Weaving Passages for the momentous

Weaving passages for the momentous

Chinese Medicine, broken hearts, and life as radical change

Within my changing sense of self, a recurring thought I have become familiar with is that something must be, in one way or another, wrong with me. Like a periodically occurring fog, it shows up as a feeling of general, almost causal kind of unfitting-ness; a wrongbeing-ness. My self becomes a lumpy, heavy, and sometimes empty wagon that I drag behind me. In more severe episodes, my perception seems to scorch my sensation into a multi-layered acid, where, unspeakably but in fantasy, all I would like to do is remove myself from the here and now. This type of wrongbeing feels like being trapped and simultaneously thrown out of my own body; I enter a double location, from either side of which I cannot operate. Senses unwilling to make actual sense to me, bodyspace betraying me deviously, disfiguring my encounters of the world, turning me into a wrongbeing.

As a dancer and choreographer I work on the slippery slopes of the life of a body: its perception and senses, its enigmatic ways of expressing, its sensitivity, blunt honesty, and surprising reactivity. Oftentimes, I am simultaneously practitioner, witness, and evaluator. Working with the body means moving along the limits of perception, control, and interpretation. To learn about the body from a continuously moving perspective respectively creates continuous reconsideration, doubt, and surprise. When practice is process, and the only constant is change, a need for orientation becomes inevitable. In search of such orientation, I aim to understand the body via the logics of process, seeing movement as imperative to life.

The culture I was born, raised, and educated in is white, Christian, and occidental. In Greta Gaard’s essay ‘Toward a Queer Ecofeminism’, Gaard describes how Christianity began as a small sect, ‘shaped in the context of urban, secular philosophies rather than in the context of earth-based, rural agriculture’. Supported by the Roman Empire, which was becoming increasingly militarised, Christianity was promoted for its obedience to authority and virtues of self-sacrifice for the state. From its inception, it was notorious for its intolerance of other religions.1

Practices of excluding, dividing, and othering are part of western culture, and have materialised in uncountable acts of violence since its forceful invasion of most of the planet, the people, creatures, land, soil, sea, and air, up until today. Binaries such as wrong and right, healthy and sick are deeply intertwined with the western domination of somatic realities. As a cultural heritage those ideas shape the western medical approach too. Within the current postcolonial awakening, I see my own sense of wrongbeing as a symptom; a document of a cultural violence that negates life in its complexity and difference. In 2021, I began to study traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), reassuringly confirming and conceptually challenging my view on the body as an experience. When approaching TCM as a westerner, cautious interpreting and concluding is advised. In fact, ‘conclusiveness’ isn’t a helpful approach when conceptualising the body through the lens of TCM, since the body is understood as an ongoing process, rather than a thing. This process-based view expresses itself not only through TCM’s practices, but becomes apparent as a linguistic difference between Mandarin and English. Like most western languages, English is rooted in a substantial understanding of the world, while Chinese languages prioritise becoming over being. This complicates translation, which often compromises the Chinese linguistic sensibility.2

TCM’s medical perspective is rooted in and reflects some of the basic concepts of Taoist cosmology and philosophy. The concept of Tao—translated to ‘way’—describes life in accordance with a universal orientation. Tao is seen as a behavioural code; an order of how things flow, change, and move within the cosmos. Taoist practice and teachings are understood to create a way of being, rather than life designed by dogma. Maintaining Tao in its most unadulterated state is referred to as Ziran. Ziran has multiple translations, such as ‘spontaneity’ and ‘by-itself-so-ness’. Ziran describes a state of affairs, primarily dealing with change, balance, and process. In its changing nature, it refers to the body as always a result of multiple relations. When Ziran can’t be maintained, life consequently shifts into different states of relations and balances. TCM understands bodies to carry an immense and inherent capacity for adjustment. Like water in a tilted glass, new kinds of balance are continuously (re)established to create relations, possibilities, shifts, movements, journeys, pathways, life, and dead ends. They make themselves notable in streams of thought, in anxiety attacks, in depression, in mysterious pains, sleeplessness, a trembling voice, a twitch of the eye that won’t go away for weeks, in shaky hands, hair loss, skin rashes, in all sorts of cramps, a disturbed metabolism, diarrhoea, bladder infections ... You may complete the list. What is overwhelming to understand is overwhelmingly magic to observe. These symptoms are expressions of balancing acts of uncountable variety: the bountiful acrobatics our bodies perform to enter states of balance.

The concept of Qi translates to ‘life force’. Implicit in all living matter, Qi is a hyper-intelligent, moving stream that informs and mobilises all functions and life processes. ‘The force’ in Star Wars, deeply inspired by Qi, may serve as a helpful comparison for those new to the concept. As a multilingual translator, Qi communicates with and between our bodily matters, mediating changes between material and immaterial bodily activity. Challenging dualist thinking traditions, TCM proposes that the material and immaterial aspects of our body are constantly inter-transforming as different states of the same thing, similar to water molecules turning into gas. Material and immaterial are understood as two different qualities of life that share fuzzy boundaries. Their difference is acknowledged, without denying their inter-transformability and relationship with each other. Qi also co-produces our mental faculty, called Shen. Shen accounts for various experiences including emotions, feelings, sensations, sleeping and dreaming, concentration, envisioning, memorising, and learning. Body and mind are therefore inter-transformable on a direct energetic and material level. Shen isn’t considered a metaphysical, spiritual, or strictly psychological extension of the body but an implicit part of it. Body and mind—much more process than thing—rely on and process one another interactively and continuously. Rather than thinking of opposites, TCM works with the dynamic idea of complementary agents, which can, when conditions are ripe, turn into each other. This basic principle is expressed through Yin and Yang: each thing contains within itself the seed to become the other, hence the black and white parts of the symbol carry a tiny dot of the opposite. Yin and Yang overview two energetic tendencies and in the process of life they are close collaborators. While the general, energetic tendency of Yang is to expand and find its way out, Yin restores, collects, and moves inwards, nourishing the body. So the body is always analysed through its ability to give or spend (Yang), and its capacity to receive or restore (Yin). Yin and Yang coordinate together through Qi. Qi, the body’s translator, can alternate between Yin and Yang functionality. Interconnected to one another in life, upon death’s arrival, Yin and Yang separate.

I remember my Chinese professor laughing at us, as though we had just asked a bizarre question, when one student asked if it is possible to see the meridian channels when cutting the body open. ‘Hahahaha! You cannot see it,’ she left a significant pause ... ‘But it IS there!’ A big smile appeared on her face. Meridian channels are the interconnecting highways of our body, which are used by Qi, and are invisible to both the human eye and the microscope. Along the meridian line there are several landmarks, known as acupuncture points, which are stimulation areas used for TCM treatment, through manipulation or needling techniques. An article published in 20123 researching electromagnetic field studies and TCM proposes that electromagnetic transmission lines of the human body show close proximity to the acupuncture points of the meridian lines. Through the use of polarised light, it was possible to observe magnetic field changes along and near the acupuncture points of cancer patients. When TCM was developed centuries ago, there was limited technology available to open up the body or perform surgery. Acupuncture points were detected by studying connections; by learning that manipulating specific physical areas can relieve pain and support or regulate activity in other parts of the body. Over many years of work and study, an extremely complex and coherent system developed, mapping the body’s internal relations via its acupoints and meridian lines.

TCM proposes that these indirect connections, invisible manoeuvres, and immaterial operations highly define our bodily lives. These crucial processes can be disturbed, and affect our system. Just as bones, teeth, or nails can break, hair can split, or vessels rip, these invisible systems are vulnerable, too. Embracing this assumption, I look at the possibility of clinical validity of a broken heart, through the lenses of both TCM and biomedicine.

Legendary German actress Romy Schneider reportedly died from a broken heart in 1982. Her diagnosis—cardiac arrest—describes the sudden ceasing of the heart’s function. Not a year prior to her passing, Romy went through a divorce, had her right kidney removed due to a tumour, and her oldest child died in an accident. Although no autopsy was made, it was concluded that she must have died from a broken heart. ‘Broken heart syndrome’ was first described in Japan in 1990 as Tako Tsubo Cardiomyopathie and is considered a special case amongst heart diseases. The patient’s symptoms show similarities with acute coronary disease, such as a heart attack, but atypically, no blocking of the main coronary vessels—the defining symptom of a heart attack—is observed. Coronary vessels commonly block due to a buildup of plaque and the consequential narrowing of the vessels inhibits the blood flow. Under the MRI, a broken-heart syndrome patient’s vessels, however, show up intact, yet the heart is still malfunctioning. Different from a common heart attack, broken heart syndrome suggests changes of the heart’s electrical activity.4

Recent studies of broken heart syndrome speculate towards a ‘connection in between aerials of the nervous system, associated to autonomous functions and the regulation of the limbic system’, the faculty of the brain designated to process emotions.5 Although the pattern has not been concluded, extraordinary physically and emotionally stressful situations have been frequently observed to trigger a heart to ‘break’. The death of seven-year-old Rayan Suleiman, a Palestinian boy who died after being chased by Israeli soldiers in 2022, suggests a similar pathology. In utter fear the boy collapsed, scared to death. The Israeli government claims the boy had a pre-existing heart condition, which his family disproves. I can only try to imagine the impact of constant life-threatening stress on the heart of a Palestinian child living under Israeli military occupation. The autopsy is still determining the final cause of death at the time I write, but the most probable scenario is that Rayan’s heart went into sudden cardiac arrest, causing him to die of fear.6

While dying from a broken heart likely sounds romantic and far-fetched to westerners, according to TCM, heart failure due to emotional stress is plausible. TCM sees the heart as the main residence of our mental faculty, Shen. The heart’s task, amongst others, is to process mental and emotional activities. Being the residence of Shen, all emotional activities have to pass through and be expressed through the heart. Expressing means that the heart system needs to manage the energetic output caused by emotional and mental activity. Acting as the emotional computer for our bodies, the heart is the place where we are able to recognise impacts, feel them, and have the ability to respond to them. The heart is further surrounded by a fluid-filled sac called the pericardium. In TCM, the pericardium is called the ‘heart protector’ and has its own meridian system. The pericardium protects the heart from shocking or traumatic information, but can, when the impact on the system is too immense, become inoperative. TCM proposes that acute or prolonged intensely stressful situations can injure the heart and interfere with its energetic and physical functionality, disabling the heart’s function with possibly deadly consequences.

TCM interweaves the material and immaterial planes of life, and existence is defined by constant communication, with relation being a given. Negotiation is central to this relation, yet relation in itself is a non-negotiable condition. TCM looks closely at how patterns of relations are formed, how they hint at and respond to each other in deep interconnection. A pathology is not a singular occurrence or a thing that one can strategically isolate. A pathology can, in principle, not be eradicated without addressing a systemic change on multiple, interconnected, yet distinguished planes. While the relationships informing those planes are continuously shifting, as a repercussion, all changes find their way through someone's body and mind and are meant to do so. Interchanging with each other, they transform on the way, hence producing all kinds of necessary ripple effects that can’t simply be disposed of. Just as meridians exist in our body to channel streams of Qi, energy, thoughts, fluids, and more, pathologies are partly byproducts of this channel-logic, an expression of something finding its river bed through our system.

In acknowledgment of change, dynamism, continuity, and relation, at times the sensible and intelligent streams moving through me become both more daunting and imaginable. When senses stop making sense to me and my wrongbeing visits me, I attempt to mend the obsessive, corrective thoughts of my institution of self. It is at the fuzzy edge of my being that I bear witness to change: not a mere concept, but a process accompanied by physical and emotional sensations. A startling and at times frightening view. As I bear witness to it on
different scales, my wrongbeing, humbled, reconsiders itself by granting temporary episodes of self-absolution. Sensing that something feels wrong is a real, physical pain that can unwillingly become part of one’s identity. Understanding it as a co-emergent aspect of a movable, changing self, one of many, in conversation with the much, much more-than-me, reveals both boundaries and elasticity, resilience and fragility, creates space and cracks. Those inert and fantastic abilities do require different states of discomfort, dislocation, and destabilisation that are so often misinterpreted by me as wrongbeingness, an error in my system.

When I deinstitutionalise my experience of wrongbeingness and stop thinking of it as an irrational and completely unfitting side effect of my being, then my wrongbeing actually manages to open up a little. It has a hunch that it is not an ultimate state of determination. If I were not to abandon it, there would be a lot to discover, understand, and process from it. And as conclusiveness is not a helpful parameter when viewing the world through the lens of TCM, I follow this hunch and move on.

1 Greta Gaard, “Toward a Queer Ecofeminism,” Hypatia 12, no. 1 (1997): 114–137.

2 Giovanni Maciocia, The Foundations of Chinese Medicine, 3rd ed. (London: Elsevier Health Sciences, 2015), 23.

3 Lulu Fu, Hong Xu, “Chinese Medicine and Integrative Approaches in the Prevention of Breast Cancer – Acupuncture Meridian, Pulsed Electromagnetic Field Test and Chinese Food Therapy,” in Recent Advances in Theories and Practice of Chinese Medicine, ed. Haixue Kuang (London: InTechOpen, 2012), 353–360.

4 Wallid Abdulla, Susanne Vogt, Praxisbuch Intensivmedizin (Munich and Jena: Urban & Fischer Verlag/Elsevier GmbH, 2021), 415.

5 Martin Möckel, Peter W. Radke, Sebastian Wolfrum, Kardiovaskuläre Notfall und Akutmedizin (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 224–230.

6 Isabelle Debre, “Palestinians mourn boy who died ‘of fear’ of Israeli troops,” The San Diego Union Tribune, September 30, 2022,https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/nation-world/story/2022-09-30/palestinians-mourn-boy-who-died-of-fear- of-israeli-troops.

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This Text was written by Toni Steffens and edited by Rosie Haward and Nell Schwan. It was written as a contribution for the Extra Intra Reader #2, comissioned by the editorial board of extra curricular studies of Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Institue, Amsterdam, 2022, 23. The Launch of this reader will take place on the 30st of March 2023, at San Seriffe.

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