Some friends of mine have suggested that we hike up Pike’s Peak in Colorado this summer. I haven’t decided yet, but, frighteningly, I’m actually seriously considering it. It’s a good sign because it shows how much I’ve improved in the past few years, that that’s even in the range of my thought. However, if I decided to do it I’d have to condition myself for it.

But if I do it, I’ve decided that I’m not going to train for it in a conventional way. Instead I’ll follow a qigong way of training. I’ve been inspired by these stories.

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I graduate from acupuncture school in a month and a half, after ten semesters straight with hardly a break. How has my own health fared in that time?

When I first started school, my health had been going downhill since I did my year in the woods. I slept long hours without feeling rested, I was tired during the day. I had to eat constantly to keep from getting a headache. At the end of every week of school I was pretty exhausted, and took the whole weekend to recover. On a scale of 1 to 10, my fatigue was generally at about a 7.

Today I have had only one free weekend in the past month. I’ve been going nearly seven days a week starting at the end of September when I took and passed a board exam. In addition to classes and clinic during the week, I’ve gone to seminar after seminar and have also traveled to visit a friend, and am still trying to study for my next board exam. I’ve slept an average of five and a half hours for the past four days.

Fatigue? It’s at a 3 out of 10.

I’m miles better than where I was three years ago. Still not quite where I would like to be, but instead of lying half-dead in the gully, I’m clinging to the side of the cliff climbing a rope solidly attached to the top.

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I’m thinking I need to modify my view of physical exercise that I wrote about a couple of years ago, in which I quoted a qigong master who derided jogging and weightlifting as lesser or even deleterious methods of attaining health.

Upon rereading and considering what’s taught in that school of qigong, I realize that it’s best not to take things too far out of context. Even they advocate some strengthening exercises, such as squats, although they put strong emphasis on performing those exercises as qigong.

The reason this is coming up is that I’m still having trouble standing and walking for long periods of time, even after a few years of qigong that focuses on healthy flow of qi, and even after building up my overall physical energy, and even after a few years of Alexander Technique lessons that assists in freeing blockages.

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My first week of qigong training is over.

My initial criticisms still stand. I think the course really works best as an intermediate training program. I find that my background in qi, Chinese medicine, and body movement help immensely to make me feel like I’m at a good baseline. Initially this was quite off-putting since I didn’t quite expect to be thrown into the deep end. It still makes me worry about what I’m missing.

As the week went on, though, I also began to see how that blade cuts both ways, and it actually started to excite me. I mean, really, would I really have wanted to sit through more detailed lectures on the Five Elements? Would I really have wanted to sit through lectures on what is qi and descriptions on how to achieve qi sensation and flow? I sure wouldn’t.

This was an information dump, no question about it. Not much time for emphasis or individual assistance; just plain turning on the fire hose full blast. But in the midst of that I start to see a pattern in the madness. There are so many details that begin to make sense. And I think I’m starting to understand that this form of healing could be really, truly awesome. All of the details point to a very systematic and refined way of using mind, body, breath, and energy to heal. It’s no less than a science of energy healing.

At the end of the week, I sat back and realized something: This is what I’ve wanted for years.

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This qigong training is rubbing me the wrong way a little bit, and it’s taking me some time to figure out why. Forgive me as I complain.

Basically, it reminds me of a Tom Brown, Jr. class. One week of being bombarded with material, to the point of information overload. Do this, do that. Got it? Good. Some inspiring stories to break up the routine. Repeat.

It’s not that it’s bad information. It’s that the quantity of the material is being presented without attention to the process of learning.

I like it when the teaching of something starts from the beginning. What is qi? What’s the experience of qi? What are the foundational things that lead to that experience? Once experienced, what are the basic ways you can direct, use, and refine it? That’s what I thought this would be like. Instead, it launched into esoteric theories followed by multiple exercises for dispersing and tonifying various kinds of qi in various organs.

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I’ve embarked on another step in this journey: Today I started a training program in medical qigong.

I’ll only note one thing right now, and that is that I feel that this, which is in some ways touches deeply into the essence of the type of healing I would like to do, has the remarkable ability to touch one of my greatest strengths an done of my greatest weaknesses simultaneously.

I enjoy the strength of being relatively sensitive to energy.

I suffer the weakness of being fairly incapable of inhabiting my body well, leading to tension and weakness and a weak constitution.

The combination means that I can command energy but it’s not well grounded. And as anyone who works with energy knows, ultimately energy and matter go hand in hand. In other words, if I want to progress anywhere with my qi capabilities, I have to allow it to flow and settle correctly in myself first.

Which touches on so much: on breathing, on posture, on emotional blocks and mental habits.

The learning, and the challenges, never seem to stop. Sometimes I like it that way, but other times … Damn, I wish I could just say I’m done learning for awhile.

Yesterday in clinic I conducted my 35th initial intake. We are required to do 35 new-patient intakes by graduation.

I don’t graduate until December.

Whew.

I have to remind myself continually that the game of chasing results in the clinic is dangerous. It’s a fine balance to strike, because of course that’s the whole reason people come in the door: to get improvements in their health. No one’s going to plunk down cash for some abstract concept like an improvement in the pulse, if it doesn’t also include their own experience of feeling better.

A point that has been hammered in many times, but which I still forget, is that before you rush to treatment, you need to make a proper diagnosis. This, too, is more difficult than it sounds, because often diagnosis is an ongoing process, not a one-time-only affair. Thus treatment can become part of the process, confirming or contradicting the diagnosis. But when this is combined with the rush to get results, sometimes diagnosis gets thrown by the wayside.

I wrote about this a few months ago. More recently I had a similar challenge.

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For all of my love affair with instant results and instant feedback through the methods of acupuncture I’m learning and applying, it’s also useful to know that that approach has limitations.

In the November 1999 issue of the North American Journal of Oriental Medicine, Dan Bensky (famous in the Chinese medicine community in the West, for his textbooks on herbs) wrote an article titled “Listening to the Channels.” In the latter section, he discusses the fundamental assumptions of acupuncture, and specifically of meridian therapy. It’s worth quoting at length.

Assumptions

Part of the problem is that we work on assumptions that make us feel good about our work and ourselves, but do not necessarily help us treat patients more effectively. I would like to briefly address one of these assumptions. My goal is more to raise questions than to give any definitive answers, as the recognition of problems is the first step to dealing with them.

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This weekend I graduated from the Toyohari program in Japanese acupuncture and meridian therapy.

I have to say that it really revolutionized the way I practice acupuncture, and has honed the way I feel qi. I remember that during the first few months of acupuncture school, I had no idea how to feel for an acupuncture point, and it was never made that clear to me; and, indeed, the more common Chinese method is not really that precise. A couple of my classmates recently went to China; I saw a video they took of a Chinese doctor inserting needles, and they were these really thick, long needles being plunged quickly and without sensitivity into the abdomen of a thin woman and stimulated mercilessly. And that’s the way people are used to doing it in China, and by many practitioners in the States.

Nothing wrong with that, of course. It gets results. But it’s a different philosophy.

For me, I’ve acquired the ability to run my finger very lightly along a channel and feel whether there’s qi at a point or not. It really does feel like a pooling of energy — there’s a buzzing, a softness, an aliveness that’s present when the point is active. How do I know it’s really active? Because when I feel a good point, fellow Toyohari practitioners who are taking the pulse will tell me that the pulse feels improved when I’m touching that point.

It’s an exquisite, sensitive, and refined way to do acupuncture, and fits my character and constitution, as a practitioner — and as a patient!

So now I have some more tools under my belt to use.

The next stop for me is something one step even more esoteric. I plan to take a program on medical qigong being offered locally by a national organization. I currently practice a style of qigong I find really beneficial, but see no way to apply it in treating others, and don’t feel very drawn to the martial arts stuff that’s emphasized by the instructor. So I’m trying out a different style which is aimed specifically toward patient treatment.

This stuff seems very weird and fluffy and not like anything that should work according to everything that’s taught in the Western world. But when you start seeing severe pain vanish within thirty seconds of applying a non-insertion needling technique, then many more things seem possible.