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Big love,
SB x
Yesterday I turned up to my fortnightly session with my Network Chiropractor, to tune up my body and reset after a week of teaching Spinal Attunement in Byron Bay.
I walked in and told her, “my body feels really good this week — there is nothing to really report. I feel grounded and rested and am getting incredible sleep in my new home.”
She put her hands on my body and confirmed my body felt soft, open and relaxed and ready to move a new pattern entirely.
I laid down and the minute I did, I could feel my throat and my heart start to come online, as though saying “I am ready to be worked on”.
There are much older and deeper patterns in my body that have remained unaccessible to access for many years, as surface survival patterns have dominated my body. As they do for all of us. These adaptive or survival patterns in the body often mask our deeper wounds — the unconscious patternings that sit deep in the body, in the deep rivers (channels) of the body.
In traditional chinese medicine, our lineage or ancestral patterns are held in what are known as the Eight Extraordinary Vessels, the deepest channels of the body. Classical texts describe the twelve primary meridians as rivers and canals, carrying qi through our daily lives, our digestion, our breath, our moods, our movement through the world. The extraordinary vessels sit beneath them like vast underground reservoirs. They form first in the womb, before the organs and before the primary meridians, and they carry our Jing, the essence we inherit from our parents and, through them, from every generation that came before. When the rivers flood with more than we can process, the overflow drains down into these reservoirs and waits there, sometimes for decades, sometimes for lifetimes.
The first and most foundational of these is the Chong Mai, the Penetrating Vessel. The ancient texts call it the Sea of Blood and the Sea of the Twelve Channels, because every other channel in the body draws from it. It rises from the space between the kidneys, from the womb in women, emerging at the pelvic floor and travelling up through the core of the body alongside the spine and the belly. It moves through the abdomen, fans out across the chest and the heart, climbs through the throat, wraps around the lips and reaches up toward the eyes. A descending branch runs all the way down the legs into the feet, rooting us into the earth we stand on.
Teachers in the classical lineages describe the Chong Mai as the blueprint, the very first pulse of life at the moment of conception, holding the template of who we came here to be along with everything our ancestors could not finish. Our grandmothers’ unspoken grief lives here. So do our fathers’ fear of scarcity, the hunger and the war and the migrations, the silences passed down at kitchen tables. These patterns rarely announce themselves. They sit in the deep water while the surface of the body does the louder work of keeping us safe, bracing, holding, getting through the week.
This is why the deepest work often can only begin when the body feels well. Survival patterns are loyal and tireless, and they will hold the front door for as long as they believe they are needed. Only when the nervous system is rested and resourced, when we are sleeping deeply in a home that feels like ours, does the body finally trust that it can lower the drawbridge and let the older material rise.
So when my throat and heart came online on the table, I recognised the pathway immediately. The Chong Mai moves directly through the chest and the throat, and when it begins to stir, people often feel a wave rising from the pelvis upward, a fullness behind the sternum, a tightness or opening in the throat as something ancient asks to be spoken or released. The classics even have a name for this upward surge of energy through the core. My body was telling me that the surface work was complete for now, and that the reservoir was ready to be touched.
What lives in that deep water is older than my own story. It belongs to the women and men whose blood runs through mine. When a lineage pattern finally moves through one body, it moves through all of them, upstream and downstream. And when we heal at this depth, we change what we hand on to those who come after us.
On the table yesterday, when my chiropractor started working on some of these deeper patterns, my heart started to open and process a deep reservoir of unconscious grief, and with it, I heard the words, “you are dishonouring your family”.
I saw myself as a female Samurai, almost like in Mulan.
My ancestry on my paternal grandmothers side is Chinese and often, when I am healing my deeper conditionings, I have images of myself in China.
I saw myself with a sword crossing my back.
And I also felt my Dad present.
I felt the deeper unconscious conditioning around being the first born daughter to my Chinese papa, who unconsciously also holds lineage conditionings of needing to be in “honour” — to work hard, to be responsible, to do the right thing by the family.
I felt all of the ways I feel unconscious pressure and expectation to always be in honour and do the right thing… to please my father, to not do anything that will disturb the family line.
I felt the ways in which I am still bound to this pattern in my life — even though it is deeply unconscious.
The ways in which my work is a disruption to the families peace, because they do not really understand it or see it as valuable.
Lately I have had so many people tell me I should just “go back to being a physiotherapist and treat people”.
Projections by people that do not really understand the nature of what “I do” or that are still caught in the ideology of the 9-5 mentality, where you sell your soul for profit.
I have been maddened by people’s reflections. Angered by their misunderstandings. I tell them I would rather die a slow death than go back to being a traditional practitioner in a clinic space devoid of any magic.
They don’t understand. I leave it alone.
Yesterday I got to process the deeper tensions around being misunderstood, and my fear of dishonouring my family.
I don’t know what kind of space and freedom that is going to open up in my heart, just yet, but I always know that when we do the work to heal our ancestral patterns, that magic unfolds in our lives, back and forwards in time, through the red ribbon that connects us to our ancestors.
With Love,
Sigourney Belle X
