287 Tradition and Innovation • Mark Petruzzi and Jeffrey Dann
Acupuncture As practitioners of East Asian medicine, we are informed deeply by the ancient medicine, experience and wisdom passed down through generations. The holism woven into the East Asian medicine traditions is especially important in a modern world that often separates the...
286 Qi, Yi and Tensegrity • Stefan Grace
Daoism Our language tells the tale of our evolution and the movement of the mind. It captures the experiences, attitudes, and wisdom of our ancestors and allows us to reflect upon our own. As herbalists and acupuncturists, the language of our medicine allows us to explore...
285 The Work and Perspectives of Dr Bear • David Toone
Acupuncture Treating what you see sounds easy. And it is essential if you want to craft a targeted and effective treatment. It’s those well aimed treatments that hit the mark that conflated with magic. But seeing clearly the underlying dynamic that gives rise to the troubles and...
284 Case Studies and Storytelling a Lens into Medicine and Meaning • Sarah Rivkin
Diagnosis So much of our medicine is conveyed in stories—the ones we live, the ones we tell, and the ones we hear. Storytelling is an innate human impulse. It provides context and meaning, allowing us to share complex ideas and navigate our experience. Stories—of both success...
283 The Spiral Process of Learning • Kristen Lambertin
Practitioner Cultivation & Development Making the leap from the classroom to the clinic is an opportunity to explore a new world—but without a travel guide in the form of teachers and colleagues to help guide you along the way. You’re tasked with the lifetime opportunity of applying and refining your...
282 Five Gentleman of Flavor, Taste & Nature • L Stiteler, B Bernadsky, S Feeney, F Griffo, A Ellis
Herbal Medicine To use herbs within the scope of traditional Chinese medicine, we must first understand the qualities, temperatures, and tastes that dictate how each herb will function. Flavor, Taste and Nature gives us a snapshot of how an herb travels in the body, how it functions...
281 Fun With Marketing • Michelle Grasek
Business & Practice Management Practitioners today navigate a dynamic and ever-evolving world of marketing and communications. There are so many ideas about practice building and how to use technology when it comes to attracting the attention of potential patients, and inviting them through our...
280 Navigating the Passage, Healing as Voyage of Exploration • Heather Becker-Brungard
Bodywork Getting off track is not something uncommon for us. In fact, it’s an everyday part of our human experience. The question is, how do you notice when this happens and then how do you reorient? More importantly, how do you navigate when in unfamiliar territory? And...
279 Not What I Thought, An Investigation of Adverse Reactions • Karina Smith
Practitioner Cultivation & Development The principles behind our medicine are relatively simple. The idea is to restore balance to a body that is in disharmony. To detect the patterns and ripples in the system. To facilitate the unimpeded flow of qi as a river does. Yet applying these theories in the...
278 Digging the Earthly Branches • Deborah Woolf
Cosmology Heaven and Earth, the creative and the created, micro and macrocosm. All ways of saying there is a reality we inhabit, and beyond that a lot of mystery. And mystery is something us humans have, at best, an ambivalent relationship with. We seek to find some sense of...
277 The Heart in the Clinic • Josephine Spilka
Practitioner Cultivation & Development Classical Chinese medicine recognizes the Heart (心 Xin) as a central organ to our being. It’s seen as holding the sovereign position as the emperor of the kingdom (i.e., the body). The Heart is where the Shen (神), the spirit, resides. It’s what gives us discernment...
276 Interoceptive Awareness • Lisa Taylor-Swanson, Nick Lowe & Elizabeth Osgood-Campbell
Methods Tuning in is a cultivated skill that’s in many East Asian Medicine practitioner’s toolbox. We learn early on to bring our intention, attention, and awareness to the clinic encounter. To pick up subtle movement and cues on the diagnostic table. But our...
275 If You’re Falling, Dive— Trauma, Heartbreak and Possiblities • Randal Lyons
Acupuncture No one gets through life without difficulties. We all carry wounds and the consequences of the meanings we’ve made in the moments of heartbreak, fear and confusion. In this second conversation with Randle Lyons we discuss the dark forest of transformation. How our...274 Panel on Wei Qi, Ann Cecil-Sterman, Laurie Ayres & Zhongxian Wu
Diagnosis I recently got to thinking about Wei qi, especially as we are moving into the dark of the year in the northern hemisphere, and I realized that I hear discussions about wei qi, and how we should attend to it, or nourish it. Often enough, perhaps too often, we equate...
273 Intention, Awareness and The Power of Restraint • Zoe Brenner
Acupuncture Our job as Chinese Medicine practitioners is not so much to impress our ideas on patients but to cultivate a capacity and restraint to allow them to come back to themselves. Our assessment is meant to determine the patient’s understanding of their disharmony, and...
272 Ishizaka Acupuncture, Attending to the Stillness in the Center of Motion • Kubota Sensei
Acupuncture Many acupuncture traditions share the idea that our troubles stem from a root cause , and treating the root is an essential part of the therapeutic process. Then there is the branch where symptomatic issues present themselves, this is the focus for the patient, and...
271 Cycles, Nodes and the Spaces in the Seasons • Sheri Lee
Cosmology Life is built on rhythms, the natural world is constantly in a state of transformation. A cyclical flow of growth and decline—manifested in the turning of the seasons, waxing and waning of the moon, and the oscillation of day and night. The intertwined correspondences...
270 Authentic Movement and the Wisdom of the Body • Margot Rossi
Exercise & Movement Movement is life. Movement is part of how our body communicates with itself and senses itself in the outside world. Proper and ease filled movement, be it with our emotions, the circulation of our blood, the way our joints through their range movement, and how we can...