This is an evergreen post, as they say, because when you’re really devoted to learning the ancient art and science of East Asian medicine the learning never ends. Every day, every breath, every patient, every re-read text – all of it is a meditation on the circular learning process at the heart of most education…
Category: Meta & Personal
Three insights governing my work on this site so far
For more than ten years, I’ve been operating as a practitioner of classical Chinese medicine. During that time, I’ve built up five clinic locations, closed three, taught for ten years at National University of Natural Medicine and started and stopped dozens of projects revolving around the professions of Chinese herbalism and acupuncture. I’ve read, studies and…
Renewal
The truth is I’m a little obsessed with the Gallbladder. Not in the intensely intellectually curious way – I’m not learning the intricacies of biomedical anatomy or thumbing through studies about the etymological analysis of the Chinese character dan 膽. This is visceral, personal. This is lived experience. Since I started school in Chinese medicine…
The importance of lineage in [Chinese] medicine
I set the word “Chinese” apart with brackets because I believe lineage is important in all medicine – indeed in all human endeavor. Unfortunately, lately the word has become something of a curse, something looked down upon as being too subjectively oriented, too privileged, too hierarchical. Of course, there are those, too, who put it…
In which I am reminded again that Chinese medicine theory can save my life
I’ve been reading a couple of interesting books. One, which I’ve read a couple of times before, is called The Diamond Cutter, which elaborates a Buddhist view on business and life management. I’m not done with it, yet, but it is subtly shifting my consciousness in a new direction. Actually, it is more accurate to…
Making the medicine our own
I teach about business to Chinese medicine students at NUNM. As is typical, I’m learning more from them than they likely learn from me. One of the things that continually inspires me about these students is the way they feel utterly free from the trappings and expectations of the received wisdom in the business world….
Mastery, striving for a goal, and the four S words
All my life, I have been trying to do my best at whatever I am doing. I am very interested in the way we humans learn, how we retain and recall information, and how we reach great heights in performance. In some way, that’s why Chinese Medicine Central exists. Certainly, it’s why all the posts…