Episode 75: Why Humans Suffer and How to Bring Love into Healing with Lonny Jarrett, L.Ac
Show Summary:
Lonny Jarret is recognized worldwide as a leading practitioner, author, scholar and teacher of East Asian Medicine. Lonny has been practicing Acupuncture and Herbology in Stockbridge, Massachusetts since 1986 and is the author of three meticulously crafted books that are classics, or soon-to-be classics in the field of Chinese medicine.
This is a discussion about why Lonny was drawn to acupuncture and Chinese Medicine and his experiences working with patients in transforming their health. We hope you enjoy this conversation.
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Full Transcript:
Lonny Jarrett:
What we do is inspire people to change and when we talk to people run the depth of our own self which we have discovered, isn't wounded isn't traumatized, isn't victimized, doesn't need any more time has nothing to overcome and is always at all times, places and circumstances hole when we speak from that dimension of ourselves to others, even about their physical symptomatology, we provide the invitation to to go deeper and we introduce we say okay, I, you know, I try to draw connection to people between the symptom their shoulder, their asthma, their infertility, always drawing a connection between what they're complaining about and saying they want to change, make a connection between that their belief system and their behaviors, and draw connection and pretty soon the person feels moved because we're speaking to them from a depth of limitless care.
Liz Baer:
Hi, everyone. I'm Liz bear, acupuncturist and co founder of CH I'm excited to bring to you this insightful conversation with Lani Jarrett. Lonnie Jared is recognized worldwide as a leading practitioner, author, scholar, and teacher of East Asian medicine. He's been practicing acupuncture and Chinese herb ology in Stockbridge, Massachusetts since 1986, and is the author of three meticulously crafted books, which are classics, or assumed to be classics in the field of Chinese medicine. This is a discussion about why Lonnie was drawn to acupuncture and Chinese medicine and his experiences working with patients and transforming their health. We hope you enjoy the conversation.
Dr. Andrew Wong:
Welcome onto the podcast. We're so happy and honored to have you here.
Lonny Jarrett:
Yeah, I'm happy to be here. Thank you for the invitation.
Dr. Andrew Wong:
So this is the first podcast that that Liz and I have done together. It's very exciting to have you on this as well. Yeah, it's
Liz Baer:
fun to be with you, Andy.
Dr. Andrew Wong:
So I think we know that a lot of you've been recognized worldwide as a leader and kind of developing the I would say the future of East Asian medicine, I know this can probably talk a little bit better about that. But you're really a leading practitioner, author, scholar, and teacher and just reading some of your works, almost like also weaving a web of sort of the philosophical underpinnings of East Asian medicine kind of where, where it's been, where it is now and kind of where it's going. So you have dedicated most of your life to the field of Chinese medicine between seeing patients in private practice Massachusetts teaching and mentoring students, and of course, reading your Opus, you know, magnum opus books, as well. Just from your stories, it sounds like you were drawn to the healing arts from a very young age. Could you kind of tell us about that? And maybe just have our audience get to know you a little bit?
Lonny Jarrett:
Sure. I mean, I mean, you know, just to make it simply, you know, I think the moment of conception is not a neutral event. And we come in with a direction. And I literally remember the moment when I was three years old that my mother read me, Bambi, Bambi his mother, got shot by a hunter and I started crying. And she said, Well, when you grow up, you can be a veterinarian. And I said, What's that? And she said, it's a doctor that heals sick animals. And I said, okay, and literally, at that moment, at three years old, I it was always in my consciousness that I was going to go into medicine and be a healer. I mean, I didn't become a veterinarian, but that was always the direction of things. And as I as I grew, I got interested in. I started studying martial arts when I was 10. And my best friend was Chinese whose parents ran the laundry in town, and we used to go into Chinatown, to watch kung fu movies on weekends and, and they would always stop by the pharmacy to pick up herbs and I was just introduced to at at a young age and when I was about 1314, I found all the Chinese philosophical texts in my in my mother had a huge library in the house and I found the E Ching as well as all of Berdan Watson and James legs, translations and the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita and by 14 I was reading all of that. And when I was 17, I wrote my college entrance essay on the difference between eastern and western worldviews and our discussed Chinese medicine. When I was 22, I graduated from college in neurobiology and took a 10 week course and five element acupuncture. That was in 1980. And went through graduate school in neuroscience and left neuroscience to go into Chinese medicine, and was in school from 84 to 86, learning five element acupuncture. In school, I met Leon Hamer. And when I graduated in 86, and moved up to Western Massachusetts, I contacted Leon who was practicing about an hour and 20 minutes away in Saratoga, New York, and apprenticed and studied with him for 10 years, and learning pulse diagnosis and very deep Chinese physiology. And have been in practice, you know, since 1985, but 1986 here and practiced for 37 years and done about 95,000 clinical sessions. And as I got into clinical practice, Chinese medicine was very young in this country when I got interested in it, and there were literally no scholarly resources. And it wasn't until about 82 That Munford Parker's first books came out and Ted caps tricks book web that has no Weaver came out. And even then those were the only two books and resources were pretty thin, and I knew I was doing something in the treatment room. And that there was a lot more going on than I had been taught by my teachers. So I taught myself a fair amount are classical Chinese and learn the language of the medicine. I had been reading the philosophical textbooks, and the alchemical textbooks, the cultivation of texts my whole life, I practiced and embodied practice of martial arts. I'm a fourth degree black belt in Taekwondo, I'd studied have Kido. I've been doing Qigong regularly since 1980. And meditating since 1972. I had learned, you know, transcendental meditation in ninth grade. And so as looking, I knew there was a lot more going on, but it wasn't certainly in any of the books. Certainly, it wasn't in the web that has no waiver. It was pointed to by Munford porkers texts, and I, I learned to get some degree of facility with the classical Chinese characters and the etymological textbooks and just read, you know, went very deep into study so I could articulate the depth of what I saw going on in the treatment room. And, you know, that has continued through my three books and my inquiry, ever since. And I, I've been with several spiritual teachers and communities and have been a free agent for about 10 years.
Liz Baer:
I was gonna say, you know, we have so many acupuncturists in Maryland, or we have, yes, additionally had a lot of because of the school, which was Tai Sophia, and then, you know, Maryland University of Integrative Health. And but, you know, oftentimes I find when folks come into our office, they, some are very familiar with five element acupuncture, but a lot of people come in with the mindset of like, you know, I've got my elbow hurts, or how can you fix this issue or that issue? I was wondering if you could help explain to our audience a little bit about what's what distinguishes five element from other styles, and then also, you've taken five element like that tradition that you first learned and have kind of exploded it into bringing in all of these other different, you know, philosophical and psychological models. So would you talk a little bit about that?
Lonny Jarrett:
Well, you know, in China, to have a real integral grasp of Chinese medicine involves understanding medicines that are based on number systems zero through 13. And the five elements is one of those. And the five elements is a deeply beautiful system that is ecologically paced, and can be looked at as farming in people. And this medicine arose and agrarian culture, with the textbooks were written 500 to 300 BC, BC, the, you know, the main medical textbooks after 1000s of years of development of the medicine. And the five element tradition in particular is is an ecological view of humanity. And I have to say, on my, on my 13th birthday, which was April 21 1970, I went into Greenwich Village to see the Broadway musical hair. And it was the first Earth Day. And there were hundreds and hundreds of 1000s of people in the streets and pictures of this little blue green ball on flags and banners and buttons everywhere floating in space, which is really the dawning of holistic awareness coming online in the mainstream. And of a cosmos centric view, like, you know, we're just on this little ball in space. And the Clean Air Act, what the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Environmental Protection Act, the Endangered Species Act, we're all passing them. And you kind of had a view, I had a view as a 13 year old, like the adults around this, we're taking care of it, it's all good. And when I went into when I took that 10 week class, the thing that really taught, there were two things that happened. One, I had this deep recognition of the imperative to learn and become this medicine. And that was rooted in the deep ecological view of the times and I realized that the five element tradition, that medicine was that medicine is politics and medicine, there's no more political statement one can make than defining what is health and one is ill what his illness. And I'm sure this was influenced at the time, because I had literally just finished college. And my last semester focused on the writings of Michel Foucault, whose basic thesis was to deconstruct power hierarchies. And that knowledge is power, but power is knowledge. And I recognize medicine as one of the most potent forces to deliver values through. And I really saw the ecological worldview of the five elements as one of the most significant vehicles through which one could change the consciousness of culture to reinvent the world, my my overwhelming feeling after, by the time I had taken that acupuncture class, I had worked at Albert Einstein medical school for a year, and published neuroscience in one of the world's leading cellular biology journals, and had a revelation in the electron microscope room. It wasn't about consciousness. It was about the structure of cells, and that's physical, but consciousness was completely missing. And for me, Chinese medicine, and particularly this beautiful five element tradition, was the perfect synthesis, of art, science, philosophy, Alchemy, mythology, magic, rationality, and trans rationality. And it just brought together for me, I had this instantaneous recognition that this is everything that I haven't learned in science, and to be whole, I have to become this medicine.
Liz Baer:
Wow. Yeah. And that's why when you when we go to an acupuncturist, sometimes they say, I didn't know that this was acupuncture. You're like, yeah,
Lonny Jarrett:
yeah, we get that all the time. Yeah. Well, well, we meet people, a good practice. So the bodhisattva vow begins by declaring, may I be the doctor and the medicine. And it doesn't take much to become a doctor, a person of any reasonable intelligence can do it. It just learns. It just takes passing some tests and learning a technical language. That's the theory, but to become the medicine takes as many lifetimes as we have. It's a position of acknowledging that we didn't have to You come back. And we agreed to come back for the privilege of helping Take the wounded and suffering to the distant shore. And that we were the contract for coming back is I will experience anything I have to experience any of the vicissitudes of life, I'll suffer whatever I need to be suffer for the sake of being shown, what I need to be shown, so I can be a vehicle to help ease the suffering of other people. And that becomes the context of our life. And if that's the context of our life, we literally become the medicine in service to others. And I just think it's very powerful. All in a materialistic culture. When a person is led into a treatment room by whatever symptom they have. I always teach their conservative people go to doctors so they can get drugs and surgery. So they can feel better without having to change and liberal people become tacky, punctures, bodyworkers homeopaths so they can feel better without having to change. And what we do is inspire people to change and when we talk to people, rum, the depth of our own self, which we have discovered, isn't wounded, isn't traumatized, isn't victimized, doesn't need any more time, has nothing to overcome, and is always at all times, places and circumstances hole. When we speak from that dimension of ourselves to others, even about their physical symptomatology, we provide the invitation to to go deeper and we introduce we say okay, I, you know, I try to draw connection to people between the symptom their shoulder, their asthma, their infertility, always drawing a connection between what they're complaining about and saying they want to change, make a connection between that their belief system and their behaviors. And draw connection. And pretty soon the person feels moved, because we're speaking to them from a depth of limitless care, a depth of concern and care that is rare. And we're speaking to all the dimensions of their life and all the dimensions of their experience. One of the, one of the strongest structures that potentially potentiate suffering in people is that of separation. And the illusion caused by separation, that what's happened to them in their life is personal on its private. And basically, we're all having it may be too far to say the same. But we're all having a very, very similar life experience. Each of us experience we were all having the same life experience. But as individuals, different aspects of that experience are emphasized by degrees. But none of them are unique. Everyone's been betrayed, everybody's been wounded, everyone's been misunderstood. Everyone's been abandoned, everyone hasn't been listened to. Everyone has a sense, a sense of isolation in almost all of us have grown up in the context of an inherently limited view of possibility. And when we're spoken to by someone who has realized the universality of the human experience within themselves, yeah, it's can be very profoundly moving and awakening and an invitation to to be met at an uncommon depth that is different from a 15 minute insurance visit broken into 15 minute billable segments where where the physician or the nurse sits down and and they try to make connection with you for a minute or two. You know, it's a different experience.
Liz Baer:
You I've heard you say that Most patients come into the treatment room in a relative state of shock.
Lonny Jarrett:
Yes. You want to talk about that?
Liz Baer:
I do. Because I think what you're, what I'm hearing is like, it's that we come in so much, much of our perception is that we're in this, we're separated, we're separated from the present self to the past of what could have been, who used to be before this thing happened, we're separated from the parts of ourself that are actually an integrated whole. And we think that they're all separate, we feel isolated from our communities. That all seems like it's part of the shock. Sure, I
Lonny Jarrett:
mean, I mean, the process of a soul incarnating into a body is quite a thing. And you know, people like Wilhelm Reich and Stanislav Grof, and Christina Graf, have talked a lot about birth trauma. And then, you know, even after that public school, and just being raised in her family's Creek creates a lot of, you know, lays upon us a lot of content, unquestioned content, and a lot of momentum, to socialize us into culture into a membership, collective and culture. And I think we can all agree that there are a lot of unwholesome aspects to culture and a lot of a lot of unwholesome momentum behind a lot of constructs and culture that grew out of early magic and mythic consciousness, which just then even even out of rational consciousness, you know, the Cartesian mind brain duality, which is perpetuated, that creates separation. And so there are just a lot of cultural constructs interjected into us, the, you know, the metaphor I give is that we're driving down the road looking at of life looking at the scenery, and over time, mud gets on the windshield, and insects and birds poop on it, and rocks hit it. And over 1020 3040 50 years of looking through that windshield, we we come to being trained to what's on the windshield, losing most of our view of what of what's actually going on, we come to identify with all the, with all the constructs and junk and dirt. And and we come to identify in you ask a patient who they are, and they tell you what's happened to them. Which in in Buddhism, these are called some scars. Some scars are the conditioning in of conditioned influences of life experience. And interesting the Chinese character, Buddhist Chinese character for some Scara is the character in Chinese medicine that's translated into element, the whooshing the five transformations from a Buddhist point of view are the five samskaras, the five conditioning influences of mind. And and people are out in that wheel hypnotized to the events of water going, they find themselves clinging to the wheel by conditioned by fear and desire being spun through life by a momentum that they are unconscious of, for the most part and don't really understand and the whole point of Chinese medicine and of cultivation practices to become free of that wheel so that it's spinning around you and you can see it and you're not out in it and what we can see we can change so we can you know, in relationship to shock you know, I mean, I've I've written extensively about it, and it's more than we can describe here. But shock exists on a continuum from very subtle, too subtle to gross, and most people are in a gross shock of just not you know, when we think about shock, we think about a horrible like being in a car accident or the death of a loved one or having something terrible happen. And that that is shock. But there are subtler dimensions of shock which just reinforce and channel all of our Tension onto the relative dimension art of our experience in denial of the universal dimensions of self that we share with all of creation. So, so in its more subtle aspect, the evidence of shock is just separation. And separation, as I said is pain. And, and the only medicine is consciousness, which is love. And love is the proof of no separation and union.
Liz Baer:
And I always think of his blood contains everything, right? So it contains all the good bad, ugly, triumphant everything. Yeah, I love separation.
Lonny Jarrett:
Yes, I would. So I agree. And I might, for me, rather than use the word contains, I would just say, Love is the context. It it, it is the paper that the whole thing is printed on. So so it contains it, but more than content, because you can think of like a bowl containing cherries. But the bowl doesn't permeate the cherries. The bowl isn't the cherries, whereas love is not. So we can say yes, love contains it. But it's
Liz Baer:
more the fabric.
Lonny Jarrett:
It's It's the it's the fundamental vibration of the whole it is the whole it is the everything else is a construct and love of his actually what it's constructed of.
Liz Baer:
So how does someone from LA knees perspective, find their way into that. I don't know even read the word. I mean, it's not like an acceptance, but like, what has to open in someone to see that into to know that understand it to incorporate that or become that?
Lonny Jarrett:
Well, there are different stages of development. Most of the world, most of the humans in the world are at a pre personal stage of development. They're living in a magic to a magic mythic or a mythic context. And that they're you we don't really get to a significant personal degree of development, personal stages of development to we break out of the membership tribe. So that the membership Collective is the the age you were at, where the most important thing in life to you was having the same sneakers your friends had by the same bicycle. And then like, if you really wanted a pair of sneakers, and your mother, like your parents gave you a gift for your birthday, and you opened it. And it was another, of course a beautiful pair of sneakers, but not the same brand as your friends you're like No sorry. This, it's you know, it's got to be this or it's got to be an orange when varsity or it has to be, you know, it has to be this pair of jeans or that's membership level you're in or you're out, you're with us, or you're against this. So, essentially, from many people the the imperative in medicine is to help them build egos not to help them transcend egos. It's literally to help them become individuals. If you take somebody, you have to have an ego before you can transcend ego. You have to be someone before you can be no one. So, for many of my patients I'm on. I was just in the treatment room with a woman yesterday. And, you know, she when she first came in a couple years ago, I mean, she was just she was in shock. She was having tantrums. She was having panic attacks all the time. She barely had the facility when someone was asking her to do something to know where she was and whether whether to say yes or no or she was so blended with everything and everyone. And we were just I was just talking with her yesterday. She was asking me about you know, meditation and some philosophical constructs and I said, for you for you, we're working. We're not working on transcending ego. We're working on you building an ego We want you to get to a point where yes means yes, no means no. You when every year interacting about to make a decision, a significant decision that involves time or resources or other people, you're able to take a breath, stand back, check in with yourself, you feel the autonomy to say, I can get back to you on this in 15 minutes, or let's talk about this on Thursday, I need a little time. So, for that person, we're building an ego, we're building autonomy. What we fundamentally want to do with people, what's inherent, so all technique and all theory always serve who the practitioner actually is the state and stage development of the practitioner. And the goal would be for the practitioner, to become the self, capital S. And if we awaken to love as an absolute call, and as an absolute demand, if we awaken to an infinite care, and we put our stake in the ground, that I have recognized that who my who I am, body, mind, and soul is a vehicle for the transmission of the light of consciousness, which is love, and manifests as care. And I'm, I've recognized myself as that without question. And I'm giving myself to that for the rest of my life, because that's the context of my existence. The degree to which we mean it, is the degree to which every structure within us that stands in opposition to that will become a lumen to us. And then in taking on those structures and taking on that resistance that will impart to us the compassion and the humility and the wisdom we need to become the self. And as we become the self, capital S. We just be the self and bring that to our patients. And before we prescribe an herb before we give a needle, before we give lifestyle, advice about nutrition and exercise, just who we are through resonance, will catalyze to some degree, the emergence of the self within the patient. And diagnosis is the process of recognizing the degree to which the self is already present and resonating through resonance with us. And that will illuminate to us in physiological terms of Chinese medicine, in this case, because we're talking about Chinese medicine, the places within the body, and then the beliefs and mental constructs that stand in opposition to the recognition of and the enacting of the self within within the individual and in the world. And the process of medicine is eliminating those stagnations what what we do in Chinese medicine is promote the flow of Qi, we can build Qi and promote the flow of Qi. And promoting the flow of Qi is a physiological metaphor. War, promoting communication between that which has become separate, and separation is pain. And what we're doing is just promoted where we're bringing consciousness through love. And over and over time, we hope we endeavor to have the self emerge within the individual and encourage the patient and support the patient, at first to having higher state experiences of union. And over time, we want higher state experiences become translated into actual stages of development as identity shifts, from self small, less to self largest.
Liz Baer:
And a really practical way. One thing that's coming up for me right now is thinking about how you know we can apply this sort of mythic membership Stage Two are to, to the internal self so much so thinking that you're separate from your body and that your body is the enemy and there's creating that separation and, or even thinking that like, the mind really wants this thing of chocolate the body doesn't but the mind does and that they're not related. And I'm wondering is like, you know, as we, as we allow for a different stage to emerge, we start to be like, Oh, I love this body this body is part it's a vehicle for everything is it's so sweet. And then we there's so much less conflict and doing things that are wholesome for the whole.
Lonny Jarrett:
So what you described isn't the mythic membership stage, everything else? Okay, that is correct. What what it is, is that so the mythic membership stage is one unquestioningly, you believe in Santa Claus.
Liz Baer:
Okay, okay.
Lonny Jarrett:
Mythic rational, is when you go to your parents when you're 10. And you're not sure and you say, you know, Mom and Dad. I looked up the chimney today, and there's no way a 300 pound guy with a huge stack of toys gets down an eight inch hole. And the answer is they're not sure whether to dispel the myth now for you, there's kind of attached because they want to put they like writing the letter and putting out the milk and cookies and they don't want to see you not. So they say you just have to know sent in your heart you just believe that's mythic rational. In mythic. Their translation translations of myth are literal. In mythic rational, the literal translations begin to fail in rational. You said no way it happens. There is no Santa Claus. And what you do is begin repressing. At that point, you just think that myth is all literal, because you've just woken up out of literal myth. My parents lied to me. And then you think you go around telling all your friends there is no Santa Claus, because you're going to be the change agent. And all the other parents get mad at you because you're the one going around, ruining their kids taking their kids out of myth out of the mythic collective. And you start thinking everyone who still believes in Santa is stupid. So so as rationality comes in, it represses the unconscious, it represses myth, it doesn't have the capacity to understand the mythic language is an adequate language of the subtle realm. And it's not supposed to be taken literally. It's all metaphor. They're all the mythic language is a subtle language for dream time, and psychoanalytic projection. But when you get to postmodern which is the stage beyond rationality, post modernism begins to cease repressing, it overthrows the church, it overthrows the state by deconstructing power hierarchies. And then the world becomes reinvented and Joni Mitchell sayings, we've got to get ourselves back to the garden. And that's where the Eastern traditions come into the West and psychedelic start being used. And there's this and everyone starts doing yoga and transcendental meditation in the 60s and 70s. And they're sort of this a sensation, a cessation of repression and sort of bringing the baby back that got thrown out of with with the materialistic bathwater.
My my recent book, deepening perspectives on Chinese medicine is 1050 pages, looking at Chinese medicine as as the art and science of human development and we look and I I spent five 600 pages, looking at the moment before conception through conception up through death in the moment after death. Through all the meridians and points and and five elements and theories of Chinese medicine. Yes, Andrew.
Unknown Speaker
Thank you Bonnie for right In that book it's it's for one thing like, like I think we said before a magnum opus and I think it's it's, you know, so deeply spiritual I think anyone that wants to anyone that's a healer you know practitioner that wants to is called to do the deep work like like you've been detail in this podcast today should really pick up that book and I would say, would you say it would be helpful for for like people that are not practitioners as well. I mean, where do you see that for that book?
Lonny Jarrett:
Well, yes, I mean, it's a deeply philosophical text, it uses the language of Chinese medicine. But I explained the terms, I also think my firt for non practitioners, my first book, nourishing Destiny is a really good introduction. But I and you know, many people read that who are just patients or interested in Chico and Tai Chi. But you know, I give a two year class in Chinese medicine, five element diagnosis, pulse diagnosis, I'm starting another one in September, people can get all my stuff at Lonnie jarrett.com. And look, I've had people who were the, the, the heads of philosophy departments at universities take it I've had many, many, many people take it who were not practitioners who later went on to become practitioners. So there were oriental, you know, Asian party workers or so I mean, anyone could, could take that my books are, I think nourishing Destiny is a really good place for people to start. If you're not a practitioner, but if you're really interested in developmental spirituality, evolutionary spirituality, Terra de Shar Dawn, Shri R Bindu. And all the developmental lists and process oriented philosophers from Heraclitus, forward, then this deepening perspective would be a book, I think that would be meaningful to people.
Unknown Speaker
Thank you so much money for coming on today. I don't suppose you have any other final thoughts, but I really enjoyed this conversation. And we're so honored to have you on. Thank you so much.
Liz Baer:
It's been great. Yeah, it's good to see
Lonny Jarrett:
ya. It's wonderful to spend time with you both. And, um, yeah, to just everybody who's who's listening. Thank you for your time.
Dr. Andrew Wong:
Thank you for taking the time to listen to us today. If you enjoyed this conversation, please take a moment to leave us a review. It helps our podcasts to reach more listeners. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss our next episodes and conversations. And thank you so much again for being with us.