My first instinct was fear.

I had just returned a couple of rented movies to the store and was sitting in my car with the door open, when I heard someone nearby say, “Excuse me.”

I looked over to see a guy who looked like a panhandler. He was maybe in his late 30’s or 40’s. Weathered skin tinged with yellow and grey and a little red. Bloodshot eyes. Worn clothes. Like a longtime smoker, drinker, “white trash.”

He explained that he was from Alabama and was stranded and could he get a ride to the highway (a twenty-minute drive).

Multiple scenarios flashed through my head in that moment, many of them involving me being attacked with some sort of sharp weapon. So I said no, I was going in the opposite direction. He thanked me and left me alone.

After that, I was so torn. I couldn’t decide whether to change my mind and help him out or not. I watched him for a minute, and it didn’t look like he was asking anyone else for help. Quite unlike your usual panhandler. But still, my fears gripped me. Finally I just started the car and left. But two minutes away I could not stop thinking about him, so I pulled onto a side road and stopped the car.

The worst case scenario was that he was some sort of psycho and I would put myself in grave danger by helping him.

But another worst case scenario was that he really, genuinely needed assistance — he was far from home, and no one else would lift a finger to help him … and I was going to just dump him there.

I didn’t know what to do. My paranoia warred with my compassion, and mixed in there was guilt about class and wealth, as well as my own physical fatigue and the ever-present concerns about generosity versus self-preservation that everyone in a helping profession must struggle with.

Then, I swept all of that aside and asked myself: What do I feel, in my gut? And as I tuned into my body-feeling about him, I remembered the look in his eyes, and I knew then that he was real. And since he was real, I had to help him.

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Life is impermanent.

I find my days passing in a schizophrenic way. Either I am moving quickly in a series of endless little tasks that add up to what people call a normal life. Or I step back and open to a vast, complex, and utterly frightening world. The former is comfortable and familiar, shouting loudly that all is well, filling the world with the illusion that safety endures day after day, and that everyone is, for now at least, immortal.

The latter speaks quietly to the constant dying of things.

I’m not quite sure how this awareness sidled its way up to the forefront of my consciousness. Maybe it was the grief of missing my wife, who was recently out of town for a week and a half — the shock that I am not even able to endure her absence for one night without missing her. Maybe it was the strange and peculiar shock at the news that actor Heath Ledger died — strange, because I expect people who are so distant as to be practically fictional to mean nothing to me; and yet this man did make stories that sat in the privacy of my living room and touched me. Maybe it is the progressive awareness that my parents are getting older, and that my thirtieth birthday is less than a year away. Maybe it’s the fact that I thought school would take forever, and yet in just one more year it will be over forever and I must leave this place and everyone I know here and find the next place where I am meant be in this life.

So much change. So much transition. It frightens me. It makes me want to know: What is real? What is permanent? And, looking, I find nothing. Everything shifts, everything moves, everything changes. I grieve when I try to hang on, while everything dies around me.

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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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There’s no place quite like the Teaching Drum Outdoor School.

For nearly ten years now, under the guidance of Tamarack Song, the school has offered its unique Wilderness Guide Program, a program unlike any other that I’m aware of, one that takes people from a life in civilization and casts them into the woods for one year, to live and learn from that best of teachers: experience. That includes the experience of nature itself, the experience of one’s own raw struggles, and the experience of living intimately with a small community.

There are a few other primitive skills opportunities out there that are in the same general field, all with different focuses. I don’t have much experience or contact with any of these others, but my sense is that, still, Teaching Drum is rather unique in that it focuses not only on skills or philosophy, but on building culture and relationship skills. In essence, it is, or attempts to be, more of a “complete” experience, aiming to align the student, mind and body and soul, to the Old Way.

When I took it in 2001-2002 (anyone who’s unfamiliar with my story can read a summary here), it was in its third year, and we were, at eleven people, by far the largest group to have committed to the yearlong. Since then, many students have come and gone, and many have gotten a lot of growth from the program.

Elsewhere on this blog I’ve described extensively many of the struggles I had at Teaching Drum, and many I continued to have after leaving. What I have largely left untouched is the fact that I was hardly alone in the types of things I was feeling. I haven’t returned to visit since 2003, but I’ve continued to have periodic contact with people associated with the school, and in doing so I’ve noticed that, year after year, for most people there have been similar issues, which leads me to believe that the problem is not individual (or rather, not only individual), but systemic. Among all of the positives that result from taking the yearlong, I also observe that many people emerge feeling exhausted, guilty, conflicted, and with an increased addiction to food and various other substances. Many don’t make it at all, and drop out after a week, a month, or six months.

In this article, I’d like to offer what is hopefully a constructive critique of some of the causes of these problems. Although the experience I had in the yearlong was enriching, what I have come to realize is that it also carried danger, and these dangers have manifested as physical, emotional, and mental health problems among myself and other students.

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As my education progresses, Oriental medicine continues to reveal to me more and more methods and perspectives of extraordinary perception into a person’s being. I’ve been learning a detailed system of pulse diagnosis and asking diagnosis in school; I just came back from an extracurricular training in Japanese meridian therapy that involves significantly more emphasis on sensation of qi (or ki, as it’s called in Japanese), and various other methods of diagnosis. The totality of it is staggering to me.

So, to help organize it in my own mind, I’ve decided to present a brief little introduction to Oriental diagnostic methods, so far as I’ve experienced them in my brief sojourn into the medicine.

Oriental medicine rests on what is called the Four Examinations, or the Four Pillars of Diagnosis. They are:

1. Looking
2. Listening/Smelling
3. Palpation
4. Asking

However, it gets much more in depth than this! There are many, many systems and microsystems that can be examined and plundered for information, and all of them rest on the assumption that the microcosm reflects the macrocosm. That is, that a small area, like the ear or the pulse, is a holographic representation of the larger whole of the human body. This means that nearly any part of the body can be an image of the entire body. The methods that I list here are only a few of the major ones.

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This picture just says so much.

I felt the hand of Destiny at work.

It’s an odd feeling; like you’re a part of some pattern larger than just you. I’ve read about it — it’s a common enough convention in novels. But I’ve never quite experienced it like this — with the possible exception of meeting my wife.

Here’s what happened.

For a while I’ve been struggling with this whole issue of living in this flawed world while maintaining a sense of balance, honor, and integrity. Forced — challenged — by life to become more outgoing and extroverted than I’m accustomed to being, I’ve found myself agonizing, floundering, trying to push forth with energy while cowering with weakness.

The form this challenge has taken in my life’s circumstances has been the clinic situation. Though I love the medicine, the administrative support around the clinic is pretty shoddy; this, combined with the many ethical issues about the act of pressuring people into healing has felt, well, dirty to me, as I’ve written about before. At any rate, the bottom line is that we students are forced to recruit our own patients, or run the risk of graduating late or not at all.

Going into this semester, I knew I was going to have to do something to bring in patients, something to project my name and presence into the community; but I wasn’t sure what.

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I’m getting older. In some ways I feel more satisfied. That core emptiness that used to drive me has been met by a spiritual tradition and a heart relationship, and I’ve given my commitment to both. It feels good.

And yet, the task of living has hardly begun. The central question that continues to dog me these days is: How do I live in the world?

I’m at that life stage where I must begin to consider how to survive, stay afloat, and thrive in the world in a more long-term sense — that is, to plan for a larger arc in life, rather than live year by year. I graduate from acupuncture school in a year and a half. Where will we live? And in what way? How will I conduct my practice, my career? Where and how will I raise my family?

How does a young couple at the sunset of the industrial age choose a meaningful way to survive and live into the future?

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I’m becoming aware of a certain kind of energetic space that I think of as human space.

When I sit and talk with a patient in the clinic, much of what I’m trying to do is extend my senses and mind to a clear perception their being, in order to discern what they need and to determine how best I can meet those needs with what I have to offer. I suppose it could be thought of as a cold information-gathering process. Part of our training is to investigate and interrogate as thoroughly as we can, because the more information we have, the more clearly we can know someone.

But, there’s a more important process underlying this procedure, something deeper and more basic: creating a space for authenticity. Asking questions about a person’s health automatically induces a degree of self-reflection, and brings some self-awareness. The standard questions of Chinese medical diagnosis, regarding one’s digestion or urination or palpitations, do not go far enough in this regard, though. I feel that the work of a truly great physician involves the opening of a space in which people can experience themselves with greater awareness, depth, and acceptance. In other words, a human space.

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The experience of qi, or vital energy, has become a regular experience in my daily life.

To me, this is remarkable, not for its supernatural quality, but for its very ordinariness. Vital energy permeates all of life, so every one of us contacts it in some way, in every moment. Indeed, it’s the fact that most of us are not conscious of it that is most striking. It’s a silence which speaks volumes.

I won’t waste any time here debating the reality of vital energy. I’ve felt it, off and on, since I was young, although it’s only in the past few years that I really got curious enough to start learning more about it. I can do some basic things that are common to those who are attuned to energy, like warm my hands and feet by directing qi there, or make little energy balls, or feel the outlines of a person’s aura, or sense my own energy blockages.

What’s actually more interesting to me than the experience of energy, though, is the pragmatic philosophy of it.

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