There is a dreamtime

There is a dreamtime

on buses

in London.

Sitting there

all those hours gathered

like metaphysical

frequent flyer miles

Buys time

in the dreamtime

leaning your head

against vibrating walls,

a tired supporting hand,

gazing out on

pearl-bound nights,

looking at the internal pictures

of your life.

Talking

(dancing)

to the ancestors who

guide your steps

shadow-bound

singing safe your life

from bus stop to

bus stop

of your life.

Daniel Skyle © 2010

Merry Christmas

Yup. Merry Christmas, all who read this (all three, and that drunk guy and his wet dog) and to the rest of the world too.

I´m back home surrounded by a meter of snow. More is promised.

Europe is 12 hours away from Christmas. In England, they got a little bit of snow, which paralyzed large amounts of the infrastructure and ways of travel. Heathrow – one of the largest airports in the world, if not the largest – was struck so hard by its inability to deal with snow and ice that incredible scenes took place in the airport. The negligence in dealing with passengers and flights seem to be continuing saga of travelling in the early part of the 21^st century.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2010/dec/21/snow-ice-disrupt-christmas-travel-live-updates

A happy passenger put together this phone-interview video with other stranded passengers at Heathrow, where the treatment of waiting passengers seems to have been very badly done throughout Heathrow Airport. Because the airport owners and parties aren´t paid to be prepared for stuff like this happening?..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s0PzV0KJD0

I was stuck with the ash-cloud in the Spring of 2010, but got fairly good treatment from Easyjet who was my carrier at the time, something I´m still happy about.

Further Christmas news in these darkest days of winter 2010 are that Transport for London are shutting down the entire Tube network over Christmas Day. The entire network. On Christmas Day, the day that the UK really celebrates Christmas (the 24^th, in Sweden). There are lots of snow, and all people will have to get to relatives and parties are buses, taxis and cars, objects which are often, well, a bit hampered by large amounts of snow.

The mounting tension in the Korean Peninsula looks just great right now, with the North starting to pump up their propaganda with words like getting ready for a holy war with South Korea and similar. Please don´t. Go for a coffee instead.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/23/north-korea-holy-war-warning

And I´m back home, studying for a test in Physiology and writing. And training. And doing more training. And studying Chinese medicine.

The university courses seem pleasantly far away right now, along with such things as being told that 2500 years of continous Chinese medicine research done by pretty smart people might be wrong about a particular organ connection since one Westerner published one article in a Western acupuncture magazine which said so; that qi is absolutely not to be called ”energy”, but vitality; that we aren´t really embarassed about Chinese medicine and absolutely not defending it to Western science but we kind of really are. Maybe.

It´s Christmas now. Never mind.

The core of Chinese medicine: diagnostics, Ents, and one-needle doctors

I try to think quite a lot about bigger questions in Chinese medicine. Such as the core principles, the overriding concepts, the keys to open the deeper doors of being a good Classical Chinese Medicine practitioner.

First of all, there´s intent. The intent of the practitioner is not everything, but it is a lot. Hence the classical practitioners who practice a lot of qigong and meditation, as both these gives you more energy, cleaner energy, and a cleaner mind that has the ability to affect patients with clearer, greater levels of intent. Within Daoism, there are many specific practices done in becoming aware of the intent we have, how we manifest it out into the world, how we clean it up and start growing up as human beings when we take responsibility for it, and how intent is specifically used with the patient in Chinese medicine.

Next would be diagnosis. This starts as soon as the practitioner sees the patient in front of him or her, and is the looking part of diagnosis. The more skilled and experienced the practitioner, the more instantly they can see and diagnose while looking. The other diagnostic techniques are then added to deepen the initial diagnosis or correct it.

There are many diagnostic techniques, but next of the main ones would be feeling the pulse. Chinese medicine takes the pulse along three places off the radial bone, and train in how to feel all three as a unit as well as separately, and then at different depths, followed by how they weave together and with ever more precise skills in what they show from inside the patient. Usually, about 28 different standardized pulses are listed. Each pulse is linked to different organs, functions or depths in the person. This training is seen as standard in good Chinese medicine, and with time truly exceptional diagnostics can be done through the subtle skill of feeling the pulse.

The third main one is looking at the tounge. In Chinese medicine, diagnostics exist for how the tounge looks and what this is linked to inside the body. The changes of the tounge indicate the deeper, more long-time disturbances in body and mind.

Weaving these together, with huge amounts of information in how they interact and what they show, is the beginning of putting together a diagnosis. All these are done each time a patient turns up, as the state of the person changes from time to time – from hour to hour, really. Treatment is then adapted after the changes and improvements in the patient´s body, mind, and energy-system.

But now, let´s talk about trees. Or Ents, if you prefer.

Classical Chinese Medicine talks about leaf – branch – trunk – root. In this simple phrase lies a whole art and a science. Chinese thinking and Daoism often use simple phrases – like the classical ones, often with four characters, called four-character phrases – to both summarize and hide information in. When it comes to practical application and training, many of these phrases can take a whole lifetime to learn in depth and the amount of information inside them is huge.

Leaf means the very outskirts of the patient´s system and illness or imbalance. Western medicine treats leaf quite a lot, as it sees this part as important. Often, unfortunately, this mean medication becoming permanent in treating a leaf, instead of solving the problem itself, with added wear-and-tear on the system.

Branch is deeper in the patient and their illness, but not by much. Trunk is becoming deep in, and here many problems and illnesses can be solved so well that they actually give up and go away for a long time.

Root is the deepest aspect of the patient and problem. If a practitioner is skilled enough to solve things here, it will often also mean a significant effect on the patient´s life and view of reality too, not just their physical health.

So, most people would say, let´s solve this problem at the root and I won´t be ill, right?

Yes. Well. Life doesn´t work quite like that.

Part of skilled Chinese medicine diagnostics is judging where the treatment can start. With some patients, you have to start at the level of leaf, maybe even remain treating there for quite some time, if the illness or imbalance in their system has gone on for a very long time and gone very deep, or if they are old and the system is less stable.

Then, with each treatment, it becomes more and more clear how that patient´s particular system and mind functions, and the treatment can slowly go deeper. Treating root issues is sometimes never done at all, as it is so deep that it could trigger a lot of side-effects – the soil, as it were, can´t support working at that level, and needs to be nourished first.

The rumoured one-needle doctors are legends in this. They are said to be so skilled in diagnostics and treament from three-four decades of experience, that they diagnose well enough to only need very few needles to create an incredible effect. At best, at the very apex of skill, this is done with only one needle in the exact right place for everything else to unravel and open like dominoes falling or a forest rising in spring.

These are the things I am thinking of, a Westerner learning acupuncture in the West in the 21^st century.

 

Daniel Skyle © 2010

Stones into Schools: a review of a book and the work of many miracles of humanity

This is an incredible book, and this review not particularly impartial. Go buy it. Now. I mean, you can read the review too, if you have nothing else to do, but really, just go buy it.

The drive and intent to help the world takes all manner of strange manifestations. Some good, some bad; some brilliant, some misplaced. Some manifested out of ego; some out of genuine and selfless altruism. In 2009, it´s calculated that there were about 250 000 aid workers out there. The aid world is a multi-billion dollar industry, and sad to say, a circus that some are in for the money. The main part of them though, are incredibly brave people who try to help others, often in places and during times when things could be worse, but it´s hard to figure out exactly how.

Stones into Schools describes the work of Greg Mortenson and the Central Asia Institute. The first part of his story can be found in the book Three Cups of Tea, but simply put, he tried to climb Mount Everest back in the 90´s, kinda failed, got lost, ended up in a small, local village where they treated him as a returning family member since that was the culture they had with guests, and then he listened to them talk about how much they wanted a school for their children.

And Greg Mortenson kinda found himself promising they would get their school. They did, eventually, but only after first having to build a bridge to get the building materials across to the village.

From this, the idea was born to build schools all over Pakistan. Not only schools, but schools in the places that follow once you keep going from where the map says ”End of the road”. Not only schools, but schools focused on increasing girls´ and women´s literacy, letting the local community guide everything and with deals with the elders that the school must eventually have at least 50% female students. Usually they end up having much more.

Not only schools, but, over time, an honors program that takes the best and brightest and gives them grants for further studies, often to doctor, nurse or teacher, which they then head back with to help out communities on the edge of the world, people forgotten even by the nation they are in, let alone the rest of the planet.

Not only schools, but life, literacy, and future.

”At the moment, female literacy in rural Afghanistan continues to languish in the single digits. In rural Pakistan, the figures are a little higher, but not by much. The demand for schools, teachers, books, desks, notebooks, uniforms, chalkboards, paper and pencils in these two Islamic nations is immense, and the benefits of American investment in this ”intellectual infrastructure” are indisputably clear. Nothing that has happened since my unsuccessful attempt to climb K2 – including 9/11 – has changed my conviction that promoting female literacy represents the best way forward for Pakistan and for Afghanistan.

Education is one of the many basic values that Amerians of all faiths share with Muslim people everywhere.”

Stones into Schools details something even bigger than this (if that´s possible to conceive). In it, we follow Greg Mortenson in his work in Pakistan...and how it slowly starts to tip over into Afghanistan. Suddenly, he and his very small staff of brave people are helping communitites to build schools in Afghanistan...even into areas still controlled by the Taliban. Not only schools: hope.

And in the middle of this, the Kirghiz turn up. They want to have help with building a school in one of the most inaccessible places on the planet, the Wakhan Corridor (http://maps.google.se/maps?hl=sv&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4HPNN_svSE310SE310&tab=wl. You want to have fun? Try zooming in really close).

”When word had reached Abdul Rashid Khan (the leader of the Kirghiz, blog writer´s addition) that the American school builder was scheduled to pay a visit to the Charpurson Valley, he had sent out a platoon of his strongest riders and his swiftest horses to find this man and ask if he would consider coming into Afghanistan to build schools for the sons and the daughers of the Kirghiz.”

Stones into Schools talks about Mortenson´s very clear hope – and there really is hope: here is someone who´s heart and fire burn like a beacon – his very clear hope to save whole generations of children and young people and give them the chance for a future for themselves and for communities torn by decades of war and sundered by earthquake, religious intolerance and bad governments.

It really is an astounding read, a brilliant read, a read with great compassion.

For myself, I think it might be the best book I have read in quite some time.

You can buy Stones into Schools here: http://www.stonesintoschools.com/purchase-stones-into-schools/

And if you wish, you can donate to their work here: https://www.ikat.org/make-a-donation/

Done thinking

for the moment. I will stay at the course, for now. There are downsides to this and upsides, but the balance right now is to stay. Part of the problem is the lack of Chinese medicine – ha ha, but not so funny. Only half the course is pure Chinese medicine, the rest being Western science and Western medicine, and Therapeutic Relationships. I need more Chinese medicine, so I will balance that out with doing other stuff around the course itself, other, smaller courses or clinic placements or something.

We´ll see.

The jury took a long, long walk for a coffee, walked around the lake, did the promenade, saw the gazebo, loitered by the second-hand bookstore, took in three cafés on the way, and even after that – and enough coffee that two jurors switched to decaf, though no-one spoke to them without sniggering on the way back to chambers – it still ended up a hung jury.

Next post is about something extraordinary, something I really recommend as the Christmas book of the year for 2010-2012 (and after too, if it turns out that the nutcases and the azteks both are wrong about that little calendar thing).

Darknesses

There are

darknesses

in the city

See the door

find the handle

follow the shape

that knows the

way already

move

within the

city

that is real.

London, 2010

So, what is this city like now, when I am here? If someone reads this in twenty year´s time, ten, five, one, what was it like, now when I am studying here? What was it like?

Red double-decker buses are the biggest herbivores of the city. They drift through it, sometimes lazily, sometimes fast. Sometimes they flock in large numbers around a specific crossing or stop. There are smaller ones too, one level only, but longer, like aardvarks, that will take you to more local stops. Among their dance there are ponderous old elephants: the old Routemasters, the ones where you could get on and off on the open platform at the back. Most of them have been scrapped or sold, only a few move along what is called the ”Heritage Line” of buses 9 and 15 who take tourists from Liverpool Street Station, through Aldgate and the Strand, past Charing Cross Station and Trafalgar Square, and on to Picadilly Circus, Oxford Street, Regent Street, then later, Paddington or Knightsbridge and High Street Kensington.

Names, names. The city is still filled with all these magical names. Muttered invocations, mumbled curses, softer laughs of places to meet, streets to live on, neighbourhoods to avoid or live longing for.

...Angel, Mayfair, Goose Green and Notting Hill...

London has always had a reputation for noise. Today, cell phones are everywhere. Inventors have yet to invent an internal system for controlling the loudness of an individual – maybe by your time, when you read this in the future, this will exist and force the talker to keep a low tone when other people are around. Maybe there will even be controls from the outside, for people who are habitually loud and obnoxious, or some kind of system where you are legally allowed to taser them on sight – like you are today, when someone plays music out loud on the bus or on the train (oh I wish this was so).

There are five loose paving stones just in front of the bus shelter facing the theater on Cambridge Circus. They are rectangular, and pale.

London 2010 is a bustling city in constant change and movement. Yesterday, I went back home on a bus. Suddenly we were re-routed: the bridge was closed. It was a Sunday, and a lot of engineering works is done on Sundays to minimize problems. The bus was still full to the brim on a Sunday at 1800. They are constantly upgrading the Tube; there is a Sisyphosian labour of restoring the plumbing all over London, upgrading the Victorian pipes to something resembling present day technology. Not that they weren´t great, it seems they really were extraordinarily well done, but...it´s been a while since the 1800´s.

It´s difficult to get a flat in London. Prices are going up, and then going up more. A mortgage for buying a small flat would probably start at 300 000 pounds today (about 3 million SEK, current rate). And that would be a very, very small flat.

Boris Johnson is mayor. Boris of the bicycle, the floppy hair, and the great idea to restore a version of the old Routemasters which I really like.

Lady Gaga is very popular; Stephen Fry just came out with his second part of his autobiography. The Robin Hood Tax movement still fights the fight to get the banks taxed; Portobello Market still fills every week, just a bit away from Notting Hill Gate where a beacon stood in Roman times, 2000 years ago. Instead of grim-faced Roman soldiers now here walks Japanese tourists with high-tech digital cameras, young students in gazelle-like flocks, and the owners with the special faces of the ”antique” dealers resembling the rats that you´re never supposed to be more than 1.5 meters away from in most places in London.

London is gearing up for 2012 and the Olympics. There are a few zillion security cameras in the capital now – I think you´re covered by 3 cameras for most meters that you walk – and the new cars with roving cameras that weave through traffic have started a new movement, where bikers or motorcyclists wearing masks drive next to them with a big sign and an arrow that says, ”Smile – you´re being filmed!”.

Maybe you will be reading this in a hundred years´ time. Who knows. Then London might be a built-in metropolis covering the entire south of England, with bridges to France like the bridges that cross the Thames today, and both the London and Paris-sides of the water can say that it´s in fact the other city that is a suburb to theirs.

...Lambeth, Southwark, Aldgate and St Giles...

Now Old King Winter is moving in. He is dressed in his huge old cape, with his long white beard and a crown of crystal ice, one hand holds a lantern made in of old black iron, the other, a scepter covered in frost. He moves into London, covering the bridges with snow, the tall buildings with icicles; he walks gently, on soles hidden in snow, killing homeless people and the old. Snow over London. Maybe in a hundred years´ time the whole city will be covered by cupolas, geodesics, thermal walkways, airfilter systems that will clean out any terrorist attacks that tries to use germs or bacterial warfare. The security people for the Olympics here 2012 must be spending their entire days worrying, and not sleeping much. Talk about a good place for terrorists to succeed and be seen, during the London Olympics. And I will be here, then. Great. Time to stock up on extra first aid kits for my backpack. And, uh, some high quality instant coffee. You never know if you can get that when disaster hits.

...St. James´s, Pimlico and Bloomsbury, Hackney, Westminster and Camden Town...

Clinic. And the final days of Semester 1

Had clinic all day Monday. First part was Video Clinic. Here the students sit most of the time in one room, while the tutor treats a patient in another room that is fitted with camera (the patient has consented to being filmed). The case is discussed, before and after, treatment is planned and discussed (followed-up, if it´s a returning patient) and the tutor will then come back and explain what he or she did, and why. A lot of case notes are taken, and students are taught how to look at the diagnosis through Chinese medical eyes, but also with some differential diagnosis from Western medicine and Western pharmacology.

The second part of the day was Observation Clinic. Here we walk around and observe the Third year students as they take their first, stumbling steps in treating people with needles. The first two years of the course is all observation, with rarely any needling done. Diagnostics are done though, and the main process of looking, pulse-taking and tongue-diagnosis (see the earlier post on this for more detail. We will go in more in depth on them later on) are repeated and checked, and a slow internal database of references and concrete experience of how patients look, feel or talk is put into place. A third year student will be in charge of the patient, do the main diagnosis, then walk out and talk it through with the tutor or the clinic supervisor. Advice will be given, both on diagnosis, treatment-plan done to get clearer intent, and the selection of points, then the student goes back to implement it. This is done in the University clinic but also in the Gateway clinic, which is integrated into a London NHS hospital. All through this, extensive case-notes and patient files are kept, checked, and logged.

It´s now barely more than a week before the first semester is over. So...only five more to go before the Bachelor is done. Hooray. Add another two semesters for the full Masters.

We´re going out for drinks tomorrow, students from all three years of the course. That feels like a very good idea right now.

Next week, three tests are due. Two essays and the final test in Anatomy. There is also a presentation as part of one of the other modules.

Drinks. Yeah. Drinks.

Whispering

I whisper to

myself

on buses, trains

while

stumbling on sidewalks,

while choosing

groceries

whispering in

winter.

Snow and thinking

Runes of snow written on the tarmac at Kastrup airport. Planes and cars write them with clumsy fists, while the air traffic controllers weave the spells that throw us through the air (this incredible blasphemy against the gods), and safely to our destination.

I´ve been grounded since Wednesday. Sunday now. Five days, flightless. Several lessons missed, as the snows swept in over England and grounded flights while the cold and snow freaked out the Southern English in a way that is sort of cute if you´re Scandinavian. Usually barely an inch of snow in the south of England will have people on the verge of hysterics, talking of ”problems” and ”situations”. The day I left, there was talk of five centimeters of snow coming over the weekend, and ”the city authorities wanted people to know that they were prepared for this”.

But there came much more than that. Enough to ground flights, enough to make England as cold as Iceland, enough to kill.

Heading back now for the final two weeks of the first semester, I am debating the pros and cons of the course with myself. Is it worth the large amount of money it costs me, worth the hassle from some of the teachers, worth living as poor as I do in England, worth being away from home this much?..

The jury´s still out on that one too.

On the tarmac, dancing convoys of snowploughs snake their away along the concourses, looking like something out of a Disney movie in the dark. SAS planes, KLM, far-away tall lights of other parts of the airport. Nearby, a snowed-over car stands empty and cold, and small crew-buses zoom by heading towards planes that hopefully will leave as planned.

In here, the travellers move through the Airport Deli, buying very expensive food after having been let through security and filtered through the vacuum-cleaner of the tax-free aisles.

Learning Chinese medicine. Hmmm. Great stuff, but the pressure on and around the course is... But I´m going for quality, investing in it, which is a value I like. There is no training in Scandinavia even approaching this one in the amount of training-time. There is no course in Scandinavia with the same amount of Western medicine in it, which is helpful for dealing with the NHS and with Western diagnosises that patients walk in with. There is no university course like this in Scandinavia, period.

Hmmm. The jury is still out. Probably going for coffee.

Snow out there, on the tarmac, in the skies.

Studying for tests

I´m back home here studying today. Tomorrow we have two tests in Points class. One is what they call summative – that is, the points count. The other is formative – a test for you for your own skill; points don´t count.

The summative test is on the Small Intestine channel, a general overview; the formative is on practical point location of what is called the wu shu, the Five Transporting-points or the Five Element points, now of the hand yang channels: Small Intestine, Sanjiao, and Large Intestine (see respective posts about these). We are also supposed to know a few other points on the channels. All this with added western anatomical language. (...Large Intestine 11 is on the lateral transverse cubital crease, between Lung 5 and the lateral epicondyle of the humerus...did this teach you how to feel the point energetically?..no...will we teach that during the course? According to older students, no...)

Found out yesterday that we do have the same build-up as the doctor-training in Chinese universities: we don´t get to treat patients until our third year. All the time before that in clinic is spent hanging around and watching, and learning from what the third-year students do well or badly.

Two essays are coming up in December: one on a class called Chinese medical Concepts, and one in what is called Therapeutic Relationships. We also have a practical summative test in Anatomy – the only one really, as we only get four classes of Anatomy during the course. We get huge amounts of Physiology though, including biochemistry, molecular structures, how molecular bonding works and other things completely irrelevant to being good at Chinese medicine. More Anatomy, one would have thought, could have been more interesting for the job.

In Concepts, we are currently going through the basics of the zangfu, the internal organs, and how they work in CCM. I´ll do a post on them later.

And tomorrow...students will needle each other for the first time ever. *drumroll, clash of cymbals and a single clownish sound played on a lone trumpet*

Yesterday, we were also lectured at about how the British Acupuncture Council works, what you might think about concerning yourself in practice and in clinic, how to act with patients, and on how the NHS works (sjukvården, på svenska). This might seem a bit early on to talk about given that the students are only two months into their course and that 95% of them have no previous knowledge of treating people professionally. Maybe it´s good to get it in early to get people to think. I don´t know. I do know that most of the class looked despondent and a bit overwhelmed at the information.

Yesterday afternoon after class, our study-group in the library were deep into the Five Transporting points despite that part of the test being formative. I think people are pressuring themselves on that, it´s better to give time to it. But everybody learns in different ways.

Come the final exams on Points, 80% of the points on the test have to be correct for you to pass. Including finding them, and describing them in anatomical language (...Large Intestine 1 is on the radial side of the index finger, on the dorsal aspect of the hand, on a line from the longitudinal line of the nail meeting the horizontal line, approximately 0,1 cun away from the nail...).

Early morning, heading for class

It´s dark. The famous London sky hasn´t opened yet: it´s being helped from below by the light of many windows. I get up, get some clothes on in my coldish room then stumble down to make breakfast. An hour, that´s usually what I give myself before walking off, an hour.

Commuter train, low voices, silent figures standing on the platform, preserving energy. A flurry of Metros, London edition; the hand-written sign in the station updating what tube-lines are working and which are not, which are delayed, which have ”good service”. They are saying that before the olympics here 2012, there will not be a single weekend with all tube-lines running, due to repair-work.

Get in to a London station, changing trains, the final leg in to central London. Then a short walk to the bus with London waking up more and more around me. The commuters have a grim and narrow intent, heading for work; bicyclists zoom by, often dressed in high visibility clothes that would make a clown on LSD feel embarassed about this After Ski-blue kilt he wears with his sparkling sequined harlequin coat.

The homeless, straggling in lines sometimes, waiting for food, sometimes just the lonely figure carrying a big backpack filled with bad memories and heading for one of the homeless-centers in central London to get breakfast, some coffee, other people for another kind of warmth.

See central London wake up; Tottenham Court Road station, St Giles, Tottenham Court Road itself where an alien fleet deposited all their tech geeks to open up computer- and video-stores, but only here, only here, so you don´t make the humans suspicious. Londoners on the bus, everywhere, usually fairly quiet and polite, sometimes freaking out from the pressure of big city life; maybe living in a really bad flat, going to a pretty bad job all day only to go back to living in a really bad flat in one of the concrete estates that surround London like islands of penal colonies.

Getting off the bus, going for a coffee to bring with me. I carry it like a small grail along the almost empty back-streets. At the university, there´s also almost no people in this early, just lights, cleaning-staff, a handful of students, the receptionist who sits there like a quiet queen on the figure-head of a ship. I log in with my card and muzzily head for the right room to do some training before class, carrying coffee.

Seeing a unicorn from the London bus

On my way into town one day, I see a unicorn in the window on the second floor of a house. It´s made out of papiér-machêr, professionally made, with half the body standing up and leaning against the window-frame. It has a short horn and it´s white, all white.

Wingstrokes

Wingstrokes

my soul is flying again

not between lives

(yet)

but places

these two lives

different faces

facing

different faces

different responsibilities

like

lifting one tool

and putting down

another

going from

one house to

another

chiselling stone,

carving a front door

to stand life

and the rain.

They´re going to start needling people soon

my fellow students, that is. 99% of them for the first time ever. In class. Next week. First lesson where they´re needling another living human being. This is a big threshold for most people. There are acupuncturists who still, despite years of clinical practice, are afraid of using needles on their patients.

There are techniques to change your intent so that this works better and easier. Most don´t learn these, however, and have to make do with whatever they can come up with themselves, or what their teachers can help them with. Some of them can still carry a feeling that the needles are hurting or injuring patients, and without getting rid of that, working well with acupuncture and healing people gets difficult.

This is early to start needling others, I think. In the chinese acupuncture doctor trainings it takes much longer before you´re even let near a needle, and other courses in the West vary wildly across the board on it too, some fast, some only after a year or more.

It is early in the course to be doing this: barely three months in. The only needling most of the students have done is being taught twice in class how to needle pads, fruit or objects. Then we are supposed to go home and practice like hell...which most don´t, of course. Maybe it is good to get it done this quickly and get past that threshold, maybe it´s not. Most students are very nervous about it and we put together a little bit of practice for those who wanted to have a try before the class.

Acupuncture. If I´m skilled at it, will it help people greatly? Yes. Will it contain needles? Yes.

Tests

We have exams coming up before Christmas.

Including in Anatomy.

Ghaaaaa.

Sanjiao revisited: Triple Burner: the organ that is no organ (now with notes and smileys)

Currently we are going through the Sanjiao meridian in class. Test on Thursday. Ooops.

  Anyway. Sanjiao is usually translated as ”triple burner” in English. Literally, ”three burners”. It is a curiosity: an organ that has no physical, one organ linked to it.

All the other main meridians are linked to physical organs. In Chinese medicine (Classical Chinese Medicine, CCM) each organ has (at least) three levels: 1) the physical organ itself, what is an ”organ” to Western medicine, 2) the qi, energy of that organ, and the links from it to the rest of the body and how they work, and 3) the emotions and mind-states linked to that organ and to ourselves. All these three weave together in unity in Chinese medicine. They would never be seen as separate – even the act of seeing them as being able to separate leaves heads towards Western thinking. ”Separate” simply isn´t possible. And then there is also 4): how well the first three move in balance and harmony with the external world outside ourselves.

The body has three main sections. Upper burner – head to diaphragm. Middle burner – the diaphragm to belly button. Lower burner – everything beneath that. The function of the Sanjiao is making the flow and function between them smooth and balanced. This is one of many things that the Sanjiao meridian itself can work with. It´s a Yang meridian, where, for example, the Pericardium meridian we spoke about before, is a Yin meridian. They are a pair: Pericardium and Triple Burner.

This is one of those facets that you often have to treat people to make them discover that it´s possible. I have seen this work in real life, and seen how the needles awaken the link between the three jiao in the person. Suddenly, they feel a wholeness they never knew could be there. It´s very nice to watch. :) The kind of health that good CCM can give people is something that has to be felt personally to be understood. Here in the West, we simply have no tools for discovering the joy of that kind of health at all. There are no Western medical techniques that come even close. Most of us are programmed and brain-washed by bad Western science in how we view reality and health, and the depth these programmings go to is greater than most of us ever discover.

It is one of our first longer meridians, and covers a total of 22 points. The meridian itself starts at the ulnar (outer) side of the ring finger. From there it goes up the arm on the outer side, makes a brief jump over the shoulder and then goes on up to the side of the head, around and to the ear and touching eyes and throat. Part of this main channel also continues all the way through the body, through all the three burners, internally. There is another branch that touches the tounge, but this is the main one.

It has several bloody branches we have to study, along with all the other channels´ branches. Oh well. No-one said CCM was anything but complex and difficult to learn.

Treating the Sanjiao meridian weaves the three burners together with remarkable speed and smoothness. It can also treat problems with internal heat, balance the function of energy to the outside of the body, work with Wind in the body, and with certain kinds of ear- and eye-problems.

Ear-problems in CCM can be of many different kinds and for many different reasons. Loss of hearing in old people is often that their kidney energy is going down, which it does naturally through age, and this can often be treated fairly well through acupuncture. Sanjiao meridian-treatments would move more specifically to ear-problems caused by problems in the Wood element, the liver and gallblader, and how that has affected hearing. Same goes for eye-problems.

Treating it is also one way of indirectly working with and balancing the Pericardium, Fire Element and shen. In the older texts, the Sanjiao is seen as one of the conduits for yuanqi, the original qi of the body, which rests in the kidneys and lower dantian, and it can be worked and balanced to activate this when it has gone down or become inactive.

Yuanqi is the CCM term for the energy we are born with – some call it genetic qi, some call it original qi. It is the main part of your bank-balance for health all throughout your life. Some people are born with stronger yuanqi, some with weaker. The strong ones can work all hours of the day, party all night, and die healthy at 99. The weaker ones will have more health problems and issues, and will be fatigued and tired more easily. Problems with low yuanqi can be treated and balanced through CCM, as well as through specific kinds of qigong.

We are going to talk more about the Five Elements in a future post, and do the same with the concept of Wind in Chinese medicine. Wind is one of the liuxie, six evil influences, six major ways the our external environment can affect the health in our internal one. Of these, Wind is seen as the most important to protect against.

CCM talks about six main external pathogenic factors (try to work that phrase into an everyday conversation) that will affect a person from the outside. If the system is quite healthy, the effect is negligable: if it´s less healthy, it will be more affected by it. CCM teaches that external wind can get into the energy and body of the patient in energetic form. If the immune system, both in physical and energetic version, and the defenses aren´t strong enough, if you already are ill, old, have a cold, too tired, stressed – Wind can get inside to a greater depth and start causing more serious health-problems. There are techniques for diagnosing and treating this. Wind can also be a purely internal factor – emotions manifesting erratically could be seen as wind, for example; internal pain that moves around a lot with no fixed abode but comes and goes, moving, would also be seen as Wind.

The Yellow Emperor said, ”In heaven, there are winds from the eight directions, but for man, there are only winds of the five viscera, and what is the reason?”

Qibo answered: ”All the eight winds are evil winds that may hurt the human body. If one´s channels are being affected by the evil wind, it will further invade the viscera. When the viscera are touched by the evil wind through channels, one will contract disease and the winds of the five viscera will occur.”

- Neijing, chapter 4.

”The eight winds of heaven” here are the winds from the eight directions in nature. In humans, this then shifts to how it affects the organs (viscera) linked to the Five Elements – in our discussion here, Sanjiao, Triple Burner, which is linked to Fire together with the Pericardium, Heart, and Small Intestine. If it goes into the body, it would first affect higher depths where the meridians (channels) are. If it goes deeper and starts creating more injury, it will come to the level of the organs themselves. Xie, evil, is an older phrase which harks back to the time when shamanism still infused Chinese medicine. Winds were seen not only as winds, but with the possibility of including evil wind spirits that might hurt you, instead of all the friendly ones who simply played with your clothes and hair. Today it would normally be translated as an ”external pathogenic factor”, and GoreTex has been invented, to the blessing of everybody.

...re-reading this I realize that I will have to write some explanations to this. I sometimes forget that people read this blog who don´t know something about Chinese medicine from before. I´ll write an annotated version of this post in a little while to remedy that...

Hope this did the job. :)

On the bus

heading out one evening, the rain is pouring down outside and the bus is warming up inside, misting the windows. A young woman in front of me has punk badges on her bag; her ear-rings are filled with spikes and peace-signs.

She draws a cat next to her, on the window, just face and ears and whiskers and nose. The cat is looking to its right, in the direction the bus is going, and its nose looks like a small heart with two whiskers going out on each side. It´s quite square, this cat. I sit there smiling at it, and her, for a while. These small acts of humanity, of rebellion, of life.

The Physiology class

is now getting so much critique by our class and others in it, that we are putting together a petition for changes in the teaching format. Don´t know if anything will happen, but a lot of people are really tired and annoyed at how the classes are run at the moment. According to older students, it has been much the same the other years. We found out yesterday that a class two years before us did complain and changes were made, a little. What we are getting is an improved and upgraded version of theirs. And right now, the teacher only reads out loud from her notes during most of the class, and big subjects are covered every two pages without explanations as to what they really are and how they work before going on to next. So this is better than theirs? Jeez.

The class

is gelling as a group. It´s quite nice. We seem to have been very lucky in the people who are in it. This will make the next three-four years a lot easier – and a lot nicer.

Sanjiao, Triple Burner: the organ that is no organ

Currently we are going through the Sanjiao meridian in class. Test on Thursday. Ooops.

Anyway. Sanjiao is usually translated as ”triple burner” in English. Literally, ”three burners”. It is a curiosity: an organ that has no physical, one organ linked to it.

The body has three main sections. Upper burner – head to diaphragm. Middle burner – the diaphragm to belly button. Lower burner – everything beneath that. The function of the Sanjiao is making the flow and function between them smooth and balanced. This is one of many things that the Sanjiao meridian itself can work with. It´s a Yang meridian, where, for example, the Pericardium meridian we spoke about before, is a Yin meridian. They are a pair: Pericardium and Triple Burner.

It is one of our first longer meridians, and covers a total of 22 points. The meridian itself starts at the ulnar (outer) side of the ring finger. From there it goes up the arm on the outer side, makes a brief jump over the shoulder and then goes on up to the side of the head, around and to the ear and touching eyes and throat. Part of this main channel also continues all the way through the body, through all the three burners, internally. There is another branch that touches the tounge, but this is the main one.

Treating the Sanjiao meridian weaves the three burners together with remarkable speed and smoothness. It can also treat problems with internal heat, balance the function of energy to the outside of the body, work with Wind in the body, and with certain kinds of ear- and eye-problems.

Treating it is also one way of indirectly working with and balancing the Pericardium, Fire Element and shen. In the older texts, the Sanjiao is seen as one of the conduits for yuanqi, the original qi of the body, which rests in the kidneys and lower dantian. and it can be worked and balanced to activate this when it has gone down or become inactive.

We are going to talk more about the Five Elements in a future post, and do the same with the concept of Wind in Chinese medicine. Wind is one of the liuxie, six evil influences, six major ways the our external environment can affect the health in our internal one. Of these, Wind is seen as the most important to protect against.

...re-reading this I realize that I will have to write some explanations to this. I sometimes forget that people read this blog who don´t know something about Chinese medicine from before. I´ll write an annotated version of this post in a little while to remedy that...