Last weekend I attended an old friend’s wedding. Like the other weddings I’ve attended in the past few years (including mine), it was a blast. Nothing like the energy of a wedding and a reunion with old friends to shake things out of their normal rut.

A bit of a difference this time, though, one being that I’ve begun to see things differently thanks to what I’m learning in school. I used my friends as guinea pigs, testing my nascent pulse diagnosis skills on them. As I told them, I’ve barely just gotten over finding the different pulse positions and depths correctly, so I couldn’t tell them very much about themselves.

But here’s the thing: I could tell enough to be frightened. I’ve felt the pulses of a few dozen people by now, mostly in the days when I didn’t know anything yet; but I’ve felt enough to begin to sense a few qualities and form an impression of what they mean. So when I felt my friends’ radial arteries, I realized that I could sense something of their personalities, their character, a hint of their essential being, just by that simple touch. That mystery at the core of who each person is became a little bit less foggy.

At my level of learning, that’s as far as it could get. But it scared me, surprisingly enough: This kind of perceptive power is what I was after when I came here, and yet now that I’m awakening to it, I realize that with that power comes responsibility. The ability to glean information from the pulse, or any other diagnostic modality, is an invasion of privacy. In the treatment room, there’s an implicit understanding between patient and practitioner that everyone is there for the patient’s well-being. Yet sitting in a restaurant, feeling the pulses of my friends, the truth of it was that I was taking a glimpse inside them for no better reasons than that I wanted to practice, and perhaps to show off a little the strangeness of Chinese pulse diagnosis. There was no implicit contract between us that I was doing this for their well-being. Everything was dependent on my integrity.

Interestingly enough, I’ve also begun to notice that times when I have a lack of integrity, I feel less. When I have some agenda I’m trying to pursue, even subconsciously, I lose the ability to detect subtle qualities. It’s only when I let go into what is, and open to the person in front of me, that I am able to sink into the pulse and the information it offers.

And even then, I am at a level where I can neither differentiate finer details nor translate subtle sensations into information in a useful theoretical framework.

So, all of this is to say that pulse diagnosis as I am learning it opens up many avenues of questioning, not only in terms of figuring out a person’s health picture, but also moral and ethical issues that touch directly on one’s integrity as a practitioner and as a person.