為人 The Min Jie School 為人
Becoming Human, Serving Humanity
Changing the Course of History
With Min Jie Stone Needles
Well Maybe
Transcript of an Interview Between John Mini and Esmuy Fuerte of Dodge Magazine of Manila
Q: How did you get the idea to begin teaching your Min Jie Stone Needle therapy to just plain people rather than to acupuncture practitioners?
A: I’ve noticed over the years that many people go to a range of different healers in their quest for healing. This isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, but if we just keep going from one healer to another without doing our own work to integrate and expand on our healing, then even the best healing doesn’t have any place to land, develop and grow. I don’t want to say that going around like that is a complete waste of time, energy and resources, but it sure isn’t the best use of them either.
Part of the impulse these people have is right on the mark- if we really want to heal, then we’ll also want to optimize our process by remaining in a continuous state of healing as much as possible. That means we’ll want to develop and practice something that keeps us in an active state of healing rather than just the passive healing that happens when a healer works on us. Healing has both active and passive dimensions, and the best healing happens when there’s a dynamic interplay between the two.
Q: So how does Min Jie Stone Needle therapy fit in to that picture?
A: Min Jie Stone Needle therapy is an active process that we do with ourselves. It integrates and enhances the work we do with other healers, whatever modalities they might use. It’s also the perfect complementary pratice to Min Jie Qi Gong. Using the stone needles teaches us how to heal ourselves by cultivating a continuous state of healing. That’s exactly what we want to do if we really want to heal.
Q: What is Min Jie Stone Needle therapy?
A: Think about it: Acupuncture has been around for at least tens of thousands of years, but human beings only learned how to refine and use metal beginning with the Chalcolithic or Copper Age around 8-9000 years ago. So what were the original acupuncture needles made of before we had access to metal? People from different cultures probably used a number of different things, but one thing we know for sure is that shamans in Asia, particularly in the area we now call China, used a very specific and rare kind of stone. I won’t go into what makes this stone so unique, but we know this is what they used.
Min Jie Stone Needle therapy is a resurrection of this original form of acupuncture.
Q: But I do want to go into what makes this stone so unique…
A: Ok, that’s fair and actually you are very correct in wanting to know. If we look at this historically in China, and we’re just talking about stone needles rather than other materials we used for therapeutic purposes, there were three different kinds: one was called Stone Needle or Needle Stone, another was called Arrow-Head Stone, and a third was called Bian Stone.
There were various Arrow-Head stones, but most were made of chert and were just like arrowheads from other parts of the world.
The Bian stones came from a major meteorite event in what is now Shandong province. Other meteorites were and are also used.
The use of Stone Needles or Needle Stones predated the other two and came from extremely ancient Paleolithic roots long, long ago. These stones are a very unique form of obsidian that literally comes straight out of the Earth in the form of needles. They are not worked or shaped in any way like the other two kinds of therapeutic stones were. The Stone Needles are raw. These are what the Min Jie Stone Needles are.
Q: Is their rawness what creates the effect?
A: That’s an important part of it, yes. There’s a definite perfection in their natural form, and this is what organically led to how they came to be used for healing: Their shape and feel leads us very spontaneously into how to use them.
There are a lot of wacky theories about how acupuncture began. If you spend five or ten minutes with a stone needle without having any particular intention at all, there’s a very strong chance, in fact it’s almost certain, that you’ll discover for yourself where acupuncture came from.
Acupuncture came from the Earth. It still does. The stone needles form a natural union with our own polysomatic intelligence that happens without even consciously trying. It’s a beautiful and childlike experience that makes perfect sense once you feel it.
The Min Jie Stone Needle experience is similar in many ways to that of acupuncture. If you go to a good acupuncturist you feel the qi and the acupuncture channels opening up and you get swept away into another dimension by what is happening. Nobody needs to explain what acupuncture is to you when you have that experience anymore than you need somebody to explain what your hand or your face is. It just is.
Q: OK, that’s all groovy, but how can you advocate people doing acupuncture on themselves, especially in such a crude way with stone needles?!?
A: Because that’s the original and best way to use them. Our stone needles don’t go into the skin or puncture it in any way, so the entire experience is very safe from that point of view as long as people use them in the ways we teach them to. Our students learn how to move the stone needles around on top of the skin in highly specific paths to activate the body’s healing mechanisms. That process helps to keep us as healthy and strong as we can be. Encounters with stone needles are anything but crude…
Q: What makes your stone needle therapy so special and unique?
A: Do you know anybody else doing it? I don’t. So that’s the unique part, at least so far. And what’s so special about it is that the stone needles’ effects are not only powerful, but they’re consistent. I teach people how to practice the Min Jie techniques on themselves and they work on them a little bit every day. That consistency is an important part of what makes the stone needle therapy so powerful and effective.
On top of that, practicing our stone needle therapy teaches you how to stay aware and in touch with what’s going on in your body. This gives you the most important resource that you can have in healing.
Q: What’s that?
A: Time. Time and timing are often the most important factors in healing. It’s much easier to address a problem that is small rather than one that is large. Many if not most illnesses start out small and get larger only if we ignore them. I teach my students methods to discover and address problems while they’re still small, before they become problems.
Q: What would I get out of using stone needle therapy if I learned to do it on myself?
A: I can’t really answer that because I’m not you. But isn’t that exciting? You’re the best authority for what pertains to you- if you pay close and consistent attention to yourself. Min Jie Stone Needle therapy is a systematic method for paying very close attention to what is happening with you. When you combine that practice with developing and integrating your energy and sensitivity with Min Jie Qi Gong, you’ll have a very powerful and sophisticated system to monitor and treat yourself. This gives you a significant edge to stay as healthy as possible for as long as possible.
Q: Isn’t that what we’re doing with biometric technology?
A: (Laughter) I guess we could say that is the stated goal of biometric technology, but that way of doing things is just another part of a trend of progressive disempowerment of our own abilities through ‘helpful’ technology...
Q: What do you mean by that?
A: Tech frequently promises that it is going to liberate us when it’s doing exactly the opposite. Has tech really liberated our creativity like it promised? Has it expanded our powers of imagination or our abilities to think? No. The human world is getting more homogenous, banal and less creative by the hour because we’re allowing technology to do so much for us that our natural powers and abilities are atrophying to the point that we’re becoming helpless without it.
There’s nothing wrong with data. It’s how we use them and how we allow ourselves to be used by them that is the issue. Our fundamentalist culture tends to take things to extremes and incubate true believers. So now we have true believers in data. But data are always incomplete and biased, often in ridiculous ways because of how they are designed. Data are designed. That’s what makes them data.
Data aren’t objective, but we believe they are. That’s a problem. Many people have been conditioned to believe anything that has been quantified. Yet data are the easiest things to manipulate and they are manipulated very often and in ways that should probably make us so uncomfortable that we chuck the whole thing down the toilet immediately before it kills us.
Q: So what’s the real problem here?
A: The problem, and it’s a legitimate problem because we didn’t take care of it earlier, is that people believe what data are telling them rather than their own senses. And a lot of the time we’re not even considering the data themselves, but parroting an evaluation of data from a third party source. If people really understood what a charade this whole house of cards is that we call modern life, I sincerely doubt they would participate in it with such gusto.
Q: Where do you see this most often?
A: I’m in the medical field, so I see it all the time. Physicians rarely see patients anymore, even if the patient visits them face to face in the office or the clinic. Modern physicians look at data. Those data only give the physician thin little strips of information about a test. Often times that test completely misses an important or essential part of the diagnosis which would be revealed within moments if the physician simply saw, listened to and palpated the patient to begin with. They rarely do that anymore. Instead, they create a paper-trail of data and follow a set of protocols that excuse them from legal liability for anything they do.
Patients aren’t getting what they need from doctors on a human level. They’re fed up with it and I agree with them 100 percent. The system needs to change. That’s why one of our many Min Jie school mottos is to ‘rehumanize medicine.’
Q: Understood and agreed. Are there any other practitioners of stone needle therapy?
A: For now, I’m the only person that I know of anywhere in the world who is practicing this medicine. As acupuncture students we learn that stone needle therapy was practiced in ancient times, but the spin with things medicine in the east as well as the west is on how much better we are than our predecessors and aren’t we so wonderful for making all these great discoveries? That’s a very modernist slant that perfectly reflects our current notion of history- that we come from a dark and undeveloped past, we’re getting better and better all the time and we are the crowning glory of all creation.
Other cultures look at history very differently than we do, thinking that prehistory was a time of very advanced development compared to our own. In this view, the human condition has been perpetually degrading since that time and we’re moving forward into a dark and undeveloped future.
When I say that other cultures look at history very differently than we do, it’s probably more accurate to say that other cultures looked at history very differently than we do. Tech is creating a global monoculture from behind a smiley face mask that spouts pleasantries about diversity while it brutally destroys it. So more and more we just have a single culture of commercialism that is spreading and infecting everything it touches.
Anyway, as a result of our modernist bias, I don’t know of any acupuncturists who have investigated stone needle therapy or are practicing it- so far. We learn something about it as an historical fact, and then we plow forward in our education and practice without really exploring what the stone needle therapy can do. And it can do a lot.
But to me the most exciting thing is that people can do it for themselves.
Q: Ok, so the flipside of my other question is how can you just let people use such a sophisticated healing technique on themselves?
A: Same answer, because that’s the best way to practice it. Min Jie students get the healing effects of these techniques plus something more- they learn how to orient themselves to their own healing. They begin to develop their powers of observation and become aware of themselves and the world around them. They learn how to optimize their own healing potential and how to go get help when they really need it. These things hold an incredible value for the people themselves and also for the healthcare systems in their communities that are bogged down to the point of virtual collapse.
Q: Some of the people in our audience say that they know practitioners who do both Gua Sha and Bian needle therapy. How is your stone needle therapy different from those?
A: There are many practitioners who use what is called Gua Sha and Bian needle therapy, but there are some important differences between Gua Sha, Bian needle and Min Jie Stone Needle therapy.
Gua Sha is very widely practiced by many different kinds of practitioners, not just Chinese medicine people. It basically involves stimulating, massaging and moving all of the tissue complexes along and around the main acupuncture channels. This activates the channels and when done well also clears blockages from them. I support Gua Sha and I think if people can find a good practitioner they would do well to go to that practitioner often.
In a sense, Bian stone therapy and Min Jie Stone Needle therapy could also fall under the category of Gua Sha, but again, there are some important differences.
Several different materials are used to work the channels in Gua Sha. Each practitioner develops her/his own preferences for what they use, and certain materials are better than others for specific conditions and applications.
Bian stone therapy is definitely a form of Gua Sha, but the difference is that Bian stone therapy places a very large importance on the material of the Bian stone itself. Bian stones come from the sky. They are meteorites or the products of meteorites. Now in China it is claimed that there is only one genuine and safe location for the Bian stones to come from, and that may or may not be true, I don’t know. The Chinese government has done a surprising amount of research on the official Bian stones to come up with ways to ‘validate’ their therapeutic effects, and by all current and even scientific standards we can say that they do have verifiable healing effects.
I support Bian stone therapy as well, as long as practitioners use authentic Bian stones that have been tested for safe radioactivity levels and the practitioners know what they’re doing, which basically means they need to be good Gua Sha practitioners.
This issue with the Bian stones coming from the sky is an important one in terms of both traditional medicine and modern science. From a traditional viewpoint, the energy of the sky is the energy of heaven. There are very specific times and places to apply the energy of heaven on a therapeutic level. There are also times not to apply it.
From the point of view of modern science, just because something comes from the sky that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to be helpful or useful to us as medicine due to issues of potential toxicity such as radiation, and who knows what else may be in there or radiating from these things because of their extraterrestrial origins that we can’t even imagine.
Plus, how exactly do we measure positive healing radiations from alien star systems? With pendulums?
Bian stones are highly worked and polished and primarily take the form of Gua Sha tools and that’s the way they’re generally used. Bian stone practitioners also heat them and sometimes ring them like little gongs to create therapeutic effects.
Bian stone therapy is mostly Gua Sha done with a magic tool. Regardless of how magic the healing tool is or isn’t, the practitioner still has to have a certain amount of skill to use the tool in the right way. So with Bian stones we’re back to finding a good Gua Sha practitioner.
Now let’s talk about Min Jie Stone Needle therapy and how it’s different from both Gua Sha and Bian stone therapy.
Min Jie Stone Needle therapy comes directly from the Earth. It has a completely different origin and application than the Bian stones, but there are some similarities in how we use them because we all work on and have the same or at least similar bodies. These similarities come from our shared human physiology and the most ingenious and effective ways to work with it.
The Min Jie Stone Needles are a very rare form of obsidian. What makes them rare is the way the Earth forms them into natural needle-like shapes. There’s a unique synergy that happens between the structure and the material in the Min Jie Stone Needles that lends itself to healing, especially self-healing.
I doubt that the effects of the Min Jie Stone Needles will ever be measured. This is because of their neutrality. It’s difficult to measure the absence of something. The stone needles definitely don’t radiate some Spielberg movie-like power. Their effects are quite different from that. And it’s exactly their neutrality that makes them so exciting.
The stone needles have no crystalline structure. They aren’t crystals or anything like crystals. Their lack of crystalline structure is similar to the origin of our material universe. They’re incoherent. Yet they spontaneously attain form. That’s where their beautiful, subtle form and power resides.
The effects that I have noticed working with the stone needles on myself, on many of my patients and the amazing experiences that people have when they use the stone needles on themselves are undeniable. Nobody needs to prove or disprove something to these people that is already in their experience.
In any case, we’re not just talking about the needles here, we’re comparing the different stone therapies. Min Jie Stone Needle therapy is similar to Gua Sha in some respects, but it’s much more granular, detailed and utilizes many of the deep mathematical foundations of acupuncture and Chinese medicine as its basis. It also embodies an extremely wide range of both intensity and subtlety, often at the same time.
But again, to me the most exciting thing is that people can do it for themselves. When you learn how to do Min Jie Stone Needle therapy, you become the healing practitioner that you had always hoped to find one day.
Q: Is Min Jie Stone Needle therapy going to replace or eliminate the need for healers?
A: It isn’t replacing healers, it’s making what healers do more effective. Min Jie Stone Needle therapy enables patients to take much of their healing into their own hands. It evens out those roller coaster curves that happen when we go to a healer, get a boost and then crash again because we don’t have a solid foundation to stabilize the healing that we received.
The combination of Min Jie Stone Needle therapy and Min Jie Qi Gong gives us the ability to stay in a healing field all the time or nearly all the time. It’s a skill that we develop to build, maintain and grow our own healing field and to connect with the larger healing fields of nature as we used to do before we became domesticated into societies. This way, healers have more raw potential to work with when we do work with them, and we have much more of an ability to integrate and incorporate the healings that we receive from them.
Min Jie Stone Needle therapy is true paleomedicine. Paleomedicine is our original medicine, whatever cultural or ethnic background or backgrounds we may come from. Our bodies respond to it in the deepest possible ways both because of what it is and also due to our deep ancestral memories of what it is and has been since the dawn of time. This profound depth allows it to direct, potentiate and empower any other layers of medicine that get added on top of it.
Q: What makes you imagine that Min Jie Stone Needle therapy can heal both personal and planetary issues?
A: Human beings are an essential part of nature. But over the last hundred years or so, we’ve violated and abandoned nature and pretended to separate ourselves from it to the level that we are making ourselves, our societies and the planet itself ill.
The separation that we’ve created between ourselves and nature has confused our biorhythms not only individually, but collectively as well to the point that we’ve literally broken the cycle of the seasons on our planet.
The seasons are the cycle of regeneration for the Earth. Earth itself and all of life is a very sensitive biofeedback system. All of its parts are connected. If even a few individuals in the system begin to realign themselves with nature and their innate organic timing, that influences all of life with its coherency and it initiates a reset of the entire system.
Q: How does that work?
A: Remember, our bodies and all other natural systems want to be well. So when a door to wellness opens even a tiny bit, life wants to rush through it into a better, healthier place. It doesn’t take any coercing or convincing. It just happens.
The feedback system I’m talking about occurs naturally through the process of co-regulation. When someone or something is distressed we can co-regulate with it in the same way that holding a crying baby can calm it down.
Q: It can also work the other way around, the crying baby can put others into a state of anxiety as well.
A: Thank you, that’s exactly my point. We co-regulate with each other. Our society and nearly everybody in it is either in a state of distress or in a profound state of denial in an effort not to experience that stress. The two work together and amplify each other.
We have a society of crying babies dysregulating each other almost everywhere we look. Some of them are crying loudly. Some are angry because nobody’s paying attention to them. Babies aren’t capable of doing much damage to others other than by crying louder and louder. It’s different with adults.
Q: How do the stone needles address that?
A: It’s not exactly the stone needles that do it, it’s the way we use them. It’s not just the stone needles, it’s our daily interaction with them that makes the real magic happen.
There are techniques of how to use the stone needles that realign us with organic timing. Once we learn those techniques and begin to use the stone needles on ourselves every day, it begins to open up a flow of natural energy. That flow immediately begins to clean out the debris, poison and accumulations that have built up over a lifetime of being separated from the innate flow of who we are and what we came here to do. This is the natural flow that society hijacks from us for its own purposes and leaves us with little or nothing in the end.
Q: So do we drop out of society when we use the Min Jie Stone Needles?
A: The stone needles don’t drop us out of society, they drop us in to nature and who we were organically born to be. Society is a part of us. We originally created it to serve our needs. The problem is that society has become its own self-serving entity over time and it has become so coercive that it can sweep us away with its agenda and blot out our own original and authentic reasons for being alive right here right now.
We all have a genuine role to play in society and it’s important to play that out to the extent that it’s healthy for us and the people around us. Fulfilling our authentic role is the key.
Paradoxically, it takes a tremendous amount of work to be natural, authentic and spontaneous because of all of the layers of conditioning that society has placed on us. That’s where the Min Jie work comes in. We have methods that streamline the process of getting ourselves back and reclaiming who we are.
The Min Jie Stone Needles and Min Jie Qi Gong are the most fundamental and elegant ways that I know of to make the transition back to our natural flow. When we do the Min Jie practices deeply and consistently enough, we reset our relationship to ourselves, the people and other creatures around us, our communities and the world. That shift creates a ripple in our thread of the fabric of the universe. And the universe responds.
Q: That’s a pretty ambitious goal for such a humble project, especially because you only work with a few people at a time.
A: Yes, that’s the way it happens. The first thing people usually ask me when they learn about the Min Jie trainings is can they take them online? The answer is no. The transition we’re after is one of quality and livingness. Those things need to be personal with one to one real human contact.
David Byrne wrote something a few years ago about how he noticed that each technological advance seems to bring us into less direct contact with other human beings. I agree with his evaluation and would pin a certain sense of urgency on it.
There are some things that we can do online and there are other things we can’t. That may seem obvious to many of us now, but in a few years or less it won’t be so obvious because so many of us will be too deeply conditioned and withdrawn into our personal silos of neurologically engineered addictions. That’s all we’ll know. We’ll call it normal because that’s what ‘everybody’ will be doing.
But ‘everybody’ can be wrong.
The real issue here is that there are many significant dimensions of human experience that we can’t have online. But tech culture doesn’t value or validate those experiences unless they come through highly monetized digital filters. If we don’t save ourselves from this trend of dehumanization nobody else will.
Many aspects of being human are precious and they’re going extinct. They may go completely extinct in the next generation because of the way we indoctrinate our children so deeply into tech culture with the belief that it’s perfect and wonderful. But we’re actually passing along our addictions to our children in the same way that other abuses get passed down from generation to generation.
Q: That’s incredibly dark. What’s your solution?
A: I’ve been very fortunate that fate has placed me under the tutelage of some of the great and final old world masters- people who were and those who are still alive are -superheroes by pretty much anybody’s definition. I was able to see and experience a bit of the magic of the old worlds of China, Mexico, the Philippines and India through my ongoing contact with these masters and the systems they taught me.
I also had the discipline to practice what I learned from them at every opportunity. This is what it takes to embody their teachings and that’s one big reason why the old world and its magic are disappearing: people lack the discipline and integrity to continue the practices.
There are very few people now who are willing to live in the way that it takes to keep those old world traditions alive. Yet this is the way it has always been. These things are secret. They’re sacred. They’re guarded by a very few. This isn’t a snobbish thing, it’s kind of the opposite of that. It’s humble and non-glamorous. It’s very safe to say that these practices require going off in a completely different direction than anything that our society is chasing right now.
When we lose our discipline and our contact with wise elders we lose our power. We lose the most precious seeds of excellence that we were born with because too much of our time and attention gets robbed by society’s buffoonery. Life becomes empty and meaningless outside of feeding our social addictions. And life truly is empty and meaningless at that level because we never get to do what we came here to do in the first place. So yes, the point of life and existence really does vanish if we go down that track.
But you know, none of this needs to be esoteric. There are so many rich dimensions of life and experience that don’t have anything to do with magic and superpowers at all. They’re just human and wonderful. Basic things like having friendships and other non-transactional relationships. There is life beyond commercialism, or at least there used to be. I know there is for me and the people I’m close with.
If the Min Jie Foundations courses don’t change the course of history, that’s ok. We will have changed the course of our own history and our relationships with each other and human history. That’s sufficient.
Dodge Magazine of Manila is an analog network of artists, philanthropists, indigenists, inventors and engineers whose origins, orientations and intentions remain a mystery.
Questions Answered About the Min Jie Foundations Workshops
