the artist’s body
My Journey with Art-making & Acupuncture
written by Monica Sun
I keep coming back to the decision that landed me here, slanted my trajectory a few degrees and altered my path forever.
Never in a million years would I have imagined myself a doctor. I was an artist first, a writer (kept meticulous journals as early as eight), and I had every intention of making writing my life’s work. But, much as I longed to be singular, funnel all my selves into one vessel, optimized, I could not sustain it.
A life led only by the mind left my body behind.
By second year of university, I was writing in circles. Language looped me into a state of self- inflicted suffering as I relived and relived painful memories in the name of excavation until I was completely eclipsed. It seemed the more I wrote, the more narrative entangled me in the chronology of hurt and harm. There was a desperation inside me to have my pain acknowledged so that I might finally let it go. But by whom and to what end? Regardless, I could never seem to arrive there ( “there” being a place far, far away, and always inextricably out of reach ).
It was then that I wandered into the dance studio:
I’d had no prior experience with dancing, only an aching question in my heart. Fortunately, the university I attended had an experimental dance department and much of my education involved improvisation and movement exploration, which upon reflection is what drew me to it. I was a dreamer, too, and the idea of donning the title “dancer” appealed to my romantic senses. But the reality of studying dance was far from rosy.
he level of shame that was evoked by the mere act of dancing was startling, to say the least — often so intolerable, I’d frequently sit out of class. Sometimes I would not show up at all. At the time, I chalked it up to feeling self-conscious and amateurish. But one day in the classroom, while seated criss-cross on the marleyed floor, a friend’s knee brushed up against mine by accident. My knee jerked back in response. It was so automatic, it startled me. Embarrassed, though no one else seemed to notice, I could not stop thinking about it long after. It perturbed me to no end.
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I started to wonder if the knee jerk was actually everywhere in my body. Thereafter, I was flooded with questions: How could this have happened? Was it caused by one cataclysmic event or by many little catastrophes? Was it something I could be rid of? Or was it so tangled to the skeleton of my being that to remove it would be to remove parts of myself?
Most of all, I realized there is a place the mind alone cannot touch. And that place terrified me, because I did not know it. I could neither read nor decipher it. My body was completely unknown to me.
declared the dance major; but it was more of a declaration to myself. The mind had proven to be riddled with self-protective measures, had become over the years a labyrinth designed to dam that which would break me. The body on the other hand was not interested in protecting me, but wanted to be broken, broken open, and reveal its raw, bloody innards. Dancing elicited shame, bitterness, grief, desire, dread, joy, jealousy, tenderness, and longing; all con-ng
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tained and writhing in one being. For how long were these emotions stuck inside me, accumulating, congealing into gum? Possibly my whole life. Without any avenue for release or expression, they bound to flesh and stayed. Through dancing, however, they were unlocked, unearthed. But my body was not finished with me.
Yet again, in the throes of medical school, the cerebral did nothing to penetrate the great mystery of my growing ailments.
With no rhyme or reason, my digestive system had deteriorated to a sorry state. Any food, even water, made me uncomfortably full — sometimes nauseous — not to mention I was constantly bloated, even with nothing in my stomach. Mysterious rashes erupted on my elbows, spurred by anxiety. Standard bug bites became swollen and infected and took weeks to heal. I experienced frequent hot flashes, but was markedly sensitive to the cold, wind, and rain. Tired all the time, even daily tasks seemed herculean, let alone the thought of returning to my dance praxis. At night, however, I’d alternate between insomnia or fitful bouts of sleep riddled with recurring nightmares. In the morning, I’d find my hands balled into fists. Sometimes, I’d wake up screaming.
Socially, I was anxious, timid, and quiet; insulated myself and judged others from a distance. I was fragile, easily hurt, but also rigid and resentful. There was a year I did not cry, not once ( this fact would surprise any one of my friends today ). It wasn’t that I never felt sad — in fact it was entirely the opposite. I was sad all the time, stained with this chronic, low-grade melancholy. And yet, even when I felt the sadness well in my throat, the tears just wouldn’t come.
I had been in therapy for six years at this point, and although we had made great strides to address the more urgent issues, it felt at times that we were just putting out fires.
When it came to broaching the subject of victimhood and envisioning a future beyond the wound, I became defensive and resisted. After all our work, I still felt that my life was full of suffering. My pain was precious to me — it was mine. Deep down, I did not want to let it go or be free of it.
My pain felt like the only thing that truly belonged to me, the one thing that no one could take away from me.
Creatively, I had completed a seventy-poem collection, entitled How to Make a Home Out of Hands & Feet, an accumulation of writings over the course of six years. However, in my afterword, I expressed how deeply exhausted I was as an artist, how torturous the process had been, and how dearly I wished to give up writing.
I felt defeated by the very praxis that identified me.
eanwhile, my physical ailments seemed only to grow in number and intensity, and could no longer be ignored. So it was at this point I started receiving regular acupuncture treatments and Chinese herbs. I will never forget my first assignment: buy a carton of eggs and smash them in the bathtub.
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This assignment baffled me. It seemed my pulse reflected a “bowstring” quality, often characteristic of unexpressed anger. The only trouble was, I was not an angry person. Certainly, I have always been a more serious, pensive character, but I was also poised, deliberate, reserved even — none of which denoted “angry.
As acupuncture stimulated activity of the stagnant qi, blood, and body fluid, I found myself overcome with uncontrollable rage bubbling out of me, as though venting a pressure cooker. Instead of breaking eggs, I opted to dance. But it was less dancing than it was kicking, punching the air, and screaming strings of curses and promises of retribution to the wall. The explosive physicality was so unlike me, I scared myself. Who was this red-faced, wrathful, vigorous woman?
A few months into acupuncture therapy,
I discovered sadness was protecting me from rage.
The “angry dancing” sessions would leave me heaving, exhausted, but surprisingly relieved. More than that, I felt different. I was the same person, but filled out. Like all the spaces and interstices that had once been weighted by shame, tightened by bitterness, had become dispersed with air, aerosolized. Where I once felt like a heavy bag of tepid water, I suddenly felt light and spry and powerful. Like there was an engine in me that wasn’t there before or had previously been covered by a wet rag.
rom thereon, it was a slow unraveling. It would take several years of sustained acupuncture, herbs, and lifestyle changes for that “bowstring” pulse quality to soften. But in the meantime, my energy and focus revived as though coming out of a fog. My digestion regulated: appetite returned, bloating and cravings diminished, and I could actually tell when I was full instead of eating to bursting. My posture, which previously was concave as a perpetual apology, inflated to an upright position. Shoulders, which seemed to have assumed a permanent position by my ears, relaxed. Ribcage, once gripped around my lungs like a fist, loosened. For the first time in a long time, I could take a deep, effortless, “belly” breath. Even my speaking voice grew louder. I so love to sing and had accepted that I had an airy “head” voice. But suddenly, my singing voice had a sustained power behind it. I sank into my chest voice. I could belt songs I normally would run out of breath singing.
In therapy, I emerged out of plateau.
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Behaviors and narratives I’d been rinsing and repeating for years were finally shifting like tectonic plates.
I wasn’t free from the challenges of living, but I did feel a burgeoning sense of agency. I was starting to develop a familiarity and curiosity with my emotional landscape where once I felt foreign and frightened. To this day, I am still reconciling my re-
lationship with anger; but also with joy, pleasure, permission, disappointment, wistfulness, whimsy, humor, and hope. Once I stopped resisting feeling — and with the facilitation of acupuncture to keep Qi moving smoothly — I realized I am capable of feeling so much. And none of it involved reducing or subtracting what makes me me. Only widened my aperture for light, color, and dimension.
And finally, finally, after everything else shifted into place, my writing shifted, too. Originally aphasiac, truncated poetics elongated into lyrical prose. I was no longer interrupting myself at every word. I followed through with thoughts, let them transform as the line continued, unearthed a sort of candor and curiosity just by going forward.
Chinese medicine bridged the psychic and somatic until, like weft and warp, I was one whole integrated being.
The mind is fast, but the body is slow. Some people spend their whole lives trying to make a meaningful change. Making a big change is easy. You could move across the world tomorrow. But that’s not what healing is.
It is the small, incremental, ordinary changes sustained over a long period of time that bring us enduringly closer to our most authentic selves.
Integration happens in degrees.
In hindsight, those qualities that so defined me ( introversion, meticulous composure, reticence, etc. ) were a heavy armor I’d mistaken for my own skin. As I shed the carapace of poise, I’m discovering that I am in fact naturally warm, inquisitive, playful, tenacious, and vibrant. I feel for the first time, I am finally getting to know myself. And who knows? Perhaps this whole, winding, kaleidoscopic journey has led me back to my love for language. After all, all I have wanted in this life is to write something beautiful.
