| At a recent conference, I was treated to a spoon-bending meditation that led to a tearful, full-on, snot-filled, alligator-tear epiphany. Yes. I allowed a spoon to provoke this response. Some people can channel their energy and bend spoons with ease. Others struggle. I only slightly bent my spoon. Naturally, my ego walked in first. “I’ve got this,” I told myself. “I’m an acupuncturist. I work with energy every day. I’m a qi ninja.” We warmed up our hands and fingers, then dropped into a soul-pumping guided meditation paired with music meant to wake up the inner energy master in all of us. At first, I felt the spoon moving, first one side, then the other. And then… I left my body. I went straight into my head. Opposite of the whole point of this meditation! I thought, If I can feel one side moving, I’ll just use my brain to move the other side. The moment I did that? The spoon stopped bending. Completely. In came the voices in my head for their commentary: “I can do this.” “No one wants to be the person who doesn’t bend the spoon.” “But wait… it moved when you weren’t trying.” Ego strikes again. The spoon didn’t move anymore for the rest of the session. Instead I spent the rest of the 30-minute meditation arguing with myself to stop forcing it and just trust that it would bend on its own, through my energy, not my effort. When the session ended, I looked around. The woman next to me had bent her spoon completely in half. Someone behind me had snapped hers. And me? I sat there holding a spoon that looked like it had gotten into a mild disagreement with the dishwasher. Still usable. Still polite. Slightly warped. Like a restaurant fork with one bent tine that makes you wonder how it lived its life. What happened? I couldn’t shut my brain off long enough to trust my body. This was a massive EGO check. AKA: EGO: Everyone’s Greatest Obstacle. The spoon never needed more force. It needed less. The moment I tried to control the outcome, my nervous system shifted into effort, tension, and survival. And a nervous system in survival mode can’t heal, adapt, or create change. I see this every single day in my practice. You want to lose weight. Feel good. Get your hair growing. End your battle with pain. Heal whatever is bothering you. The entire focus goes on the problem. You stop feeling the process. People say, “Enjoy the journey,” and honestly…I despise that phrase. When you’re suffering, you don’t want a journey. You want the problem gone. I wanted that spoon to bend so badly that my fingers and forearms hurt for an entire day afterward. I was cold, shaking, and completely drained after the meditation! I used all my energy… to get nothing. Because I was forcing instead of allowing. So I’ll ask you this:What are you pouring energy into right now that’s keeping your nervous system stuck in effort instead of healing? I’m not saying your problems are insignificant. I’m saying what if the solution doesn’t come from pushing harder? What if, like the spoon, your body responds when it feels safe enough to soften? The spoon was never the point. Your nervous system is. And the moment you stop trying to bend it… is often the moment things finally begin to change. Here’s to tapping into your nervous system, Dr. Jannine PS: Feeling stuck with your health? Listen to my podcast this week, it’s real, raw and I really want you to listen to it. Click the button below to listen now. |
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