It’s been a minute. Rather than my laying out an exhaustive mea culpa inventory, I invite you to invent your own version of ‘what happened to Tara’ and put it in the comments. It will be waaaaaay more entertaining…
So let’s talk about practice. Having a practice. Praktikos from the Greek meaning ‘concerned with action’.1
It’s about doing the work. For me, it’s become more than the work of acupuncture, the art of acupuncture. It’s the work of becoming human. Dominant culture says we are born human, indigenous culture says we become human. We don’t arrive here knowing this. Rather, we come here to learn it.
And we don’t learn by getting it right- we learn from mistakes. From fucking it up. By having the humility to realize our mistake and the perseverance to try again. And again. Rinse and repeat, baby.
So in the wake of twenty-five years of glorious mistakes, here are some thoughts.
Trust the process.
Back in the early days of my own acupuncture treatment, I wanted it all NOW. To be a healthy human, body mind and spirit. To get over it (whatever it is). I also wanted to be a practitioner. To know all the things of medicine and magic and, of course, hello inner critic, to nail it.
My practitioner was/is notorious for NEVER telling a patient what to do. And yes, it was enormously frustrating. But she knew that we never do what we’re told. That true learning has to arise from within. And most humans are bolshie teenagers at best…
On occasion, we as her patients (her practice consisted mostly of acupuncturists, lord love her), drove her batshit crazy enough that a little nugget might slip out. At that point in my life, I was living on 30 acres in the Blue Ridge and had developed an outrageous heirloom chicken habit.
“Do you get frustrated with your chickens?”
“No.”
“Do you stand over the chicks telling them to grow faster?”
“Uh, no. That’s stupid.”
“Then why the fuck do you insist on doing that to yourself?”
Whereupon she retired to the kitchen for coffee and a cigarette, most likely reflecting upon why she had chosen the life path of teaching, mentoring and treating acupuncturists.
We live in a culture that tells us that we can have everything right now. Not only that we can have it, but more concerningly, we deserve it. We’ve earned it.
By filling our Amazon cart? Just by the gargantuan effort of listening to Spotify? Are you effing kidding me?
Most of us didn’t arrive here via a straight line. At 20, working illegally in a teashop making pots of tea for Scottish grannies, I wasn’t patting myself on the back for building much needed social skills.
Actually, I was in the kitchen testing the limit of how much cheddar one can add to handcrafted mac and cheese. Spoiler alert- there are no limits other than the size of the block. Edinburgh- beautiful city of the brave. And the constipated.
I have been gifted with master teachers my whole life. From Georgetown to now, the buggers just keep showing up. One of the current ones is fond of saying the following-
Everything you’ve done in your life has brought you to this moment…every good deed, every terrible act has brought you to now. What will you do with this life you have been given?
Our navel or that big amazing world out there- it’s a choice.
At another point in my role of chief annoyer of master acupuncturists, I was determined to go do a bunch of ayahuasca. Which is a thing currently. Back in 2000, not so much. I just wanted to break through all my bullshit, to get to the ‘good stuff’.
“You’ll get there.”
“But…”
“Just do the fucking work, Tara.”
Back to the kitchen she went…
It’s a process becoming a practitioner. Of anything. Just put in the time. Trust the process of egg to chick to hen. It only seems a drag when we are in the past or projecting into the future.
Spoiler alert- we never get there.
Are we teachable?
That was her sole criterion, that irascible mentor of mine. And to be teachable, we must be curious. To set aside certainty for not knowing. The left side of the brain, so good at grasping and drilling down into little parts, is very very certain about things, all manner of things.
It’s absolutely certain that THOSE people, who believe a different thing, are idiots. Dangerous idiots. And they should be stopped, by all means necessary. And then we could all ride our la-Z-boys into the sunset.
The left brain is a good servant, but a terrible master. The right side of the brain holds the big picture and has the ability to interface with complex systems. The only thing it might be certain of is that it doesn’t have all the answers. And it’s deeply curious about all the possibilities. So be curious.
“Look for the potential in a patient. If you look for the pathology, that’s all you will ever see. Look for the potential- along the way, you’ll bump into the pathology. But your work is to hold the potential, so that one day, they might again hold it for themselves.” The irascible one.
Let the ‘thing’ teach you.
Many years ago, Stephen Buhner was leading a workshop in the boonies of Virginia. He asked us how indigenous people gained their plant knowledge. We made some some half-hearted attempts to answer along the lines of ‘well, they must have tried this.’ Experimentation, Western model explanations.
“You’re a woman with a sick baby. Are you seriously going to run around the jungle and shove different leaves in your child’s mouth? Indigenous people learned from the plants themselves. The plants taught them the medicine.”
Whereupon he probably retired to our host’s back porch to take refuge in his equivalent of coffee and hand-rolled cigarettes. Teaching is hard work…2
As acupuncturists, the points can teach us. As can the body, the pathways and the five elements and the four seasons, to name just a few. A teacher can be a song or a ceremony or a cherry tomato plant in a container garden. To wit, I recently discovered that there are acupuncturists who don’t learn the names of acupuncture points- they are taught to refer to Bladder 2, for example. I mean, I get it. ‘Bladder 2’ is neat and clean and sciencey.
OK Western scientific mind- what will you do with this song?
Beginning of Light, Gathering Bamboo, Night Light, Origin Pillar, Bright Light, Man Present.3
‘Man Present’ seems important. Show up, little human.
I don’t trust we are capable of finding our way to ‘Gathering Bamboo’, a name that simultaneously calls in a gathering of forces and the power of growth and flexibility (ever made the mistake of planting bamboo on your property? Or lost a neighbor to it?) from ‘Bladder 2.’
Stepping off my tiny soapbox now.
Do I truly know the full potential of the second point on the Bladder meridian? Nope. Yet I like to think that if I continue to show up, get out of the way, to call in its power and truly listen…mayhaps I might learn something from it.
And if I am truly present, seeing, palpating, listening in the treatment room, the patient has something to teach me as well.
Accepting the invitation that each and every one of our patients has something precious to teach us is not abnegation of power. (It is the abnegation of authority.)
Rather it is the acceptance of the responsibility we hold as practitioners.
Shame, guilt and responsibility
I’m not a fan of shame or shaming. If guilt is “I did a bad thing” then shame is “I am a bad person.”
I don’t believe shame is helpful or productive. In fact, I think shame is much more likely to be the source of destructive, hurtful behavior than the solution or cure. I think the fear of disconnection can make us dangerous.” Brenee Brown 4
Brown proposes that guilt can be constructive, encouraging us to change behaviors. And I agree in principle. What I see in practice, both in patients and practitioners, is that guilt becomes a black hole portal into the navel of ‘I suck.’ (I don’t think we are clear on the concept and thus confuse the two- no wonder Brown had to write a brilliant book on emotions5.) Rather than an incitement to reflection and behavior modification, ‘guilt’ spirals into helplessness and self-loathing. And then we end up making the situation ALL about us, rather than engaging in reflection, restitution and reconciliation.
And our dominant culture encourages this confusion. A friend of mine is fond of quoting John Trudell6. I’ve tried to track down the quote with no avail- here’s the synopsis.
There are two perceptions of reality- the religious and the spiritual. In the religious reality, you are guilty and to blame, in the spiritual, you are responsible.
Both in the treatment room and out, we are invited to take responsibility for our actions. Not for the response to our words and deeds, but for our words and actions and most importantly, the place inside us that they arise from.
We have a duty to be safe.
Being a practitioner of anything means that we must engage with the wounded healer inside ourselves. We can manage it, we can have a ‘good’ front but inevitably there will be the day where we are too tired or hangry to keep the lid on that little demon. And that day we will be emotionally unsafe in the treatment room. We all know how this happens…We love our patients- and we all have those folks the appearance of a name on the schedule incites heart-sink.
That’s the sign of a master teacher showing up for us.
As practitioners, we have (hopefully) have been working on our baggage for a while. My long-suffering mentor labeled me a “fifteen year project” at my first treatment. She wasn’t wrong. And even with a lot of good treatment from a range of modalities and a ton of personal work, I am a human with buttons. 2020 was great. If only because not working for ten weeks allowed me to realize my ground state of highly functional batshit crazy. Nothing like the absence of work to drive a workaholic around the twist…
So I dove into Elizabeth Stanley’s MMFT which is brilliant beautiful work. And realized that we just don’t know what we don’t know. For example, I had no idea that going to work every day was the nervous system equivalent of a four alarm fire. Hell, that’s how my family did it- isn’t that normal?
Which led to more work- Internal Family Systems, Family Constellations and the Gupta Program. (all brilliant). Whereupon I realized the following-
We are only as safe with other people as we are with ourselves.
So let’s do the good hard work with ourselves. Because our patients are paying the price of what we fail to engage with…
“The practice of medicine is an art, not a trade; a calling, not a business; a calling in which your heart will be exercised equally with your head.” Sir William Osler
https://www.oed.com/dictionary/practical_adj?tab=factsheet#28706988
https://www.stephenharrodbuhner.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Article_NotTeaching.pdf
If you aren’t familiar with the exquisite writing of Stephen, his riff on why he stopped teaching workshops is a howler.
Grasping the Wind by Andrew Ellis
https://brenebrown.com/articles/2013/01/15/shame-v-guilt/
https://brenebrown.com/resources/atlas-of-the-heart-list-of-emotions/
2005 interview with Trudell, prophetic to say the least…