Creativity, Presence and Attention
With Guest: Michael McMahon
Episode Qi123
Michael McMahon, like many of us, did not initially set out to become a Chinese medicine practitioner. It was more a process of discovery— of a kind of feeling your way in the dark. It was a following something that lead to the next, which in turn opened a new opportunity. Not unlike the threads we follow in clinic that take and our patients to surprising places.
Listen in to this conversation that reminds us there is something quiet and still that helps to inform the “doing” of our work.
- The brilliance of Lynda Berry
- How Michael got in to TCM
- How the Polyvagal Theory can help us to understand our patients
- Framing the patients experience
- Helping patients feel safe
- The perspective of neurobiology
- The neuroceptive system that is always attending to safety
- Understanding and inhabiting our own nervous system
- The importance of Agency
- How is the body experiencing itself?
- Pacing and tempo of treatment
- The Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurology
Michael recommends this interview with Stephen Porges, author of The Polyvagal Theory which he considers to be an essential theory for our work and just understanding being human.
The Wayfinders: Ancient Wisdom and Why it Matters in the Modern World, by Wade Davis. Michael says this book is essential for understanding and becoming conversant with different epistemologies. In the modern west rationalism rules but that is just one way of knowing – and it shouldn’t be dismissed. But, it should be balanced in service of epistemologies rooted in natural processes. Wade Davis is an anthropologist who has an uncanny ability to let the people he is with to speak their stories themselves.
Other recommended reading:
Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology, by Daniel Siegel
Being a Brainwise Therapist, by Bonnie Badenoch
