oetry has always been a healing practice for me. I wrote my first poems as a young teenager. In high school I remember submitting a collection of these poems and some short stories for consideration in a creative writing contest. My collection was titled, “My Living Tools.” I didn’t win the contest, but through the process of crafting this work I did realize how necessary poetry and writing were for my sanity. I still have that original handwritten manuscript, with some of the first poems I ever wrote.

Even before my early poetry years I was also strongly drawn to medicine and natural living. After high school, at the age of 17, I went off to UC Berkeley as a pre-med student. After a disenchanting year at Berkeley being depressed, anxious, and physically ill, I longed for a more fundamental and meaningful education and way of life.

So, in my early twenties I moved to Santa Barbara, California where I turned to nature for these desires. I grew all my own food and medicinal herbs, lived for a year in a tent in the woods, and often bathed in one of several creeks. I earned a living as a tutor, massage therapist and yoga instructor among other part-time jobs. Miraculously, during this time my Berkeley ails disappeared.

During my radical nature living time in Santa Barbara I learned many profound and subtle lessons, many that I still cannot even put into words. I was getting the education that I truly yearned for, and it was satisfying and nourishing me at a core level. At the end of my apprenticeship with the raw forces of nature, I was drawn again to medicine. But this time, surprise, it was natural medicine. To my delight and amaze, I found that many of the insights realized in my first-hand experiences in nature were spelled out in the basic theories of Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine.

I strongly considered going to India to study Ayurveda, my first holistic medical love, but after dropping out of college, I wanted to pursue a degree that would give me a legal medical license. Chinese medicine fit the bill. But, I was resistant to studying anything just to get licensed or for the promise of making more money. As anyone who has been through Chinese medical school knows, especially in California, there are much less expensive and tiring ways to make money! So, Chinese medicine had to pass the test of my heart, as Ayurveda had.

I decided to wet my feet. When I began studying Chinese medicine at the Santa Barbara College of Oriental Medicine, something very strange occurred, something I had never felt before, and to this day I do not fully understand. I was repulsed by Chinese medicine. I was so strongly repelled by it that, ironically, I was just as strongly drawn to it to discover what this extreme reaction was all about.

I couldn’t even look at Chinese characters without getting a stomachache or feeling queasy. It took many months of feeling utterly uncomfortable and haunted, really, before I found peace with Chinese medicine. And, before long I fell deeply in love. I have since noticed a similar feeling when we are drawn towards lovers or life situations to work out and heal past wounds and inhibitions.

About two years after my studies at the Santa Barbara school I traveled up to Santa Cruz, California to study with Michael and Lesley Tierra, two of my first herbal medicine teachers, and two of the most wonderful people I have ever met (though Michael can be a bear). I was going to Santa Cruz to attend a week-long, hands-on seminar as part of a correspondence course in herbology that the Tierra’s offer. If you are interested in a comprehensive introduction to herbal medicine, one that introduces the Chinese, Ayurvedic, Native American, and European traditions, click here to learn more about the Tierra’s correspondence course.

I’ll never forget what Michael said during one of our group discussions. Someone asked, “Michael, how did you learn so many herbs and retain all that information?” Michael answered, “For me, learning herbal Chinese medicine has been more a process of remembering than learning.” I interpreted this response to mean that Michael had somehow inherited this knowledge and that his life was now a process of drawing it out from deep in his bones. The familiarity I had in my first encounters with Chinese medicine, though utterly uncomfortable, have always reminded me of what Michael had said years before in our group discussion.

The way I see it now, my introduction to Chinese medicine was as close to a past-life experience as I can imagine. What my repulsion was all about I don’t know. Maybe in some other life I was unable or prevented against my will from studying the medicine, or I had some other negative encounter with it I had to work through.

When I finally entered Chinese medical school full-time at Yo San University in Santa Monica, Ca., at age 26, I remember being able to absorb and retain vast amounts of herbal information in a short time. Almost as though I were merely remembering it, or being reminded of it, rather than learning it for the first time. Writing herbal prescriptions, gathering herbs in the wild, concocting formulas, and researching herbs remains my passion and greatest joy in medicine.

What also particularly attracted me to Chinese medicine was its metaphorical framework, a framework purely poetic in nature. Chinese medicine provides a model for natural living according to the cycle of the seasons and for how to cure illness by natural means. I had been cured by following my intuition and returning to a simple life close to nature. But, this was not the answer for everyone. Studying Chinese Medicine presented itself as an ideal way for me to creatively mingle method, science, and poetry with my own organic experiences and roots in nature to help others back to wellness. Chinese medicine allowed me to integrate my love of medicine, my home in nature, and my passion for poetry.

BREAKING OPEN

“There are many paths to wisdom, but each begins with a broken heart.”

—Leonard Cohen

Poetry resurfaced in my life at the age of 28. During this time I was immersed in body-centered psychotherapy and about half way through Chinese medical school when the woman whom I loved more than any other before had just left me. With my grief, the poems also started flowing, and I thought, “Oh, how nice, Jack, you are writing poems again.” But long after the grief subsided the poems didn’t stop, and never have. What I thought was just another heartbreak was really a catalyst for the breaking open of my whole life. Through this experience I came to trust even more in the process of breaking open and breaking down.

Prior to this time I had always been private with my poems, but now I was moved to share my poems out in the world. So, I printed the first run of my “Healing Poem Cards” —800 cards with my little songs on them hot off the press! When I saw them shooting out the printer slot I almost had a panic attack. I remember telling myself, “This is crazy, I can’t do this.” I had barely read my poems aloud, and at that, only to my closest friends. I got over the shock in few days and sold out of the first printing of cards in about two months. Poem after poem spilled out of me for the next ten years, until this very day.

In medical school poetry helped me stay sane and connected with my soul’s true desires and to nature, which the hullabaloo, concrete, and constant machine noise of Los Angeles made extremely challenging. It was a true lesson in discovering who I was by immersing myself in what I was not.

Without the nurturing and deeply life-affirming and vitalizing elements of nature that I was accustomed to having around me, I was forced to find life and the forces of nature inside myself. My stint in the city began an intense inward healing journey for which psychotherapy and poem-writing became my allies and constant companions.

Body-centered psychotherapy allowed me to find healing with the emotional wounds and blocks to my true nature I had been carrying around with me since childhood, whether I was in nature or not. I turned to poetry and creativity for inspiration, catharsis, and vision. I celebrated life by pouring out the depths of my soul in poems. Poetry and emotional healing in therapy nourished and freed me where the natural medicine I was learning could not reach. Poetry and therapy were the paths to clearing the obstructions from around my already whole and shining heart.

Poetic Medicine

Today poetry means much more to me than writing poems. I don’t think we have write poems to appreciate poetry and to live poetically. At its core, poetry is much more than the artful expression of words. And medicine is much more than curing the body, or the mind and spirit for that matter. As I say in my book, Poetic Healing,

“Healing is far more than the attempt to fix brokenness through the technique and method of medicine. Healing is the wholeness, fulfillment, passion, creativity, and belonging to life that we experience at all levels of our being. Similarly, poetry is not just the artful expression of ourselves through the written word. It is the breadth and depth with which we encounter all the seasons of life and the greater health we experience living from the fullness of our hearts. Indeed, poetry is the spirit through which we mend our separation from life.”

What I came to realize through my years in Chinese medical school is how important each person’s individual calling and creativity are to a meaningful, “healthy,” and truly rewarding life. And this is where poetry for me has been most helpful. But not everyone is a writer. So, I use poems as models, as metaphors in themselves, for each person’s finding and living out the poetry, the creative thrust and passion, that is their unique calling and purpose in life. This is the larger life of poetry.

Sometimes I encourage patients to write poems, or I read them poems, as a way to inspire their creativity and vision and to discover meaning and purpose in their lives. Poems that inspire us to live poetically, combined with other golden sources of poetics, such as the Five Phases of holistic medicine give us the tools to live utterly creative, meaningful, and soulful lives.

At their best, the practices of poetry and holistic medicine are a deepening into the richness of life, into an intimacy with all things, into full-heartedness. Sure, in my Chinese medical practice I help cure common colds, tight muscles, and menstrual cramps, but this is just the beginning of medicine. I no longer believe that the antithesis of being well is being sick, but instead, not to live. Just as the antithesis of being sick is not being disease free, but to live fully. And, either polarity—sickness or wellness—can coexist with the other, just as Yin and Yang are never separate when life is happening, and even more co-present when life is really happening. This “really happening” territory is what I call our greater health, described at length in my upcoming book.

By the same token, I have seen and also written poems that say pretty, understandable things, and that say them quite artistically and cleverly. But this is just the beginning of poetry. Other poems knock me off my seat and plunge me into the hidden beauties and treasures of hard-earned wisdom, subtle insight, and utter mystery—into the full poetry of living. These poems often contain certain lines or images that, like a mantra, will stay with me year after year. They are like medicine that I sip regularly during times of crisis. An example is Khalil Gibran’s line from The Prophet:

“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain”

So is Mary Oliver’s,

“Happiness, it is another way to enter the fire.”

The words of these famous poets include and transcend our personal stories and culture, speaking to universal aspects of life that confront us all at one time or another. This way, poems are healing tools for generations past and future.

Living Poetry

Poetry for me means finding the inspiration and flow of our life’s deeper purpose, day to day, year to year, phase to phase, moment to moment, regardless of what it takes, or drags, us through. Poetry, therefore, means living with courage and following the callings that often demand that we enter and embrace chaos and confusion and constantly redefine who we think we are. This courage may mean that we make changes to deconstruct our lives so that we can appreciate the abundant beauty of life already present in the simplicity of life.

But a poetic simplicity is not necessarily a literal one, for we all know that life is not simple. Rather, a poetic simplicity is a radical simplicity, a certain emptiness, where we can appreciate and have the time to celebrate the more fundamental, enduring, and inherent complexities of life—a thoroughly rich emptiness. It may be the complexity of making the time to meaningfully reflect on the way we work and on the effects of our day to day actions. It can also be the complexity of listening deeply to our bodies and our deepest desires and longings, and the complexity of following this voice. It is the complexity of making time to do nothing, sit alone in nature or in meditation, and marvel. Or it may be the complexity of running a business or starting a project that we are passionate about. Or heartfully and earnestly dealing with the problems that come up in our intimate relationships, and in raising a family with the same honest care and integrity.

These simple complexities nourish and develop the core of our being and are inherently healing. They create a simplicity that spends less time boggled up and bogged down in life’s busyness, a busyness that we often self-create as a way not to face the radical issues of life that demand more of our heart and soul, and our own pain. Avoiding facing the unknown, basic, complexities of living from a deep place we also abandon our own greatness and the true grandeur of life that already exist before our ever-clever creations and interpretations of it—before our eyes ever opened and blinked.

In these deeper waters great things are born: timeless poems are created and our lives take on meaning, sacred mystery and a richness beyond our efforts. So, perhaps we can say that the posture of poetry is simple, but the life that emerges from this place is utterly complex, colorful, and heart-rousing.

When we experience simplicity in the midst of the complexity of our lives, we are usually on the right track. This complexity will often be fueled by a passion and inspiration emanating from the center of our simplicity.

Poetry also means looking for and finding deeper meaning in the seemingly ordinary events of daily life. It means doing what we love to do, because in that love and passion G-d is acting through us and we are filled with excitement, and sometimes even devastation. But, it is the heart and the passion that count, the gusto and guts with which we earnestly encounter ourselves and the world, and from this, the gifts to the world that emerge from these same depths and recesses of our being.

Thank you for your interest in poetic healing. I welcome any comments, inspirations, poems, insights, or questions. May you live full-heartedly, deeply, and generously. And may you allow the space for poetry to find you—

Jack A. Weber