Of the business and practice building books I’ve been drawing on to help me build my business, the one I have resonated with so far is Mark Silver’s book, that I quoted a couple of weeks ago. That’s because his is the only approach I’ve seen that starts with Spirit.

It saddens me, though, to need support in this area. I am one of the most spiritual people I know. Nonetheless, when it comes to matters of material and corporeal existence, in practice I make the same mistake that everyone else makes: I shelve spirituality as this esoteric, ineffable thing that doesn’t really have a bearing on the matter (pun intended).

This is rooted in a deep anxiety about physical survival.

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I was treating a woman for sciatic pain the other day. Toward the end, I decided to enhance my acupuncture treatment with qigong techniques, as she still seemed to be in some discomfort. I started gently moving energy through her leg, and she reported feeling better.

But I made a mistake. I didn’t protect myself. I’ve made that mistake before, but I suppose I’ll keep making it until I learn my lesson.

The next morning I woke up with a significant amount of pain and stiffness in my leg, completely consistent with the symptoms that my patient suffered. I never have this. It was because I absorbed her sick qi.

No, I don’t think it was entirely from that. I think that sick qi can more likely affect me if my body is ill-equipped to handle it. In my case, I don’t stretch very much and tend to have stiff hips and legs. But, I have never felt the kind of sciatic pain that I felt after treating her.

So I spent much of the next day circulating my qi through the stiffness and it gradually receded. I suppose by absorbing her sick qi, I had inadvertently taken on some of the karma. I’ll have to be clearer in my boundaries in the future. It’s a good lesson.

In other news, I scalded my hand on a hot baking pan a few days ago, and spent some time trying to circulate qi through the area to get rid of the burn. I noticed that it did help, but not enough to completely resolve the problem. I did end up using some Chinese herbal burn salve which got rid of the rest of it.

There’s a cemetery near our house. We went walking in it this afternoon and spied out an interesting-looking grave made in the shape of a tree stump. It said:

I came home and searched for him online, and found this on a genealogy forum:

Oct 10 1895 issue Scio Press

A Fatal Accident

Last Wednesday afternoon as the O.C. & E. train was passing Kingston, John Skipton, the head brakeman, in pulling a coupling pin to throw out a car, slipped and fell to the track, and several cars passed over his legs mangling them in a horrible manner. Conductor Tway immediately returned to Albany with the engine and coach, with the wounded man aboard, arriving about 4 p.m. Dr. Matson, the company’s surgeon, was at the depot and took charge of and dressed the wounds of the injured man. It was found that amputation of the right leg below the knee was necessary, which was done. However the shock and loss of blood was too great and death resulted at about 10 p.m.

The deceased was aged about 27 years … He had been working on the road but about a week.

I checked. October 2, 1895 was a Wednesday. It must be the same man.

Sad and a little eerie, to have someone who died 114 years ago touch me this way.

What do architecture, nonviolent political theory, internal martial arts, and acupuncture channel theory have in common?

I’m not quite sure either. So let me take a different tack.

I read Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now several years ago. For those who haven’t read it, it’s a spiritual book that basically prescribes living in the Now, the present moment, as much as you can. I know that it’s had great impact on some people. I myself think the practice of being entirely in this moment, and not some imagined past or future, could be quite valuable. Yet there was something about it that never quite felt complete to me.

It’s like this. You go into a room where four people are sitting at a round table, facing each other. They’re not speaking. They’re not really looking at each other. They’re holding stiff pieces of paper with marks and colors on them. There are flat colored discs on the table. Occasionally one of them slaps down a paper, moves a flat colored disc, and says words like “raise” or “call.” What the heck is going on?

Poker, obviously. But you wouldn’t know that unless you knew something beyond what was evident to your senses in that moment. You wouldn’t know that unless you had, in your mind, an idea of what “poker” is and how it’s played—the rules, written and unwritten. You wouldn’t know, unless you had access to information that was not immediately available to your senses.

A mechanic listens to the sound of an engine and knows what’s wrong. A tracker glances at a faded print and knows what’s going on with the bobcat he’s tracking. A programmer scrutinizes the code and determines what’s causing the program to screw up. These things require preexisting knowledge that surpasses the momentary input of the senses.

And more. An artist gazes at the Sistine Chapel and sees what she sees. But an architect sees differently. A historian sees differently. A priest sees differently.

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From Mark Silver’s Unveiling the Heart of Your Business:

The reason why most of business is a desert, is because most people spend their time and their energy in trying to create, manufacture, acquire what they need from the marketplace. You’d think that would make sense—after all, don’t we do business trying to make a living, to gain something?

What I’ve discovered is that the things we truly need, such as peace, mercy, love, security, strength, and on, and on, are essential qualities expressed through us, and can only be accessed internally. Many times I’ve seen people, including myself, chasing after money or business success, thinking that it will bring the security or love or approval the heart is thirsting for.

The end result? Well, either they exhaust themselves chasing success and don’t ever get it. Or they do achieve success, but find that it doesn’t really quench the heart’s thirst. Either way, you are left still thirsty.

Listen, I’ve done it myself. Thousands of cold calls. All kinds of marketing and business work. Late nights and working weekends. Was it effective? Sometimes, more often not. Was it fulfilling? No. Not in and of itself.

Instead of this fruitless chase, I suggest you allow yourself to come to business as a spiritual journey. Let your business actions be an expression of the deepest truths within you. And, when it feels as if you don’t have access to those truths, and you feel empty, restrain yourself from chasing after things in the world to fill the emptiness.

Instead, allow yourself to feel your emptiness, and, yes, the helplessness that often arises around these issues, no matter how much or little success you have in business. And, in your helplessness, Remember.

I want to talk about order.

I feel caught in the midst of a paradox, or perhaps a transition.

I see the cube on the left, and feel at peace. The colors are uniform, simple. The lines are clean, straight. The shape is elegant and orderly. Everything is in obvious mathematical harmony.

I see the landscape on the right, and the lines are blurred or unclear, the colors blend into each other. The shapes are indeterminate and uncontrollable. The simple mathematical harmony is not there.

But guess which one is alive?

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by Derrick Jensen.

THE OTHER NIGHT I saw a commercial for a PBS program that breathlessly described how orcas “dominate” the oceans. And the nature program I had the misfortune to see before that talked of different species of bears “conquering” each other’s territories. The program repeatedly emphasized the powerful bite of one particular type of bear—making sure we got the point by always playing scary music when these bears were depicted—and only late in the program did viewers learn that these bears were exclusively scavengers, with powerful jaws not so they could “conquer” and “dominate,” but so they could break the bones of those already dead. This projection onto the natural world of this culture’s urge to dominate is so ubiquitous as to be at this point almost invisible to us, like air. And obviously, how we perceive the natural world affects how we behave toward it: if we perceive it as full of domination, we are more likely to attempt to dominate it.

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