People drawn to the field of acupuncture and Oriental Medicine tend to be those who march to the beat of a different drummer. Unlike most people entering professions that require extended education and challenging licensure requirements, earning a lot of money is rarely the top motivation for people in these fields.
I have read several surveys that asked acupuncture students why they chose this profession. The most common replies follow these themes:
What is common to all of these motivations is a desire to help people who are suffering and have not yet found an effective solution. While this is a simple and noble aspiration, what is required to fulfill it usually requires much more than we bargained for.
Oriental Medicine is based on the Yin-Yang principle — that the whole is composed of two complementary and inter-dependent forces. This very much applies to this discussion. Yin-Yang is useful for referring to the two aspects of skillsets needed to effectively help people suffering with recalcitrant conditions.
In this case Yang refers to your intellectual and technical competencies, including point location, needling skills and ability to analyze signs and symptoms to arrive at an accurate diagnosis. On the other hand Yin refers to your innate intuitive and empathic qualities, and your capacity to facilitate beneficial healing transformations on a spirit/soul level.
As with all things some acupuncturists are much more focused on the Yang side while others would more strongly identify with what I have described as Yin. After knowing hundreds of acupuncturists over the last few decades I have observed that the most successful and effective ones seem to integrate both of these aspects. They combine a high degree of technical competency with strong intuitive abilities, as well as some good business smarts.
There is certainly an opportunity to create a thriving business by helping people with unrelieved suffering resolve their challenges and feel better. This is a growth industry!
Rapid changes on political, economic, social and environmental levels have people reeling. So many of the traditional sources of emotional stability are disappearing or morphing for most people.
In my opinion Trump's rapid rise was due to his appeal to people trying to reverse or deny this trend. Add to this the increasing toxic load on our bodies from chemicals, new pathogens and disturbing electro-magnetic fields, plus mental pollution through the media. Finally, and less understood, the Earth's energy fields are going through rapid and unprecedented shifts that are literally rocking our worlds.
What is all this doing to us? One major effect of these rapid changes is to bring old, buried emotional conflicts up to the surface, much like a giant spiritual roto-rooter. This could precipitate all kinds of pain and disease symptoms.
I am mentioning all this to make an important point. When prospective patients tell you about their low back pain, migraines or fatigue there is usually much more than meets the eye! When a new client calls me and says he has neck pain and is feeling anxious it is possible that he is experiencing a reaction to a short term event in his life, and a few treatments will take care of it. But it is much more likely that if that was true he would try to deal with it himself or just wait till it goes away. In my experience people don't contact me until they have already exhausted all other possibilities of how they may find relief, and I am truly their last resort.
The symptoms many modern patients are complaining about may really just be the tip of the proverbial iceberg. For you to be successful at helping such last resort patients find resolution, it may require that you grasp what the full iceberg really is. You will probably need to help them get past internal blockages that have been there for a long, long time.
This will usually require a lot more than identifying an imbalanced organ, selecting appropriate acu-points and prescribing a good herbal formula. Skillful acupuncture and herbal medicine is a great support and often does provide a significant degree of resolution for challenging patients. Many of the people coming to you, however need more than that. They have already been around the mulberry bush for years to decades with both Western and alternative health practitioners. Yet they are still on the horns of the same underlying dilemmas that started disturbing them a long time ago.
It is my observation that most of the people who come to me with challenging physical and emotional complaints are in need of spiritual renewal at least as much as they need skillful techniques done to them. Oriental Medical professionals who want to help suffering people who have been left behind by our medical system will need to learn what it really takes to work on that level.
Yes, it requires a commitment to learn a great deal about theory, diagnosis, techniques, ethics, business skills and patient management. It will also require their willingness to continually work on themselves, face their own demons and evolve their consciousness. Since the phrase "evolve their consciousness" may sound rather vague and metaphysical, I will more clearly define what I mean by that. We are evolving our consciousness as we …
Those practitioners who are committed to these processes will go through a lot of personal growth. Their lives do change, often in unforeseen ways. There are often some difficult passages and bumps in the road. Yet there are also many moments of joy and gratitude as we witness what looks like miraculous transformations in those people who have come to us for care and guidance.
As acupuncturists go through a process of growth and expansion there are points on the journey where quantum leaps can occur. There are times when there is an open doorway to rapidly boosting your level of consciousness and healing abilities. These passages have been called "initiations" in some metaphysical teachings.
When approaching such a quantum leap most people feel stressed, overwhelmed and full of self-doubt. This is because a big wad of old traumatic and limiting experiences are in your face and ready to be released. That can truly feel overwhelming. It is easy to get discouraged and want to turn away or give up at times like that, and it is of great importance to seek support from those who have already been through such experiences.
Passing through your own initiation experiences will empower you to be more effective at helping people with challenging health conditions. I think a good way to describe the experience of attaining mastery as a practitioner-healer is "I never promised you a rose garden". It is not an easy process, but it is extremely rewarding. For many of us, it is the only game worth playing.
Chronic pain afflicts over 20% of the adult population. Sadly, most MDs have essentially no education in treating pain, beyond offering a few toxic medications. Then they tend to steer people with pain away from those health practitioners who are trained. This puts the acupuncture community on the front lines for addressing this epidemic.
When the body is going through a stressful event, the sympathetic system is activated. This activation will help the body with a life-threatening situation. If this state is activated for prolonged periods of time, it starts to consume energy. These traumatic events that generate stressors in the autonomic nervous system (ANS) will eventually become internalized.
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One of the things that makes acupuncture so difficult to measure is that the medicine actually does contain some esoteric aspects. There have been numerous studies that demonstrate the neurochemical reasoning behind why acupuncture points stimulate the autonomic nervous system to enact change However, not all the benefits of TCM can easily be measured by randomized, controlled trials. But does that make them fundamentally and definitively untrue?
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