My life is busy and, really, Full enough that when I notice I haven't quite achieved all of my goals I'm really okay with it.  On some level.  I do beat myself up a bit, but there it is.

Somehow in the last two years I've lost the ability to communicate honestly.  Which isn't to say I'm deceitful.  Perhaps it's better to say that I've lost the ability to communicate FREELY.  I've always been a person who wants to be sure I am saying what I mean - or meaning what I say.  I don't like it when I feel that I'm saying things that are being misinterpreted.  Instead of thinking that it's probably the listener's problem that misunderstandings are occuring, I figure it's my own deal. 

I have several Livejournals and I don't really use any of them - because of this problem.  I don't want to say anything for fear of being misunderstood.

But St. Francis asks us not to seek so much to be understood as to understand.  And a vital part of understanding is communicating with people.  So communicating is important.  Reaching out.  Moving forward...

I'm ending the second year of my journey in Classical Chinese Medicine.  The entire experience has just blown me away.  I have consistently done well academically and earned the respect (I think) of a few professors and students.  They have certainly earned mine.  Despite all of this, I have struggled in a few ways.  The top few I can think of right now are:

1. Developing a routine:  This has to do with balancing my life, mostly.  I feel sort of sporadic with most things and that's not acceptable to me.  There are building blocks to the path I've chosen and I've struggled greatly to find a way to fit those building blocks into the way I habitually live my life.
2. Going deeper with information:  Part of this is a function of the difficulty of the program I'm in.  We are required to do a lot.  A whole lot.  Much of it quite different from anything we've ever done before.  Combine this with inefficient use of time as hinted out in item 1 -- and it leaves me sort of learning what I have to learn to pass tests and not much more.  The problem with this is that much of what we're learning for tests is not really what I resonate with, enjoy or think I will be focusing on as I progress.  I understand the necessity of learning the material and I do so well - but I need to be going above and beyond if I expect to get to the level I know I can get to.
3. Integration of material:  Similar to 2, but here it has more to do with just basic studying of what I'm learning on a day to day basis.  Because of the busy-ness of my schedule and my mismanagement of resources I find that I'm studying to tests, mostly in concentrated bursts, and thus I'm not making the connections necessary to mature in the medicine.  I also think integration and even depth can be achieved by making an effort to externalize it more often.  I learned in Philosophy grad school that you often don't know what you don't know until you try to tell someone what you think you know.  You know?
   

I could think of more ways to look at it, but I think this is the crux of it.  I need to be taking in the material consistently, reviewing it consistently, making connections (through a more constant level of engagement combined with efforts to externalize the information) and thus diving deeper into the material.  I think most everything else I'm looking for will follow from that.  There are some basic spiritual concerns I'm working with, but I don't think they are primary when compared to this more basic scholastic set of issues.  This is going to be my life.  I love this material deeply.  I want to be a doctor.  Most earnestly I do!

So, I'm going to work on these things and I'm going to document my progress using Zaadz.  Why?  Several reasons.

1. Writing something in the public domain, for me, increases accountability.  It doesn't assure great performance but it helps.
2. In the process of doing this I will be putting ideas together, putting information on the Internet that may never have been there before.  Because most of this information involves a new way of living in the world, a new way of looking at health and healing - it is likely to be of interest to Zaadzsters.
3. It gives me a handy excuse for coming and seeing how Zaadz is progressing.
   

I need to head to a clinic shift now, otherwise I'd work on the principles I will be working with (and thus the features I will be watching for benchmarks)... maybe I will have time between patients.

Thanks,

Eric

I thank God for my life.  Too often in the past 30 years I have been mired in personal worries, confined in the pictures of me that others have in their hearts, too afraid to live unabashedly the person who is in me.  I have been petty.  I have obsessed over tiny things.  I have closed myself off from others.  I have given into anger, lust, laziness, self-righteousness. 

But honestly - I haven't really lived in those places in a long time.  Since I started my medical school path I have consistently worked to root out the darkest parts of my psyche - leaving them exposed to the light where they can dry out and become dust.  I keep a little of the dust from each of these in a psychic bottle.  It helps me to remember, and to see the sicknesses I have suffered in others.  I'm not saying I'm perfect.  Far from it.  But I don't feel angry anymore.  Not ever.  I do feel motivated.  I feel compelled to change things.  I feel empowered to stand up for myself.  But not angry.  Physiological anger, maybe.  :)  I do sometimes still feel lazy, but that's coming less and less often.  More often distracted - I think.  Probably just an insidious form of laziness.  Lust is mostly a thing of the past, and I'm happy about that.  I do feel quite healthy feelings toward my partner - but not much beyond that.  It's more than enough.

So, I'm happy.  But I don't feel at the end of anything.  It's like the feeling when you're finally packed and ready to take off on some huge roadtrip.  It's an ecstatic feeling, to know you're finally packed and not TOO worried that you're leaving anything behind.  And then just the road ahead - and that comes with a mix of trepidation and elation.  It's a long long road and I'm going to run out of gas, I'm going to skid off the shoulder sometimes, I'm going to meet ghostly hitchhikers and irate police and lock my keys in the trunk when I'm 20 miles from the nearest town.  Sometimes I'm gong to question the wisdom of ever leaving home.

But mostly I'm just going to keep moving forward with a smile on my face, my favorite song in my mind and nothing but excitement for what's to come.

May you be blessed with whatever passes for this in your life.  Because despite it's mixed blessings - it's a wonderful thing.

Ah.  Men.

e

I am not a perfect student.  I sometimes choose to watch a movie or screw around on the computer instead of doing something to advance my medical knowledge or my personal cultivation.  I want to say that first so I can’t be accused of having unreasonably high standards.  I do understand that folks have things other than school-related activity to do.  I understand that a full life requires one to make time for family, friends, exercise, relaxation, work, personal development, etc…  I understand, further, that American culture has peculiarities that make the focused and utterly determined mode of scholarship common in other cultures basically impossible to achieve. 

But I am seriously concerned about the lack of rigor I see among students at my institution.  I want to hasten to say that I don’t think this is specific to my institution.  I think it’s just more noticeable because it clashes so severely with the material we are learning and, especially, the teachers who are providing us with the awesome opportunity to learn.

The Neijing, which we like to quote so much, is basically a transcript of an interaction between master and disciple.  Whether the master and disciple were flesh and blood beings or not is irrelevant.  They represent a form of the master/disciple relationship that should serve as a template for all students who hope to be Classical in their approach to Chinese Medicine.  What happens in the Neijing?  The disciple starts with some amount of information.  After some undetermined amount of time (likely an extended period) the student comes back with deep insightful questions that are usually preceded with an extended exposition of what he understands.  This mode shows the master – “Hey, I care enough about this material that I spent plenty of time trying to understand what you have already explained to me and this is what I still don’t quite get.”  The disciple doesn’t ask questions he could easily have figured out, one imagines.  The disciple doesn’t complain that he’s learning too little, too slowly, or too much, too fast.  He certainly doesn’t complain that he doesn’t like the master’s personality.

This is the model of learning that is needed today.  Nothing fancy.  Just devote every part of yourself you have left after taking care of your basic needs to obtaining and digesting (and, eventually comprehending) the material that is available to you.  When you can’t go any farther with what you’ve got – ask a question based on what you do know and see where it takes you.

I know “devoting every part (that’s left) of yourself” to the material is a bit of a daunting task.  Some of it is bloody boring, it’s true.  Some of it seems irrelevant.  I’m sure sometimes HuangDi wanted to say, “I don’t want to know about THAT – tell me more about X.”  I’m sure sometimes he didn’t want to do the extremely difficult intellectual work necessary to understand the most complex and viable medical system ever known anywhere.  We don’t hear about it because that’s not the stuff that used to be put in biographies.  Nowadays, it’s the only kind of stuff that makes it in to biographies.  Go figure.

Anyway – you have a responsibility.  You are here to pay back the fine professors you have access to for their hard work.  Yes, their hard work.  They worked hard (some of them VERY HARD, under HARD conditions) to learn what they know.  They work hard now – building their classes, doing their own scholarly work, running their clinics, raising their families, often sitting on multiple committees, often dealing with various personal difficulties.  They work hard sitting in front of you, struggling to answer your sometimes totally inane questions.   All they ask in return is that you be a good student.  That more often than not you turn away from the 10,000 distractions of the modern world and turn toward your work.  That you struggle with the hard stuff, and quickly assimilate the easy stuff.  That you don’t complain when the work is too hard, or when it’s too easy.  That you treat them with respect – respect beyond what you’ve probably been accustomed to giving your teachers.  The culture of respect in this country, particularly in education, is dead or dying.  So it’s time to revive that – starting with the masters we are lucky enough to work with.  It’s not much to ask.

You don’t have to be here.  No one has tied you down.  You had to apply.  You were chosen.  Now you’re here, and it won’t last long.  Once you leave, these wells of incredible information aren’t going to be there for you to dip into any time you get thirsty. 

If you’re not ready to commit yourself to this massive task, if you’re not sure this is really what you want to do with your life – go do something else.  Leave for a while and think about it.  Come back when you’re ready.  No judgement, no worries.  But as long as you stay here, frustrating the hell out of your teachers and wasting their time and yours – not to mention your money… you’re serving nothing.  Or at least nothing good.

Eric