This is a fascinating technique that I stumbled across a few years ago and have never really used, but I was reminded of it recently.

Serge Kahili King, a Caucasian teacher of Huna, presented it in his book Urban Shaman:

Repatterning

A long time ago, so long that I can’t remember the source, I learned that if you stub your toe, all you have to do is repeat the same action several times, without quite stubbing your toe again, and the pain will go away. I used that a lot unthinkingly, but in later years I studied the process in detail and began teaching it in my courses, suggesting that the students try out variations. The concept I developed was that by re-creating the pattern and changing the ending, you were, in effect, giving the ku [subconscious] a new memory of the event, requiring the ku to change the body state in conformity to the new version of what happened. The sooner you could do this after the event, the sooner the body would get back into harmony.

What the students did amazed and delighted me.

A man in California, one week after the training, was in his backyard building a fence. At one point he smashed his thumb hard with a hammer and then pulled the hammer back prior to dropping it and following the normal routine of jumping up and down while squeezing his thumb and cussing. At the high point of his swing away from his thumb he remembered my lesson about repeating the pattern and changing the ending, so he followed through with his swing without quite touching his thumb. He repeated that action about seventeen more times. By then his thumb barely tingled and he went on with his work. When he was through he looked at this thumb and there was neither bruising nor swelling nor pain.

A medical doctor in Texas reported that he was chopping up lettuce for salad with a knife and sliced deep into a finger. Professionally he knew it would require several stitches, but he decided to try out my crazy idea anyway. After a few repetitive passes with the knife his finger stopped bleeding and the pain went away so he forgot about it and finished the salad. Three days later he remembered the accident and looked at his finger. There was no sign it had been cut.

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Though it may seem very abstract, this theme of forms has many direct applications, the most relevant one at the moment, for me, being in the field of interpersonal relationships.

The easiest way I can illustrate this is by evoking your own body’s experience of other people. There are people who just “push” you back. They have wide eyes, loud voices, forceful demeanors. There are other people who “suck” you in. They have soft voices and shy demeanors. There are people who don’t say what they mean, or whose smiles never reach their eyes, and they actually feel “slimy.” There are people who feel bright, people who feel dark, people who feel solid, people who feel frail. And this often has nothing to do with their physical body type.

This is the “form” of personality.

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Now that I face the genuine task of achieving, or failing to achieve, success in the real marketplace (as opposed to the cocoon of school), I find myself faced directly with the deep ethical challenges that underlie the very notion of success.

Specifically, what does it mean to succeed within a social system that operates on inequity and is maintained by violence? What does it mean to accumulate wealth in a world where people are poor and starving? And, doesn’t success within such a system inevitably cause the person who succeeds to become more invested in the status quo, and thus more willing to compromise moral principles and integrity for the sake of security, status, and the protection of that success?

As I pondered these and imagined how I might be corrupted by success, it struck me that that would be possible only because it would be an extension of a dynamic that already exists in me.

In short, I fear the corrupting power of wealth and success because I am already corrupted by it.

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Forms are a way to capture energy in useful ways, depending on the nature of what’s doing the capturing, the relationship with surrounding factors, and the amount and type of energy. Chemistry provides abundant examples. The shape and characteristics of a molecule depend, very simplistically, on the elements involved and how they relate within the molecule as well as to environmental factors such as pressure, heat, and so forth.

Dissolving forms does two things. First, it frees energy that has been trapped in those forms. A molecule with a bunch of double or triple bonds has a lot of energy stored, and when those bonds are broken that energy becomes free to interact and be utilized by other aspects of the environment.

Second, it enables — or compels, depending on how you look at it — those elements previously encased in form to discover a new balance with the environment. This usually results in the establishment of other forms.

Let’s move from the microscopic perspective to a cultural one. When someone breaks with a belief system or set of practices in which they’ve invested a great deal of energy — say, a lifelong adherent of a religion breaks away — that energy is suddenly freed to become something else. What was bound up becomes potential, able to go in many different directions.

The power of this state of being is in its high potential and low investment in any particular form. Many things are possible from this state. A man freed of, say, a fundamentalist Protestant sect may decide to explore other forms of Christianity, such as Catholicism or Eastern Orthodox, or other religions entirely, such as Buddhism or Asatru or Scientology. Of course, the person’s needs and nature and opportunities will dictate what he finds, but the potential is there. Eventually a new form is adopted or established and a new, more suitable equilibrium is found.

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This is a vast topic, so bear with me.

I’ve been thinking a lot about forms. A form is basically the manifestation of an essence. It’s how something meaningful yet abstract is crystallized into concrete existence. It can be an object, an action, a relationship.

I really struggle with forms in my life.

Forms can be prisons, of course. That’s how I’ve thought of and experienced forms since my teenage years. I’ve been iconoclastic, I’ve put a lot of effort into deconstructing the forms that have surrounded me, forms that I grew up with and never questioned until they confined me in my growth, forms that shaped who I am — forms as seemingly benign as what and how I eat, and more important things like what I believe about myself and how I act on that.

Anybody who changes and heals from their upbringing has to challenge and discard some of the forms they’ve been given in growing up. I think that I’ve done that more aggressively than many people. I went through a process of serious rejection of many of the things that should have defined me, such as my ethnicity, my academic success, my early religious interests. All of this was for the purpose of discovering what, exactly, is essential to who I am. And I was reasonably successful.

The problem is that tearing things down to their essence is diametrically opposed to the way this everyday world of forms and manifestations operates, and opposed to the stage I’m at in life where I have to build a public self in order to become known and make money and all that.

So basically, I have to find a way to be successful in the world of forms. I have to learn to play the game rather than watch it from a high mountaintop. And that means I have to figure out exactly what game I want to be playing, what forms I feel comfortable adopting. I can’t stay floating in some vague ether. If you want to make money, you have to settle on something to sell.

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I graduated from acupuncture school.

My last big celebration like this was my wedding. It always feels like a dramatic shift in consciousness. Which is good; which is what’s needed, to propel me through the rite of passage, through the death and into a new birth.

It’s unfortunate in my mind that other people don’t consider things the same way. I attended the last two graduation ceremonies at my school and both of them were lackluster in terms of ritual force. Yes, they had their usual speeches and congratulations and everything, but no one understood that rituals and ceremonies are supposed to be theater and drama, that they are supposed to inform the body that transformation is occurring, that they are supposed to carry all participants on a journey.

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Last day of school.

Bittersweet.

I remember being blown away by being taught yin/yang theory the first week of school. Not by the information; just by the fact that I was being taught yin/yang theory, by an institution.

Long time ago.

I’ve learned so much. My perceptions are keep getting richer and richer.

I said goodbye to my patients. I’ve touched their lives.

Graduation is in three days. I say goodbye to my classmates and teachers then. We’ve been, in my opinion, one of the best classes to have gone through the school. We all like each other and stick together. It’s been a good group.

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