The Healers Council
The Healers Council creates a space for us to join in conversation with wise healers as we explore a wisdom that can inspire and inform our work as twenty-first century healers.
The Healers Council
Lonny Jarrett - Nourishing Our Destiny
In this intimate conversation, Lonny Jarrett, an internationally recognized authority on the practice of Five Element Acupuncture, shares his insights on the journey of a healer. He describes his spiritual awakening and the transformative impact it had on his life and practice, acknowledging the courage and faith it takes to truly serve as a healer. He discusses the integral nature of healing, emphasizing the responsibility of healers to transform suffering into compassion and wisdom. Lonny also reminisces about his lifelong mentorship with Leon Hammer, his own contributions to Chinese medicine in the West, and his decision to wind down his practice. His journey culminates in the essential lesson that everybody is a teacher and that our humanity is a vital aspect of the healer's journey.
00:00 Introduction to the Healing Journey
01:40 The Healers Council: A Conversation with Lani Jarrett
07:39 The Path to Becoming a Healer
09:10 The Role of Chinese Medicine in Healing
13:03 The Importance of Self-Cultivation in Healing
17:12 The Three Levels of Medicine
25:57 The Integral View of Healing
40:27 The Role of Healers in Society
44:00 The Responsibility of Healers in the Modern World
47:43 Creating a Group of Thought Leaders
48:41 Understanding Integral Medicine
50:19 The Role of Courage in Healing
50:58 The Bodhisattva Vow and the Motivation to Make Things Whole
51:58 The Journey of Awakening and Self-Realization
54:30 The Struggle with Ego and the Path to Development
59:10 The Spiritual Path and Working with What Is
01:00:22 The Importance of Being Ready and Facing the Reality of Aging
01:00:58 The Transition Period in Practice and the Importance of Self-Compassion
01:06:58 The Journey of Becoming a Healer and the Influence of Teachers
01:15:45 The Passing of Leon Hammer and His Influence
01:25:39 The Future of Healing and the Importance of Collective Growth
www.healerscouncil.org
What really takes a whole life many lifetimes. Is to become the medicine so that it's who we are, what we are is not just a living example of the virtues to the patient, but that who we are catalyzes the emergence within them. of their own authentic self, their own true self, the, their, we could say in the context of Buddhism, Buddha nature, or we can say if we want to talk about it in Chinese medical terms Zen Qi, the authentic Qi, the upright Qi. In Taoist terms, it's the true self, the authentic self. And so through us being that, the deep compassion of our listening to them that the patient, even though it may be unconscious, has the sense of being listened to and not just listened to, but heard and seen at a deeper level than they've been looking at and listening to their own selves.
We are witnessing so many remarkable miracles in this modern age of medical sciences. But what about a wisdom that is capable of containing this intellectual genius? Please join me as I engage in conversations with remarkable healers from different traditions. As we explore wisdom that can both inspire and inform our workers. 21st century healers. So welcome please join us on the healers council I am truly delighted to invite Lani Jarrett. As one of the first members of the healers council. Lonnie has been a teacher of mine for many years now. And I am so appreciative of the wisdom that he has shared with me. Lonnie has been a practicing acupuncturist. In the Birch as a Massachusetts for many years. Money is an internationally recognized or authority. And clinician on the practice of five element acupuncture Lonnie has published three major textbooks in classical Chinese medicine. The first is nourishing destiny, which was one of the most important texts on healing that I have ever had an opportunity to read. Nani's second book is a clinical textbook on the practice of clinical medicine. And his most recent textbook. Is titled deepening perspectives on Chinese medicine. I authority recommend each of his textbooks. They are available through spirit path, press.com. And of course on Amazon and other online sellers. I am just delighted to welcome Lonnie to the healers council.
James:Welcome everybody to the Healers Council. I'm delighted that you're joining us, and I'm particularly delighted to be able to welcome someone I consider a great teacher and also a friend. And we could perhaps talk about how those two connect with each other and but I'm delighted to welcome Lonnie Jarret to the Healers Council. I really cannot think of anyone who I think embodies what the Healers Council is about, which is exploring the wisdom of healing and those things that inform and inspire ourselves and our work in this difficult art of healing. So be welcome Lonnie. Thank you for joining us.
Track 1:Nice to be here.
James:So I'd actually like to start where it all began with me and Lonnie. Lonnie may not know this, but so my relationship with Lonnie actually started a long time before we actually met each other in person almost 20 years ago now. I was a neuropsychiatrist at MD Anderson Cancer Center the world's largest And ranked number one cancer center in the world. And and at the same time, I was also the president of something called the Institute for Spirituality and Health. And I was really struggling a lot around how do I bring these worlds together? How do I bring the world of spirit and healing to the world's largest medical center, the Texas Medical Center. And whilst people have talked about terms like consilience, and it just wasn't, I wasn't getting any traction. And somehow, and I'm not sure quite how, I do know actually how I in my work as a neuropsychiatrist at MD Anderson, I was often called in to work with people who had symptoms that weren't simply weren't responding to conventional allopathy. And it could be in as simple as constipation, right? Really major symptom or fatigue. And we, we were fortunate enough to have several very talented acupuncturists on our faculty. And I was fortunate enough to actually watch them work. And not only was I impressed by their demeanor and how they related to patients, but I was even more impressed by their results. And I saw people responding to this treatment that had failed every other remarkable medicine that Allopathy could come up with. I, I was quizzical, I was, gee, what's going on here? And so I decided to do some reading and somehow came across Lonnie's first book. And here's the book. It's called Nourishing Destiny, the Inner Tradition of Chinese Medicine. And, there's a, I think all of us can identify a couple of books in our life that have really been transformative. And Lonnie's book was just for me. And he had me at the first line of the introduction, and I'm gonna read the introduction. And here it is. The introduction is a quote from the she Young Benal, and I always mispronounce my Chinese terms. But this is the first recorded text in herbal medicine, and it starts with the upper class of medicines govern the nourishment of destiny and corresponds to heaven. If one wishes to prolong the years of life without aging, one should use these. The middle class of medicines govern the nourishment of one's nature and correspond. Respond to man. If one wishes to prevent illness and to supplement depletions and emaciation. One should use these the lower class of medicines govern the treatment of illness and correspond to earth. If one wishes to remove cold heat and other evil influences from the body to break accumulations and to cure illness, One should base one's efforts on drugs that are listed in the lower class of medicines that are contained within this manual of herbal medicine. And so I kinda, Lonnie had me at that quotation because here actually everything began to make sense for me that it wasn't about me trying to figure out what was better or worse. It was really about how do we relate these different ways of being in our work as a healer. And I can certainly state as an allopath. I, I know which me level of medicine I was trained in and the use of medications to treat symptoms and accumulations, hot and cold, et cetera. So I think a place of starting Lonnie, I know it would be very helpful this concept of. We'll get into this concept of the levels of medicine, but actually before I would do that, I actually would be really helpful to understand, why you became a healer, and particularly why Chinese medicine.
Track 1:I can tell you that when I was, literally, I can remember when I was three years old, my mother read me the book Bambi, and Bambi's mother gets shot by a hunter, and I started to cry, and she said when you get older, you can be a veterinarian. And I said, what's that? And she said, a doctor that takes care of animals. And then I decided then and there I was going into medicine. And it didn't take the form of becoming a veterinarian, but it, there was an understanding. I had my whole life that I was to be in, be a healer, that I was to be involved in alleviating the suffering of other beings. That was the context for that I had in the background of my mind. And as I got older, moved more and more to the foreground of my mind. I wrote my college entrance essay when I was 17 and 1975 on the difference between Eastern and Western worldviews, and talked about Chinese medicine, my best friend through probably sixth to 10th grade. was Chinese and I used to go into Chinatown with his family and we'd always stop at the pharmacy to pick things up. And so I was exposed to it as a young age and to me Chinese medicine has been the perfect synthesis of science, art, magic, rationality, shamanism, depth, transpersonal, developmental psychology. There, Chinese medicine can hold all of it. In a real integral, authentic integral view of the human condition. So my books really represent so when to back up a little, so I went to college and worked in psychology and neuroscience in college worked at Albert Einstein Medical School for a few years, did DNA research, went to the University of Michigan in the doctoral integrative. Neuroscience program there in the PhD program and wound up actually leaving to pursue my interests. I took a master's in neuroscience and went into Chinese medicine and I've been practice. I closed my practice last week after 38 years of practice.
James:So we're certainly gonna, I think what a remarkable inflection point in your life that you moving out of clinical care, and we'll certainly come back to that. I want to go back to Bambi, why needing, how, why having this sense that you needed to heal Bambi. You could have, I'm sure you have fire engines and space rockets and, you were at an age when people were going to the moon. Why not become a spaceman? What was it about, what was it in you that said, I need to heal Bambi and not go to the moon?
Track 1:I don't think I know. It's a mystery, isn't it? It's just a mystery. I just felt. compelled to be able to gain the knowledge to heal other people's suffering. I've come to understand that over the course of my life through the study of the Eastern traditions and Mahayana Buddhism and the content of the Bodhisattva vow. And the Bodhisattva vow creates a context for life which can essentially be summed up as, I didn't have to come back And being here was a conscious choice that I made and that the ground of my existence is that I agreed to come back regardless of whatever slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune I might have to suffer in this life for the privilege of carrying the wounded and suffering to the distant shore. And that is an agreement, not just for one incarnation. But endlessly till, I suppose in the teachings of Teilhard de Chardin, we can say until all matter in the universe awakens to its own nature. So it's going to be a while.
James:Such a remarkable, perspective of what it means to be a healer. I'm gonna go back to that Bambi So what you just said in would imply that at some deep level you had this calling to be of service. And so my question to that is, in your experience and your perspective, do you feel that healing. Can simply be a job, a career or for to be a true healer. One, does one need to come from a place of calling to be of service?
Track 1:I, I think that in any profession. There, there's a continuum of people who go into it for practical reasons and other people who are compelled by it. And I've just, I've always felt compelled by it. Medicine to me is a cultivational path. It is a life path. It is a dharma. And the capacity to practice it comes from knowing oneself, one's own self very well in a non dual context, which means through grappling with all the dimensions and all the voices within us and coming to understand. their nature and, the inner collective and the unity of the inner collective and the relative, the motivations of each of these voices, the worldviews of each of these voices, in the context of seeing them from a unified self, which is the field in which all these other genetically programmed and culturally reinforced movements are occurring, Seeing them from the self, capital S, or we can say spirit, capital S, we can understand that there's a small self, a small spirit or shen in the Chinese concept, which is, person's frontal self, their ego, their superego their cultural conditioning, their force of habitual identification that is genetically based and culturally reinforced. And we can, and most of us, our attention is limited and confined to that self and the force that confines us, our attention to the biographical self, we can call that ego without making it an enemy. It's a, an important developmental dimension of the self that needs to be in place for transcendence. But when we've consolidated a healthy ego and self actualized ourselves. We begin to grow beyond this view so that the self we are now self authoring is very much larger than the personal self which was born in time and will die in time. So in a non dual context, we recognize a context of union with our patients and with the biosphere, with the universe. We, we understand there's only one thing happening. And from that perspective, we can understand Separation, the phenomenon of separation or perceived separation as pain, as the cause of pain, as the cause of suffering.
James:So you used the term self cultivation. For most of us in this modern world the primary struggle that we're having is, how do I work as a healer in the context of the scientific method the restrictions placed on me by my institutions or my regulatory bodies? Going back to those three levels of healing the inner, the middle, and the outer, do you think that self cultivation is necessary of one sees one's role is simply to, do a screen of symptoms and then follow a treatment algorithm? And that could be an allopath or it could be a T c M provider. It could be a Ayurvedic. Okay, so for this symptom, give treatment. Do I need to go through self cultivation to do that?
Track 1:are always going to be people engaging at different levels. What you're asking me is like saying, if I want to write music. Is it really necessary to learn the entire, to learn the language of music and spend my life developing myself as a human being in order to reach and probe the depths of the human condition? Or is it enough to just hold one finger down on a pre programmed keyboard that's going to play the bassline, the chords, the harmonies for me over 1 4 5 progression while I sing bubblegum pop. And I'd say that, people enter at different levels. When we talk about the three different levels of medicine the lowest level we can understand as working on in the gross realm. So the gross realm would be the physical body. And the dimensions of the human mind that reflect to us the apparent separation of all things, the individual nature of all things in physical reality. So this would be the gross realm. This is the realm of daylight where all things are illuminated individually and seem to have their own separate existences. And then there's a subtle realm, and that subtle realm, the character for it, really, in the Shen Nong Bon Tsao, which you trans, which was translated as nature in my book, is Xing and Sun Tzu tells us that Xing is everything we bring to this life, up to the moment of first breath. It's everything there when the infant takes its first breath. So it's the primordial nature, and the subtle realm is dreamtime, and in dreamtime, everything is deconstructed into a flow of symbols. And so from the perspective of dreams deconstruct the apparent separateness of waking life as forms change in dreams. In every form we see in the dream is a metaphor, it's a symbol with pervasive and very deep roots that go into all aspects of being. With a lot of, with a lot of meaning condensing on each symbol. So from the perspective of dreams, we can say what I experience in my dreams is every bit as real as what I see in waking life. And that's true. But from the perspective of deepest sleep, which would be spirit, which would be Shen, which would be this category corresponding to destiny, which would be the manifestation of the light of spirit through the human being, consciously taking responsibility for oneself. As spirit, recognizing one's mind, one's body, one's thoughts, one's feelings, one's emotions, as gross and subtle vehicles for the presence of spirit. And from the perspective of deep asleep, where are our dreams? So just as dreams deconstruct waking life, our deep asleep deconstructs our dreams. And I would say an integral medicine would embrace all three dimensions. Which is to say that the body, the mind, the soul, the spirit, the ego, the superego, the ground of being, emptiness, luminosity, true conscience, the authentic self, all these dimensions of ourselves are embraced in a whole. And recognized recognized within our patients. And so part of diagnosis would involve diagnosing the gross, the subtle, the very subtle, the very, very subtle manifestations of any phenomenon within the individual. Western science and medicine. isn't wrong, it's just materialistic and it confines its discourse. Dialectical materialism means defining its discourse to that which is physically real and that has great strengths. when it comes to acute care, critical care, medicine in the emergency room. So if someone's shot by a gun or they're in a car crash or they have a flesh eating bacteria, we want them taken to an emergency room where the physical form of life can be saved. But for the other dimensions of healthcare, the subtle and the very subtle dimensions, which are just as critical, saving the body is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for having a fulfilled and meaningful life. And while Western medicine saves the form of the life, really we need integral medicine. And Chinese medicine is the form of the integral medicine that I'm familiar with and that I practice. But we need an integral view if we're going to save the purpose of the life. It's not enough to save the form. We have to cultivate the purpose. to when I treat a person with sciatica or I treat a woman to get help her with fertility, I don't need to have been pregnant or have had sciatica to help people. with pathology that's on the gross level. But when it comes to helping people see through the illusion of separation and understand the pathologies that they are creating and upholding through misappropriated attention by keeping their attention focused just on a very small portion of their experience to, to really help people. Make the journey to the distant shore where they are whole. And to me, that means they arrive at a place where they can understand and appreciate and embrace that their body, their minds, with all their memories and all their thoughts, feelings, and emotions exactly as they are, is the perfect vehicle for them to express who they are and why they're here. and that... Ultimately, from the context of the Bodhisattva vow, it is our duty, our responsibility to transform every bit of separateness into union and every bit of suffering into compassion and wisdom and humility, righteousness, and the, the other, integrity, the other, and the virtues.
James:Wonderful. In, in the earlier days of what you might call modern psychiatry, we talked about the bio-psychosocial model, biological, psychological, social, and then in palliative medicine, we expanded that into bio psychosocial, spiritual and it was a framework. Having said that, however, just as a regular Doc, it was always, it's always challenging, right? Okay, so I have the bio-psychosocial spiritual, I have the three levels of medicine. The, my question is how does one decide, what level one should be working at? Because as I read your book, one of the messages that came clear was that if we, the deepest healing, it happens at that innermost level. And you are right of the goal of the inner tradition of medicine is to assist patients in transforming themselves. Now, So I'm sitting with a patient and they're presenting, with a frozen shoulder. And of course at an outer level I can say that person's just getting adhesive tendonitis in their shoulder and not much. I can do anti-inflammatory or steroid and physical therapy. Or I could look at them and say this person's really a wood element and they're really frustrated constitutionally about not being able to exert themselves in the world by moving their punching people out with the shoulder. Or this person at a spiritual level is feeling that they can't manifest who they truly are. And that, so that's the practical experience that I would be challenged with as a healer. And I'm sure anybody listening to this, how do you go about that? How do you figure out where to work?
Track 1:let me point out to this biopsychosocial spiritual that because Western medicine is based on reductionist, causal, materialistic and is analytic in nature. That the closest it can get to non duality is just putting a hyphen between word after word after word to which the hyphen intimates there must be some connection between these things, but we still have to keep them all separate. And the entire language of Chinese physiology, every single character in it is understood. to have gross, subtle, and very subtle dimensions to it simultaneously. So when we talk about phlegm exists, for instance, on a continuum from gross to the subtle to the very subtle. And gross means it's actually there, it's physical, it's measurable. It's in, it's fat and it can be present in the lungs and you can cough it out and that what you cough out can go on a scale and you can weigh it. And it has a color. It has a mass. It has a density. So that's materialistic basis of phlegm. But we can talk about less substantial phlegm subtly which would neediness. Dampness. in Chinese medicine. So dampness would be understood to be one of the seven pathogens. There are seven stars in the Big Dipper, seven holes in the head to perceive the light of heaven, and then seven internal emotions and seven external pathogens to obscure the reception of that light. And the entire language of the medicine always has gross, subtle, and very subtle characteristics. So when a person has phlegm, They might be spitting it out or it might just be subtle and I can feel it on the pulse and they have no sense of it and there's not much to physically measure because what we're talking about now is that I'm calling phlegm is not the physical thing, but the functional process that gives rise to phlegm and that functional process is a process that tends to take sources of potential nourishment in life. And turn them into burden instead of turning them into muscle and blood. And that burden comes out as whining, complaining, neediness, worry, dysfunctional caretaking, being ingratiating, hiding one's true feelings, saying yes when one should be saying no, wanting to be liked and avoiding conflict in the moment. By saying yes, and then storing up resentment and bitterness over time that come out as hot phlegm eventually, either clogging the arteries or clogging the heart or in a sinus infection or in the digest small intestine or in the large intestine, we have to, diagnose for each individual. where that symptom is going. But every word in Chinese medicine, every single word has, exists on a continuum from the gross to the subtle to the very subtle simultaneously. And I don't decide what level I'm going to work at with a patient. That isn't my process. I just engage with the patient. And I talk and they talk and it's through the living relationship through bringing all of myself and everything I am and all the dimensions of myself and all my understanding that I've accessed to through all my cultivation. I'm 65. I've been meditating since I'm 13 years old. I did martial arts, hard style for 27 years, and now I do, I meditate and do Qi Gong every day. and do cultivational practices. And of course have spent my whole life reading and applying dharma. And it's through that, that, the Bodhisattva vow implores us. It begins with the sentence, may I be the doctor and the medicine. And in Western medicine, the focus is on being the doctor and being a doctor means passing tests and it just means knowing things, but from a cultivational and a Dharmic perspective of the bodhisattva vow, it's not enough to, the doctor is a technician and it's not too hard to become a doctor. What really takes a whole life many lifetimes. Is to become the medicine so that it's who we are, what we are is not just a living example of the virtues to the patient, but that who we are catalyzes the emergence within them. of their own authentic self, their own true self, the, their, we could say in the context of Buddhism, Buddha nature, or we can say if we want to talk about it in Chinese medical terms Zen Qi, the authentic Qi, the upright Qi. In Taoist terms, it's the true self, the authentic self. And so through us being that, the deep compassion of our listening to them that the patient, even though it may be unconscious, has the sense of being listened to and not just listened to, but heard and seen at a deeper level than they've been looking at and listening to their own selves. And this catalyzes within them through resonance, the arising of this own already free, already liberated Already whole dimension of their own self that they can begin to see and intuit because through all of their pathology, because we have arisen at a point in our own development where through all the madness of our own minds and genetics, we are at a place where we don't lose touch with our own true nature. We're able to listen and speak and interact with a patient that regardless of their degree of suffering we're listening from and to a dimension of themselves, which is not separate from our, that dimension in our own selves, which is whole, where nothing ever happened where there's nothing to overcome, where there are no wounds, where there is no suffering, where the patient is. Already always whole and we just keep focused on that like a laser beam.
James:Wonderful. So much that we could, talk about. And there I just wanna make people aware of your latest book. Which is relevant to what we just talked about. So this is deepening perspectives on Chinese medicine. This is, I like to say that Carl Jung had just his red book. Lonnie has his black book, his green book, and he also has his red book, which your second volume, which is on the clinical application. I hope that in the future will be able to gain from your insights into this concept of integral theory. Which what you've been describing for us is really a map, a cartography of ourselves. I hear you talking about really states of consciousness rather than just
Track 1:well,
James:specific of
Track 1:of and stages of development and to just make it very simple. The term integral just means that we aspire to practice a medicine that leaves no significant dimension of the humans being behind. of the self behind. So we practice a medicine that embraces all of whom a human being is. Western medicine is aimed at the physical dimension of the human being, and that's its expertise, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's a true, and it's a vitally necessary, incredibly important dimension Of who and what we are. My I've seen patients with breast cancer who had to have a breast amputated and the doctor who did reconstruction to restore the physical form of the body helped heal them in an incredible deep way to create a context for wholeness, which, so when I would never diminish. The miraculous dimensions of Western biomedicine. I would just say that they're partial. They're true, but they're partial. And part of the strength of integral is we recognize all worldviews for their strengths and their liabilities. And recognize the true, but partial nature of all outlooks. Chinese, I wouldn't want to live in a culture with, that just had Chinese medicine. Because, what do you do when you're hit by a car? Rushing that person into my office, I could have admitted last rites. I just think we all have a contribution to make and it's important to understand that while the integral view is a view that embraces the whole of what it means to be a human being, at the technical level, it's not reasonable that an individual would be A brain surgeon, an acupuncturist, a massage therapist, and a psychoanalyst. Each of these endeavors takes a lifetime. I have a friend who's been doing shiatsu 30 years and I can't do what she does but we can. But the integral view embraces the strengths and weaknesses of all the methodologies. and approaches. We can say from an integral view that values lead us to choose methodologies for approaching reality. And those methodologies, whether it's a telescope or an electron microscope or contemplation, Or hermeneutics, or systems theory, the methodology we choose is going to reveal to us a reality that reinforces the values of why we chose the methodology in the first place. And what the integral view does is just appreciate the true but partial nature of all the views and all the methodologies and appreciates the relative weaknesses and strengths of all of them. Thank you. When a patient comes to me and says, I found a tick on myself this morning, and I have a bullseye rash, I don't say let me give you an acupuncture treatment and take some herbs. I say, here's the herbs, here's the acupuncture, and you call your primary doc right now, and make sure that when you're done with this session, you can drive to your pharmacy and pick up 200 milligram doxycycline. The integral, we just want the best, the right and best intervention for the individual in the moment. And all medicine has its person, place, its time, and dose. And medicine that will heal a person in one moment will harm them in another. And any technology that has the to liberate also has the potential to enslave. So it's a question of person, place, time, and dose. Heh.
James:Absolutely. I think Mike Murphy, who really founded the SEL in institute, really remarkable person really on Mike made the deci one of his values, one of his decisions was that no one captures the flag. No one captures, there is no one perspective that has authority over others. And for the Healers Council, it's a large tent, but what defines it is respect, right? Being able to respect each perspective and to paraphrase, can wil but nobody is smart enough to be wrong about everything, right? so we all have some aspect of that truth. And only by actually creating a circle of respect, non-hierarchical respect, can we actually really bring exactly what you're talking about, the right thing for the right treatment, for the, that person at that moment, in the context of
Track 1:Yes, I think the respect exercise through dialogue and listening. It's important though to recognize that there are structural imbalances in the ingrained in the system that create an artificial hierarchy so that people who specialize in the physical dimension of the human being have far more economic, political and social power to make decisions regarding individuals health care. There's this beautiful, I think it's both a book and an essay called Spiritual Emergency by Stanislaw and Christina Groff. And, they talk about how when these portals in consciousness open up, we have the potential for both regression and transcendence. And I've had several patients call me and leave messages on my answering machine saying that they were having an powerful experience of enlightenment, only to find by the time I got in touch with them that they were on psychiatric lockdown units being heavily medicated, because the people with the political power would relate to the experience that they were having as a regressed psychosis. And not have the capacity really to relate to the people in a compassionate way to make the, to help discern whether this person was actually having an awakening experience and help guide them in a way that it could be beneficial. So there are these structural inequities in place, and usually what's called integrative medicine involves clinics with physicians and Ayurvedic practitioners and acupuncturists and, God knows, Vedic astrologers and people doing flower essences and everything under some big umbrella, but it's still the doctor who decides what happens. And who gets to see who and what gets to happen. So we need a real shift of values to an integral value system. So from my perspective, given my 38 years. of experience practicing Chinese medicine and really 45 years of interaction with it. No one should have a non life threatening surgery or be put on any course of meds for any condition that is in life threatening before they've had a full course of Chinese medicine. So I think the respect is important, but that respect has to be it has to be manifest in the social sphere in terms of changing laws, rules, and regulations.
James:Sorry. In that statement, you're implying that the work of healing extends beyond just that individual sitting in front of you or that particular organ system, but the work of the healer ultimately moves into communities and to systems. I remember melanoma Somme, the remarkable African healer in his book, he wrote that healing begins with the community then the patient and then the disease. So as a healer, do you feel that we all have a responsibility to be more socially. I'm not saying politically active, but socially engaged and.
Track 1:is politics. This was, for instance, one of the great realizations of Ivan Illich and Michel Foucault and Thomas Zaz, for instance. All of whom made postmodern contributions to the view of medicine. What more political statement could there be than defining what health and illness is? It's one of the most political statements that could be made. So the people who make that choice regarding health what is healthy what is illness, during the witch trials, it wasn't that healthy to be considered to be a witch. So yes medicine. Exists simultaneously, as I said, always in the gross, the subtle and the very subtle and the gross dimensions are the body, but they're also a gross dimension to the biosphere and human beings live in two environments. We live in a biological environment that we've involved in the con evolved in the context of dependent origination for 14 to 15 billion years. Now for the last 10,000 years and in, and very much so since the Industrial Revolution, human beings are feeding back into that system to affect the biosphere, which in turn affects ourselves. So we exist in a biological context of the biosphere, of the natural environment we live in, but human beings also live in another environment. which is the social environment, the rules, the roles, the regulations that we put in place for the sake of creating a membership culture. And these rules, roles, and regulations are externalizations of the relative degree of evolvement or un evolvement of our own understanding of who and what we are. So Applied not just to the individual, Medicine in an integral context very much is also a social medicine.
James:Excuse me. What would you, what would your advice be to, to a, what you might call a modern healer, whether they be at a path, it be a t a Chinese medicine, they're Vedic or Tibetan, energy healer. What would your, how, what would you say to them about what's going on in our world and our environment and our social systems, and what is our response? What's our responsibility rather than our perspective, shall we say about how we engage with this as healers?
Track 1:The responsibility would be to realize that we're not separate from the source of all of it, and that in fact it's our project. We said yes to it. And each of us is individually responsible to the outcome. And I will suggest that no view that is less than an integral view has the potential to help us at this point in history. So if we look at, the meditators and the contemplators, we could sum up their view as be the change you want to see in the world. And I think that's a very beautiful sentiment. And I think it's absolutely true, but we also need to just change laws. We need to literally change laws. Now, people who just want to change laws and avoid contemplation, people who think that social justice is the only really truly authentic way into things we wind Khmer Rouge killing everybody who wears glasses. We wind up with Maoism and forcing all the individual intellectuals to work in rice paddies. And so the two views taken to their ultimate are distorted and they really need each other. And we just have to understand that we're not separate. And I would strongly advise all healers to start reading Integral Theory. Now, the book that I wrote that you showed, the green book, Deepening Perspectives on Chinese Medicine, is in the language of Chinese medicine, but it's 1, 050 pages looking at in the context of human development. It's looking at medicine from a developmental perspective. And I would suggest that book. I would suggest, of course, Ken Wilber's books, Integral Psychology. Or a theory of everything would be a place to start. But people need, people tend to have their own sort of specializations and their own particular interests and there's not enough, wide enough view. There's not enough metasystemic thinking and metasystemic view. We have to be able to embrace all of it at this point. The perils that confront humanity. At this point confront all of us. So we have all we, there's this saying, think globally act locally, but from a non dual perspective, there is no locally. There's just one thing. There's just one going on. So the thing is, we all really need. We need to do what you're doing by interviewing me. And getting this whole project together. You're doing it in your way. I'm doing it in my way. I put together a group of 8 of the thought leaders in my profession, all of whom are in or around an integral stage of development and we're releasing monthly. intersubjective dialogues on the medicine, and just putting them up to try to spread the value of intersubjective dialogue, intersubjective communication. and depth introspection and a systemic and metasystemic worldview to the people in the profession. So I think that integral really is about the recognition, a non dual context, and the passion behind it is really one of synthesis and making connections to really want to bring people together. And into dialogue in just the way that you and I are doing now.
James:You would prefer the term integral medicine to integrative
Track 1:integrative to me is a marketing term. Integrative to me is generally a term that Western trained physicians use to market and take control of holistic modalities. And you can't integrate a holistic view into a reductionist view. It can't be done. The holistic view is a meta view that always embraces the reductionist view, but the reductionist view can never ever embrace the holistic view. So integrative tends to just be really a way of saying we're just going to keep sticking hyphens between things, which is, which always is. illuminates the separation. And it's always a terse fit. Psychoneuroimmunology, was the hot thing, what, 10, 15, 20 years ago. This psychoneuroimmunology, it's who would have ever suspected that the mind the nervous system and the, and a person's immune system would have anything to do with each other. Chinese medicine speaks to all of that with every word in the medicine is always speaking to those dimensions.
James:So to go back to what you have just been describing there is a term within Tibetan Buddhism of the Shambala Warrior. We've talked about how there needs to be, the work of the healer extends beyond the bedside to the community. I'd like to hear your thoughts about the role of, or the importance of courage. Courage as a healer. And of course this within the larger context of what are the attributes of a healer, which is more than we could take on today. But this, it takes great courage to, to step away from the bedside to step out of the framework that you are finding yourself being restricted or shaped or suffocated by what about courage and as courage, a necessary part of being a healer, just to be able to show up to be in that space with people as they are suffering. And what are your thoughts about courage?
Track 1:to just back, take one step back before I get to that, The Bodhisattva vow states may no, no interaction ever be insignificant. So I would never make a distinction between inside or outside the treatment room. There's just one intention for all of life and every interaction is coming from the motivation to make things whole. It's coming from the motivation to catalyze the emergence of the true, the good, the beautiful. And in the treatment room, that takes the form of medicine, perhaps in the form of needles, dietary advice, herbs, physical manipulation, talking, whatever we're doing. But when we step out the door, it's just the same intention. There's only one thing going on. When I play music, when I do photography, when I'm having this talk with you, this is all medicine. It's all medicine. In terms of the courage, I would say that I began meditating when I began really considering the nature of consciousness when I was very young. I can remember being five or six and pressing on my eyes and seeing patterns. And thinking about are the patterns I'm seeing real because I'm seeing them or are they just an artifact from pressing on my eyes. Are they not real? So I've always been thinking about consciousness. And I began reading dharma quite seriously when I was 14 years old. The Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita Sun Tzu and Lao Tzu, Mo Tzu, Han Fei Tzu, I found all these books, the Tao Te Ching and the I Ching the Tibetan book of the dead. I've, my mother had all these on the shelves and I found them when I was 14 and began reading them very seriously. And it got to a point when I was 41 years old, I was meditating and I had an experience of awakening. And in one moment I understood everything I'd ever read. It was no longer abstract to me. It was all there before, in that experience of non dual union, everything I'd ever read now made sense, and my life changed in that moment, and for about four weeks, five weeks, I would say, My ego, to me, was indiscernible. It had dropped way in the background. And at some time, between five and six weeks, it started to crawl back, and then come back, and then I was having all these selfish and egoic thoughts again, and the crazy mind was there again, instead of this beautiful field, luminous field. And I was overwhelmed by it, that it was all still there. I thought it was done. Because I thought the experience would change everything. And I went into the woods, and I said to God, whatever that is, God, just to, whatever it is, I said to the hall, I said, I'm ready, take me, you just take my ego now. And what came back was, I've done my bit, the rest is up to you. And. The reality of how crazy my mind was and all the mixed motivations within me and all of the infantile needs and all of the urges, survival and sexual and power urges from the lower chakras, all of them just seemed insurmountable to me and such a contrast between Those dimensions of myself, which I had thought were gone because of the transcendent state experience. And I was just overwhelmed realizing that I had to make that state experience an actual stage of development. And I was the one who was going to have to take all those forces on. And I'll tell you, Jim, I would go for these seven mile runs through the woods on trails. with tears streaming from my eyes, overwhelmed at the idea that I could ever actually be victorious in this. I just literally couldn't imagine being able to let go of all the attachments I would need to let go of and to right all the wrongs, and to make all the hard choices I was going to have to make. And in order to live with integrity to, to what I had seen was true. And I would say... That at that point, we're faced with, at the point we know that we're no longer a seeker but a finder, we discover that the ego wants every breath I have the rest of my life, and what I've awoken to wants every breath the rest of my life, and they're both absolute demands, and here I am caught between them. And once you wake up, then I had to say to myself I've studied Dharma now for 30 years. And I've meditated and done qigong and done martial arts and read the books and gone on the teachings and had the teachers and gone to the satsangs and done this, that, and the other thing. And now I've woken up and if I turn my back on what I have to do, I'm a phony. So if I turn my back and I give up, I'm a phony and yet moving ahead seems completely insurmountable. And I would say that it took both courage and tremendous faith. And it took faith not in something I had read or faith in someone taught me. it took faith in the ultimate positivity of the process, and it took a strong, a great courage and a strong faith that I could get through this and I could do it. And that's where the courage really came in. And what carried me through and gave me the courage and gave me the faith was the recognition that this isn't about me, that this is literally my obligation for having. chosen to incarnate and that I consciously made the decision to be here and I have to do this and I owe this to my children, I owe this to my wife, I owe this to my patients, I owe this to my students, I owe this to the community, I owe this to the biosphere, I owe this ultimately to the entire, to all that is and all that isn't, that I have to do this. that I literally don't have a choice. And that, that, that took courage. I really, I walked out of the meditation room the day I had this insight and I closed the martial arts school I had run for 17 years because I realized that the Taekwondo and Hapkido and the Jiu Jitsu I was doing was just an outer manifestation and the real martial art lay in overcoming the self. And that's where I had to now put my attention.
James:I, that's remarkable, and thank you for that authentic insight. I wonder about the little boy. I think aged four. Hearing about Bambi's fate I, what I'm hearing you talk about is the nature of a calling that a calling in its very essence requires sacrifice and a letting go of our own agenda and opening ourselves to what the universe is asking of
Track 1:Yes. I've essentially come to understand the spiritual path as working with what is. Now, most of us want to guarantee or prior conditions in place before we're ready to go all the way. That's called, I had one teacher who called that getting ready to be ready. The coins when tossed the balls in the air, your both teams are on the field and you're in the locker room doing pushups. Getting ready to be ready, but never ready. And when will I be ready? I'll be ready when I don't no longer have unpleasant thoughts, unpleasant feelings, unpleasant memories, and my body doesn't hurt. I'll be ready when I finally get what I want out of life. And that's the ego basically saying, ego creating this illusion that you're not ready yet, you need more time. We can understand the ego as the motive to need more time. More time before what? More time before, giving ourselves to the serious things in life. And I mean anybody who's paying attention By the time they turn 50 years old, 50 has to mark the date at which they realize that they don't have infinite time left to get to the most important things. And by 60, your body starts to go, right? There are actual physical changes. So by 60 years old, if you've been paying attention, you realize, I don't have more time. I have to I have to get to the most important things. And get to them now.
James:So I want to, I wanna really recognize that this is a transition period in your life with your practice. To go back to the four year old boy in Bambi. What would you say to him is the most important thing about his calling to be a healer? What's the one most important thing? If you could share one thing with him, what's the one most important thing he needs to be aware of? If he's going to really Bambi?
Track 1:I think there are several things. One is that which is causing us to seek is what we're looking for. When we awaken we what we awaken to is that we are the impulse to understand to develop. And I would also just say that in my own experience. Transcribed The path has meant simply being willing to be myself, to become my own self, unadorned, increasingly unadorned by all of the conditioning from family, from culture, that there is a perfectly formed image in the heart that is purely generous and has deep gratitude. That is humble. And that is the foundation of gaining wisdom in life and the ability to impart that wisdom to others and that it's really a question of being true to one's own self. And that self is not just a self small s of I want this and I want that. But a self largest and as I've. and a tough and an ambivalent decision to close my medical practice. I could retire, I'm 65. I was told I could retire when I was 60. It took five years. I lost my, when I moved to Stockbridge in May of 1986, I went out for breakfast the first morning and found the office that I worked in for the next 36 years. And I rented that place and they didn't raise my rent in 36 years. And it was a beautiful place. And then during the pandemic, the family sold it. The new owners threw me out. I got a new office. And that burnt down. And I said to myself I don't have to wait. I'm terrified to find out what the third sign is going to be. And so I closed my practice and. There are a lot of practitioners around, there are a lot of people I've trained, so I know that, I know there are a lot of good people around to take care of everybody. And I'm in a big question I'm pretty sure I'm done writing books on Chinese medicine. There are three or four I have in my mind that I could write, but Jim, my first Nourishing Destiny took 15 years, because I had to learn to significantly read classical Chinese. My, to do it and I, and there was really no internet then, so it took 15 years. My second book took six and the green book, which you showed, took 17 years to write. There are 1, 400 footnotes. And about 550 bibliographic entries. I don't have time in my life to write another book that's going to take me 15 or 20 years to write. I would imagine I could write a book on pulse and I could write a book on herbs. And there's a book that I've outlined and have all the research done on the three heater. And I don't think I'm going to write that. I think I'm done writing. More or less done treating people. I mean I went in yesterday and treated two people and I'll probably do ten people one day a month. As opposed to fifty people. I've done an average of fifty people a week for thirty eight years. About ninety five thousand sessions. I think I'm done with that, but I am going to keep teaching. You took my two year clinical integration class. I've got the last one coming up in September. And I'm going to keep doing four or six weekends a year and probably give retreats. And I'm interested in who I'll be. I'm creating sort of an empty space now to see what's next. I'm working hard on jazz guitar. I can now play Charlie Parker's Ornithology at about 180 beats a minute and play through all the changes. So that's good. And I just had a photographic opening last week of my own photography show and people are buying the prints and loving the work. And I'm going into just these creative enterprises and I'm interested to see what I'll do next. I'm creating a space to see what happens and I hope it'll be. Deepening relationships with you and people, people like us who are at an integral stage and be and trend, moving into the transpersonal stages of development to. I'm not interested in doing something that's about Lonnie Jarrett anymore. My, my books I wrote and I produced I self published them because the first book was turned down from 40 publishers. And what I'm interested now is, working with the collective and bringing people together into large dialogues and we'll see what form that takes, just like you're doing here.
James:You remind me of the quote by TSS Elliot, that the elderly need to become explorers.
Track 1:Yes.
James:And I think that creativity around passion and purpose, and love. So that's remarkable. I wanna just to acknowledge as we are, we have a lot of time, but I, of course, this is the, you hearing that you're winding down your practice. You haven't entirely non-attached to it, It's still a, there's still a few people. But this is the end of this phase and How, and as you look back on this, that young man that graduated from that school, advice to the four year old,
Track 1:was just I was my whole life. I've done everything that I had an awakening to Chinese medicine when I was, so when I graduated from college, I was standing in a, or my last year of college, must've been my last year. I was standing in a bus stop in Amherst, Massachusetts with my girlfriend, Robin, who is also an acupuncturist. And she took off a tear tag, and it said 10 week course in five element acupuncture. And I said, oh, I'd do that with you. And on the last day of the class, we sat in a circle around Emily Dickinson's grave. And, which was out behind, in the backyard behind, she's buried out behind the acupuncture clinic. Her house is four houses down from it. And we were sitting around her grave and a person would stand up and just talk about what they were doing in their lives. And the teacher would say, what was their color? What was their sound? What was their emotion? And I got everybody right. And the teacher and the people in the class were looking at me as I said, Oh, they were blue. And when they started talking about their girlfriend, they turned yellow. And I was, I had this, I said, this is what I'm going to do with my life. But at that exact, within weeks, I got a full scholarship to the University of Michigan. And there were no good books on Chinese medicine, but that year. that first year of Michigan, the Web That Has No Weaver came out, and Manfred Porcard's first books came out. And I read the Web That Has No Weaver and there was nothing I understood about having read all the Chinese philosophical texts. The Web That, the first volume of Web That Has No Weaver was just straight communist TCM. It had a sort of an appendix that made fun of the five elements. And I read the book and I said, I can write a better book than this. This isn't what I know and love about Chinese medicine. And I gave it everything I had. And I can say at this end of my life, I did, I've exceeded and done what I set out to do, which was to change the discourse of Chinese medicine in the west. And I think I've been in, my work's been an important part of that discourse. And so I would just tell myself to relax and be less hard on myself if I could go back.
James:Self-compassion.
Track 1:self compassion. But of course, Jim, when we're 22 years old, we see the potential ahead of us. But we're insecure and we have no idea that we can even become an individual. We have no idea that we can get the love that we have in our hearts that will be able to manifest it in the world. And for me, there was a huge structure opposing me. I, at the University of Michigan, I gave my presentation before prelims on the neural basis of five element acupuncture with a proposal to map out The the shoe points on what organs they map to and on what parts of the brain they terminated in. And it was suggested to me I take a master's degree and leave the program and I was told by the heads of the program. Nobody's going to, we're not going to let PhD from our program to further this witchdoctory that you're involved with. Because Chinese medicine is a complete sham, and you're not using our credential to do it. Now, the person who's the head of the Society for Acupuncture Research is actually one of the chief anesthesiologists at the hospital at the University of Michigan. So things have, and now at the University of Michigan, they're doing research on the neural basis of acupuncture and Chinese medicine. I'd have to say I'm deeply gratified. I have great gratitude that there has been a listening for my work. My first book, 40 publishers wouldn't publish it. When I contacted the head of the, one of the chief Chinese medicine press, they said there's no market for this. No one's going to be interested in this. I've sold almost 20, 000 copies. So I'm just gratified that there has been an audience and that the work has moved people so much and I would just tell myself looking back to relax, which is, which is what I live now and in the realization of the path is always working with what is. And just to relax and to be interested in it. interested in what's happening.
James:And often recall a comment that you made when you would, when I was doing your course, you said, take nothing personally,
Track 1:Yes.
James:and I think that's really what you're talking about, right? As as you've gone, you maybe would've told that younger self interim practice or with that review committee at the University of Michigan. I'm not gonna take this personally,
Track 1:course. That's the medicine for the lungs and the large intestine in Chinese medicine is to see through the illusion of the personal. The lungs and the large intestine regulate immunity and they create the boundary between self and not self.
James:So let me ask you this question, and it's some, it's a comment that comes up saying that comes up a lot and we hear it from, often from patients who have been through just a really challenging illness. They'll say, I'm actually coming out the other side. I'm actually grateful for this experience. Is that the right relationship to all of this? You're grateful for the University of Michigan Review Committee and
Track 1:of course but it's a privileged position. Which is to say that most of the human race is at a stage of development, whether daily life is focused on survival needs. And we just have to recognize that the medicine that I'm talking about at any rate is a medicine from to help modern people become postmodern people to become holistic and integral people to begin transcending into the early transpersonal stages of development. And these are all relatively high developmental levels. I would never look at a your average patient in terrible pain and say, you should really be grateful. for the fact that you can't move without feeling agony. I'd never look at someone who had just suffered a horrible trauma and say there's a part of you that's never been wounded and injured. Let's just put our attention there. We have to be able to embrace the whole condition and the whole human condition. But certainly I think. The goal is to come to a place in life where we do have gratitude. I had one of the most moving things I was ever taught by a patient in terms of dignity and depth was a man in his early 40s came in and he sat down and he said, I have a brain tumor and brain cancer and I know it's going to kill me. And the last thing I have left to give my family is a death with dignity and I want you to help me do that. And so I think we can aspire to the wholesomeness of that view of realizing our debt to others, of realizing that our own healing is not, it's not for us. It's a debt. Our wholeness is a debt we owe others for the sake of their own wholeness. And that's the context at any rate that I understand my own life in, but it's a relatively evolved context. And yes, I think that we arrive at a place where we have gratitude for the experiences that we've had, because they've, in facing them in the right way, those experiences have given us and engendered within us the humility and the compassion to actually be useful.
James:In that context as I, I gratitude and experience I want to just acknowledge the passing of Leon Hammer yesterday and of course he, it would be helpful, I think to, in our, at least with an allopathy we have a tendency, part of our agenda is to actually Decapitate our teachers, we disempower them. I, we part of our mission is to actually prove that they were wrong or inadequate to, in their science, that we can do a better job. And but the relationship of a healer to their teacher is very different than that. And first of all, I want to acknowledge him and all of his contributions. And perhaps if you could share with us your experience of, I, I believe I'm correct in saying that you saw him as a teacher
Track 1:sure. I met Leon when I was in acupuncture school in either 84 or 85. And so Leon, a beautiful foxtress ran in front of my window. So Leon was at the forefront of the humanistic psychology movement. He was a student of Harry Stack Sullivan. He was a student of Alexander Loewen. Alexander Loewen was a student of Wilhelm Reich. And Leon was asked to inherit the tradition of bioenergetics from Alexander Loewen. And Leon was in the early 60s at the forefront of psychology using, psychiatry using LSD. In his clinic with his patients till it was made illegal and he walked away from bioenergetics and psychoanalysis because he realized that in all traditions of healing in the world for all time, physicians had touched their patients. And there was no touching the patients. And with LSD illegal when Leon was. About 48 years old, he met Dr. John Chen, who was one of the great, perhaps the greatest pulse diagnosticians and one of the greatest Chinese herbalists of the last century. And he apprenticed with John Chen for decades and learned Chinese medicine from him and in and synthesized. What he learned into his view of psychiatry and the whole human potential movement that was emerging in the 60s and the 70s. And I met Leon in school and when I got, I, when I got out of acupuncture school, I needed a mentor and I called the people at school and said, who was that doctor that I met in school? Where does he live? And it turned out he was in Saratoga, New York, which was an hour and 15 minutes from me. And I started going up and following him in clinic and took a class and said why don't I take over your teaching and I ran all of his teaching out of my clinic for 10 years. And we would, he would come and I would take a patient's pulses for 45 minutes to an hour and he would take their pulses for 45 minutes to an hour. And then we'd take together for an hour and then the patient would leave and we'd take a, talk about the patient for an hour. And we do two people a day and we did that from, we didn't do that all the time, but we did it many times a year for the 10 years and would talk about cases on the phone. And he was a deep teacher for me, a marvelous human being. He felt. That after LSD was made illegal, Chinese medicine was the next thing he found, which had the greatest potential for affecting human consciousness and unrepressing the self and restoring original nature. Of course, when you take LSD, you're on a rocket sled, you swallow something and 35 minutes later you're having all kinds of experiences, but Chinese medicine is really just as powerful, but far more subtle, and we can build that kind of awakening much more gradually with people. So I would say Leon was one of the most prominent and important figures. not in the migration of Chinese medicine to the West, but in the blossoming of Chinese medicine in the West into it becoming not Chinese medicine, but a world medicine, a full synthesis of East and West, which had always been my passion since I was young, having written my college entrance essay when I was 17. So Liana and I recognized each other immediately and worked very deeply for 10 years. Had, as you say, a falling out as he tried to kill, as I got successful. He tried to kill me and I tried to kill him. I just walked away. I just had to do my own thing. And so we were together 10 years. We didn't speak for 10 years. And then at the end of that we came together and we've been, we're close friends. ever since. He lived up in Indian Lake, New York, and I would go every year and we would spend a day and have lunch. I would flew to Florida to see him after he moved down there, and we would have calls four times a year. The last time I talked to him was February, and he was, he just had this beautiful attribute of When I was a young, when I was in my practice, in my first year of practice, he would come to see patients with me, not to teach me, but to watch what I was doing and learn what I was doing, because he wanted to learn the five element tradition. He had a deep compassion and a very deep humility, really, too. He died just a few weeks short of his 98th birthday. Up to last year, he was still giving teleseminars and I'm sure he was in the middle of writing a book when he died. And we I feel that Leon really gave me the medicine. He gave me the capacity to practice Chinese medicine as a truly preventive medicine that embraced the whole of the human condition. There, I'm just filled with gratitude for that because, teachers like this, we feel like they've given us the world. So that's a debt that can only be repaid by passing that on.
James:So if there was one attribute about Dion that was the most powerful influence. On you? What would, what was that attribute about him?
Track 1:For Leon, it was his basic humanity. There was just a very deep humanity born of his own suffering. Part of that suffering was his experience during the Second World War, flying bombing missions. And every time he went out on that airplane, there was a 50% chance that no one was going to come home. The planes were, there was always a 50% chance of being shot down. And he had other experiences in his very early life that caused deep suffering to him. And through it I think that imparted to him a very deep humanity and a very profound compassion.
James:So when you say humanity are you referring to compassion, authenticity, vulnerability?
Track 1:I, again, I would say compassion, but also by, in humility, I would say Leon was a man who was always more interested in what he didn't know than in what he did know. He was, he could learn from every, anybody. And he described himself in his, in the introduction, I think it was in Dragon Rises, Red Bird Flies, as a beachcomber. Going down the beach, finding this, finding that, finding the other thing. And he would study with and learn from anyone. And he was interested in all of it. And I've always, Felt that way myself. So I always found that very inspiring.
James:Thank you for that. I never had a chance to meet him. I was hoping to have him join us on the Healers Council, but his dragon rising really was really important book for me. And time is, has I Permanent time has run out for us. I want to go back to the beginning. I, as I think about Bambi and the four year old self I wonder Leon might've advice would've been to the four year old. You, you can learn from everybody.
Track 1:Yes.
James:Take the opportunity.
Track 1:Yes, I and that really is where I've come to in my life after being with three different spiritual teachers and having seen through all those hierarchies and And, membership hierarchies. Really, I've just come to the simple place that everybody is my teacher. And I'm finding that a very healthy place to be.
James:Yeah. And certainly as healers, if we could experience that in our relationships with those who come to seek relief from
Track 1:they are, they really are they're the ones who teach us the medicine. It's the patients, really, who teach us the medicine if we pay attention.
James:Yeah. So thank you so much Lonnie, for spending this time with us. A lot of what we talked about references will be of course in the show notes. And I'm just so have gratitude for you, for your teaching and who you are and your humanity. And and I welcome to the Healers Council. I'm confident we're gonna become a gathering group of seekers, seeking our, commonality of our humanity as we move into this future, not just as individuals, but as a collective.
Track 1:Yeah, I look forward to all future association and anybody who's interested can find all of my work at LonnieJarrett. com.
James:great. Thank you so much, Lonnie. I hope to see you again soon.
Track 1:Thank you,
James:care. Bye-bye.