Health & Healing: It's All About RELATIONSHIPS(a.k.a. the in-betweenness of things)

The following is an excerpt from a book I've been reading with my Book Club for the last 2 years - The Matter With Things, by Iain McGilchrist, (pgs. 1004-1005):

"One of the most important words for space in the Japanese language is ma, a word that has no exact English translation. It is, as far as I believe I understand it, something similar to what I would call 'betweenness'. it refers to both time and space. It suggests the idea of an interval, an interstice; and yet a span, and a relationship. It does not refer to an objective space, but to a sense of the space in the consciousness of the observer. Without ma, nothing can fulfill itself. It also, like Śūnyatā, suggests the generative potential of space, a potential space where something can come into being: 'ma is filled with nothing but energy and feeling'. 

It is written with the ideogram for a door and the sun, so might be thought of as a crack through which the light gets in... Alan Fletcher writes:

Mallarme conceived poems with absences as well as words. Ralph Richardson asserted that acting lay in pauses... Isaac Stern described music as 'that little bit between each note - silences which give the form'. Franz Kafka warned that 'the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence... Someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence, certainly never'... The Japanese have a word (ma) for this interval which gives shape to the whole. In the West we have neither word nor term. A serious omission.

In Japanese the word for a fool, manuke, means someone lacking in ma, which, given that we Westerners haven't got ma at all, ought to bring us up short. Ma is the depth that is expressed by reticence, silence, what is not said; it is a space that is the opposite of empty.

This is reminiscent of the lines from the Tao Te Ching:

Thirty spokes meet in the hub,

but the empty space between them

is the essence of the wheel.

Pots are formed from clay,

but the empty space within it

is the essence of the pot.

Walls with windows and doors for the house,

but the empty space within it

is the essence of the home.

The ways in which distinct (but never wholly separate) entities are related are more important than the relata, the things so related."

And now I, Amanda, ask: could it be that True Healing is all about changing the relationship between us and our bodies? This idea is beautifully summed up by Luke Kohen here:

"The capacity to BE WITH vs. GET RID OF can be the determining factor in an authentic shift in reality in the healing journey."

Luke Kohen

Our bodies embody this idea of ma, or betweenness - we talk about energy potentials, energy gradients from inside the cell relative to the outside. We understand metabolism to be the epitome of the relationship between protons and electrons, not one or the other, but the gradient in between them. More protons relative to electrons = acidity/low pH. Conversely, more electrons than protons = alkalinity/high pH. The result of this relationship? dis-ease or ease. But this outcome is never absolute. More alkalinity isn't necessarily better. Like my husband always says:

"The truth is somewhere in the middle"

[And I might add: "it's in that relationship between 2 things/people/cells/enzymes/hormones/etc."]

 So much to unpack here. I will simply leave you to ponder.

much love,

Amanda

PS: I cannot recommend Dr. McGilchrist's book enough. The man is a genius. If you're more of an auditory learner, look him up here or on YouTube.