Focus Health & Wellness Educational Symposium

By Steve | Published: December 28, 2009

While my domicile remains in Sonora, I haven’t been focused on the local community since closing the Healing Center of the Sierra several years ago. I’ve cut back my practice quite dramatically, so I could focus more intensively on my researches into classical Chinese medicine, and work on various writing projects. Some of those writings are archived on this site, others provide the foundation for seminars I’ve taught and am preparing. I’m working toward drafting a series of monographs; my current focus is the five systems of acupuncture channels, which provide the conceptual foundation for Neijing (Inner Classic) style acupuncture. Of course, it’s convenient that I’m also in the process of writing the handouts that I’ll provide for a four weekend seminar series that I’ll be teaching on the clinical application of those systems.

During the past couple years, a few friends suggested I join another in a long line of local groups aimed at gathering “like-minded people” to provide mutual support and focus attempts toward social change, either local and global. Often the groups I’ve gravitated toward have gathered around healing work or sustainability and green politics; in this case it seems to focus equally on both. Yet, I’m generally much more interested in my own philosophical and clinical investigations of Chinese medicine than I am in group process, so I continued in blissful ignorance of the progress of:

FoCuS — Foothill Collaborative for Sustainability

Yet, about a month ago Sheila Gradison asked me to participate in an Educational Symposium on March 19, 2010. I went to my first meeting about that event on Wed. (12/2), and found engaged and interesting people involved in various aspects of the “holistic health” field. We had a discussion about the topics each of us would like to address during that brief symposium, which touched on the topic of quantum physics (of all things!). I’m reminded that group process has its virtues, including stimulating clarification. After many years of reflecting on my work, that meeting stimulated me to write a few pages of comments on the foundations of Chinese medicine, which even leads many enthusiasts to invoke the results of experiments in quantum physics! My interest in this topic dates back to the beginning of my interest in Chinese medicine; I’m curious to see how others will connect with those ideas.

While quantum physics can be a valuable topic for holistic health practitioners who are attempting to engage (particularly “scientific”) members of the public, I believe it is ultimately a distraction. It can help pry open the minds of people set in their allegiance to mechanistic conceptual models of reality, but it also tends to invite people to enroll in it as the “right” conceptual model that explains how things work. People want so badly to feel in control of their world…

I believe the key point that most holistic health practitioners are trying to make in referring to quantum physics is that mechanistic “scientific” models do not provide the ultimate explanation of the world — that the world, especially the human world,  is much more complex and magical than most imagine. Some people believe quantum physics suggests that there is a consciousness expressed through the “physical” universe. Indeed, they’ve given one type of quark (subatomic particles) a suggestive name like “charm.” While such speculations may amuse us, why do we seek support for the idea that consciousness be included in our descriptions of individual human life from the outset?

Each individual is an embodied spirit. The first task of that embodied spirit is to survive in this world of constant polar interactions. The highest healing work facilitates that process, rather than controlling the expression of distress when there is something awry. We need to study that, and how to support it in disentangling from its blockages and stagnation. Natural medicine is far more (and less!) than the use of naturally occurring products. It is the process of facilitating an individual’s return to his or her own nature — to optimize it’s ability to live.

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Busy, Busy, Busy

By Steve | Published: December 4, 2009

I haven’t quit blogging. In fact, I have A LOT of ideas I want to explore in this venue. This past month has just been AMAZINGLY busy.I hope to return to blogging CCM at least a couple times per week, even though I have many other things on my platter. In addition to me ongoing practice treatment patients:

  1. I went to San Diego twice in November; the second was to teach a newly conceived one day seminar introducing the five sets of acupuncture channels. It was a big success, and I want to thank Justin Ehrlich and Carrie Denaro for their wonderful help in organizing and marketing the seminar, and the upcoming four weekend series on the channel systems in San Diego. I also want to thank all the practitioners and students of Chinese medicine who came out to listen to some of my ideas about Neijing (Inner Classic) style acupuncture, question both my ideas and their own experience and understanding, and evolve their thinking about Chinese medicine. My heart was warmed by your enthusiastic response to my work to restore the vitality to acupuncture, and look forward to seeing many of you in a couple months when we start the series.
  2. I’ve made initial contacts with a medical illustrator and a publisher about several book projects I’m in the process of developing in conjunction with the seminars I’m currently writing, and the ones I’ve already taught. Those early contacts have been very fruitful, and have taken a lot of time and focus.
  3. Cindy Micleu and I have finalized plans for a new full weekend version of my seminar introducing the Waike (External Medicine) Specialty of Chinese herbal medicine. It will be held next October in Seattle.
  4. Also finalized plans with Golden Flower Chinese Herbs for their sponsoring the four weekend series on the five systems of channels in the San Francisco Bay Area starting in Sept. 2010 and in Albuquerque early in 2011.
  5. I’ve gotten involve in a Health & Wellness Educational Symposium to be held March 19, 2010 in Murphys – near my home in Sonora. While I hadn’t been much involved with the local community since closing the Healing Center of the Sierra several years ago, I’ve been inspired by the planning meeting I attended.
  6. Oh, and by the way, I also got a new roof on my house. The noise…

So, please don’t draw any unwarranted conclusions from my absence from blogging for a few weeks. Thank you for sharing links with friends and associates who might be interested in the healing possibilities of CCM. The site continues to grow and evolve. There is now a list of classes and seminars scheduled around the country in the upper right corner of each page, and the blog is coming back to life…

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The Archeology of Disease

By Steve | Published: November 5, 2009

People develop progressive and degenerative diseases from stagnations that accumulate within the embodied spirit. We can tolerate those accumulations for some time, but eventually they impede or obstruct “normal” physiological process. Each embodied spirit is provided with an amazingly effective collection of “storage reservoirs” that allow them to adapt and adjust to pathogenic stagnations. (Technically, those reservoirs are called luo vessels, channel divergences, and several of the eight extraordinary vessels). They allow people to “move on” with life by storing pathogenic factors, when they are unable or unwilling to resolve them. However,

This process of storing unresolved pathogenic factors is a double-edged sword.

While storing unresolved pathogenic factors facilitates the individual’s personality in going on with life in the short-term, it also renders the diseases that eventually emerge more difficult to resolve. If we can resist the temptation to suspend the challenges and discomfort our unresolved pathogenic factors present, we can avoid burdening ourselves with such an immense project in the future, because

We can’t simply balance or control those diseases into resolution!

Instead, resolving most chronic progressive and degenerative diseases requires the willingness to dig through the layers of “unfinished business,” and unravel the entangled accumulations we’ve stored away. Healing is very much like Archeology, though in addition to digging through the layers (and documenting them), we are faced with the challenge of resolving the pathogenic factors stored in those layers. There are no “short-cuts” for the embodied spirit — if it hasn’t finished with some aspect of life process, it’s stored away to pile up. So, if we want to heal, we may as well get out our (metaphorical) shovels and start digging!

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Lessons from the River

By Steve | Published: November 2, 2009

My brief hiatus from blogging has come during a Colorado river trip through the Grand Canyon from Lees Ferry to Phantom Ranch. It was a GREAT trip, but alas I wasn’t well prepared with a backlog of posts to publish while I was out of contact! While I was hiking out of the wondrous canyon, it occurred to me that perhaps

the ancient Daoists may have been whitewater boatmen.

They were, after all, the first to counsel “going with the flow.” Indeed, the river teaches very clearly that trying to fight the flow brings only struggle and ultimately failure. Running the river also teaches us that if we pay very careful attention to choose when and where to exert our efforts, we can avoid getting hung up on the rocks. The boatmen all did a great job, allowing me to cogitate that insight within the safety of the boat. It is equally true concerning life (and the Dao), as it is relative to the river.

I’ve returned home for a few days of office hours, then I’m off to San Diego tomorrow for the Pacific Symposium — an annual meeting of practitioners of acupuncture and Chinese medicine. Look for me there, and ask about the one-day “Introduction to the Channels and Vessels” seminar we’re planning for San Diego on Nov. 22.

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Teaching the Soul of Classical Chinese Medicine

By Steve | Published: October 16, 2009

Give a man a fish to feed him for a day; teach him to fish to feed him for a lifetime!

I’m committed to sharing the wealth of classical Chinese medicine, which I’ve been able to learn through the generous teachings of Jeffrey Yuen. Yet, Jeffrey doesn’t make it easy – The sage is not humane (Dao De Jing, verse 5). Or, in contemporary vernacular – it’s cruel to be kind! Jeffrey is inspired in his teaching, though he’s also assiduously “low key” about the value of his teachings. His teaching style expresses to me that the key to realizing the wealth of Chinese medicine lay in learning to “sort out” the subtle and dynamic factors that guide each patient’s life, and thus discern accurate and inspired treatment strategies.

Patients present their practitioners with lessons and complexities, which certainly don’t come emblazoned on their foreheads. Practitioners are challenged to identify the specific nature and location of pathogenic factors, and differentiate them from the embodied spirit’s intrinsic responses to sustain life. Modern TCM teaches us to classify the manifestations of a patient’s distress, but provides little guidance for unwinding that individual’s entanglement in habituated dysfunction. We’ve been taught to simply treat whatever imbalances the patient manifests. However…

Symptoms and signs express the embodied spirit’s struggle to maintain life in the face of “pathogenic factors” that challenge it.

They exhibit the combined influences of pathogenic factors and the embodied spirit’s reaction it them! I’ve found that the best therapies focus on resolving pathogenic factors, without compromising the individual’s vitality. Indeed, they often stimulate and facilitate the embodied spirit’s intrinsic responsiveness to allow it to function more freely. Can one teach others the inspiration to sort out the entangled nature of a patient’s symptoms and signs, and the willingness to trust the embodied spirit in its sometimes violent efforts to expel factors that have been blocking its healing? Probably not, but Jeffrey and I reach out to participants in our seminars and try…

Try what? In the end, we each have to come from our strengths. Jeffrey has nearly boundless experience, learning through direct contact since he was a toddler from masters who embodied strong currents of classical Chinese medicine. I’ll never match the depth and variety of that experience, but I do have one experience that may be valuable to practitioners and students who want to learn from his enigmatic teachings. I’ve had the experience of having to figure out the mysteries of classical Chinese medicine as an adult. While Jeffrey shares the dynamic and responsive world he sees and challenges his students to awaken to that reality, my seminars provide a little more step-by-step guidance, as I:

  • share my thinking process, and how it’s inspired by specific images and theories of CCM
  • engage participants to entertain the CCM (especially the Neijing – Inner Classic) thinking process
  • describe how I work through the evaluation of a patient to devise a treatment strategy

I provide lecture notes, because I want participants to engage the ideas and thinking process of classical Chinese medicine while I’m presenting them rather than trying to scribble down a lot of unfamiliar theory and information. I invite questions, because I know the challenge of working through the systematic limitations of modern TCM. I’ve written essays to give perspective participants (and others) the chance to read and “chew on” the perspective of classical Chinese medicine that I’ve learned and cultivated — before they come to a seminar. After attending a seminar, participants will be invited to participate in an online discussion to help them implement those teachings.

Check out the new link in the upper right corner of every page — Scheduled Classes. I’m currently talking with three seminar sponsors, including Golden Flower Chinese Herbs — gracious sponsors of my seminars for the past two years, and hope to have more links there soon!

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Some Treatments Are Plain as Day

By Steve | Published: October 11, 2009

Stagnant blood is the somatic version of unresolved emotional conflicts.

Who doesn’t have any of those? No attachment to having your way? Don’t think your way is the right way? Well, I don’t believe contemporary people come close to that stringent standard of spiritual liberation. We have too much apparent (temporal) power, and generally fail to differentiate clearly between what we can and can’t control. Yet, our embodied spirits also know they have to put those unresolved issues aside, so we can get on with life. Ever wonder where those finished issues go?

The embodied spirit uses its key function of embodiment to displace unresolved spiritual issues into the body.

Among a broader range of unresolved spiritual conflicts, emotional conflicts have specific “targets,” and are displaced into the blood. Chapter 10 of the Lingshu (Spiritual Axis) instructs that the embodied spirit stores such blood stagnation in the luo vessels, which that important chapter notes are the only visible acupuncture channels. Learning to diagnose and treat luo vessels is among the simplest ways to begin working with the channels (in contrast to the modern acupuncture approach, which focuses on specific points and point combinations).

[Note: Other spiritual conflicts (without clear targets) are often displaced into one or more vital fluids, and are stored in the channel divergences. These are not visible, and learning to treat them requires considerably more study. Learn more about the theory and clinical application of the channels and vessels.]

Treating luo vessels can assist the embodied spirit in moving blood stagnation out of the system

Often blood stagnation accumulates for years, before it eventually progresses into overt disease. While venting out that accumulation doesn’t actually change the underlying pathogenic process (of accumulating unresolved emotional conflict), it can substantially reduce the load. Since most luo vessels flow into the chest, their filling frequently compromises the axis of qi – in the chest. Thus, releasing stagnant blood facilitates the flow of all post-natal qi — the vital functions of life.

Each of the five systems of channels and vessels fills a key role in sustaining individual life

Each system of channels and vessels exhibits distinctive pathological processes, and responds to specific clinical procedures. The luo fill with stagnant blood (unfulfilled and somatized emotional conflict), until they overflow to empty back into the primary channels, which leads to a progression of pathology. A one-day study of the luo is included in the four weekend series of seminars on the systems of channels, which introduces Neijing style acupuncture.

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Is Health Care Against Society?

By Steve | Published: October 6, 2009

I ran into an old friend at the grocery store a couple days ago. We greeted each other warmly, after not seeing each other for several years. Matt is a medical doctor, specifically a radiologist, who was one of few medical professionals in our small rural California town to accept my efforts practicing Chinese medicine fifteen years ago. At that time, we bonded over our deep concern for the well-being of patients and our scornful opinions concerning the practice of medicine.

Yet, Matt and I were going in different directions. He was pretty cynical about many of his local colleagues, and how they used (and mis-used!) the very expensive technology at the core of his specialty. I learned a lot from him about both the strengths and limitations of medical imaging as part of my specialized training in “acupuncture orthopedics,” and I was searching for an entirely different conceptual framework for practicing health care. We drifted apart as the stresses of our respective lives consumed our attention, even though our souls knew we were “brothers” in our quest to improve American health care.

The focus of Matt’s rapier wit has shifted from local to global. He now believes there are severe systemic flaws in American health care, and declares that only a complete transformation of financial incentives can repair the system. Matt shared his perception that:

The current fee-for-service health care system renders patients into fodder to generate fees (and hence INCOME) for providers

Matt strongly expressed his conviction that our health care system can only be repaired by adopting a national program like the one in Great Britain. His twenty-five years practicing medicine has convinced him that the health care system must be designed with patient welfare at its center! I heartily agree with that perception.

While I may identify different specifics and remedies, Matt and I agree on many aspects of our societal challenges with health. I concur that our health care system suffers because of some very warped incentives, and believe lasting effective remedies must address them. Twenty years ago the “money people” devised “managed care,” which was supposed to squeeze the inefficiencies out of our health care system. Yet, that industry now soaks up more than 17% of GNP, and our health outcomes are poor relative to other industrialized nations, especially when measuring health span. Maybe we can start with several principles:

  1. We must find ways to put patients back at the center of health care, especially identifying specific life changes they can cultivate to promote healing
  2. We must line up incentives throughout the entire economy to support health
  3. Modern (western) medicine doesn’t have a monopoly on wisdom about health — a free marketplace of ideas will optimize our solutions

We can find solutions for our health care crisis!

I told Matt about my blogging concerning health care policy; he shared his small website to spread his philosophy. I suppose he got disheartened or busy with other things, because he hasn’t continued writing new pieces for that site. Matt seemed inspired by the idea of blogging, and I hope he gets invigorated to share his experience and insights about our profound societal health care challenges. While our voices and messages are rather different, I believe that a mélange of caring and concerned health care practitioners will identify the important principles for resolving our health care challenges.

Sometimes, the darnedest things happen at the supermarket!

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Practicing Health Care

By Steve | Published: September 27, 2009

A few weeks ago, I taught a weekend continuing education seminar for acupuncturists on the channel divergences, which have central importance for both understanding and reversing progressive and degenerative disease. Early in that seminar, I posed the following question, which I believe lay deep in the soul of many health care practitioners:

Do you want to participate in the disease management industry or the art of healing?

Has the idealism to help others, which continues to inspire many young people to enter the health care fields, been overwhelmed by the “scientific” doctrines students must learn and later the practical challenges of making a living? While that idealism appears well beaten-down in most, I believe it continues to smolder in the hearts of many. Can we gently fan those embers with the knowledge that the healing potential of the embodied spirit dwarfs the efforts of scientific medicine to control the expression of pathology?

Modern medicine relies on fear.

Allopathic medicine portrays patients’ bodies as “broken” — in need of permanent physical repair through surgery or ongoing physiological control with pharmaceuticals. Yet, embodied spirits that exhibit various diseases aren’t broken; they’re simply congested with stagnation, which blocks the natural flow of vital function. The symptoms and signs of disease are a cry for help; they are the embodied spirit’s gesture to express the nature and extent of its distress.

While western medicine sets the tone for our health care system, most proponents of “natural” medicine conform to its passive care model. And why not? — it makes SO MUCH SENSE economically. What could be better than selling people on the need to take a certain supplement for the rest of their lives, or come for three treatments per week for the next six months? Excuse me while I price a new BMW.

Practicing Health Care is a Sacred Trust.

People come to health care practitioners with their pains and their fears. I believe our work challenges us to discern the sources of each individual’s suffering, and find ways to stimulate the transformations of healing. Often that takes more time initially than simply controlling the manifestations of distress, but careful work to discriminate an individual’s blocks to healing can pay substantial dividends. The financial value for both individuals and our society of empowering patients to resolve their ailments is enormous. The non-financial value is even greater!

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To Publish or Not to Publish?

By Steve | Published: September 25, 2009

That is the question. It’s particularly salient for me, as my own editor and publisher of this site. I’m wanting to make good use of my precious time and energy, and have bit into a REALLY BIG project — trying to share a worldview about health and healing that’s profoundly different from our modern “knowledge.” While modern scientific knowledge concerning health and healing appeals convincingly to the naïve perspectives of our personalities, it isn’t actually TRUE. As Shakespeare wrote so eloquently (Hamlet Act 1, Scene 5):

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy (or modern science!).

Relative to human health, there are the awesome mysteries and magic of the embodied spirit. Yet, where there is awesome power, many experience fear. How will people respond to my lancing – like a picador – the “sacred cow” of modern medical science? Many people place their faith in the truths of science as profoundly as many generations of our ancestors invested theirs in religion. Fundamental challenges to the authority of socially dominant paradigms have not been welcomed — ask Galileo or Socrates! Yet, the growth of human knowledge depend on such challenges.

The conceptual power of modern scientific thought is exactly what renders it incomplete for the study of human health and disease. The wondrous conceptual frameworks of modern science enhance our investigations of those aspects of human life that exhibit uniform physical laws, yet they fail to help us facilitate the individual potential to heal. The predictive power of modern science belies the individual possibilities of the embodied spirit. Can we learn to enhance the magic of individual healing? The modern consumption-based approach to health care doesn’t account for this basic truth:

Health and healing emerge from individuals who live in alignment with their beings; they are NOT consumer goods that can be procured from the outside.

We can’t control healing, but we can learn to stimulate and facilitate it. Are modern people willing to hear the basic truth that we can’t externally control such a fundamental aspect of human life as our health? Modern medical technologies leap forward in their ability to control acute crises, but ailing patients remain subject to the natural progression of most diseases. Are we willing to return our faith to efforts focused on enhancing the embodied spirit’s healing process, rather than simply trying to control the expression of distress?

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Health Care: NOT Just a Funding Challenge

By Steve | Published: September 21, 2009

The Problem with Health Care is the Pervasive Fantasy that We Can Treat It as a Consumer Good!

Health and healing are not consumer goods. Why would one think we could treat health care as one? If consuming health care actually made people healthier, there could never be enough. Our society would have to ration it explicitly.

When policy makers consider the issue of how to distribute health care, they get carried away with economic models, and forget about the underlying issue. In economic terms, individuals pay for goods and services to achieve a desired result, yet healing doesn’t work that way. We might buy short-term control of the manifestation of distress, but that purchase undermines our ability to use that expression of distress to sort out the factors that create it.

Health and healing are a matter of cultivation. We might even consider them a life-style, but try as we might we cannot make them into consumer goods. Health comes from the inside, and suppressing the signs of physiological distress doesn’t bring it back.

We can’t buy health any more than we can buy love.

For either health or love, it may appear for a short time that one can buy it, but doing so only introduces the unquenchable thirst for more purchases. Trying to turn them into consumer goods subverts their very nature.

Health (like love) flourishes when individuals invest in it!

Health flourishes when an embodied spirit invests in its individuality, and suffers when the individual’s alignment with life wavers. Pay attention to facilitating vital function, rather than simply the desire to enjoy your experience. Make decisions based on what your embodied spirit expresses, and you will tend to grow healthier. Yet, simple as it sounds, following that injunction isn’t always easy. Sometimes people need to experience the discomfort of the healing process.

The challenge of health care is NOT financial, it’s technical. We will start conquering it when we explore how to resolve disease, rather than maintaining it by managing expression.

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  • About Steven

    Steven Alpern, L.Ac., practices acupuncture and Chinese medicine as applied clinical philosophy. He is also a teacher, author and speaker. His efforts to discern the nature of individual health draw upon the classics of Chinese medicine and several historical traditions and specialties. Learn more...

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