Nourishing Destiny

This week I have been reading a great book, “Nourishing Destiny” by Lonnie S. Jarrett. I find this to be a very interesting book about the Inner Traditions of Chinese Medicine. I am still in the first 100 pages, its not one of those books I can just burn through. I read a paragraph or two and find myself sitting contemplating what I have just read.
I appreciate his writings about the ‘unnamed Tao’ as compared to the named Tao. The propensity of naming “things” is problematic for growth if one allows oneself to believe that one understands a concept because we think we understand its “name.” The words for the Tao, Yin, Yang, God, Heaven and everything else all convey specific concepts, yet to see beyond our limitations we have to see beyond our concept of words. As Mr. Jarrett says about the Tao, “The Tao is one when it is unnamed. As soon as it is named there are two, the named and the unnamed.” The difficulty anyone has that discusses this is that by nature of conversation we have to use the named to conceptualize the unnamed, yet ideally we are talking about the unnamed aspect. Keep that in your awareness. Or as Zhuangzi stated “Words exist because of meaning; once you understand the meaning you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him.”
Another intriguing idea he puts out in this book is that there is a destiny that is unique to each one of us that we have a ‘contract’ with the universe to fulfill. (I would word it slightly different than this but I did not write the book.)
Mr. Jarrett contends that at the moment of conception the Tao imprints a unique, specific destiny into each one of us. This portion of our existence is what he calls early heaven. At the time of our first breath we ‘disconnect from our potential destiny’ and start to manifest our own individual destiny, everything that occurs after our first breath is called later heaven and that is the part we are responsible for. Our own destiny is the result of our own unique, individual choices; however Mr. Jarrett believes that it is the Universe’s desire to have the destiny we were imprinted with fulfilled and if we will not do that then the Universe may remove us, into another life and imprint that destiny upon someone else (now that gives one food for thought).
Mr. Jarrett’s concept of health is based on discovering and then nourishing the destiny that the Universe has created for you. Part of this concept of health is dependant on understanding and assimilating in a positive way the experiences that the universe has sent to each one of us. Another way of saying this is to say that for every experience we have there is a reason that the universe has sent us this experience that will help us to fulfill our destiny. I find this to be an interesting concept, mainly because I too feel that each one of us has a unique reason for being in the particular incarnation we are in and it is to fulfill our evolution as a Spiritual Being that we are creating the experiences we create.
Learning to discern the destiny of a life is a search that is as old as consciousness itself, yet when we watch an infant that has not unlearned its connection to the Universal will and has not yet developed its own individual will we are seeing destiny manifesting as life. The infant is spontaneous and is in the eternal now; as the Tao De Jing says, “An infant can cry all day without becoming hoarse.” As we disconnect from the Universal Will and our individual will asserts itself we grow hoarse if we yell for more than a few minutes. There are many reasons for that; one is that it is our Individual Will that we would be manifesting if we were to yell for an extended period of time.
Learning to hear and follow the Inner messages does not have to be difficult; it is just that we have been taught to ignore these subtle messages. We pay for the choice of ignoring these messages with our health.
As a practitioner of Chinese medicine I find that one of the hardest lessons for myself as well as for my patients is to learn to discern what is the Universal Will or as I would term it God’s Will. These lessons can be as subtle as watching a butterfly land upon a flower, or as drastic as a tsunami devastating everything in your world. My martial arts teacher used to say, “Listen to the whispers and avoid hearing the shouts.” When I am taking the history of a patient I find, time and again, that it is the excess insistence of a particular behavior that is now manifesting as a disease. For example I mean that it is the fifty-year-old accountant that is insisting on playing in a handball game when his hamstring is pulled and he can hardly walk. I am sure you can fill in your own observation that would be just as valid.
Asking a patient to actually rest their body while it heals is fairly normal, but you can imagine the looks I get when I ask them to contemplate why they created this particular experience in their life at this time. “What is the lesson for you from this?” [“Damn Martha, you said he was crazy, but I didn’t know you meant it!!!] Yet from my perspective it is the value gained from assimilating the lesson that is the justification for the experience.
One more thought to contemplate for the week. Mr. Jarrett writes about how mankind is the ‘vortex’ of energy that mediates between the earth and heaven. I have used the same context in explaining my perception of our relationship in the universe. I see the state of being a human as the space between the manifest and the unmanifest reality. As a Spiritual Being we are striving to make the unmanifest reality manifest in our lives, that is Nourishing Destiny, in my opinion.