I spent most of my 20s in and out of doctors’ offices trying to get to the bottom of stomach issues, only to have every possible ailment ruled out. It wasn’t fun and it was a huge waste of time.
After I left my legal career, the stomach issues miraculously disappeared.
Interesting how that happened.
In the west, we primarily focus on solving the symptoms of disease, illness, or other problems.
The cough, the runny nose, the insomnia, the stomach ache, the sprained knee, the achy lower back, the inattentive child.
Eastern medicine is focused first on finding the cause.
What’s causing the cough? What is preventing a person from getting to sleep? What’s happening down the biomechanical chain to create an achy lower back or cause a sprained knee?
In the body, if we focus only on treating the symptoms, we end up playing whack-a-mole with physical ailments.
Take any physical ailment and trace it back through the chain, and you’ll see a bigger pattern.
Most people I know with shoulder issues — myself included — also have an issue with the opposite hip. This isn’t a fluke. The body is connected through fascial networks that pull across the body.
Everything cross references.
We can apply this approach to areas beyond the physical body.
Every pattern maps to the same grid.
What if, instead of pathologizing your inattentive child by giving them a label and a condition, you did the work to uncover the reason for the child’s inattentiveness?
What if, instead of criticizing yourself for procrastinating, you investigated the reasons you were procrastinating?
It may take more time to investigate the cause of an issue, but treating the problem at the level of the cause is ultimately much more efficient.
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