Think of the last time you saw an expansive, breathtaking natural view, with mountains and valleys and flowing rivers, maybe a distant glimpse of the sea. Vast, majestic, peaceful. Alive, yet eternal and serene. Beautiful, no?

Now imagine your body is like that. 

I know, it’s hard. Most people don’t think of their bodies as having expansive vistas, flowing rivers, or gentle slopes covered with trees. People’s relationships with their bodies are usually more intimate, perhaps a bit on the constrained side. When they think about the subject at all, modern people tend to think of their bodies as functional, fairly mechanical and hydraulic spaces. More like machines, if you will. Wet, squishy, squeaking machines with a penchant for breaking down in uniquely annoying ways. Think of an old, used car, or a computer that’s exceeded its planned obsolescence curve. This follows from the fact that most of us won’t think about our bodies at all, unless they malfunction. More on this later. 

It’s not our fault. The adage about the lonely hammer and the ubiquity of nails it engenders applies here, big-time. We live in a world where the machines we’ve created seem closer, more similar and more real to us than the forest and the river. This is logical because we made those machines, after all, so we see ourselves in them. Besides, the people to whom we delegate the responsibility for taking care of us are rigorously trained to think of the patient as a machine with discrete parts and problems to be fixed. To borrow another hippie platitude, we don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are. 

But just for the sake of argument, think of your body as that landscape. Indulge for a second in the fantasy that there are forests and valleys and mountains inside you, their shapes contoured by the causeways of rivers that flow towards the lakes and seas that sit below them. From the low places the rarefied essences of their activity rise to become clouds, and then float over that landscape raining down their blessings upon the land, in an endless cycle, over and over again.

If a machine breaks down, or your computer malfunctions, you need someone to go in there with some tools and fix things pronto. Maybe rip out (and hopefully replace) a faulty part or three. But what would it be like if something went wrong in the landscape? If there was a drought, or a flood, or an avalanche, or if beavers built a dam in the middle of one of the causeways, stoppering the flow and creating a mud-riddled pond where a river should rush through? The mechanic with his tools would be at a loss. One’d need someone who understood landscapes — environmental science I think it’s called — and how river basins exist and flow. What happens to the trees if there’s a flood, or a drought, or a fire? How does one stop the damage, or correct what’s wrong?

Talk to anyone who does landscaping, or wilderness management, or firefighting in the woods. Most of those people are very humble, because they recognise how precious little they can control the systems that they’re dealing with. At best, they can hope to influence them in a positive direction, but most of them will probably acknowledge that the system has a mind of its own, a way it tends to self-correct if nudged in the right direction. 

This is what acupuncture really does. 

Let me break it down a little. 

Acupuncture is one of the many jewels gracing the crown of ancient Chinese culture. It’s old, the art of needle and cauterisation (which is what the Chinese characters for acupuncture, 鍼灸, literally mean). If the official party line is to be believed, it’s been around for several thousands of years. More likely, the earliest versions of the theories about the workings of acupuncture as we know it today arose around the time that the ancient Chinese developed massive irrigation projects. It was the great technology of the day. It was the big way that humans back then were changing the world around them, digging ditches and opening canals, so of course they conceptualised the body in terms of water flow and nourishment for raising crops. The hammer and the nails, again.

Now, one might well argue that all metaphors are context-based and arbitrary. However, there is something uniquely and cleverly compelling about this landscaping metaphor that the one about the computer with the leaky gasket lacks. It implies a certain similarity, a correspondence between the natural world and the human milieu that is quite simply lacking from comparing it with the most complex objects that humans have created in an effort to control it all, industrious apes that we are. It implies that it is us and we are it, in a way that just doesn’t ring true for even the most advanced computer, the heaviest lifting equipment, or the coolest sports car. 

You see, humans aren’t the distant descendants of the natural world, separated and made synthetic by our homes with central heating, our expensive cars, or our fancy clothes. Underneath all that makeup, we are just as much a part of nature as that landscape, and every tree and cloud and river in it. It follows that the workings of that landscape might hold clues to the workings of the body, being as they are part of the natural system as a whole. 

The ancient Chinese shamans that started talking about the human body in terms of water reservoirs and underground rivers weren’t trying to be holistic or environmentally-conscious. They were acknowledging that what was inside looked and behaved a lot like what was outside  — that it was all organised the same, really. Moreover, they were pointing to a two-sided truth about the workings of the body: on the one side, those workings are more complex and intricate, interdependent and interconnected than their manifestations might make them appear. On the other, they have an internal logic that keeps them happening in a way that is always predictable, yet capable of sustaining endless variety whilst retaining its coherence overall.  

One of my favourite aphorisms from my time studying with indigenous peoples is this: “Healing arises as a result of right relationship. When there is right relationship, the curing of symptoms is irrelevant.” What this means is a bit tricky to explain, especially if you are suffering from migraines or lower back pain, or any of the other ways that your body might choose to be annoying on any particular bad day. It took a while for me to figure it out, and I do this for a living. Truth be told, I’m not entirely sure I fully grok it, but what I think it means is this: we have no control over what happens, but we have some say in how we choose to relate with what happens. 

There is no guarantee, no matter what we do, that we won’t suffer from pain, discomfort, illness or disease at some point in our lives. In fact, one might wax philosophical so far as to say that the guarantee is that we will. The question is more, what are you going to do when that happens? This, interestingly enough, is also the only real option when something big happens ‘in nature’. We can’t do anything about rain or snow except bring an umbrella. If there is a flood, head to higher ground or learn to swim. If there’s a drought, migrate to where there’s water. If there’s a fire… you get the idea. 

In the inner landscape of the body, the proportions are reversed, so here is where those ancient Chinese shamans got cunning. They started out with their hands, then with hot sticks and sharpened stones. Gradually, over a few thousand years, they got pretty good at mapping out the river valleys and the mountain chains of the human landscape. They discovered they could predict with relative accuracy how it talked to itself, the way observing the seasons and the rains makes you savvy about the movements of ungulate herds and the best times and places to harvest certain plants. Little by little, they figured out some pretty accurate guidelines for ‘if this happens, try that’, and the best of these survived and got passed on. Observing nature, recording the results, disproving or verifying findings through repetition… science!

Then, around the same time of the irrigation ditches, the Chinese got crazy about metallurgy. The hot sticks and sharpened stones were replaced by lancets and needles, to make the cauterisations and poking and prodding of the pathways of the rivers of the inner landscape more precise (as an aside, cauterisation is not something we talk about a lot in modern acupuncture practice, for obvious reasons, but from experience I can tell you, it works — it’s just not a popular thing to do these days. Oh well). However, for hundreds of years afterwards this natural science retained that sense of tending to the landscape and gently nudging the inner flows. It’s still there, if you know where to look.

However, these days, acupuncture is mostly practised by rote. Those ancient observations and guidelines have been codified into a fairly dry and formulaic approach where inserting needles into specific, more-or-less accurately located points is intended to elicit such-and-such result. Influenced first by herbal and then modern Western medicines, acupuncture became, like many forms of premodern knowledge that require hands-on experience, artistry and imagination to truly grasp, a bit of an arcane. The explanations as to why or how it works are full of outlandish terms, discussions of invisible pathways and elusive energies that nobody can see or measure. ‘Modern’ acupuncture is ancient and mystical, mysterious and different. It’s a bit like magic.

Except it isn’t like that. Human bodies haven’t changed hardly at all for the last seventy thousand years. Believe it or not, the language of ‘meridians’ and ‘chee’ isn’t describing some abstruse, rarified, metaphysical truth — it is describing the body, albeit in terms that arise from the body-as-landscape idea, unfortunate and misguided translation choices notwithstanding. The needles aren’t antennae to connect to the mothership or balance the colours of your aura. They are tools for intervening in and influencing the flow of substances in the body, albeit in ways that are way more subtle than any modern medical tool can or does.

Acupuncture, as originally intended, requires one to accept that the system knows what it’s doing, and wants to heal on its own. One’s job is to optimise the conditions for that to happen by removing obstructions and encouraging what is already going on in a cooperative and constructive way. Less is more. The interventions are laser-focused and minimalist, and work best when tailored individually to what this particular body is doing right now, classical point locations be damned. 

So when you come for acupuncture treatment, think of it as an opportunity to have a nice day out ‘in nature’. You might discover that there is a whole new world inside you, with wider vistas and a much more pleasant overall feeling to it than if you think you’re getting ‘fixed.’ Who knows? You might even find that the curing of symptoms is irrelevant, and you can live more naturally and freely with what is actually going on.