Healing EEs/EHEs/Healing Process Record Type: Review   ID: 142
All Sickness is Home Sickness Connelly, Dianne M.
Dianne Connelly has practiced Traditional Acupuncture for 26 years and chairs the Board of Trustees of the Traditional Acupuncture Institute and is Executive Editor of the Journal of Traditional Acupuncture. This inspiring volume is primarily about the meaning of life and who we are. It could have been subtitled "The View From the Experiential Paradigm." It also conveys in practical, meaningful terms the philosophy of Traditional Acupuncture. Finally, it offers snatches of her own EHE autobiography. Although her vocation is acupuncture, this book is about Life as it is expressed in individual humans and ways of responding to Life’s call. The book is liberally sprinkled with very apt quotations from poets, scientists, and mystics. It also contains many passages of her own that could be used with great profit and relevance in other people’s books. She has a knack for explaining in one or two sentences, her own or those of others, that go to (and come from) the core of reality, starting with the title. She explains its meaning more fully in the text: "Home is the place from which I have come and to which I return. Home is where I always am. All circumstances call me to new steps in the dance. All sickness points me there. All sickness is homesickness. All healing is homecoming. Sharing moves me homeward" (p. 25). She is also postmodern in her approach: "Life lives us and we interpret it—yet life is uninterpretable. It translates only to and from itself, and continues to confound us in its mystery as we keep rendering accounts. We are life interpreting Life. Probably forever" (p. 150). I will give one more quotation, which obviously comes out of the Experiential Paradigm: "We reach for the symptoms as problems to be discarded rather than opportunities to realize the integrity of our bodymindspirit. Every moment of life, be it in intimacy or in politics, requires us to acknowledge and reveal our Nature. By the very force of life, we are commanded to know who we are so that we see every interchange as a source of nourishment, every moment as making a difference, every relationship as a source of empowerment, every symptom as a sign of integrity. Herein lies the healing, the coming into wholeness, the making room for each other in the recognition of our deep and ineluctable journey...creating vision and furthering life" (p. 93). Ultimately, this book is not about Connelly, her life, her work, her philosophy! It is about all of us as individual carriers of life¾ in any way we can, trying to give back what we have been given.
Publisher Information:	Columbia, MD: Traditional Acupuncture Institute, 1993. xviii + 167p. 13 illus; 86 refs

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