Letters to a Young Healer by David Shuch

Author:David Shuch [Shuch, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: River Grove Books

Your loving uncle,

James

15 The Charm Carver, p 78.

AUGUST

On Vitality

My Dearest Madeline,

I am so pleased to learn of your working in a plant nursery. Bringing a healing spirit to plants is a wonderful thing, as they are so responsive and never ask for much. I’ll have more to say about that, but first let me address the part in your letter where you told me that many things are getting in your way—hindrances, obstacles—all kinds of things that interfere with your earnest intentions. These seem to be circling around something that is not at all clear to me; maybe it is clear to you? If you know what it is, don’t be shy about sharing it with me in your next letter.

I have no doubt that some of what troubles you comes from the spirits that carry you where they may. And so it may seem like a riddle with no answer, because if these interferences keep you from building the strength you need to deal with them, how will you ever be able to clean house?

The exercises that build your spiritual muscles also create different qualities of energy that get stored in something like a series of spiritual buckets. Your vitality is a measure of how full these buckets become. But now we need to speak not so much of the ways to add to your buckets but of other things—things that touch on all of what troubles you now. You see, it’s hard for any of these buckets to fill if there are holes in them, because any fuel you manage to add just leaks out, without a trace of any gain for you.

So, I will mostly confine myself to the things that poke holes in your buckets. These are all the things that drain away vitality and so make it hard to do anything new, anything that has not already become a habit. Because once your body has mastered a task, it requires little attention, and so the precious energy of attention is no longer needed to complete it. Also, in learning a new task, the body can be awkward and clumsy, and it will use its muscles inefficiently, which takes more energy than when a familiar task can be smoothly done. And yet, some habits are just the things that create these holes in the first place, but these are not so much the habits of things that you do as they are the habits of how you are.

Take for example the simplest things, like how you sit, stand, and move. These require the actions of muscles. And there are ways of sitting, standing, and moving that take far more energy than what is required. Also, within these activities, there are habits of posture that require constant effort, nervous habits of movement that bleed off energy, and habitual constrictions of muscle pairs—for example, the small muscles between the eyebrows that constrict to reduce incoming impressions; the muscles on either side of the jaws that constrict when there

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