I’ve experienced the “other self” a number of times. Sometimes when I do qigong, for example, the contact with vital energy can be a doorway to heightened awareness. Most often when I do sitting meditation, and my thoughts fade away, leaving bare perception of something strange and foreign yet whole and close and familiar. Usually these are times set apart from the activity of the day. Then I get on with my day.

In the past, I would walk meditatively where I could — in the woods, or even in a parking lot — and tune in to the surroundings with my subtle senses, to a degree that the passing of a car felt magical, somehow; destined. That kind of meditation put me more in tune with the ordinary world in a magical way.

But I don’t do much of that active meditation anymore. It’s not that the other-self is absent. It’s just that somehow life has gotten so busy, so crazy with mundane detail, or so filled with little fires to put out, that it almost doesn’t seem worth the break in mental routine to step outside of the realm of ordinary human thought to contact that otherness.

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The second-year students have just started their very first semester treating patients in the clinic, and it’s kind of interesting to watch. They move more slowly and deliberately than the third-year students (who by now are self-assured and ready to get the hell out of here in August), they take a while to come up with a diagnosis and a treatment plan, they spend a long time figuring out what herbs to prescribe. I can easily see myself in their shoes.

Sometimes it’s very informative to observe an experienced practitioner treat patients: On Thursday, Kathleen, a longtime practitioner, had a patient who she’d been seeing for a number of years and had a strange pain disorder that Western doctors couldn’t treat and even Kathleen had a hard time figuring out. It was mystifying. But sometimes watching acupuncturists who’ve been doing it ten-plus years is tiring, I just never know exactly what’s going on because they’ve been doing it so long that they can skip steps and jump to conclusions.

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The third semester of school has started, and it’s just dawning on me how much stress it will be to be in school for three-plus years straight without a break longer than two weeks. While my physical energy has improved as a result of qigong and acupuncture treatments, it is still nowhere near the exuberance I’d like it to be.

Coming back to school was like diving into a cold swimming pool: It was quite a big shock that first week, certainly not unexpected, but shocking nonetheless. But it’s the third week now, and I’ve started to get attuned to the rhythm once again.

We have started our class on pulse diagnosis, which is the first of five classes devoted exclusively to learning a very intricate and detailed system of pulse diagnosis that is supposed to be able to discern a tremendous amount of information about a person’s physical, mental, and emotional health. (See the quote toward the end of this post for more details.) I’m fascinated and excited about it, as this is the main reason I was interested in Chinese medicine: The ability to perceive subtle details using the senses, and transform those details into a deep understanding of health of body, mind, and soul. This class is the first step in what I hope will be a long and fruitful journey.

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