As I sit to write this foreword I can hear Bill playing the piano. This is a memory making itself present so I pay attention. What am I hearing that wants to inform this foreword? It is a freely roaming improvisation, an exploration of themes and how they connect and relate, an ongoing revelation filled with joy and curiosity. It is compelling, absorbing, elegant. Reading this book is much like listening to his music.
I have known Bill for forty years and from the moment I first encountered his work I knew I had stumbled across something rare and very exciting. Just as his musical improvisation is grounded in a deep understanding of music, his free roaming explorations of oriental medicine rest on a deep understanding of its traditions.
Bill has a radical and synthesising mind. Radical in the sense of looking at the root and synthesising in the sense of looking for relationship between systems. So many books on Chinese medicine stay within the orthodoxies of its forms and language. Not so here.
Bill’s exploration of Chinese medicine ranges across vast territories: from Gestalt Psychology to Body-Mind Centering; from the spiritual practice of Dzog Chen to Iain McGilchrist’s philosophy of mind; relating Michael Levin’s exploration of biological intelligence to the Chinese concept of Qi; and connecting theories of Human Development to the Eight Shields system of community creation.
Just as the essential tenet of the Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Chinese Medicine is that the therapist’s role is to educate and guide a person before they become ill, Bill’s work sits in that lineage. As he says in Chapter 40: “The role of the therapist is as a facilitator rather than as a doctor and the process feels like education rather than medicine.”. The work is enabling and empowering – uncovering the teacher within, found in the sensations and movements of the body.
In my many conversations with Bill over the years, one theme has been central: how to inspire people to change their mindset from consuming knowledge to finding it out for themselves. So throughout the book you will find many explorations to help the reader experience their own take on the concepts in the text. I encourage you to try them. After all, his school is called the “School for Experiential Education” for a reason!
In my view this is the most significant and inspiring book to emerge from the world of oriental medicine for a very long time. Not only is it a manual for the system of Movement Shiatsu that Bill has developed over the last forty years or so, it is also a work which makes bridges between East Asian medicine and science.
Take, for example, the notion of “Qi”. To describe Qi as energy has always felt unsatisfactory. More poetic interpretations such as breath of life, animating force or vital essence don’t quite get us there either. In my experience, the attempt to explain Qi is the place where so many conversations with the scientific mind break down and it leaves the impression that practitioners of oriental medicine are woolly or deluded.
So reading Bill’s definition of Qi as “the distributed intelligence of the body” is very exciting. It gives us a working definition which avoids anything resembling magical thinking or the esoteric, a definition that bridges between the languages of East Asian medicine and science. And this is one of the great gifts of this book: it gives us a common language for that conversation.
I am delighted this book has finally made the light of day and my hope is that it will be read by people working in all therapeutic models, east and west. We have all been waiting a very long time but it has been well worth the wait. May this outstanding book travel far and wide.