On Paths Less Trodden

Continuing the Conversation with Neeshee Pandit

You may recall that I interviewed my Neeshee Pandit, colleague in the fields of East Asian Medicine, Ayurveda and Vedic astrology, in these pages earlier this year. (If you missed it, that two part interview is linked in the next section, below.)

Well, Neeshee-ji also collaborated on the reverse fixture (to use a footballing term), swapping roles as I became the interviewee. This ‘reverse’ interview is available here on Somaraja, Neeshee’s erudite and eloquent Substack. For ease of reference, and because I don’t often introduce myself ‘from scratch’ in this context, I’m also reproducing the interview below, with Neeshee’s introduction up front. Please enjoy. - JE

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Neeshee writes:

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Jonathan Hadas Edwards of Seeds from the World Tree. Jonathan and I have many parallels as practitioners—we not only share training in Ayurveda, Vedic Astrology, and Chinese medicine, we also share an interest in natural perfumery and incense-making. In this interview, Jonathan details his interest in traditional medicine, his time spent studying Ayurveda in Nepal, his love of Sa’am acupuncture, how he integrates these various systems, and more.

Be sure to check out Jonathan’s two-part interview with me, and subscribe to his substack for a wealth of interesting writing!

Interview with Neeshee, Part 1

Interview with Neeshee, Part 2

NP: Jonathan, you are a diverse practitioner, with training in Chinese Medicine, Ayurveda, and Vedic Astrology. How did you find your way to medicine and to these systems in particular? 

JHE: Like most young people, I had no particular interest in medicine until life forced me to take one. That began with personal health issues and also with watching my father's painful decline with an early-onset dementia. For both of us, Western medicine seemed to have very little to offer. In my dad's case, the treatment consisted of sedatives to keep him docile as he became more unpredictable. Part of me thought, "there's got to be another way." 

Around the same time I was developing an interest in Asian religion and culture. I spent a college semester in India, and Ayurveda and Tibetan Medicine both came onto my radar screen (the latter through a lecture by medical anthropologist Barbara Gerke, who was based in Kalimpong where I was studying). I learned about some basics like the three doshas and the concept of agni or digestive fire. That metaphor of a fire in the belly really landed. It empowered me to begin understanding my body and at least to start moving in a healing direction. 

Around the same time, my inner landscape and priorities were shifting for reasons I didn't understand, and I felt this stirring need to find—or make—meaning. At an age when most of my friends were happy to be partying, I found myself on a kind of spiritual quest. It was weird and lonely but I thought "I've got to follow my weird." (I only learned later that weird comes from wyrd, meaning fate, in the three fates or "weird sisters" from Greek mythology.) I eventually learned that I was going through a huge astrological transition during those years, from the daśā or major period of Jupiter to that of Saturn. It was like entering a completely different ecosystem. 

After college, I hit a few dead-ends and then enrolled at the Ayurvedic Institute (then in New Mexico), thinking it would be good to pick up some practical skills while I figured out what I actually wanted to do with my life. As an aside, I was first exposed to Jyotish (Vedic astrology) at the Institute--the first person to look at my chart told me I might want to study astrology, and I took some interest, but it didn't become a focus. What was really piquing my interest was herbs, botanical medicine. I'd always had an eye for plants and loved being in nature; now Ayurveda gave me a framework to start understanding how plants and people might interact for healing.

I became fascinated, but it still wasn't something I considered as a possible career path at that point. 

Then I ended up in Nepal on a Fulbright grant in 2008-9. Wanting to get back to that part of the world, I'd written a project proposal on something outside of medicine. It didn't much matter, because I got acutely sick to my stomach right off the bat, my very first day in the country. I dragged myself to the old bazaar to ask for help. Someone took me to what turned out to be a highly respected Ayurvedic clinic. The vaidya there took my pulse, asked a question or two and gave me some herbal medicines I'd never heard of. Things turned right around, at least in terms of that particular illness. I started to think that maybe the reason I was there had more to do Ayurveda and herbalism after all. 

Not that things unfolded in a smooth or linear way. First I had to orient to the Ayurvedic landscape in Nepal, which was a lot more varied than the rather sanitized Ayurveda I'd learned stateside. There were jharphuke vaidyas (tantric healers) doing divination to diagnose illness and conducting spirit de-possessions; alchemists making formulas out of minerals and metals; folk healers who were practically illiterate, and classical philosopher-physicians who spoke such highly Sanskritized Nepali that I could hardly understand them. I spent a couple of months just learning the lay of the land and getting oriented. 

Eventually I realized I was drawn to the traditionalists: lineage-based herbalist/physicians who didn't have have white coats or a college degrees, but who were doing things as their teachers or fathers had done for generations on back, both in terms of making medicines and treating patients. They turned out to be something of an endangered species, unfortunately. And many of the ones I met weren't interested in sharing their traditions with a bideshi (foreigner). I was twenty-three, twenty-four and not super aware of myself or my naive entitlement. Saturn was slowly humbling me, one might say. 

It was an interesting but grinding winter in Kathmandu, with a lot more illness and a lot more dead-ends in terms of my attempted research. Then sometime in the Spring of '09 I made one more attempt to connect with a traditional vaidya, and fate smiled on me. It's a story I tell elsewhere, so I won't go into great detail. But basically I found my way to this practitioner, Keshab Lal Vaidya, who opened his home and heart to me. We spent just a few days together, but they were intense ones. He would tell me clinical anecdotes, show me medicines he'd made or was working on currently. By that point his alchemical workshop where they made the rasa ausadhi (mineral and metallurgical preparations) was closed; he was over seventy-five, with a failing heart. I learned that he had no one to carry on his lineage, since his son had decided to pursue a career in engineering. I think he was dying of heartbreak, in a way, to see his beautiful lineage coming to an end. And there I was, this random hopeful, showing up on his doorstep. It was weird, not in a bad way. 

We connected. There was no way I could become his apprentice or his student, there wasn't time. But there was this emotional transmission that happened, I guess you could say. I was moved by his generosity, by the predicament of this beautiful tradition that was hitting its own dead-end. And something in me said "yes" to carrying on whatever I could. Not of his specific lineage, but of old-school herbalism more broadly. 

I only saw Keshab-ji one other time, a few weeks later; he died later that year, after I'd returned to the States. (I still have some of his medicines, things like shilajit, shankha bhasma, hand-rolled yogārāj guggul pills). But by that summer then I was re-orienting to pursue herbal medicine as a practitioner. So that's how I got started. 

NP: You had rare and precious opportunities to learn Ayurveda in its own cultural context. Your story gives a rich perspective of a tradition that has only been partially transmitted in the West, if that. From Nepal and Ayurveda, how did you find your way to Chinese medicine?

JHE: Chinese Medicine was a natural continuation, in the sense that here was this incredibly deep herbal tradition that came with possibilities for licensure and a more established profession (as compared to Ayurveda). I didn't have any interest in acupuncture at first, it was just something that came along for the ride as part of Chinese herbs school. Most people think of it the other way around, that herbs are something you maybe pick up while at acupuncture school. But where I went, the School of Classical Chinese Medicine within what's now called NUNM (National University of Natural Medicine in Portland, OR), herbs were the main strength, since the program was founded by a serious herbalist, Dr Heiner Fruehauf. Anyway, I absolutely loved learning ancient Chinese cosmology and the herbs and formulas that fit so beautifully into that holistic paradigm. There's such incredible wisdom there. I use classical Chinese formulas all the time, sometimes just as they were written two thousand years ago, sometimes with modification. We may be seeing novel viruses, but human physiology hasn't changed––at least not much.

Eventually I did embrace acupuncture as another, elegant application of theory I'd fallen in love with. But that didn't happen until a few years into clinical practice, when I discovered a Korean acupuncture style called Sa'am.    

NP: I'm intrigued by how your journey took you through Ayurveda, Tibetan Medicine, and finally into Chinese Medicine, with astrology interspersed. It is unique and very valuable for a practitioner to have significant exposure to all of these systems. How would you summarize the differences between Ayurveda as practiced in the Himalayan context from contemporary Ayurveda taught in the West? 

JHE: For one thing, the Ayurveda I encountered in Nepal was much more diverse. There was just a whole lot going on under the umbrella of "Ayurveda," which after all means "knowledge of life." That's a pretty broad scope!  A good example is practices pertaining to bhuta vidya. 

Sometimes glossed as Ayurvedic psychology, bhuta vidya means "knowledge of beings" or spirits. Probably for reasons of not scaring people off, that whole side of the tradition has been minimized in the West. But In Nepal, it was and is alive and well. There are specialized practitioners who make use of tantric and mantric methods; these guys (mostly men, from what I saw) are basically somewhere between physicians and magicians. The point is that ritual is part and parcel of Ayurveda just as it is arguably part and parcel of every healing tradition, biomedicine included.  Another example would be rasa shastra, Vedic alchemy. This barely gets mentioned in the West, because of its associations with toxic compounds such as mercury. But rasa shastra as a discipline is well aware of mercury's toxicity and has developed ingenious ways to work with it safely. Still, on Western soil the whole subject becomes taboo and is just not part of the conversation. Which is a shame, because in throwing out the bathwater of toxicity, the baby of classical formulas also gets tossed. 

On some level the question is: are we trying to introduce a sanitized, truncated form of holistic medicine that can fit into existing societal parameters? Or are we opening ourselves up to radically different ways of being and doing medicine? It's the same question that East Asian Medicine has had to face in coming to America. And in both cases, it seems the first movement is towards shrinking to fit the cultural mold, as happened with TCM. But then there's a countermovement, and I think maybe we'll see that with Ayurveda just like we have with Chinese or East Asian Medicine, where new (actually very old) dimensions have been opened back up. In my view, it comes down to not giving all the power to the rationalist/materialist paradigm which is really a child, or maybe a rowdy teenager, in the scope of things.  Precocious but immature. These other ways of knowing are the elders in the room. 

NP: I couldn't agree more. The spiritual / shamanic aspects of Asian medical traditions have been lost in the West, because of a difference in cultural paradigms. I think practitioners in the West face the burden of becoming aware of these lost aspects and finding ways to apply them in the modern clinic. Returning to your herbal background, how do you integrate your knowledge of Ayurvedic herbalism with Chinese herbalism, if at all? 

JHE: I'm somewhat eclectic and do stock several dozen Ayurvedic herbs in addition to those that are already part of East Asian herbalism (there's a lot of overlap in the materia medica, as you know). I'll bring in some of those Ayurvedic medicinals in some of my tincture formulas, or incorporate them into someone's custom formulation. But in truth I don't draw on Ayurvedic herbs all that heavily, because my work is based on formulas, and classical Chinese formulas are so beautiful and brilliantly constructed. As alluded to above, Ayurveda has its own classical formulas, but many of them are inaccessible here due to concerns around metal and mineral content. And frankly I've never been handed the keys to the castle with Ayurvedic herbalism the way I feel I was with East Asian herbalism. These subjects were always intended to be passed down through oral instruction, and my Ayurvedic clinical training didn't ultimately go as deep. 

NP: What drew you to the Sa'am style of acupuncture, and what are its cornerstones? 

JHE: I found in my first few years of practice that I would help some people and not help others. That's to be expected, but the thing was I didn't have any idea how to improve. When a treatment wasn't effective, how much should I change? How could I test out my ideas? There were way too many variables. When I heard about Sa'am, this classically-based acupuncture system from Korea, the first thing that struck me about it was how powerful the treatments sounded. And not just powerful, but directional. The word was that you either helped someone considerably, or you made them worse. And while that can sound scary, as a practitioner it's very empowering because you have a way of learning from your mistakes and course-correcting. 

From a theoretical perspective, Sa'am beautifully ties together the five phases with the six qi / six conformations in a way that's elegant and efficient. Basically it pairs the organ channels in a unique way, cross-linking the normal pairs with one another in a dynamic way. For instance. the Heart channel is fire in the five phase classification and fire in the six confirmations (being a shaoyin organ). That's double fire. The Urinary Bladder is water in the five phases and water in the six confirmations (being a taiyang organ). Double water. One is yin, the other yang. Thus these two organs are opposites, and Sa'am recognizes them as a counterbalancing pair, like two ends of a see-saw, because that's how they function. 

Clinically, we look for excess patterns and then typically treat by supplementing the counterbalancer. So someone who's nervous, fearful and chilly with a slow heart rate and tight abdominal midline, that's a Bladder excess presentation; we might supplement the Heart to thaw them out, soften them, help them open. We can also drain the Bladder directly instead of supplementing its counterbalancer, but that's a riskier and more advanced strategy with less margin for error. And there are certain organs that we never drain at all. 

The treatments themselves are typically just four needles. The needles work with the five phase transport points to powerfully tonify or sedate a given organ. Continuing with our example, to supplement the Heart we would tonify the Wood point on the Heart Channel and the Wood point on the yin Wood channel, since Wood feeds Fire. These two needles we insert in the direction of channel flow with clockwise rotation. In addition, we would sedate the Water point on the Heart channel and Water on yin Water (Kidney). These two we insert against the channel flow and with the opposite rotation. That's it. Then we watch and see if the patient settles on the table and how their complexion responds. That initial response is very telling. 

It sounds simple and elegant, but of course in practice it's not so easy. We have to be ready to admit our ideas were mistaken, otherwise we risk doing someone a real disservice. So you have to stay on your toes. For all the challenges that the clinic can bring, Sa'am is a beautiful system that can really move the needle (pun intended, I guess) quickly for a wide range of potentially severe conditions. I expect to be deepening with it for a long time to come. 

NP: Do you feel your practice is enhanced by using both herbal medicine and acupuncture? 

JHE: I do, yeah. I may have started out as an herbalist, but I've come to really value hands-on modalities like acupuncture and moxa (also cupping, guasha, and subtle hands-on work). And of course they have different strengths. Acupuncture and moxa can make a profound impact, but not only is it limited to the people one can see in person, it's also very time-bound. Sometimes we can obtain a lasting shift, but other times there will be recurrence after a few days, and the patient has to come back. With herbs, the patient can keep taking them over time, which is a huge plus. Herbal consults can happen remotely without too much loss of clinical precision, so that opens up possibilities. That said, there's nothing like interacting with folks in person, at a bodily level. I wouldn't want to lose that dimension or to work only virtually. Pulse, abdomen, even odor/ aroma can all be such rich sources of information. I doubt tech will ever fully replace the most advanced technology, which is the human organism itself. 

Thank you, Neeshee. It's been a real pleasure.