Watering the Flowers of Spring; Positive Suggestions and the Importance of Stimulating the Patient's Strengths in the Helping Relationship
After 15 years of working in a helping relationship, I increasingly realize how important it is to stimulate the patient's strengths and positive elements. Positive suggestions are powerful tools for transformation. The traditional crisis management model is to identify problems in order to find solutions, but often the solution is contained within the problem, the answer within the question.
Someone's greatest weaknesses are also their greatest strengths. This is one of the most fundamental concepts that Oriental traditional medicine has transmitted to Westerners.
Indeed, the Eight Principles (Ba Gang), which describe all phenomena in the form of poles, demonstrate how a phenomenon diametrically opposed contains the roots of its opposite and IS, in fact, the same energy at a different stage of its manifestation. These eight polarized principles are: interior and exterior, heat and cold, fullness and emptiness, yin and yang.
This same idea is also found in the diagnostic framework of the organs and bowels (Zang Fu). The organ experiencing a great energetic tide during the current period of the year is the Liver, which has the shape of a blooming petal. A congested liver can generate the green feelings of anger and frustration, which can also lead to rage when compressed. Conversely, a well-nourished liver with fluid organic movements can generate feelings of compassion and right vision.
What this also implies is that:
1. The greatest blockages are powerful springs once released. Aim high!
2. Symptoms are messenger. They are trying to tell you something. Listen to them with curiosity rather than judgment.
3. How do I speak to myself? My inner dialogue is an honest reflection of the climate of my heart. When inner dialogue ceases, I allow myself to be as I am.
Yes, I am in part a body that enjoys pleasures and suffers from pain, according to age and seasons. But I am much more...
My deep nature includes the torrent in the river, the thunder that rumbles in the sky, the wind in the trees, the Earth that vibrates more powerfully than anything built upon it, the silence at the bottom of the seas. I am the same age as the water that flows in the river. All the history of the world flows through my veins! My place as a human being is at the center, between heaven and earth, with an open heart, open eyes, and consciousness in full growth. I make my choices in consciousness. I choose peace, I choose love, I choose health, I choose to radiate.
Most choices made by the average person are exercised at an unconscious level. We choose, without really realizing it; fear, anxiety, worries, hatred, illness, and death. When I consciously stop numbing all the unpleasant sensations through various compensation reflexes (junk food, substances, shopping, screens, etc.), I begin to feel again...to live. Awakened and sensitive once more, good choices become easier to make. Then, through practice, I develop the courage to do what I need to do. And I do it well.
By Olivier Roy, Acupuncturist, Clinique Shanti, Acupuncture Montréal, http://laclinique.net
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