Acupuncture protocol for bringing tenderness to grief

Another look at Miriam Lee's "10 Point Protocol"

While I’ve written at length about the contributions of Dr. Miriam Lee–the “godmother of American Acupuncture”– I actually think her greatest gift to our profession is her 10 Point protocol, one of my favorites.

Acupuncture lore tells us she performed this specific prescription on 80-100 patients a day at her Bay Area clinic: a "perfect protocol" which–at its most literal–is for tonifying the digestive system (SP-6 & ST-36); then resetting and clearing the colon (Li-11 & LI-4). Her fundamental suggestion is that if the middle jiao is strong, the rest of the system will follow.

However on the deeper level, Dr. Lee's 10 Points reveal something else entirely: her protocol is following the season’s change, from Late Summer to Fall, guiding the patient from the harvest and abundance of those big tonic Earth points to the letting go–the death and decay–inherent in Metal. It's tracking the arc of loss: the centrifugal force leading us into the darkness coming in Winter.

Dr. Lee's 10 Points describe how we are meant to understand and contextualize grief: how do we make peace with letting go? How best do we shed the parts of ourselves that we can’t take with us to the next cycle? How do we shake the dead leaves off the tree before Winter?

Her answer is to remember that Metal is born from Earth: to meet grief with sweetness and appreciation.

In affixing those SP/ST points to the Metal points, she is suggesting that the will to shed–to sift away our layers and return to the nothing from which we came that Autumn asks for–is not born from pain or despair; rather, it's preceded and generated by the gratitude and replenishment of Late Summer, which yielded new understanding of what nourishes us, what we actually need. It is from this grounded self-reflection and abundance that we let go in Fall.

Her protocol suggests that the goal for rectifying grief is not to limit its frequency, minimize its wreckage, or steel yourself from feeling the depth of its pain. Rather, we may prepare for–and heal–the pain of grief by connecting loss to the spirit of wholeness, communion and care that are the virtues of Earth(SP-6/ST-36) and transmitting those virtues to Metal (LI-11, the Earth Point on the Metal channel, the crucial point here); only then can we release it through Metal’s Entry and Exit points (LI-4 & LU-7).

Dr. Lee’s protocol is an instruction that when we say goodbye, we do it with sweetness and celebration. When it is time to let her go, you kiss your mother on the forehead with care and thanksgiving. You don’t get to keep her, because like everything else in life, none of it belongs to you. The cosmos gives and takes according to its own grace and intelligence that is ultimately unknown to us, and unknowable. So you lay her in daisies and give her back–like an exhale. You see her off, like she is the setting sun, with a deep joyful love, tenderness and appreciation that is greater than your sadness. Of course it will be sad, but it is more than sad: it is beautiful. It’s precious, like gold.

This is how Earth turns to Metal. 

That Dr. Lee gave this treatment 100 times a day tells us what she thought of her American clientele: they were people beset by their losses with no true understanding of them; a nation suffering from grief without context for it. Even now, so much of what is brutish and painful about living in America is based on the loss that is at the heart of our country. Days before another election, the feeling of loss hangs in the air. Even when your side “wins,” it still somehow feels like loss.

By standardizing this prescription, she was affirming not just that we must treat grief in every patient, but that it’s the only thing we treat.  She was saying: to be an acupuncturist in America is to treat grief. For all the political work she did on behalf of our profession, paving the way for our legality and licensure, I still maintain that Dr. Lee’s greatest contribution to acupuncture is this treatment, and her conviction that every patient–100 a day–must solder the grief and coldness of Metal to the tenderness and care of Earth.

Miriam Lee’s ultimate gift was her decree that the foundation for health for every human is to marry their grief to gratitude, and heartbreak to celebration.

Is there anything more hallowed than that?

Miriam Lee (Dec 8, 1926-Jun 24, 2009), originally named Lee Chuan Djin