Conflict

I went through some bizarre energy "stuff" (for lack of a better word) last night... I couldn't tell if said energy was fear or anger, but it definitely had its knickers in a twist somehow. But most interestingly, it had no desire to interact with my consciousness and tell me what it was unhappy about or what it wanted. It was quite petulant, actually.

I've had similar experiences at my acupuncturist's office: a couple of treatments ago, I told him that the treatment was working, I guess, but my energy clearly had no interest in anything he had to contribute to the party. (It was at that point he whipped out CV5, and things changed immediately.) This energetic non-cooperation was also experienced by my Qi Gong doctor: at my last treatment, he said that in previous treatments, the energy "wouldn't move."

The acupuncturist I visit when my regular person isn't available said that I have passive-agressive pulses. When she takes my pulses, she asks them, "How are you?" And then, a moment later, she asks them, "How are you really?" (At which point she gets the "real" reading.)

MS is all about conflict. It chews away at your neural insulation. Your nervous system responds by rerouting itself (or trying to, at least). The MS chews back. The nervous system reroutes. The patient feels this impact in whatever way it manifests. The patient fights against himself to push through the debilitation/inconvenience/whatever to get back to "normal" life. The MS pushes back. The patient pushes back at the MS harder. The end result of the patient and MS pushing at each other in opposite directions is that, when everything is said and done, nobody has moved much, if at all. But the patient, at least, is exhausted. Gee, no wonder we're all tired all the time, we spend most of our energy pushing back at ourselves and going nowhere.

One day, my doctor said that "Cancer patients need to fight back. MS patients need to stop fighting." An MS sufferer himself, he certainly didn't mean that we need to give up, roll over, and die quietly; but that "fighting" is part of the problem.

Certainly, we must persevere... but before we push back, we need to listen.

Curiously, this is also one of the lessons of my style of kyudo: Bow already knows how to shoot, arrow already knows how to fly. Don't try to teach the bow how to shoot; let it teach you. Which means that you should stop pushing back at the bow, and instead... listen.

Speaking of "persevere..." As I write this, I realize more than ever... I really, really, really need to shoot my bow more. (We'll see how long my resolve stands up to my uncooperative and moody legs.)