Day 228

My first 5E acupuncture for a month. I needed it. And the treatment just emphasised to me how important it is to have a connection with your practitioner, and how 5E works so much better when there is that connection. We talked for an age (and I guess, as I pointed out to L, that not having had therapy for 3 weeks, I was full of stuff that needed to come out), and then I lay down on the treatment table and said “I guess what I mean is that I feel in stasis,” and she said “That’s one of the things I wrote down, stuck.” And my whole body relaxed, because I was understood. And the point I need to make here is that it’s not a question of not being understood elsewhere (by family or friends), it’s a question of being understood by someone outside that immediate circle, and by someone how is actually physically treating your maladies.

This is probably one of the main reasons I prefer female practitioners – they’re more empathetic and more spiritual than men (all generalisations are false, I know), they feel more connected and grounded, they’re not afraid of showing what they feel and think, nor afraid of being out of step with traditional thinking. That’s probably why right-wingers and misogynists hate them so much, because they’re afraid of them. But that’s another entire post for another day, for when I’ve finished the dystopian novel I’m reading right now about the suppression of women.

And, of course, she had the courage to tell me I should stop walking for some time to rest this troublesome foot. And she knew I would argue back about that, because my sequence of a minimum 2-mile walk a day is now over 1,500 days on the trot unbroken. In the end, we compromised, and she said I could make the 6-minute walk up to Mousehold Heath, and sit in the open air and write and then walk back, as long as I didn’t push it – I mean, A tells me that even when I’m walking very slowly for me, I walk “aggressively.” I am cursing myself, of course, for not having decided I needed treatment more frequently after the last one. Too obsessed with too many things.

The rain has arrived but is only coming in dribs and drabs; not even in a monumental downpour, and all the glorious symbols for thunder and lightning have disappeared from the weather forecast for the next few days. We had some rumbles of thunder earlier, but that was just about it. I want a massive explosive thunder storm that goes on for hours, that makes the houses shake and the glasses in the bureau sound like they’re about to smash. A proper thunder storm. To exorcise, however temporarily, the demons of our present, to stop us all holding our breaths, to stop us all being in stasis. Because we all are, and the storm, when it comes, will be explosive and deadly and frightening, because the cost-of-living crisis hasn’t begun in earnest, and nor has the oppression of those who are against this current government.

Be alert, good people, be alert.

AGGIE’S ART OF HAPPINESS – CHAPTER 181