Excerpted from Rob Brezny’s book, Pronoia Is The Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You With Blessings:

FLIP-FLOP THE TRAUMATIC IMPRINT

Beauty and Truth Laboratory researcher Artemisia had just begun menstruating, and was suffering from debilitating cramps. Massive doses of ibuprofen were not relieving the distress, so she went to her regular acupuncturist, Dr. Lily Ming, to get relief.

Dr. Ming had Artemisia lie down on the table and proceeded to insert 10
needles in her belly and hand and ear. Then Dr. Ming introduced a treatment that Artemisia was unfamiliar with: She lightly pounded the nail of Artemisia’s big toe with a small silver hammer for a few minutes.

“Why are you doing that?” Artemisia asked.

“It is good for the uterus,” the doctor replied.

Indeed, Artemisia’s cramps dramatically diminished as the doctor thumped, and in the days to come they did not recur.

After the session, as Artemisia prepared to leave, the usually taciturn
Ming started up a conversation. Artemisia was surprised, but listened attentively as Dr. Ming made a series of revelations. The most surprising was Dr. Ming’s description of a traumatic event from her own childhood.

During the military occupation of her native Manchuria, a province of China, she was forced to witness Japanese soldiers torturing people she loved. Their primary atrocity was using hammers to drive bamboo shoots through their victims’ big toes.

The moral of the story: Dr. Ming has accomplished the heroic feat of reversing the meaning of her most traumatic imprint. She has turned a symbol of pain into a symbol of healing.

To read other features from Rob Brezny’s book, go HERE.

To buy PRONOIA IS THE ANTIDOTE FOR PARANOIA:
How the Whole World s Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings, the book from which the above piece is excerpted, go to Amazon and Powells.