The Story of the Little Boy Healed by Love

I am frequently asked what book I would recommend for counselling techniques when working with trauma. The best advice I was ever given was in a simple and profound story told to me by my qigong master, Christopher. This story had been passed on to him by his teacher when he had asked a similar question to mine about working with trauma. I have written it verbatim as it was told to me, so that none of its depth is lost and can be understood at multiple levels.

Patricia Walsh

‘His teacher had told him an interesting story. He was working with his doctor, and they were treating a young boy who unfortunately had a deep, deep trauma and his mother was involved as well. It was incredibly complex, and he was still living with his mother. His teacher was quite worried as to how to help the child and what should be done and what was correct and how to make it better. Then one day, a traditional doctor from Taiwan, swept into the clinic, into the room and said ‘Hi, welcome’ to the young boy, ‘jump up and sit down’, and he treated him completely normally. He took his pulse with his fingers, heart (the middle, ring and little fingers in Chinese Medicine are the heart meridians), the boy’s pulse – heart- ‘taking somebody’s pulse – heart to heart’. A little tear went down the doctor’s face and he looked at the boy and smiled and said:

“You good boy, You very good boy,” and rubbed with his thumb, his third eye and that was it. The boy came pretty much every week, for a few months until he could, and he made great improvements. But the real thing about this story is that the doctor, a good doctor, could use his heart, to really be open to hear and feel, the boy’s heart or story but he didn’t go along with the tragedy. It’s like cleaning a mirror or wiping some glass. He rubbed the boy’s third eye, not the external eye but the internal eye to see ourselves. He rubbed it clear, rubbed it clean, rubbed the beliefs off, shakes the trauma off, made it shiny.’

“You good boy." So, holding in your heart, that somebody else is good and encouraging their belief to re-cognize, re-member, re-change, go back and change, recover the thinking back, that you are a good boy/girl. This is fundamental. At that point then we can start to re-gather ourselves. So as a practitioner, it can often be that it is really, just our connection to all of these things and all of the complexities and just gently holding that connection and allowing that to radiate, which may be the best help we can ever give. And it’s very, very simple. Just by being connected, just by seeing the connections, particularly through nature, is pretty much enough. It’s like a tree, it is of course doing lots of things, but it isn’t running after the rest of the jungle and the rabbits, it’s just being tree. So, it is the same for us in some sense, on some level. And then because we have hands and fingers and ears and hearts we do just naturally respond, and we can have confidence that what we do is just coming from that simple place. So really, just working with clear belief, really working with seeing clearly, being connected clearly and not being drawn into the mind of over-beliefs. What is right; What is wrong; who is bad; who is nasty but transcending all of that to a ‘forever’ space.

With grateful thanks to Christopher Woodward for his wisdom and the transmissions and teachings he has passed on from his teacher Liu Wen Ming.