As a first-year student, I was so blown away by everything I was learning in school for Chinese Medicine, I couldn’t keep my mind straight. I was being rearranged, challenged on every level. I really couldn’t have blogged about the questions I was having if I tried. During my second year, things were less windswept but busier – that was my strongest blogging year during my tenure at NCNM. My third and fourth years were *much* busier in terms of work at school, work outside of school – the blogging clip declined. Also, while I was more able to formulate relevant questions, I was less likely to actually pose them. Why? Part bravado, part fear, part exhaustion.
Bravado might be the wrong word, let me explain. Learning something new, especially something as new as Chinese medicine was to me, is always a meandering path of discovery. You don’t know who to listen to, you don’t know how to even find the right information – it’s all just surprise after surprise. As you progress, things come into focus a bit. In a field as vast as Chinese medicine, even a little focus feels like an incredible accomplishment. However, if you’re a humble person (or even just a marginally intelligent person) you realize that this little bit of focus is a REAL little bit and you’ve got several lifetimes of work to do.
But imagine… you’re a second or third year student, a year or two to go. You’ve invested lots of time, energy and money into learning a profession. You’re looking to make a career of the thing. At some point you realize that you’re basically just going to escape school with enough knowledge to avoid killing people. This is scary, because you want to graduate with enough knowledge to be as good as your teachers. At least close, anyway.
You have a couple of choices at this point. First, you can act like you know more than you know. Many people take this approach. Ill advised. Second, you can become despondent and drop out. Equally ill advised. Third, you can become despondent and a pain in the butt to the school administration, your fellow students and the profession in general. Please don’t do that. Finally, you can do some version of what I’ve done – hunker down and get to learning.
The problem with how I’ve done the latter is that I stopped being vocal. I stopped asking questions, even when I had them. It’s sort of like this – as soon as I think of a question, I see how it is attached to a million other questions and I don’t even know where to begin. So, I shut my trap. This is NOT GOOD FOR BLOGGING. It’s only when I had a particularly crystal clear question that I was able to pull something together for a post. Those posts tended to generate a lot of discussion, but they were few and far between.
What I want more than anything is for Deepest Health to grow into a vibrant community for students and practitioners of Classically oriented Chinese medicine. A place where we can come together, discuss issues, get to know one another and get busy becoming the future of the medical profession. A place where we can exchange news, resources, advice and anecdotes. A place for the genesis of new ideas that will help our patients. I’ve been working the last couple of weeks to figure out how to make this vision a reality. If you read the last 30 or so posts on DH, you might see that I’ve actually been working on this for a couple of years! :D
In service of all of this, in service of the work I’m doing to write a book, in service of the work I’m doing to be a good teacher to my fine students at NCNM – I am going to try something. Each month, I will search my soul to find a topic that is most standing out to me and will focus on that for the majority of my posting during that month. I hope that this will help us, as a community, to engage more deeply with a topic while also keeping me focused and motivated to blog. In some ways, it’s an extension and development from the Year of Sagely Living and other “grand projects” that have been discussed here. In other ways, it’s just a representation of my own development as a scholar and practitioner. It seems like an interesting possibility. The timeframe may contract or expand, depending. The topic may be vast (reading Classical Chinese) or very narrow (Mahuang in Shanghan Lun formulas) – I will try to trend a little closer to the former. We’ll just see how it goes.
We’re a little far into January, but I have to start somewhere. This month is all about flavor, wei 味.
I’ll post some introductory thoughts shortly. Thanks, as always, for your support.
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Tags: Blogging, Chinese herbs, Year of Sagely Living, herbal formulas
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey Eric,
As second semester student, your descriptions of the beginning of the journey resonates quite a bit, and I too find myself often trying to figure out how to pose a question, or start sharing some newly acquired knowledge or understanding without providing tons and tons of background info. It’s always encouraging to hear about other’s and their progress down a path, so I appreciate that.
I’m also looking forward to reading and learning more from your blog, so keep it flowing, and if there’s any way I can help, let me know!
Hey Eric,
Your post brings up a frustration I have had for a while. There seems to be a real contradiction in ‘learning’ Chinese medicine. I notice a real reluctance at time by my profs to answer some questions and they do that really annoying sort of asking you a question back thingy all the time or just let it hang. Is this some sort of conspiracy against straightforward answers or is it the inherent complexity of the whole system that pretty much demands that you kinda figure it out yourself? I have torn my hair out at times because my idea of learning is at odds with actually ‘getting it’ at a deeper level. A fellow acupuncturist here told me she couldn’t answer observing students questions as it took her years to understand these things and so there is no answer except to say keep practicing and observing… The whole cliche of the more you know the more you know how little you know seems apt… and there is just so much to get your head around that it just seems impossible at times and we don’t even get into herbs!
Hi, I have spent many years in China. An old lady cured my excema when no one else could. That was ages ago though, and it was pure luck I met that old lady, who volunteered only on Saturdays at a small clinic. Over the years I did try to find a really good Traditional Chinese Doctor many times but what I found were charlatans, and frauds. If it hadn’t been for that old lady, I would have been left thinking that CTM is just a scam.
Then recently I threw my back out really badly. I could barely move and was in extreme pain. I met this guy who renewed my faith. I endured 2 hours of this guy’s brutal torture and I was good as new! I mean like miraculous recovery, no kidding around. He also knew what the cause of the problem was and over the next two weeks addressed that as well, which is a whole other story but suffice it to say that not only is my back all better, but I feel about 15 years younger now too.
Thing is, that guy didn’t have a degree. He must have been about 70 years old. He never went to school. As a youth he traveled around china with a traveling physician who had been kicked out of a monastery. He is missing two fingers on one hand, one on the other, giant scars all over his arms and chest that look like they were likely caused by a sword. It even looks like he has a couple old bullet wounds. He could tell you some stories man. He is quite a character. He is down to earth and he knows what the real deal is.
It is something that you can never learn in a classroom. Not because they can not teach it but because they do not dare (though in this day and age most of them have forgotten or never learned it anyway).
Between that old lady, and this guy I know now, I think I understand something about why most modern CTM practitioners achieve only modest results. Because they went to school and learned from books. They studied as science something which is pure art. Reducing CTM to science strips it of a great deal of power, both in the practitioner’s mind and in the patient’s. Plus the fact that those few teachers who really know the score will never dare to formally teach what it really is.
Not to say that your studies are wasted, or that a formal education is useless. Those few who are truly masters are not easy to find, so one must begin somewhere. I think that anyone really studying in this field though should be aware that there are aspects to the art of healing which are secret and it is forbidden to speak of them. Students must uncover the truth for themselves, and those who can actually do that are few and far between. Though many fail only because they didn’t realize that they were meant to dig so deeply or uncover so much, others because they speak of what they found. So if you are aware of these things your chances should increase greatly. You must think for yourself to find the truth, there is no formula for it.
By the way, I really have been enjoying your blog, it has really gotten me thinking, numerous times.
Hey “graduation stoles” (what’s your real name?),
I think you make some good points – there is a lot of what some people call “art” in Chinese medicine, and maybe less “science.” But, I really think those words are misused in this case. Since when does a particular form of science become science? Science is merely the persistent and focused pursuit of knowledge via systematic application of proven methods – Chinese medicine certainly fits that bill. Likewise, much of what people today think of as “science” has definite artistry. There’s so much of what a person does in a laboratory that cannot be taught by a lecture in a classroom – it takes the hands-on guidance of a mentoring process to make a person’s scientific faculties really come alive.
All of that being said – my schooling most certainly wasn’t wasted. I’ve never been at a school where the most profound teaching didn’t come from outside of the classroom – those interactions with teachers, the ongoing mentoring relationships with those same teachers, the hands-on mentoring guidance of observation and internship shifts at the student clinic… The enshrining of this learning in a paid institutional setting merely makes delivery slightly more efficient and makes the medicine, theoretically, more available to a wider audience.
I don’t believe this medicine should be hidden. I don’t believe there should be secrets. My mentors don’t keep secrets. But you have to know how to ask the right questions, you have to be ready, and you have to watch carefully. Ultimately, it will be your patients that will teach you the truth or falsity of what you learned, whether in an institution or by the side of your mentor in some backwoods region of China.
Eric
Hmm, I replied to you here yesterday. I can’t imagine you deleted it, so I guess I must have shutdown this computer and gone home without actually hitting the submit button. That’s unfortunate because I had spent quite a while typing a very well thought out reply. I don’t have time now to re-think everything I said, oh well..
You asked about my real name, it is Lampica, my friends generally call me Lamp.
Hey Lampica,
Sorry your reply was lost – that’s always a huge bummer. If you get up the heart to do another one, we’ll look forward to reading it.
Eric
I like the way you captured the years you were in school so clearly. You expressed what it is like in the consecutive years with how we get in there and first it is just a crazy hectic blur. The second year we are more focused and experienced and work harder and smarter.
There is amazing healing powers in natural items and foods. I think the comment from the person whose eczema was cured is fantastic. I love to hear of people being healed like that.
I am in my mid 40’s and got a little 2 year degree online and it was a load of hard work! I worked my brain as hard as I worked my body in some jobs. But, I grew tremendously from it and loved the experience. I took a food and nutrition class and was astounded to learn of the healing power of just following a healthy diet. I would love to study the topic of Chinese medicine or even just herbs, it looks fascinating.
Thank you for the blog, I will be back.
Kevin
I think even the classic medicine has a lot of contradictions. Besides, when you are a student, no matter what your field is, you have the sensation that you are lost and you don’t know where to start. Maybe to be good at Chinese Medicine you have to be a Chinese person; you have to start learning since your childhood about the different plants, ways of treatments, theories about the way human body works, and so on. Moreover, you have to have their beliefs because everything is connected with each other. I also believe that Chinese medicine is art more than science.
Good luck!
Thanks for doing this blog. I am studying to become a natural holistic nutritionist and at the same time have been reading a lot of books on various philosophies of food, from raw food to Chinese ideas behind food. These are very often contradictory, and I will be interested to follow your thoughts on various topics. I have recently started videoing my favorite healthy vegan recipes and while I have experimented with a raw food diet in the past, I find myself drawn to many of the Chinese ways. Thanks again!
I stumbled up this blog and it is great, my mother in law is very much into chinese medicine and she recommends to all the time. great article and I will continue to read your blog.
Thanks for those wonderful posts about Chinese medicine. I had been to China and India and I was always intrigued by their medicines which are very effective in many maladies where western medicines fail. Keep up the good work of sharing your experiences with Chinese medicine.