A fascinating experience with Japanese acupuncture:

On Friday I ate a pear that a fellow student offered me. I don’t know why I thought it was okay, as I usually avoid anything that has starches or sugar, even natural sugars, due to my hypoglycemia. Quite soon afterward, I started feeling woozy and fatigued. Since I knew I still had a whole afternoon of classes to get through, not to mention a very busy weekend, I became very concerned. I didn’t know what I would do, I just knew I felt like shit.

Just on a whim, I decided to try this non-insertion acupuncture stuff. Toyohari focuses much more on sensitivity to qi, which is right up my alley; but a hard-science part of me is still skeptical of it. But in a pinch, I thought, why not give a shot? So I got out a 40-gauge silver needle and did a tonification technique on my right foot, at Spleen 3.

I felt qi rising up to my head, giving me a sense of “filling” it with energy. Immediately I felt lighter, my head cleared up, and even though I was still tired, I felt much more stable. I was stunned, and just sat there in amazement at the efficacy of one needle that didn’t even pierce the skin.

Good stuff.

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As I enter my final year of acupuncture school, a focus on practical success becomes more and more germane. However, I find that I haven’t moved very far from where I was when I wrote about this very topic last year. For the most part, school, relationships, and spiritual practice have consumed my attention. But it really is time to get down to business now.

Mental orientation is the starting point. I’ve been reviewing a few “success” books, some of which have interesting approaches that I can resonate with, such as Frank Channing Haddock’s books. Many of them write about generating a “mood of success.” Especially with the slightly psychic experiences that I’ve been having lately, I can directly experience the effects and qualities of particular thoughts, emotions, and moods that I hold in myself at any particular time, and so it’s quite evident to me that “positive thinking” and creating a mood of success can have a powerful effect.

But, at this point I still run into the same philosophical wall. I feel that even though I lack the experience, I have the willpower and the internal resources to eventually make a success of myself in this society. My hangup is that I’m not entirely certain I want success.

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I’m getting down to business again. As I’ve written before, one of the major drawbacks of this particular school is its haphazard way of neither supporting the student in recruiting patients nor in recruiting patients themselves. So we are left adrift, forced to develop individual business strategies, to avoid not graduating.

I wrote last semester about a big push I made to get patients, which was quite successful in some ways. Unfortunately, I’m beginning to realize some of the mistakes I made in that success, namely, that for the rest of the semester I was too exhausted to even think about marketing. It wasn’t sustainable, and I’m beginning to reap that thin harvest.

In Concentration: An Approach to Meditation, Ernest Wood writes,

Polarize your entire life — all your actions, your feelings, your thinking — by establishing a permanent mood towards success in some line of human endeavor …

Polarization of your lifework means that you will have a purpose in life — I do not say a goal, for there is danger in that. One makes a special and often exhausting effort to that end, reaches it and has not the resilience left to go further, so may then linger at that roadside goal for a very long time. That is perhaps one reason why in the Bhagavad Gita the aspiring Arjuna is told that his business is with the action only, never with the result of action. To dwell upon the result is to glorify something still very fleeting, or even to block the way to a higher attainment by aiming too low. In this business of living it is function we have to choose, and perfect action is possible within that function every living moment. If I am planting a tree I must give myself fully to the planting, with only a background thought to the apples or oranges I shall get from the tree a few years hence. Dwelling in thought upon that result will spoil in some measure, perhaps in great measure, my work and my pleasure of planting and the great benefit I can have from that, and even my reverence for work itself and the spiritual values of daily life.

Thus, what is required from the outset is to cultivate a mood of success, which results from careful, consistent, and magnetic thinking that focuses on process rather than goal. This is a wholly sound approach, yet very difficult when considering my school environment which is very inflexible and even occasionally hostile to students. I think, though, that in order to be sustainable as an eventual business owner, this is a skill I might as well get accustomed to now, even if for the short term it leads to problems with recruiting patients.

So I’ll start thinking myself into a successful entrepreneur, one small step at a time.

Walked by the student lounge this afternoon, during a break. Same as usual, some classmates in there, talking. Except … a little voice in me nagged that something was off. Couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I thought, what the hell, I’ll go back and check it out.

It turned out that one of my classmates had just been crying, just a little bit, not that much, but enough for her nose to be red and for everyone else to be paying full attention to her. Nothing too traumatic, just a little stress relief. I didn’t feel the need to stay long.

It was interesting to me, though, because of the feeling. There was a sort of mild electrical anticipation that marked the atmosphere just noticeably.

That’s all. Nothing major. All too subtle, even. But actually, this is exactly the kind of sense that informs me of how a patient is doing, for instance. Last week I could tell a patient was antsy. She was lying there really quietly, but I don’t know how I knew, I just knew. So I asked her, and she said, yeah, she was restless.

I can start to see how useful this would be in determining if someone were lying, if someone were hiding something, if someone were suicidal and wanted desperately to be seen. When I want to, I can notice things, a little bit, that I’d have a hard time explaining with any concrete details.

It’s not that well developed, yet. But it’s growing, and it’s fascinating to observe.

Although I tried to read Rudolf Steiner when I was younger, his concepts, possibly in part due to the strangeness of German translation, were pretty difficult to follow, and still are to some extent. However, my experiences on my path are beginning to match up to his descriptions, so that I find more resonance in his writings.

Here is an excerpt from the first chapter of Rudolf Steiner’s work on esoteric training, How to Know Higher Worlds, which seems very relevant to where I am right now, especially with regard to figuring out how to balance myself amidst the experiences of Great Mystery versus ordinary living in the civilized world.

First, on the difficulty of opening the inner senses in modern life:

Nevertheless, we must be clear about one thing. Those completely immersed in the superficial civilization of our day will find it particularly difficult to work their way to cognition of the higher worlds. To do so, they will have to work energetically upon themselves. In times when the material conditions of life were still simple, spiritual progress was easier. What was revered and held sacred stood out more clearly from the rest of the world. In an age of criticism, on the other hand, ideals are degraded. Reverence, awe, adoration, and wonder are replaced by other feelings — they are pushed more and more into the background. As a result, everyday life offers very few opportunities for their development. Anyone seeking higher knowledge must create these feelings inwardly, instilling them in the soul. This cannot be done by studying. It can be done only by living.

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To open the new year, here’s a discussion of Divine Love and karma from Rawn Clark’s essay, Dimensions of the Divine.

Divine Providence provides us with exactly what we need, exactly when we need it. It never places before us something we don’t need. Even the vilest of circumstances are, from the Divine perspective, necessary. Furthermore, they are presented according to the Universal Legality, which means that the form in which they are presented is the only form in which they could, in that moment, be presented to us.

The consequences of this astound the mind if one contemplates them deeply enough …

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