Where Pichest lives, and how

 

As the days go on, my impressions of our studies with Pichest become less linear or focused on particular days, and are more concentrated on Pichest’s various aspects, different ways he has of teaching, different moods, and the shifting energy with which he works. Mary and I have been talking a lot about all of the other work Pichest is doing, besides teaching us thai massage. As we spend more time in his space and witness and receive more interactions, we see that much more is happening energetically at Pichest’s than appears on the surface (in fact, this “other” work is often happening precisely at those times when one might have the impression that absolutely “nothing” is happening.)

Recently, in the evenings, I have been reading The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram, which is a philosophical record of a year he spent in Bali and Nepal investigating the practices of shamans and other local healers. At the beginning of the book, he talks about how the shaman does not, and in fact cannot, live at the center of the village she or he serves, but must live on the edge, on the outskirts. It is from the border zone that the shaman draws her power.

“I discovered that very few of the medicine people that I met considered their work as healers to be their primary role or function for their communities. So even though they were the healers, or the medicine people, for their villages, they saw their ability to heal as a by-product of their more primary work. This more primary work had to do with the fact that these magicians rarely live at the middle of their communities or in the heart of the village. They always live out at the edge or just outside of the village — out among the rice paddies or in a cluster of wild boulders — because their skills are not encompassed within the human modality. They are, as it were, the intermediaries between the human community and the more-than-human community — the animals, the plants, the trees, even whole forests are considered to be living, intelligent forces. Even the winds and the weather patterns are seen as living beings. Everything is animate. Everything moves. It’s just that some things move slower than other things, like the mountains or the ground itself. But everything has its movement, has its life. And the magicians were precisely those individuals who were most susceptible to the solicitations of these other-than-human shapes. It was the magicians who could most easily enter into some kind of rapport with another being, like an oak tree, or with a frog.”

This is the rice field right across from Pichest’s house. It’s just off the main road, but the main road probably hasn’t been there all that long, and certainly was once not so large as it is now.

  

Two things about where Pichest lives struck me all of a sudden.  First of all, he lives just off the same road the Old Medicine Hospital is on, though he lives much further out of Chiang Mai proper – the Old Medicine Hospital is just on the edge of the old city.  Pichest was a therapist there for many years, and so he still lives on the line of that road, on that sen, as Mary would say.  Secondly, though Pichest may be maintaining certain energetic connections with Chiang Mai, he does indeed live on the outskirts, and I have the impression that he does not go into Chiang Mai very often. He is cultivating his knowledge in a significantly different environment than the crowded streets of the main city. 

He is constantly talking about 7-11. 7-11 is everything that the natural world is not. 7-11 is, for Pichest, a total loss of knowledge, and what’s worse, 7-11 is everywhere, even in the place that used to be the “outskirts.”  Pichest is more than right…in this rapidly expanding world, the distinction between center and periphery is becoming very blurry, and the natural world and all of its inherent knowledge, is being paved over.

 A few days ago, Pichest started talking to me about the eclipse.  I couldn’t understand what he was talking about. He mentioned it a number of times. He said bad things could happen. He made a motion like slicing his throat, which I think was my throat. He mentioned the eclipse again.  I tried to wait patiently and not worry about losing my head, literally. This went on for a day or two.  Then, one day, Pichest took a long nap.

  

He often does this. When he woke up, he started shuffling around the weird piles of things, papers, dusty bottles of oil, matches and other weirder things that lie in most corners and on most surfaces of the room, especially around the altar. He was in a half-sleep, cultivating a kind of energy I’ve seen him sometimes use, which is an energy meaning that he is doing something very internal, and doesn’t want to be interrupted. Mary and I were practicing on one another, and he came over to me with the piece of paper with a lot of squares on it, and some other symbols. “Name?”  he said in a low voice. “Michelle.” He wrote my name slowly in a tiny square, fitting it all in.  “Surname.”  “Tupko.”  The tiny square below was filled in with these letters, which I spelled out.  He also did an elaborate and ancient form of counting on his fingers, using the digits of each hand to mark ones and tens. He did this a number of times, checking and double checking.  I told Mary  I think I once read something about how the Egyptians counted like that. Then he went away.
 After some time, he called me over.  He gave me these things:

  

which are, a silver (aluminum?) bowl, a candle holder, and a candle he made from a circle of yellow wax that he rolled and rolled into a candle shape, wrapped in paper.  Mary thinks the piece of paper with my name on it was inside the candle. He gave me a set of instructions about what to do that night, and said it would clear the dark energy in me. It would remove the eclipse?

Many of the shamanistic things Pichest is doing happen within the larger context of Buddhism, but it seems to me, and I’ve been asking around a bit about this as well, that here in Thailand, and particularly in the North, or the Lanna region, Buddhism and the older, animistic and extremely varied practices of the people here coexist quite peacefully with one another, and there are few conflicts set up by practitioners of these arts between this and that, between Buddhist practices and other rituals,between shamans and monks. (To illustrate this point, I’ll mention that a friend who is organizing a tour of a wide survey of local healers in the Chiang Mai outskirts, recently told me that she met a  monk who is the head of a  wat and some years ago received a vision about how to run energy through pyramids. At this wat, you can lay down beneath little pyramids with special holes cut in them in specific patterns, and water runs through them. You absorb the energy. Speaking of the Egyptians…)

Pichest has performed other simple rituals as well, like keeping the buddhas and Jivaka statues of these American students on the altar for one week, and then giving them back.  When he performs ceremonies, he often sits in this chair, which is like the place a monk would sit in a wat to give a blessing:

  

These rituals are externally simple, but, like shaman, I can tell that Pichest is doing an inner work in his own space to facilitate a deeper exchange of energy. 

I also believe that Pichest performs many rituals of various sorts for the village and community around him. The spirit house/temple (he calls it both) that he is having built is not just for us, if it’s for us at all. I have not seen any of these rituals, and would like to ask Pichest about what role he is playing outside of the work we see him do, but it hasn’t been the right time for that conversation yet.

 And now I’m starting to see how he works with that endless exchange of energy between one place and another, one person and another, when he is working on people.  Look at the different energies he’s using as he’s working.  Different moments bring different needs, and different moods and methods are elicited from him:                                                                             

   

 

 

 

 

 

Ok, enough serious talk.  Now for some fun. 

 

If I’m understanding correctly – this is the Buddha’s crystallized sweat.  That’s Pichest’s hand –I’m sure about that part, but do wonder about the nails on his thumb and pinky fingers. 

Mary greeting a sudden visitor.

Where you ride on the song tao when it’s totally full in the afternoon, as it often is. (This is Hajime, a Japanese student who’s been with Pichest for 5 months and just left to return home yesterday.)

    

 

 

 

A better picture of the offerings:

 

 

 

 

(See, wasn’t that fun?)
And now some thai massage parts.

Nigel came again on Wednesday, and he received a rather different massage than last week.  Pichest had a student do side lying bloodstops and began immediately working on Nigel’s upper body, starting with the arm and shoulder, and doing a lot of work on the back lines. He finished with the legs and seated.

Often, Pichest will say “feel feel!” sudeenly, and then a lot of hands reach in to touch and sense.

Pretty much everyone is now practicing this simple and deep knee in the gluts move:

While fewer people are practicing this more difficult forearm in the neck move:

  

And, incidentally, it’s not true that he doesn’t do yoga.  He says, during this picture. “See, can do yoga easily. Do now.”

  Really, Pichest seems to do everything easily.  Last week, he gave me a long lesson, which was “if not easy to do, do not do.  Do not do.  Do not do. Do not do.”  It took me quite a while to learn the lesson.

Actually, I have to keep learning and relearning it, by feeling, and a little bit of watching.  Look at how relaxed he is:

  

So, like this baby elephant resting, I’m practicing the practice of doing whatever I’m doing. “Do now. Easy to do.”

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