about human connection: Surrogates).

So now we need to come out of our shells, out of our fear and out of our traumatic energy stasis. We need to heal! The healer needs to heal.

In my view there is only one way to heal our qi stagnation – in fact, there is only one way to heal any qi stagnation. We need flow! And as humans there is only one way that flow can be instigated: we need to meet other people.

So whatever else you do this year and whatever you plan to spend your money on, make sure to spend a little on yourself and your own path to healing. Meet other people, meet other practitioners – come to Yarnfield Park in September!

Now I know you might be thinking, Oh he’s just advertising his own event. And to be honest, there may be a grain of truth in that. But there is so much more to see and hear at this year’s BAcC conference: from Bartosz Chmielnicki’s ‘Wild Pig In Your Chest’, to Vivien Shaw’s ‘Point Imagery’, to Claire Dabreo’s ‘AromaPoint Therapy Self-care Session’, to name but a few.

But most of all, since I visited the TCM Kongress in Rothenburg in spring, I am absolutely certain of one thing: we need time to reconnect with each other. We need time and space to harmonise again and to develop a new sense of feeling safe and healthy – and there is only one way of doing it.

We need to meet again, talk to each other again, laugh and dance together again. Only by doing these things will we find how interconnected we all are – and how much we need to re-establish ourselves as members of our profession. Only if we reconnect, will we rediscover our voice as a profession – and only then we may heal.

Looking forward to seeing, hearing and being with you in September.

Yours, Nils.