Many sectors of our health care system now recognize acupuncture as an effective treatment for a variety of physical and mental problems. Less well known is that the technique also works well as a support for spiritual growth.

There is more to wellbeing than physical and mental health. A person can feel unwell in a sound body. It is also possible to suffer without emotional turmoil, but simply from feeling purposeless and cynical. Some people enjoy spontaneous spiritual contentment and readily embrace their path in life, but many of us need to work to attain such equanimity. Acupuncture can help patients connect with their inner senses of unity, rightness, and love, which are the touchstones of spiritual health.

Spirituality gets discussed so often it has lost definition, but we know it when we find it. Whenever we feel peaceful despite tragedy, injustice, and chaos, we have found a deeper center. Whenever we realize our hearts will grow no matter what fate brings, we feel profoundly healed. This is the Health of Spirit.

A person can be gravely diseased in body and severely buffeted by circumstance, but remain at ease in that still, small refuge at the center of the storm, where divine light shines. The rational mind may seek to explain this abiding comfort: Is it the hand of God or a bracing mix of neurotransmitters? Logic cannot answer this question, but fortunately the words we use to describe Grace are less important than the peace we find when we accept it.

Acupuncture stills the mind and opens it to larger horizons. The needles stimulate deep energies in the body, brain, and spirit. At times, a fuller realization of one’s purpose, one’s loyalties, and one’s wholesome desires can result. The ordinary pains of life can be transcended as they are understood as enlightening lessons rather than meaningless torments. Tectonic shifts in perspective may occur.

Such earthshaking changes do not happen every day or for every patient. But acupuncture works a bit like meditation and prayer, awakening the heart and mind to forces latent in the human being. When a person is on the verge of a paradigm shift, acupuncture can be the catalyst to bring it about.

I’ve been reading the book, Five Spirits, Alchemical Acupuncture for Psychological and Spiritual Healing, by Lorie Eve Dechar, as part of my ongoing acupuncture education. I’m not too familiar with alchemy as a metaphysical discipline, and even less with it as a psychological one. Although I’m just getting started with the book, I’ve already come across some ‘keepers.’ For instance, the author writes:

“The alchemical mystery at the heart of traditional Chinese medicine is the healing transformation of ordinary life experience–the lead weight of suffering, illness, loss and humiliation–into the golden light of wisdom, compassion and insight.”

This nicely sums up the position I’ve been moving toward for the past several posts. More than once I’ve referred to my past hardships and traumas as gifts. I’ve come to see how my struggles have formed me into a person who is wiser and more accepting than before. I understand that my childhood wounds and my adult setbacks both worked to temper my arrogance, fuel a genuine spiritual hunger, and build in me a self esteem built on humility rather than hubris. All this happened as a natural alchemical product of my working through my pain. Along the way many teachers, many philosophies, and many moments of direct realization have helped me grow.

Obviously, knowledge of the deeper principles of alchemy was not required for my transformation to begin. But might it have happened sooner, or possibly more thoroughly, with greater understanding of what to expect?

That’s the main reason for my writing. Now that I feel largely free of my torments and despair, I blog in order to help others who face similar inner demons. Of course, I recognize that every person is unique, and so every person will find his or her own special path to freedom. Ultimately, however, there are some common themes that will be useful to most. So while one person may feel comfortable with Buddhist meditation, another may turn to Christian prayer. Maybe this woman runs to burn off hostility, while that man boxes. Maybe poetry moves me, and paintings move you. There are obvious differences in preferences, but the underlying principles of deep introspection, bodily movement, and artistic awareness can help everyone.

But help everyone do what? To transform the gross hardship of daily life into something nourishing to the soul. To become radiant with experience and love. Reading about alchemy, I see many parallels between my path to date and this ancient principle that changes darkness to light.

Perhaps it is our culture’s emphasis on who we know, what we own, and how we look that makes us think our lives unsuccessful if we don’t achieve the herd’s grails of fame, riches, and beauty. Perhaps if we lived in a society that valued wisdom instead of wealth, and serenity instead of a hollow form of sexuality, we’d find it easier to accept that sometimes failure is the best thing that can happen to us. Illness may be a greater gift than health. Loss can be the font of larger gain.

Alchemy is perhaps just a fancy word for change. But it carries a nice, symbolic ring that appeals to me on a deep level. It stands well outside the psychiatric mainstream I’ve railed against, and its connotations are implicit and mystical rather than explicit and material.

Lately, I’ve been receiving hostile emails from someone who considers acupuncture quackery. Stubbornly, I’ve tried to communicate with this person. It would be nice to report that I’ve been gentle and understanding in my responses, but until today I’ve tended toward sarcasm. Finally, I had to ask myself why my usual desire to be kind and fair got overridden. Partly, it was the intensely insulting tone of the missives I received. But it’s also true that I still get easily rankled by skeptics who insist that conventional Western biomedicine is the only legitimate form of healing.

My own former medical specialty, ophthalmic reconstructive surgery, was about as legitimate and conventional as they come. Typically I’d remove a skin cancer from an eyelid and then do some delicate stitching to repair the form and function of the eye’s surroundings. But other times I’d correct the bad outcomes of cosmetic procedures done elsewhere (my large HMO practice excluded cosmetic work). In these latter cases, I saw how my surgeries could sometimes make improvements in the material appearance of the face and eyes, but they never did anything for the underlying neurosis that drove the person to seek a ‘perfect’ appearance in the first place. I saw how my work was effective on a material level, but without impact on a psychospiritual one.

Most western medicine works similarly. At best it heals the body (and all too often fails in even that); it seldom heals the mind and almost never addresses the spirit. Its medicine is reparative, but not transformative.

Today, I’m much more interested in transformative than reparative healing. Acupuncture and other holistic methods offer more in this way than conventional medicine and psychiatry, which is why I’m drawn to study these emerging fields. Sure, they remain controversial, but these systems offer such rich, life-changing potential that it would be foolish not to pursue them.

Only as we come to accept hardship as instructive, and pain as necessary, will we find deeper peace of mind. And only as individuals achieve this inner alchemy can we then change the larger, outer world to one more sane and sustainable. We need new systems of biomedicine, and new ideas in mental health, to make this kind of fundamental change a reality.

There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others, in which the … time of tension in our soul is over, and that of happy relaxation, of calm, deep breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant future to be anxious about, has arrived.

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902

James describes exactly the condition that I’ve been enjoying since the middle of January. However, he must be mistaken when he concludes that this state of mind is available only to religious men, because I am by no means religious. Setting that important discrepancy aside, the psychologist’s numerous case studies prove that a profoundly wise and peaceful state of human existence awaits us; our task is to find ways to achieve and retain this higher mode.

James’s classic compilation and analysis of spiritual growth experiences exerted a major influence on Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. It helped Wilson and his compatriots as they created a system to facilitate spiritual transformation in alcoholics. Here is Wilson’s description of his own awakening (from the ‘Big Book’ of AA, 1939):

All about me and through me there was a wonderful feeling of Presence… A great peace stole over me and I thought, ‘No matter how wrong things seem to be, they are right’.

This transformative experience helped Wilson, a hitherto hopeless drunk, remain sober for the rest of his life. There was a time when I doubted that such a change was possible; I may even have questioned Wilson’s sincerity. But in the year 2000, after returning to AA following a long absence, I went through a series of experiences very similar to his. Here is a description of one of them, taken from a previous essay on this site:

I stood at a locus from which I viewed creation arising from subatomic scales to fill the entire span of the modern universe, in a near-instantaneous ‘vision.’ As I saw these things, I inhaled the atmosphere of all-encompassing love and ‘rightness’ that animates everything. I heard a chorus of celestial voices, and felt myself basking in a divine affection that erased all doubt that God existed, that life had meaning, and that I mattered.

Although that episode and others like it had an enormous impact on me ten years ago, I did not know how to maintain elevated states of understanding; as a result I sank back into a stubborn and miserable depression that crushed me for at least six years. Fortunately, as long term visitors here have read, transcendent awareness returned in January. As before, it was my work within the AA framework that made my heart receptive to transformation. Here is the result, once again quoting from an earlier piece (Note that this time around the experience did not feel referenced to ‘God’ or any other overtly religious concepts.):

I perceived the evanescence and formlessness of the human mind, the interplay between humans and nature, and how everything intertwines in the awesome depths of creation. The way the human spirit dwells amidst vast spreads of time, space, and scale became clear to me in ways that surpass words…The scope of this new perspective crushes into triviality many of my prior concerns.

Recently I’ve mentioned Quantum Change: When Epiphanies and Sudden Insights Transform Ordinary Lives, by William Miller and Janet C’de Baca. Like William James, these authors document many awakening experiences. Although James presented some transformations that came on gradually and others that were sudden, Miller and C’de Baca focus on ones that happened abruptly, as acute life-altering events. They cite many spiritual and secular leaders who have described swift openings of consciousness. The Buddha, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed, George Fox (the founder of Quakerism), Malcolm X, Florence Nightingale, Joan of Arc, Leo Tolstoy, C.S. Lewis, and saints Paul, Augustine, and Theresa of Avila all underwent rapid and profound transformations of consciousness. The list could go on and on.

Citing work of James E. Loder, Miller and C’de Baca tell us that such experiences unfold in a characteristic sequence. “Something disrupts the way in which the person has been perceiving reality and making sense out of life…’an insight, intuition, or vision appears’…frequently accompanied by a great emotional release and a deep sense of relief. Then, with time, the person integrates and interprets the experience…and new patterns of thought and action emerge.”

It is likely that these psychic events are generated by novel patterns of neurologic activity. In fact, patients with temporal lobe seizures recount rather similar feelings. In Phantoms in the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, the authors paraphrase such patients:

I finally understand what it’s all about. This is the moment I’ve been waiting for all my life. Suddenly it all makes sense…I have insight into the true nature of the cosmos.

These patients have demonstrable anomalies in their brain waves, so in at least these cases the new consciousness can be traced to altered neural activity. Often such people retain their elevated understanding of cosmic significance even between acute episodes. The authors speculate that new neural channels are opened that “permanently alter—and sometimes enrich—the patient’s inner emotional life.” These patients have seizure disorders, but there is every reason to suspect that even the brains of people without electrical abnormalities can be decisively transformed by powerful spiritual episodes.

In the five weeks since the onset of my altered consciousness, I have indeed observed major alterations in my ‘inner emotional life’. As I’ve mentioned in recent posts, the change has by no means left me in an unwavering state of bliss; the heightened and peaceful awareness comes and goes. Sometimes despair threatens to reassert control. On the other hand, I am learning that by taking some simple and concrete steps I can bring myself back into alignment and sidetrack my old neurotic patterns.

My message today is straightforward: humans have the capacity for elevated states of consciousness that reduce psychic distress. These psychological modes open the mind to broader ways of seeing life, reveal order and refuge in the cosmos, and often increase one’s desire to behave altruistically. Because they remove people from the narrow, egocentric and damaging patterns that society encourages from birth, these improved frames of mind may represent a natural maturation of the human mind. They can occur as religious epiphanies, but they can also develop as completely secular insights. Subsequent posts will explore the ways a person can make such transcendence more likely and more robust.

Recent posts have alluded to the ‘awakening’ I experienced during the middle part of January. Perhaps you have noticed that details have been slow in coming. The episode had such impact, and seemed so special, that I’ve wanted to savor and assimilate it before taking the risk of describing it badly. How could I possibly do it justice? If it is not entirely beyond words, it will certainly be reduced by them. So please forgive the hesitance with which I am spelling it out.

Not only do I have trouble describing what happened, I can’t even categorize it properly. In terms of emotional impact, it had much in common with the ‘psychosis’ that overwhelmed my mind in 2000. At that time, my universe came alive with divine forces and holy beings. Afterwards, everyone around me suffered through long descriptions of what I called ‘my religious visions’. Because the amazing sights, sounds, and feelings had seemed to be the handiwork of supernatural agencies, I believed them ‘spiritual’ in every sense of the word. What happened this January had the same emotional impact, but the causes seemed different. Whereas before I heard holy voices and met divine spirits, this time nothing supernatural seemed to be at play. I felt a profound connection with my surroundings, and enjoyed a penetrating clarity about my true condition as a human being. But I did not hear, feel, or see any gods or angels. My thinking did not go in that direction at all.

So was this experience ‘spiritual’, or not? Consider that it: 1) made me exquisitely aware of the profuse (and unarguable) connections between all life forms; 2) showed me my insignificance in the face of a vast and mysterious cosmos; 3) helped me recognize that the universe is perfect in its own way; and 4) reminded me of what a privilege it is to be a witness. Because I felt both humbled and absorbed by the cosmos, and because the universe struck me as exactly ‘right’, the episode counts as an awakening. And yet everything that I saw and felt, or that comforted me, came from either scientific knowledge or day-to-day experience. Whatever happened cannot be labelled ‘secular’, because it felt so numinous. But it did not seem supernatural, either. Can it be called ‘spiritual’ if it did not involve ‘spirits’?

My awakening can be described as a ‘sacred’ experience, even if it was not a strictly spiritual one. Although dictionary definitions of ‘sacred’ mostly relate to ‘God or gods’, there is also the meaning: ‘highly valued or important’. In that sense, I found myself recognizing how we inhabit a sacred universe, where every particle holds tremendous significance. Which, if you think about it, is not much of a stretch. For the simplest example, isn’t it spectacular that protons exist? And that they comprise even smaller particles called quarks, which evidently contain even smaller things of some sort (strings?). With my awakened state of mind, these momentous truths almost overwhelmed me. I was awestruck by the enormity of my surroundings, and yet I felt both absorbed and supported by them. The universe was not somehow separate from ‘me’, and I could find no objective boundary between the outside world and my inner mind. I also had absolute confidence that there are no flaws in the cosmos. Everything is as it must be. Although the reality of tragedy remained quite clear, I saw that in the larger scheme of things, it is unavoidable. Hardship is inseparable from life. In short, I knew the universe to be profound, one with me, and perfect.

Later, as the impact of this experience hit home, I found an entirely new attitude toward life. No longer obsessed with my small inner concerns, I now have much more appreciation of the larger, outer world. My depression and anxiety have lightened to the point where they hardly deserve those names any longer. Not that I feel giddy or supremely ‘happy’. An undertone of sorrow can still be heard anytime I slow down and listen. But it is a special kind of sadness, with an almost inexpressible, sorrowful majesty. Everything in this universe, including my depression, holds beauty of one kind or another.

Not only was my experience ‘sacred’, therefore, it was also transformative. After years of very slow and incremental change, I found myself leaping over barriers that had seemed insurmountable and permanent just a week earlier. My mental health jumped to a new plateau. There is room for a great deal more growth and maturity, of course, but I made more progress in January than in the entire decade between 2000 and 2010.

Having been granted a sacred, transformative awakening that followed specific actions and contemplations, I suspect that something in my experience might assist others. My first obligation, and the one way I might be able to help, is to write.