disaster In today's acupuncture/qigong session, Dr. Tom referred to my energy situation as a disaster. Liver is having a disagreement with spleen. Kidneys are having a disagreement with heart. Yang qi is deficient. Yin qi is grossly deficient. How did this happen to such a powerful soul, you say? Well, I'll tell ya. As a boy, I grew up idolizing heroes. Be it Bruce Lee, Batman, Green Lantern, or the Bionic Man; I held fast to a very particular ideal of what a man should be. What a human should be. Twenty years later, I still hold myself to it. I'm not talking about possessing superpowers or saving babies from burning buildings, I mean the character of a hero. Strong. Never quits. Willing to sacrifice everything for what he knows to be right. I became very determined to have no weaknesses. Difficult in a culture that breeds weakness. Strong men and women are poor consumers. They don't need products to fill the emptiness they feel. The strong don't feel empty. Can't have that. So, like everyone else, I was bombarded with images and ideas that were not my own. These created concepts and opinions that knocked me so far from the ideal I had already cast in stone, that it created great conflict within me. Which was the real me. The hero, or the angry, opinionated jerk. Now, they both felt natural. Neither actually were. Of course, humans are designed to learn from what they observe, so it could be argued that both were, in fact, natural. Who knows? The point is, I wanted to be the hero. I wanted to always do what's right. I wanted my strength to be legendary. So, I became very rigid. Always trying to hold back what I felt were weaknesses. Forcing myself to be something that I conceived. I built a sturdy wall around myself to keep out anything that I felt could weakem me. Being human, and thusly limited in knowledge, I was unable to properly distinguish the difference in what would strengthen, and what would weaken. That was ultimately what led to my current state. I made some poor choices. Kept out a lot of things I desparately needed to let in. Held on to things that needed to go. I hate to think of the years I've wasted, but I do believe in paths, and I believe it was necessary for me to do this to myself. If I had done everything right, would I have learned anything? Would I have been able to relate to people who weren't perfect? Probably not. So, now I have to train myself to be natural. Sounds easy enough. We'll see how it goes. I'm thinking that wall won't come down in a day, though. But it will come down.  ¶ 4:05 p.m.