Pacific College of Oriental Medicine Alumni

To have peace in one's soul is the greatest happiness. - Oriental Wisdom

Practice Building

Continuing Ed
Pacific Symposium
Additional CEU Events
CEU Tapes

Alumni events

Alumni Profiles

Oriental Medicine News

Update Your Info

Alumni Email List

Request Records

Download Graduate Exit Interview

Alumni Minutes

Classifieds
Jobs
Opportunities
Office Space
For Sale

Recovering Our Senses, Recovering the Ability to Heal Ourselves by Robert Duggan

Seldom have I allowed myself a moment of discouragement such as the one I experienced in the last days of 1999. The phenomena preceding that moment initiated a "winter of unknowing," and it brought me a very powerful learning experience.

It was a Wednesday afternoon. I was seeing patients, one after the other, going from room to room. I saw four relatively new patients successively, and in each room had a similar experience. I asked simply, "How are you? What's going on? Tell me about yourself." And each time I heard what I might call hearsay or a secondhand story. All these individuals are well educated, very successful, fluent with ideas and speech. Yet, in each case they responded with a label they had been given by a doctor, a label they had made up for themselves, or a label from a friend: "I have arthritis." "I have bursitis." "I have migraines." "I have cluster headaches." And in each case, I found that it was virtually impossible for them to describe the symptoms as they experienced them, or give details of the moments and hours before the symptoms appeared. They did not have simple language for the way an ache or a pain appeared in their forehead, or the way their breathing moved, or what happened in their body. It was a disheartening moment to realize that they could tell me ideas about their own body, yet had little concrete ability or language to share the actual sensations they experienced moving through their hands, their feet, their torso, their head.

For years I've known that a main part of my work-and, I believe, a principal effect of acupuncture-is to enhance people's sensory awareness of their own life, thus enhancing their healing-and their joy. Yet over the years, as individuals watch medical shows on television, read about medicine, and speak in abstractions with their doctors and friends, they've come to have less and less awareness of themselves, a state that seems more and more prevalent. Self-awareness is key to healing, and increasingly, individuals lack this starting point for their journey to health.

And there were other incidents that fed my discouragement.

When I was teaching a seminar last fall, a young acupuncture practitioner, a graduate of a very fine acupuncture school in the Western United States, came up to me after the first session and said, "Why are you talking about the senses? What does awakening the senses have to do with the practice of acupuncture?" At first I thought she was joking with me-but she was serious. She had studied acupuncture as a body of information out of which treatment decisions were made, and she had not realized that to use this knowledge well, she needed to awaken her senses. Even her pulse-reading provided only limited perception of what was going on within the person-not the richly textured explanations available through the multifaceted pulses; nor was she aware of the nuances of voice or sounds or colors or emotions.

In another seminar-the two-week SOPHIA intensive that starts Tai Sophia's Master of Acupuncture program-again I encountered similar sensory numbness. A loving young mother typified what I experienced in the group of fifty students. When describing her young daughter she could give us stories and labels-"bright," "hyperactive" and "difficult," for example. Yet she struggled to describe the simple phenomena of her 9-year-old. It was as if those labels were plastered over her eyes. She could not say without detailed questioning that her daughter had shortness of breath when afraid, was reading books ahead of her school level, had many close friends, and was asking too many creative questions for her teachers. Her mother knew all of this, yet it had to be pulled to the surface.

In the classroom and the treatment room, I often demand that beginning students and beginning patients take off labels and open their senses to the phenomena of their life experience. As I tear apart their language, they almost seem to feel I tear apart their flesh-their encapsulated Qi-until something new and wondrous begins to emerge: a life fully lived.

It's said that Shakespeare used 25,000 words to describe life and that the average college-educated person today is limited to 10,000. I fear that our language is being reduced to plastic words and concepts, making it difficult for our patients to know their own embodied experience of life. And with less and less capacity to know themselves, they must more and more turn themselves over to medical experts.

I've learned that in the moment of discouragement, opportunity arises. These last months have helped us at Tai Sophia become more precise about what the learning and the teaching of the Institute must be. Tai Sophia's mission is to enable all of us to learn the arts of living and of dying, based on ancient wisdom and the observing of nature. Now, we see that fundamental to this mission is the ability to speak truly about life's phenomena.

And so, from my "winter of unknowing" emerges clarity about the critical work ahead of us.

First, we must take on the very basic work of awakening our senses and recovering a language that simply describes what is before us. This work is important for our culture. In the absence of such a discourse, I believe we will be reduced to ironic, judgmental commentaries, to ungrounded abstractions about life, so wonderfully described in a recent book by Jedediah Purdy: For Common Things; Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today. The task is to reawaken our senses, and then, before we describe it in poetry, to learn and describe our experience in the simplest of language: Is it dry? Is it hot? Is it cold? Is it open? Is it closed?

Second, we need to bring people together to learn from each other. I'm aware that the language individuals use to describe their experience to me is a language they develop alone, largely in front of a television set. A lot of what I do in the treatment room, one on one, can best be done in groups. I could greet folks and then help them learn from each other. They don't need me. They need to hear the actual experience of others suffering and in pain and in the process of healing. I think of the healing temples of ancient Greece where people began the healing process by attending a Greek tragedy and then speaking about it with each other. How do we create group occasions for us to learn together, to realize that we are all on a path between birth and death that includes suffering?

Third, practitioners must use their senses to assist healing. I often say that the practitioner doesn't really know how to treat a patient, because each patient is unique. Experienced practitioners have learned to allow each patient to teach them the best way to treat that unique individual. This work cannot be done from a formula, from abstract "symptoms," to a theory about pattern, to placing needles based on a theory about the pattern. What we want to create is a different world of treatment. That means practitioners open their senses, observe when movement occurs, and then enhance that movement.

What I write in this article-although catalyzed by recent experiences-is something that has developed in my understanding over 25 years in conversation with my colleagues at Tai Sophia. We seek to recover a world virtually unknown in the modern West, a world neglected as our culture developed its great ability to analyze and take things apart. However, my colleagues and I here at the Institute have a vision:

. that we develop graduate programs through which individuals recover their senses-their ability to see, to hear, to taste, to feel and to smell nature, to be in the presence of life as it is lived, and to observe and enhance the way it moves;

. that we develop a campus where many folks spend time together, enriching that learning, and sharing it with people who do research and clinical work;

. and that we build new ways through which people recover awareness, and thus gain the ability to heal themselves, requiring much less intervention from medical experts.

Though the actual programs will have labels like "Acupuncture," "Applied Philosophy," "Nutrition" and "Herbology," sensory awareness will be at the heart of all.

So out of discouragement has arisen hope.

And that hope is grounded, perhaps, in an understanding of the deepest root of the issue-that our senses are closed and that we must open them. And that comes around to something I've known for 25 years. Something for which I've never quite had the language and the clarity that I've gained through allowing myself the winter of unknowing.

And so I invite you to go into your own winter of unknowing, for out of that experience can come the hope of spring with its vision of what can be. Here at Tai Sophia that vision is of recovering our senses and thus our common sense, of regaining our own innate ability to heal ourselves and others.

"Recovering Our Senses, Recovering the Ability to Heal Ourselves" is excerpted from Robert Duggan's recently published collection of essays, Common Sense for the Healing Arts. The book is available through the Meeting Point Bookstore by calling 800-735-2968 ext. 6632. Hear Robert Duggan present these ideas during Pacific Symposium 2004.