I only have seven months left to go until I graduate from acupuncture school. It’s the home stretch.

I only entered clinic last year, almost exactly a year ago. There has been so much stress about recruiting patients, and no doubt I will have some of the same stress when I start my own practice. But for now, recently, a remarkable thing has happened:

I’m booked.

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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.

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’ve been incredibly busy over the past few weeks with my first steps into a broader social realm. It’s a new stage of life for me, one that sees me emerging from a more isolated, withdrawn existence into a world with more variety, more stimulation, more possibilities, and yes, more danger. In a post that I wrote some months ago, I described it as dancing with the hurricane, and I’m really coming to experience this more fully now.

As such, I’m going through birthing pains. Every tiny victory brings great joy; every tiny setback feels catastrophic. It’s a wild roller-coaster ride. It’s like learning to stand on my own, to walk a few steps. It feels entirely new, it’s a breaking of many old habits and routines, and it’s both exhilarating and very frightening.

It’s taking a lot of discipline and integrity to stay the course on this unfamiliar route, and a lot of tolerance on my wife’s part, when I get overwhelmed with the stress and take it out on her. This is even more the case when particularly nasty things happen.

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The archetypal heroic quest varies in its details, but the basic structure and assumptions are the same. Good guy struggles against all manner of challenges to attain his goal and win his prize. And all was well and everyone lived happily ever after.

So what happens if that goal is by nature flawed? If the value of that prize is rooted in evil?

That subverts the entire quest, all the way down to the ignorance — or deception — of the hero regarding his own motivations and the ramifications of his actions.

This is the conflict I face in considering the meaning of success in the material world. The contamination of the goal transforms the hero’s journey into a villain’s quest.

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I’ve just begun my fifth semester of acupuncture school. In the sixth semester, beginning in May, I will start treating patients.

It’s an exciting time. After just over a year of accumulating and synthesizing bare bits of information, I will finally begin to apply it in a meaningful way. In terms of knowledge and experience, I feel ready to treat patients. Not, of course, that I feel that I’ve mastered the skills or theories I’ve learned; but I feel fairly confident in the basics, and I’m at the point where I need to actually practice in order to learn more and to consolidate what I’ve learned. And I feel well-prepared to do that.

There’s one major hitch: Recruiting patients.

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My spiritual inclinations help me do well with broad, long-term considerations. Each year I feel that I have a better outlook on life, more stability and compassion for the people around me.

On the other hand, I’ve got a lot to learn about the world of day-to-day nitty-gritty interactions, i.e. business.

I’ve been trying to sell my old beater car that I’ve had for the past year. Had a guy come check the car out today, he and his buddy looked it over pretty thoroughly, they definitely knew what they were doing. When they were done, he asked how much I wanted for it. I said $600. Then he asked how low I was willing to go. I said $450. He offered me $300. I said I’d think about it.

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The water’s getting a bit deep, and the sharks are circling.

We’re moving to Florida at the end of the month. Knowing that we were doing a major cross-country move during the busiest moving season of the year, we started planning early. Way back in March we started researching various moving companies and checking them out, and getting their agents to come to our apartment to do estimates. We decided on a company that gave us a bunch of freebies and a low quote, and didn’t have many complaints against them on the records of the Better Business Bureau and other regulating agencies.

As the time has drawn near, though, some red flags started going up. For instance, they were supposed to deliver boxes (they offered thirty free ones) three weeks ago. I was supposed to get a call before they came. End of first week: No call. I called them, they said they’d come the next week. End of second week: No call. I called them again, they postponed it another week. I called yesterday: “Oh, we’re coming tomorrow. And by the way, we’d like a $100 deposit.”

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I’ve spent a good amount of time in the last few years doing “nothing.”

By doing “nothing,” I mean contributing nothing to the gross national product, creating no goods to sell, rendering no services for hire, and being singularly unproductive to the society at large.

On one hand, this has caused me to feel some guilt. Nobody likes to think of himself as lazy and useless.

On the other hand, I consider all of my past experiences when being “useful” and “productive” was at odds with my natural impulse to stop, to rest, to play, to be creative, to experience life on my own terms.

It started in school.

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