Five-Element Acupuncture and Meditation

By AFEA member Nicky Douglas

This meditation from Richard Rohr – a Franciscan and the founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation – speaks to the power of Silence. In silence we can truly hear, we can see and we can know with an intelligence that is beyond thinking.

The meditation notes that all the World’s great spiritual traditions recognise our over reliance on ‘thinking’ and the tyranny of words as tools of the ego. Taoism which was the philosophical foundation of Five Element Acupuncture states the Tao that can be spoken of is not the constant Tao.

As Five Element Acupuncture practitioners we try to find this silence in ourselves when we are with our patients. Our ability to diagnose and then treat the underlying source of their complaint depends on our being able to really hear and see beneath the superficial facade that we all present to the world. To know without knowing we need to be silent.

Inner Silence
Wednesday, January 8, 2020

Silence is not the absence of being; it is a kind of being itself. It is not something distant, obtuse, or obscure of which only ascetics and hermits are capable. Most likely we have already experienced deep silence, and now we must feed and free it and allow it to become light within us. We do not hear silence; rather, it is that by which we hear. We cannot capture silence; it must enthrall us. Silence undergirds our very being as ceaseless, primary prayer.

Silence is a kind of thinking that is not thinking. It is a kind of thinking which truly sees (from the Latin contemplata meaning “to see”). Silence, then, is truly an alternative consciousness. It is a form of intelligence, a form of knowing beyond reacting, which is what we normally call emotion. It is a form of knowing beyond mental analysis, which is what we usually call thinking. Philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) was not wrong when he said, “I think, therefore I am.” He was accurately describing the Western person. Most of us believe that we are what we think, but we are so much more than our thoughts about things.

At their higher levels, all of the great world religions teach that this tyrannical mode of thinking has to be relativized and limited or it takes over—and rather completely takes over—to the loss of primal being. Pretty soon, words mean less and less; they mean whatever the ego wants them to mean. Witness our political discourse today! But this leads to more and more cynicism and suspicion about all words, even our own.

The ego uses words to get what it wants. When we are in an argument with our family, friends, or colleagues, that is what we do. We pull out the words that give us power, make us look right or superior, and help us win the argument. But words at that level are rather useless and even dishonest and destructive.

The soul does not use words. It surrounds words with space, and that is what I mean by silence. Silence is a kind of wholeness. It can absorb contraries, paradoxes, and contradictions. Maybe that is why we do not like silence. There is nothing to argue about in true inner silence, and the mind likes to argue. It gives us something to do. The ego loves something it can take sides on. Yet true interior silence does not allow you to take sides. That is one reason contemplation is so liberating and calming. There are no sides to take and only a wholeness to rest in—which frees us to act on behalf of love.

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Five-Element Acupuncture and Meditation

By AFEA member Nicky Douglas

Inner Silence
Wednesday, January 8, 2020

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