I graduated from acupuncture school.

My last big celebration like this was my wedding. It always feels like a dramatic shift in consciousness. Which is good; which is what’s needed, to propel me through the rite of passage, through the death and into a new birth.

It’s unfortunate in my mind that other people don’t consider things the same way. I attended the last two graduation ceremonies at my school and both of them were lackluster in terms of ritual force. Yes, they had their usual speeches and congratulations and everything, but no one understood that rituals and ceremonies are supposed to be theater and drama, that they are supposed to inform the body that transformation is occurring, that they are supposed to carry all participants on a journey.

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Last day of school.

Bittersweet.

I remember being blown away by being taught yin/yang theory the first week of school. Not by the information; just by the fact that I was being taught yin/yang theory, by an institution.

Long time ago.

I’ve learned so much. My perceptions are keep getting richer and richer.

I said goodbye to my patients. I’ve touched their lives.

Graduation is in three days. I say goodbye to my classmates and teachers then. We’ve been, in my opinion, one of the best classes to have gone through the school. We all like each other and stick together. It’s been a good group.

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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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It’s been a long journey.

I started this blog in college, and it followed me as I threw the mainstream experience aside for my year in the woods. After that I met Abigail and went rambling a bit, running and working and trying to find a good fit for myself in this world, this life. I finally did find one and threw myself into my spiritual practice, into my relationship, and into my studies in Chinese medicine with all the passion I could muster.

Growing up, I always felt older than my peers. But now, as I approach thirty, I feel for the first time that I’m at about the right age. To me that means that I’m feeling more myself than ever before.

Always a good time for a turning point.

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Abigail and I recently decided that after graduation, we’re moving to Oregon.

There, I’ll start a practice, and we’ll begin preparations to settle down, grow some roots, become part of a community that we care about, and raise children.

I turn thirty in a few months. Times, they are a-changin’.

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’d like to announce the opening of my new blog, which will be hosted on its own domain. It’s called Health Beyond Civilization, at HealthBeyondCivilization.com.

Health and medicine have long been interests of mine, especially since my struggles with my own body during the yearlong. I’ve learned so much since I began my studies in Oriental medicine and other forms of alternative health, and many times I’ve wished I could have gone back in time and given myself advice, to save me the grief.

Well, I can’t do that, but I think I can help other people in my position. People who don’t know where to turn, don’t have much clue or much time or money to visit even an alternative health practitioner regularly, but want a variety of information to help sort things out.

I’m in a healing profession, not just to make a living, but to serve. I think I’ve just found a small way I can begin to serve a larger purpose.

I invite you to visit my new website.

I’ve acquired edgeofgrace.net, so here I am. I’ve changed domain names a few times over the past few years, but this will be my final move.

Just in case anyone’s interested.

As you can tell, I’m shuffling things around a bit, and changing the color scheme of this blog. I’m finally feeling tired of the dark colors. The kind of Mystery that hides in black colors is giving way to the Mystery that hides in the vastness of light. Whatever that means.

On a more practical level, a few times over the past few months, someone has mentioned how difficult it is to read white text on a black background — most recently, a review of my site over at Spiritual Blog Reviews noted this (thanks for the mention!). So I decided that maybe it was time for a change.

I’m not particularly good with graphics. Expect things to stay really simple.