The flood of summer blessings
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Hey everyone,
I am basking in the resplendent blessings of the summer season. My thesis is completed, defended and turned in. 95% of my work is done for graduation (paperwork and the like). I passed all three of my board exams for licensure (yay!) My family is coming into town on Friday! I’m currently neck deep in a beautiful business course with Mark at the Heart of Business about money and one’s relationship to it. I’m positively exploding with ideas, inspiration and energy – so excited to move into this next phase.
I expect that several things will happen over the coming months concerning the blog. I thought I would provide some forewarning. Also : if anyone notices anything strange with the blog today, tomorrow or the next day – please email me (click on “About Eric Grey” along the top of the page, you will find my contact information there). I actually just accidentally deleted part of my database and the whole blog disappeared! I think I restored everything correctly, but there may be weirdnesses going on. Let me know.
So – the times they are a’changing
- New theme and general design of the site
- Integration of bits and pieces relating to social media, favorite websites, new writers and more
- New content schedule and regularly updated content
- Increased integration of audio, video and images
- Offering of free resources for students and new practitioners
- The integration of a Deepest Health forum
- Possible changes in advertising viewable on the site
- Increased opportunities for interaction
It’s going to take me some time to recover from these last grueling weeks, and I am taking the second week of July off to wander on the beach with my family and attend the Oregon Country Fair… but, I’m going to start working hard and getting back to one of my favorite things – interacting with people who are passionate about Chinese medicine from all over the planet (that’s you all!)
Thanks for your ongoing support and patience, everybody!
Eric
Where I can see light at the end of the tunnel : Chinese medicine senioritis
Now, if you know anything about Google search and “long tail” search results, you’ll know that the title of this blog post is going to get me some very interesting visitors. That being said, I want to give a shout out to all of YOU, my stalwart readers who have stuck with me through ups and downs, through thick and thin, through Yin and Yang, through boom and bust. I know, I know, the content has been slow in coming. You miss me, and I miss you! But, the user base has actually GROWN and that is very heartening. People want to hear more!
I have just about four weeks left of school at NCNM. Two of those weeks are substantial (one more board exam, my thesis defense, a couple of projects) and two are going to be really tough to sit through. :) We have lots of celebrations coming up, lots of weird little requirements to fulfill, paperwork to shuffle, etc…
I finished my thesis! Yes! I plan to release parts of it on the blog over the coming month. It’s not a bad little document, but I really see it as a launching pad for future work. I suppose that was the intent. I’ve also taken and passed two boards (foundations and biomedicine) and am well on my way to being totally comfortable with the third one required for licensure (acupuncture). I’ll be taking the herbal board sometime in the Fall.
Lots and lots and lots has been going on. I’ve opened a clinic with my partner, Amanda, and Brandt Stickley. There’s just so much to talk about there, I can’t even understand how I’m not blogging all the time. Think : new models for healthcare, the ins and outs of legal/financial arrangements, building a medicinary, business planning, so on and so forth. My love for and obsession with Shanghan Lun formulas has expanded by eight million since I’ve been in clinic, which is another treasure trove for blog posts. I’ve learned a lot about how best to learn this medicine from a “learning technology” standpoint – yet another womb for countless blog posts. I mean, seriously, folks – I have plenty to blog about. Just NO TIME. This changes in a couple of weeks.
So, get your RSS readers (or email inboxes, or whatever) ready!
All of that being said, I have an exciting event to announce…
This Saturday – May 30 – on the NCNM Campus Craig Mitchell from Seattle Institute of Oriental Medicine (SIOM) is coming to speak from 9am-5pm! This event is free and open to the public and will be held in Room 322 on the Ross Island Campus. The NCNM Student Government Association is sponsoring this event – one of the last in a great series that featured Patch Adams and Mark Silver, among others.
View NCNM Main Campus : 049 SW Porter, Portland, OR in a Google map
Craig will be holding forth on the topic of the Qi dynamic, Shanghan Lun formulas, and the development of understanding of those formulas through time. We’ll be working through the translation of some text and generally having a wonderful time. Craig is an eminent scholar in our field and we’re really, really lucky to have him come down for this event. If you’re interested and need more details – please contact me! Flyer below.
Eric
Mining for gold : Best of Deepest Health
Hey folks,
As I’m winding down on this crazy educational journey, I find myself nostalgic for those days of olde. Back when I wrote posts with abandon. Anyway, some pretty good discussions went on during some of those posts, and they can be hard to find in the archives. I thought I would highlight some of the best here – for your weekend enjoyment. One, the first listed, has a very recent discussion that has stirred up a lot of discussion among a few key folks at school – I expect it to blossom into a much larger conversation featuring several posts, at some point in the future.
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- The differences between Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and Classical Chinese Medicine (CCM) : this post was one of those things I wrote on the spur of the moment because I realized that not everyone was using the same terminology that I was using. There are a lot of things I would do differently in that post, mostly make it longer and explain myself more clearly. However, the discussion in the comments is the real gold. Check it out.
- 7 Keys to a balanced vegan diet in line with Chinese Medicine philosophy : again, this was something I wrote on a whim. That seems to be what the readers like. This is the highest ranking article in Google for “vegan chinese medicine” and has prompted a number of fascinating conversations. Soon, I will publish a conversation between myself and an experienced practitioner about being vegan and prescribing Chinese herbs. Look for it.
- Reading widely to learn Chinese Medicine : This article got a lot of attention and I received more personal email about it than any other post I’ve written. This is one of a rare class, a piece of writing that I look back at and find inspiration in even though I wrote it.
- The Watershed posts : Although these posts didn’t receive much attention, they are among the closest to my heart. I was truly engaged when writing all of them, and the ideas I express are going to be the heart of my practice for many years to come. You can read about “What is a Watershed,” “The nuts and bolts of the Chinese Medicine Awareness experiment,” and “Entering the Flow.”
- There are a lot of posts on Deepest Health about cosmology and symbolism. While I could never speak as eloquently and practically on the topic as Heiner Fruehauf, people have found some of my posts on the subject to be useful basic introductions. See “7 Keys to understanding the Classical Chinese Medicine concept of organs,” and the popular “Chinese Medical Symbolism: the Organ Clock.”
One day, in the not too distant future, I’ll be cranking out the content like I once did. I’m really, really looking forward to that day. For now, you can expect to hear from me this weekend about how I did in working through the first week of my 12 weeks of power.
Thanks everyone,
Eric
Migration of Natural Medicine Business Success Blog
Hey folks,
For a short time, I was running another blog called Natural Medicine Business Success – but I found that compartmentalizing my life like that just didn’t work. Someday perhaps I’ll have more time to run a whole separate project. But, now, it doesn’t feel right. So, today, I migrated all of those posts to Deepest Health. They’re melded with the other posts, so I wanted to highlight a few here. Most of them can be found by searching through the “Business” or “Business Planning” tags.
The Power of Networking in Natural Medicine (by Amanda Barp, LMT)
I’m an Acupuncturist, Not a business Person! (By Bonnie Koenig) 1/3 in a series
Where do you find help getting started with your Natural Medicine practice (BK) 3/3 in that series
Let me know if you find any problems with the articles (broken links and so on) there are bound to be some glitches in the import process.
Thanks!
AAAOM student organization scholarship and reminder of forum discussion opportunity
Hey everyone,
Just two quick items of interest:
1. The AAAOM student organization has just announced a Chinese medicine scholarship opportunity. It appears that this scholarship is intending not just to help some lucky students, but also to continue to cultivate a culture of scholarship. They say,
“A designated exhibition area at the 2009 AAAOM Conference Student Caucus in Sacramento will host this year’s competition entries in the form of table-top and poster presentations. From the entries, three scholarships of $250 each will be awarded in two exhibition categories: Scholarly Projects and Chapter Projects.”
Awesome!
2. A very enthusiastic and skilled student at my school, National College of Natural Medicine, has put together a great natural medicine forum online. I’ve talked about it before, but I really want to encourage folks to sign up. It has a section for Chinese medicine students and practitioners to talk. I thought it might be a good place for some of the discussions we have here on Deepest Health to continue in an easy to follow format. Come join the discussion!
Enjoy your New Year celebration!
Eric
What am I up to?
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Subscribe to Deepest Health
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Updates from my personal blog (Ericgrey.com)- Some lyrics… May 12, 2009
- A bikeride into God May 8, 2009
- Quiet versus moving Qigong practices March 7, 2009
- A new perspective on the healthcare crisis February 26, 2009
