The Coherency Crisis

November 2021

In the first class of my acupuncture program, I learned that the basic definition of health was ‘balance.’ To illuminate this, my teacher pointed to the way the body buffers the blood, keeping it in a narrow pH range. We then went on to study all the ways to perceive balance—by looking at the skin and eyes and tongue, feeling the pulses, etc.—without elaborate technology. The result of such an education is that many acupuncturists can look at you and know what’s going wrong.

In a similar manner, people who use the Felt Sense (a cornerstone of Resonant Attention) to perceive illness can tell when something is out of balance or, really, coherence, for balance is to coherence as a straight line is to a three-dimensional model. In my experience, coherence in a body feels like intelligence. The tissues know who they are, can organize efficiently, can instinctively jump to self-correction as soon as they get the opportunity. A coherent body can readily heal itself.

One thing that seems to interrupt coherence is pharmaceuticals. I can tell when somebody is on one drug or, especially, more than one drug, because their body responds to my touch like a person with brain fog. What? You want me to do what? Can I even do that? I don’t think I can do that. …Wait a minute, what did you ask me?

What I’m describing is hardly dire. The body is so brilliant at healing itself that it can usually shake off this type of stupor and work around the confusion. The tissues may process slowly, but they eventually come alive and start to re-establish coherence. It can take longer to heal in the presence of drugs, but healing is still possible.

Of course, pharmaceuticals create what feels like confusion in the body because they’re meant to: They’re designed to override the body’s intelligence. Pharmaceuticals know better than. The implicit reason for them is that the body doesn’t know how to heal itself. It needs rescuing. Allopathy in general shares this covert viewpoint.

The intelligence that informs allopathy—logic and deductive reasoning—and the felt sense and intuitive skill sets that come into play with Reiki, bodywork, acupuncture, and chiropractic, don’t have to be at odds. They could come into coherence. They could start to perceive each other as equals, learn to respect each other, and find the appropriate avenues for their gifts.

In the current climate, that might be asking a lot. Is it any wonder that we’ve gotten to this point of global medical confusion when our main system of healthcare creates a felt sense of confusion? But our bodies are intelligent. They can learn. After every illness, mushroom trip, healing treatment, or initiatory experience, we make evolutionary leaps. It’s what we’re here to do.

Love,

Stella