The Teacher of the Healers stood in front of a huge pine tree. It was at least thirty metres high. But in addition to its size, its roots hovered two to three metres above the ground. The pine apparently found this a comfortable position. It hung beautifully vertical, held up by nothing, comfortably in the air. She didn’t think there could be anything wrong with it.
Then the Teacher of Healers touched the huge pine tree with his hand at its roots and gently and effortlessly turned it sideways around its central pivot. The crown of the pine was now at 10 o’clock and the roots were now at 4 o’clock. All of a sudden, the position was anything but comfortable for the jaws. It was a feeling for them like the one we are familiar with when we lay on our backs in gym class and then had to lift our legs off the floor for a few minutes. It got heavier and heavier. Gravity pulled and pulled. And we were not allowed to let go. We were forced to remain in this painful and unnatural position. We shivered and sweated and gritted our teeth. We suffered.
Now you can say that the teacher of healers could have just let the pine hang in the air as before. The pine tree may have been right in thinking that this was an ideal and comfortable position. Hanging like that, two meters above the ground with the roots. But if the pine had been in its natural position, rooted ten meters deep in the ground – nourished and watered by the earth -, not hanging in nothingness, but standing vertically by its own strength: nothing and no one would have been able, with such a light touch of the hand, to bring it into such a desperate and painful position There would have been no pivot point that could have been used for this.
. Since the pine did not want to believe this, the teacher of healers made it feel it himself, how unstable its position was at that moment. And how short from there the way from pleasant to suffering can be, if one prefers to float in the air and does not care about his rootedness.