What Cannot be Mended must be Transcended

“What cannot be mended must be transcended.”                
--Ursula LeGuin, in her afterward of the book Tehanu

One of my heroes is Ursula LeGuin.  A living legend, she is not only a writer with countless awards; she is a scholar of the Tao Te Ching. This clearly comes through in her Earthsea books[1].  Recommended by my counselor in Atlanta while Beth was attending seminary, they helped me alter the course of my life.  Her consciousness-expanding allegory shifted my perspective from an entrenched worldview that left me angry, frustrated, and saddened by our world to one that introduced hope and a more rigorous and honest look at myself.  This series of books encourage the reader to bring to light the aspects of self that most of us are reluctant to acknowledge and address.  The shadow as described by Jung is used as a character within the stories.  This shadow, released into the world by an impulsive act done by a powerful but naïve protagonist in his youth serves to be his greatest teacher after he runs to The Farthest Shore trying to avoid it. 

From the work I did with my counselor with inspiration from these books, my life entered a new chapter that acknowledged the depth of pain, sorrow, and grief I felt without crippling me. Instead, it strengthened me. It allowed me to move into a more hopeful, creative, and compassionate way of living, starting with compassion for myself.   

There is brokenness in living a life.  It starts early and it just keeps going.  What are we to do with this truth?  LeGuin’s afterward continues with these words:

Maybe the change coming into Earthsea has something to do with no longer identifying freedom with power, with separating being free from being in control.  There is a kind of refusal to serve power that isn’t a revolt or a rebellion, but a revolution in the sense of reversing meanings, of changing how things are understood.  Anyone who has been able to break from the grip of a controlling, crippling belief or bigotry or enforced ignorance knows the sense of coming out into the light and air, of release, being set free to fly, to transcend.                                                                                                                           

This portion of Ursula LeGuin’s comments on her brilliant set of novels resonated with me as a calling to all sentient beings for the work that lies before us. Tehanu was written about ten years after the third book in the series, The Farthest Shore.  It tied together many aspects of the story about characters that were left broken and with many unanswered questions.  She admits it took that long for her to work out how to continue the story, and it was worth the wait.  She writes with astounding wisdom.

Thoughts are things.  We can be addicted to beliefs that may have no basis in reality. Addiction is not limited to mind altering chemicals.  The mind can be altered by thoughts, feelings, and by the misinterpretation of perceptions.  All this is dealt with in the world’s great wisdom writings, like the Tao te Ching and Patanjali’s Sutras, to name two I’ve studied.  I might add the book of Proverbs to that list. 

Energy follows thought.  The force of our life energy is something we have the ability to shape, cultivate, grow, and bring forth into the world.  The Tao te Ching has a central theme.  It is described as wu wei, the way.  I cannot begin to characterize it, for it is equally elusive and obvious.  One has to work to overcome human nature in order to see clearly, but the way is the way is the way.  It becomes clear when the ego is defeated and we can see without self-interest.  That is, to say the least, easier said than done.

What LeGuin says is profound advice for our world today.

Freedom does not mean power.

Being free does not mean being in control.

The refusal to serve power is a revolutionary act.

There are better things to serve.

The discipline it takes to see clearly without ego is formidable.

It is a job that is never finished, but what a worthy goal to put one’s energies toward!

There are many things that cannot be mended; yet there is a way to practice seeing the world that allows you to be free of ignorance and judgment.  You can see others as really doing the best they can, you can forgive yourself and keep trying, and you can enjoy the beauty of the world and appreciate the transcendent light that suffuses it.

[1] A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, Tehanu.

Possibilities

I have been listening to Herbie Hancock read his autobiography Possibilities this week in my car. His words about the journey taken over seven decades in music and many other pursuits struck a chord in me about how I am feeling about my career. In case you don’t know who he is, here is a bio.  My first memory of his work is the Jazz Chart Chameleon from his 1973 album Head Hunters.  In high school, I was deeply involved in music 6 or 7 hours a day, and we jammed on that tune whenever we could.  His work really lit a fire in me for jazz music and gave me an outlet for expressing myself during that formative time of my life.

Midway through his career, he talks about how he had to learn how to come to terms with the way people responded to his new ideas and ventures. Incredibly curious and creative, he has often been a leader in exploring new kinds of music and the use of technology in music. Even after 20+ years of success, he remembered the executives of Columbia Records, his friends, and even his manager thinking he was crazy and would lose all his fans when he presented his ground breaking single Rockit from his 1983 album Future Shock. It was the first  jazz hip-hop song and became a worldwide anthem for  breakdancers  and for the hip-hop culture of the 1980s.

He credits his mentor Miles Davis for helping him continue to grow, create new things, and move forward without being afraid to lose fans, fame, or money.  He credits his practice of Zen Buddhism for pushing him to acknowledge and face his own faults and weaknesses so that he could overcome them and keep growing.   And when he won the Academy Award for Original Score of the movie Round Midnight in 1986, he gave a beautiful speech honoring all the jazz artists that have come before to create such an amazing American original Art Form.

When he reached the age I am now (55), he had this to say:

By the mid 1990s, I came to a conclusion.  I wanted to make every new record absolutely different from any I’d done before,  and different from any record anybody had done before. I was 55 now, and I had been playing music seriously since the age of seven. It’s rare for a person to find the thing he wants to do for life at such an early age, but ever since my parents bought me that first piano, I’ve considered myself a musician.

When I graduated from elementary school, we had to write little captions for our yearbook photos of what we wanted to be when we grew up.  I wrote--concert pianist.  25 years after becoming a Buddhist, I thought of myself being a human being first, which includes being a musician, father, and husband.  Ever since making that change, I’d been thinking less about just writing tunes, and more about my purpose in creating a musical project.  What could I create as a musician that would have deeper purpose and meaning?

How could I serve humanity in some way?  One way I knew was to translate that idea into musical expression.  My perspective had been changing over time and I finally came to the inevitable conclusion that I should never do the same thing twice. If music and Buddhism had taught me anything, it was that the world is full of infinite possibilities, and that there are an infinite number of ways to look at things.  This is what jazz improvisation is all about, and it is what Miles Davis demonstrated to us every time he played.  Miles looked at every single sound as an opportunity rather than an obstacle. I tried to do the same thing, incorporating new sounds and rolling with the punches whenever anything surprising popped up.

Once, when I was playing at a jazz festival in New York, I sat down at the piano to discover that one of the keys didn’t work.  Instead of emitting the correct note, all you could hear was a dull thud because the string was broken.  I could have raised a fuss, but I decided…I liked the sound of that broken string. It gave me an unexpected slap of percussion at the touch of a finger! So I incorporated the sound into the songs we were playing just to see how it came out, opening up a whole new avenue of possibilities that I didn’t usually have on an acoustic piano. When you never stop exploring, you stay active and vital, no matter what you may be doing. People stop exploring in their lives for various reasons---fear of criticism, of failure, of disappointment… but even if you decide you don’t love the direction in which you are moving, you can always change directions.

Making every record of mine completely different from any other record would be the ultimate expression of exploring every facet of myself.

His book inspires me. I look back in wonder to see all that I have done; I look forward and wonder what new thing is ready to be born in me as I continue to grow and create?  A well lived life has themes and motifs that give it form; it also has variations that enhance its beauty and depth.

I wrote this in an essay in 1981, the year before I started Osteopathic Medical School at Michigan State:

“Oh Dave, you’ll make a great doctor.  But what’s Osteopathic Medicine?”  So I am destined to explain my course to others who seldom seem to understand where I am going.  But that’s OK.  I like where I’m going and who I’m going with.  Because Medicine upsets me and makes me happy, just like people upset me and are the source of my joy.  They go together.  Environment and Medicine go hand in hand.  Incorporate the unquantified variables.  Sense, infer, listen, and counsel.  Knowledge is a great process; a synthesis.  I will keep looking for another thread to tie in.  There are no certain answers.  So we test in reality, form ideas, and test again.  That is science;  that is life.

That is my theme.  I practice Osteopathic Medicine. Yet we are complicated beings, are we not? The practice of Yoga tempers me, makes me look at myself squarely, leaves no room to squirm away.  I see how I’ve been creative and industrious, given myself experiences and learned a great deal in each of those settings. Family Practice, Public Health, Emergency Medicine, Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Osteopathic Manipulative Medicine, Functional Medicine, Lifestyle Medicine, Private Practice, Academic Medicine, Teaching, Research, Yoga Teacher Training, now teaching and working with musicians and working for a non-profit organization.

But how does that inform what I do now?  How do all these threads tie in? What will help make all these experiences useful in creating a new, greater, integrated initiative? Did I really learn something or am I just good at moving on to something else when I come up against resistance or have an excuse to divert myself to another adventure?

I feel the need to thank those that have come before, shaping my education-- and to honor them and the profession with my work.  I want to be true to this tradition but open to a new direction that I may be uniquely suited to follow.  I listen to the young doctors with whom I work through the non profit Third Circle, the residents who see patients with me in my office, the medical students who I meet with through the Leadership Academy of Compassionate Care at MSU-COM, the young people applying to Osteopathic School who spend time with me in the office, and the hopeful candidates for admission interviewing at the College, and what do I hear?

I hear hope, compassion, intelligence, fatigue, worry, uncertainty.  They talk about the financial burden,  the disconnect between the way medicine is practiced and the way they want to practice it, the time pressures, the discouragement when day after day they do less for their patients than they would like to do.

They face a far more complex world than I did 35 years ago.  Medicine was not addressing the real needs people had for health care then and it hasn’t really changed much in that regard. However, molecular genetics, immunology, biochemistry, microbiology, physiology—to name the dominant chords of medicine—have evolved exponentially in knowledge and understanding of the interdependence and complex interactive nature of how our bodies work.   How are they supposed to fit the far more complex and integrated model of health and disease into the current business model of health care?  They are brilliant young people with good hearts and amazing energy, and we are sending them into a machine that is going to treat them and their patients like numbers on a spread sheet.  It is going to break their spirits, and I do not want that to happen.

There is not enough time in a typical doctor visit to address the patients’ needs.  The cost of that time keeps going up, but we are operating under the definition of insanity.  If we can’t address their needs, we are not going to be able to help them become healthy.  They then become more ill, and we still don’t spend enough time, but we see them more often without addressing the root of the problem. More money spent with no change for the better.  Insanity.  Do you see what I mean?

Here is what I have to say:  POSSIBILITIES.  Let’s work together to change the way we experience health care.  The students and residents who spend time with me see more possibilities in the way I practice with more opportunity to actually help people become healthy. I took radical deviations from the normal “physician lifestyle” to get myself to a place where I can afford to see fewer patients per day.  Can we afford to wait 35 years for them to be able to do that?  And will they still be standing and wanting to practice medicine by then?

Let’s all advocate for a change.  This system is broken.  I see and hear the effects of it on my friends, family, and patients every day.  What can we do to fundamentally change the way it works?  I am going to be working on this, and I invite you to join me.  Call, write, contact me any way you want.  Let’s work on this together.

Many thanks to my son Ben who gave me Herbie’s book as a gift and often seems to understand me better than I understand myself.  You inspire me, and I love you.

The Invisible Universe Of The Human Microbiome

This is a great animation about how important bacteria in our bodies are, and why they are essential to our health.

Phoenix Dancer

And now, here is the ninth and last piece in this little series introducing you to our office!

The picture you see is called Phoenix Dancer, a dry point etching made in the 1920s by an English artist named Elyse Lord.  I found it in May as we were nearing the end of the wait to get into the new office.  To cope with the stress we were feeling, Beth and I took a study break and spent the first weekend of May in a vacation rental by owner invitingly named “writers cabin.” I wasn’t looking for a piece of art necessarily to bring to our new space, but I was open to the idea I might find something that struck me as just right for my experience of this new venture. 

We were walking around the Petter Art Gallery on the Blue Star Hwy in Saugatuck/Douglas, MI,  (http://petterwinegallery.com/) at the end of the weekend, reluctant to get in the car and drive home.  When I came to this picture I stopped in my tracks. I was transfixed by it.  First I really liked the colors.  They are rich and beautiful, warm and elegant. The jewels on the dancer suggest to me abundance and fluidity.  I love their color the most. I thought the palate and the well-chosen frame would match the accent color in my office, and that is where you see it in this picture. The deep red in the phoenix’s tail and the burnt sienna of the wall give a lot of life force energy to the scene.  Burnt sienna was the first color I chose when my Grandmother Grimshaw took me to the art store at age 12 in order to help me buy oil paints, canvases, brushes, and accessories.  She was an artist, and it was she who taught me to paint over the next few years. 

Next, I immediately identified with the Phoenix symbolism.  Moving up and away from a Phoenix, a figure is dancing.  Her clothing and positioning of her hands reminded me of a traditional Indian dance form I have seen performed at the Ashram where I study Yoga in Quebec.  My focus was drawn to the energy of the dancer’s spiral shaped spin; it has a powerful sense of direction and purpose. I see her as one person at the moment she both acknowledges the Phoenix (rebirth, renewal, grace?) and spins away to engage fully in her newly realized sense of purpose.

I could see myself in her.  It’s really wonderful for me when a work of art or a piece of music brings all of these things to my awareness in what seems like almost no time at all—just a blink of an eye, a beautiful little explosion of connected ideas coming forward already organized for me to experience.  This gave me a rocket shot like infusion of inspiration and energy.

Coming from being injured and having to accept a major loss (my hip) and face my own sense of the wear and tear of these now 27 years of practicing medicine, I have worried about how much I have left in me.  I have also felt (with urgency) that there is so much more I want to do and learn and experience--- Wondering whether I have the strength and energy to be able to accomplish these hopes and aspirations has given me many nights of angst.

I brought the beautiful and graceful Phoenix dancer to my new office to remind me of the endless flow of inspiration, strength, and beauty that is available to me each day.  Every day is new.  We are given the opportunity to dance with the cosmos and co-create with others and the earth opportunities for healing and renewal and reconciliation—for ourselves and each other.  She reminds me of this each day, and here I am—again-- starting something new. 

I’m glad Life has given me this many chapters.  I am ready to dance into this one with renewed energy and engagement and wonder at the ability each of us has to cultivate an ever-expanding awareness about who we are and what we are doing.

Our Building

We are truly thrilled and thankful to be in our new location, and we hope that you are happy with it as well. To look around our suite, and any other part of the building, you’ll see the extraordinary amount of work and vision it took to build this structure back up from the brink of collapse. What is just as extraordinary is that in the process those visionaries were able to preserve pieces of its former glory, such as the beautiful terrazzo floors throughout the stairwells and waiting rooms.

If you’ve been in the main waiting room outside our office and have noticed the photos adorning most of the walls, you know this building has considerable history as the Cedar Street School. Photos and blueprints from the early 1900s are interspersed with collages of class photos all through the century, up to its closing in 1977 due to structural problems. The building remained closed for almost 30 years until Dr. Carla Guggenheim and Gail Shafer-Crane of ARM Physical Therapy had the initial vision to give it new life.

The building was understandably in rough shape at that point. Among other major repairs that had to take place before it could be habitable again a new roof was needed, and more insidious small issues like mold, lead paint and asbestos wrapped pipes needed to be addressed. This was no small feat by any stretch of the imagination!

Not only was the entire building restructured to accommodate the types of practitioners it would soon house, but they chose to go even further and install green elements into the space, and became LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified in the process. To name a few of the eco-friendly modifications, this building is equipped with: geothermal hvac system, rainwater collection and recycling for non-potable water, recycled content for carpet, and environmentally friendly paints and insulation materials.

Blending old and new can sometimes be a challenge, but Dr. Guggenheim, Gail, and each and every worker that lent their time and expertise to the project were able to achieve this balance and breathe new life into a beautiful old relic, further preserving it for future generations to enjoy. Where others could have seen the aging and dilapidated structure as an eyesore and may have simply torn it down to make room for something new, Dr. Guggenheim et. al took the challenging route in restoring it, and we sure are happy that they did!

The Conference Room

Over looking Cedar Street is our Conference room.  It serves double duty as the room I use for counseling.  There is a small nook in the corner of the room with the “therapist” couch and “crying chair”.  This room also holds a large table that can seat 8-10 people and more of the beautiful bookcases floor to ceiling.  We have tucked a TV in the shelves so we might hold educational forums and community gatherings in this room.  This room opens up into the kitchen which is decorated with travel posters.  What better way to travel the world than through the endless varieties of foods and flavors.
 

We have many hopes and dreams for what will go on in this room of our office suite. 

Some of the ways we hope to use this room are:

• Food Becomes You Gatherings- a chance to come together and realize that food really is our most powerful medicine and learn new ways to eat and be sustained.
• D3 evenings Dinner and Documentary Discussions-a time to share a meal and watch a documentary on various health and wellness topics.
• Daring Greatly groups—weekly and intensive retreats to meet, study and process the work of Brene Brown about our common needs for connection, community and compassion.
• Group Patient Visits- Gathering patients together with similar diagnosis and concerns to learn and support one another while seeking health.
• Mixed Media Art Mantra Classes- come and unlock your inner artist and create a mantra to inspire your living.

We are thrilled to have a place where we can come together and share and learn.  We are sojourners on this adventure of life.  In this place we can gather, share and shore each other up to lead us all to a holy, wholly place of health.

Mindful Grey

Color names are intriguing and sometimes rather amusing.  Imagine having the job to name colors!  The paint color we chose to unify the office space  walls was Mindful Grey.  We liked the color before we knew the name but when we saw the name , we knew this was the one.
 

“Grey has no agenda. . . . Grey has the ability, that no other color has, to make the invisible visible.” ―author Roma Tearne
 

The mindful grey color was used in the hallways and in all the rooms.  Each room then has an accent wall in a distinctcolor.  To select those colors we looked to nature.   A peaceful lake green in one treatment room and a soft early dawn blue in another.  The conference makes the boldest color statement of all with a teal green reminiscent of Traverse Bayon a bright summer day.  David’s office and the reception area are painted in a vibrant copper rust.
 

We all perceive the world in our own unique way.   I am quite sure that we all see color in unique and specific ways too.     Have you noticed when trying to describe a color to another person we make up and use adjective likeblue-ish green or peachy-pink.  The diversity of our perceptions about color and all things really, is what makes living together in this world both fascinating and frustrating, limited and limitless.
 

Like our walls, our  own mindfulness (grey or whatever color it is) can lead us all to create unity.  Unityis something we all crave.  When we are being mindful we are connecting to the source that really does indeed unify us all.

Quiet Room or Noisy Room?

As many of our patients know, here at the office we have two treatment rooms that are lovingly nicknamed The Quiet Room and The Noisy/Windowed Room. They are as diverse as their names suggest, and patients cite unique benefits from each.

The Quiet Room receives less light and so is darker, is outfitted in neutral greys and blues, and has a coziness that a room with only one transom window provides. Even the art is just a little quieter in this room; a misty Redwood forest scene, a contemplative ballerina, and a photo from space of the Earth, serene and all-encompassing.

By contrast, The Noisy/Windowed Room is vibrant and busy, with soaring windows facing the hustle of Cedar St. and Preuss Pets, deeper and brighter colors that resonate more in the ample light that filters in, and a bookshelf chock full of medical tomes and children’s toys that hint at the diversity of his patients.

When I am able to, I like to offer both rooms to patients and watch closely to which one they choose. I feel through this I can tell what they may subconsciously be needing that day. Are they feeling the need for the kind of healing that requires stillness, closeness, and feelings of safety? Or are they here today ready to grow, to flourish, to exult in life and all that it offers?

I notice also when room preferences change, and when they stay the same; when we are ready or needing something different, and when we still need more time where we’re at.

So, how are you feeling today? Quiet Room or Noisy Room? 

Written by Jenna

Form and Function

A year ago, I was presented with the opportunity to shape the space of our suite.  It was wide open.  There was one wall three feet thick and a couple of posts strategically placed in our corner of the building.  The west side has those lovely tall windows looking out over Cedar toward the river, and the north side has fewer windows with less light, which to me feels quieter. 

As an Osteopath, I have something in common with an Architect.  We both have a deep understanding of the interrelationship between structure and function. 

In nature, the shape of things allows you to understand their function.  Rivers meander, trees branch in a myriad of beautifully symmetric patterns to let their leaves catch the sun, the nautilus grows following the golden ratio to form an ever-enlarging spiral.  It is a beautiful dance of forms:  spheres, arcs, spirals, branches, honeycombs….  It rarely forms straight lines.

Of course, this is repeated within us.  Look at your beautiful hands with their perfectly proportioned fingers, the way veins and arteries branch all the way into tiny networks to provide life to every cell within us, and notice the awesome gothic cathedral-shaped arch our hips and pelvis create to support our spine.

Well, I had to have some arcs and circles and spirals happening in that office.  I wanted it to reflect life.  It needed to have flow.  The outer square-ness of the building didn’t dictate the inner shape had to look like a bunch of boxes in a row.  Working around the posts and in one case through the three-foot wall, we came up with some arcs and a hallway that opens like the bell of a clarinet into the beautiful abstract spiral Nicholas Sanchez painted for us.

Nick is a talented artist now living in NYC who grew up with our kids.  When we started working on our lifestyle education program and seriously thinking about how to help people transform their lives, we sat down with him and told him about our work.  We asked him to create an abstract piece that would reflect our intentions and hope for our practice. 

Now you can walk down that hallway, see his painting, and make choices about your life.  We invite you into this organic space to follow your own path to healing.

The Doors in our Office

According to Wikipedia…  “A door is a moving structure used to block off, and allow access to, an entrance to or within an enclosed space, such as a building or vehicle. Doors also have an aesthetic role in creating an impression of what lies beyond. Doors are often symbolically endowed with ritual purposes, and the guarding or receiving of the keys to a door, or being granted access to a door can have special significance. Similarly, doors and doorways frequently appear in metaphorical or allegorical situations, literature and the arts, often as a portent of change.

”We have some very special doors here in our office.  They are the original classroom doors from the building when it was the Cedar Street School.  The school closed in the seventies, and sat vacant until the current owners purchased it in 2007 and did a LEED renovation that was completed in 2009.  During the time the school was vacant the doors underwent quite the transformation.  Decades of sun and rain and temperature change had quite an effect on these doors.  An interior designer would call them distressed or weathered.  

We call them WONDERFUL!

You can see the decades in the layers of color. 
The drab light blue, maybe from the 40s, remain- 
The mint green from the 50s peeks out around the edges-
The mod orange of the 60s boldly emerges- 
The olive green and harvest gold of the 70s shine through brightly- 
Cracked and marbled, mismatched and perfectly coordinated, they are a work of art.  They have been hung on barn door sliding hardware, which makes their opening and closing even more dramatic.  

All of the practitioners in this space are about walking with their clients and patients through the transformative process of seeking health. Walking through a doorway is always a transition, but walking through these doors, we are reminded that who we are in this moment is indeed a compilation of our lifetime of experiences.  Everything shapes us.  And just like these doors, that is beautiful indeed.

Written by Beth Grimshaw