393 Year of the Snake: Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form • Gregory Done
It’s the subtler forces—those quietly felt but not perceived—that create the background that frames our days with a tone that is both transparent and influential. The shifting energies of a new year are a slack tide of opportunity to pause and reflect. To consider directions for where to invest our life energy in the coming year.
Listen into this discussion as we explore the symbolism of the wood snake, the balance between action and stillness, the transformative power of introspection, and how understanding the year’s energy can inform personal and collective growth.
Gregory’s reflections remind us of the profound lessons embedded in the natural cycles of life. It’s a timely conversation about embracing quietude, finding clarity, and aligning with the unique, and perhaps unsettling capacity to see in the emptiness of mind and social agreements in the coming year.
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130 Considering Covid-19, Methods and Safety • Craig Mitchell
The coronavirus has not only found its way into our bloodstream and mucus membranes, it’s worked its way into our social fabric, economic relations and political disagreements. In this age of global electronic connection news of this new virus...
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129 Currents, Culture and Conversation Through Time • Volker Scheid
Many of us like to think we are connected with doctors throughout time, that we practice the same medicine in a continuous flow from the days of Huang Di down to this modern moment. It’s a lovely narrative. One that our patients often think about...
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128 Saam Acupuncture, the Scholar Tradition • Andreas Bruch
The Saam tradition traces its roots back four hundred years to a monk who as part of his meditative practice received some insight into medicine that allowed him see and work simultaneously with the five phases and six conformations. But monks are...
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127 Tracking the Void, Non-Linear Methods of Research • Lisa Taylor-Swanson
Humans have an innate drive to make sense of the world. To understand how things work and see if we can reliability influence the outcome on something. To find a way to get more of what we want, or less of what we dislike. When you think about it,...
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126 Special Episode- Treating the Coronavirus With Chinese Medicine • Jin Zhao
The corona virus that emerged in Wu Han earlier in this year has disrupted travel and business and has been a deep cause of concern as doctors throughout the world, and especially in China, strive to understand the nature of this pathogen. Conventional medicine brings it’s modern research techniques to this inquiry. While those of us in the Chinese medicine world seek to understand this modern epidemic disease through the lens and prisms of Chinese medicine.
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125 Mirror of the Interior- Chinese Medicine Dermatology • Olivia Hsu Friedman
It’s easy to think of our skin as the outside wrapper, but really its a mirror of the internal environment. And while topical treatment of skin has it use, it’s learning to adjust that inner milieu that over time makes for the biggest changes with...
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124 Attending to the Field of Healing • Esther Platner
There is something about connection that goes beyond words. There is a way of engaging with those who seek our help that goes beyond the ten questions. Connection is not something we do, it’s a way we are.
In this conversation with long time practitioner Esther Platner we explore the spaces that don’t quite fit into words. Tread into territories without maps. And sit for a bit with the curiosities and surprise that arise in clinic when we attend with an open awareness.
Beyond our theory, and beyond understanding there is a way we can meet our patients with a wide-open sense of inquiry that asks us to bring everything we have, and leave behind our preconceptions. Chinese medicine has its scholarly tradition, but we don’t so often hear from the poetic.
Here’s your opportunity.
123 Creativity, Presence and Attention • Michael McMahon
The practice of medicine is not completely about what we do, it’s also informed by how we are. How our presence, perception and allowing ourselves to abide in that space between knowing, sensing and being can invite a quiet, non-rational part of ourselves into the clinical encounter.
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.
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122 CBD, Neurology and the Inspiration That Comes From Unexpected Challenges • Chloe Weber
The changes that come from an unexpected direction tend to be the ones that transform our lives the most. Chloe Weber did not plan on becoming an expert in neurology. She was on the path of providing herbs and acupuncture to low income populations. But when her son’s rare neurological condition invited her to move in a different direction, she took that invitation.
Listen in to this conversation on neurology, CBD, Chinese herbs and how a business can be built because it turns out that in solving your own problems, you can help a lot of other people solve theirs as well.
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121 A Neurological View of Acupuncture Points • Poney Chiang
Just how do you locate an acupuncture point? Are you looking for bony protrusions, a palpable change on the skin, or a rule based measurement from a book? Locating acupuncture points is something every practitioner needs to do, and do well. And...
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120 The Archetypes of Confucius and Carl Jung • Pia Giammasi
Archetypes are deep influences that all humans share. They give us a glimpse into the complicated landscape of our psyche. They can live in the light or influence from the dark. Carl Jung had a lot to say about our intrapsychic world, how these influences are shared across culture and time, and how they manifest in personal and societal behavior. And while they are separated by the distance of culture and thousands of years Confucius had a lot to say that rhymes with the Jungian ideas on Being, Doing, Thinking and Feeling
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119 The Power of Connection- Business as an Aspect of Community • Brigitte Linder
An often overlooked aspect of running our own business is that it gives us a potent way of connecting with others and serving a community. Sure there are additional responsibilities that come with this kind of an opportunity. But the freedom it can give us, and the ways it will challenge us with personal growth, opens up experiences and opportunities we’d otherwise not have.
Listen into this conversation on how doing business asks each of us to develop untapped potential in ourselves, connect us with a larger community and give us the opportunity to live a life where we get to choose our own responsibilities.
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Practical Cosmology • Deborah Woolf
How does acupuncture work?
We hear this question all the time. From our patients, from someone we just met at a neighborhood BBQ, from out parents, and if we are honest— ourselves.
The ancient Chinese mind that conjured up acupuncture did not consider nerve pathways, endocrinological response or brain chemistry.
The ancient Chinese mind looked out into nature and used that reflection to dream into the body. They considered the natural tides of expansion and contraction. The formed and the unformed, and how physical form arises from an unseen patterning that leaves its trace, like wind on deserts sands.
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118 Daoism in the Modern World • Josh Paynter
Daoism and Daoist thought is something that many acupuncturists have been exposed to. It might have been part of what launched our interest in studying medicine. And perhaps you’ve had the experience of reading books like the Dao De Jing and come away more with a sense of confusion than clarity. It’s challenging for us as modern westerners to grasp the meaning of writings that have come to us from across the expanse of time, culture and language.
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117 Getting Your Finances Right- What the Entrepreneurial Acupuncturist Needs to Know • Beverly Hacker
Money, for many, is the pebble in our shoe that irrates enough to annoy, but not enough for us to make a fundemental change. And if our accounting systems mirror our confusion or conflict around finances, then that adds more one more thing that we’d prefer not to think too much that will undoubtly circle back and be a source of suffering.
A good accounting system, and the basic understanding of the principles involved can save us a lot of trouble. And it’s not that difficult. If you can learn Chinese medicine, you can certainly grasp the fundamental accounting principles that will help you to better understand the financial health of your practice.
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116 Qi Anatomy • Brenda Hood
The way we make sense of structure helps us to understand function. Drawing lines and divisions helps us to understand parts. But a keen understanding of the parts does not always help us to see the whole of the functioning of those parts. The...
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115 Beyond The Visible – Electromagnetic Radiation and Health • Brandon LaGreca
Chinese medicine reminds us that we are one part of a complex, interdependent and ever evolving ecosystem. That we both influence and are influenced by the world. Our toolmaking ability has wrought remarkable changes on the world, and on ourselves.
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114 Wisdom Guild: Listening to Our Practice • Njemile Carol Jones, Laura Christensen, Esther Platner
What gets us started is not what sustains us over the long haul. The energy of beginning is essential at the start of any new endeavor. But what got us to here, will not get us to there.
It’s easy to think that we are broken because what brought us success does not help us in managing success. Nor does it help us to move through the stages of development as we age and face the challenges slowing our practice down, passing it along or letting go of it altogether.
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113 Ripples in the Flow: Pulses, Nanjing and the Questioning Mind • Z'ev Rosenberg
The classics are helpful not just because they contain pointers to how medicine works. They are helpful because of the discussions they have generated amongst practitioners over the twin distances of time and space. They are a kind of thread that connects us with the doctors of the past who have gone to this well for the wisdom within.
Listen in to this conversation on the pulse as seen through the perspective of the Classic of Difficulties, how the principle of 理 (coherence) shows up in the work we do, issues of free will and that troublesome question of what constitutes a cure.
112 Acupuncture in the Integrative Hospice • Robyn Curtis
Most of us spend our days treating illness and working to bring out patients into a great state of health and wellbeing. But there are moments toward the end of life when the greatest state of health and wellbeing means helping someone to more gently leave this world.
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