Windstone Press

I graduated from Chinese medicine school quite a few years ago. I first encountered the medicine in 1996. Initially, I was most interested in its allusiveness and mystery. Within a year, I was studying full time. I was living and breathing Chinese medicine and everything I did was related to it. For a long time, I joked that Chinese medicine had ruined my life. It had ruined all of my plans, but I really felt as though I had found my true calling in life. I remember in my last year of school being thoroughly burnt out. I didn’t care about anything other than passing my national exams and getting out into the world to practice. This was the beginning of what was to become a spiral downward.

After I moved my entire life to another city and started a practice, something was alive in me again. I was seeing patients and they were getting better-and they were paying me! I was doing well in every respect. I hit another bump in the road after about two years of practice. By that time, money and business were overshadowing the medicine, and I was losing interest. The daily routine of dealing with calls, tax filing, advertising, office management, and other related issues were sucking the life out of me. That is when I realized I needed to have a toolkit at my disposal so that Chinese medicine continued to be something that inspired my life.

Several years of studying Chinese in Taiwan and Hong Kong has certainly helped me overcome any sense of being bored with the medicine. After all, there are thousands of texts sitting in libraries that have hardly been read, let alone translated or commented on. Now that I have finished writing a book on such texts, that world is also starting to lose its freshness. Reading through several-hundred year-old medical texts doesn’t always revive my spirits, anyway. In addition, most of the current English language literature on Chinese medicine either bores me or makes me roll my eyes. There needs to be something besides books.

I have discovered a number of forums and blogs online that are written by students and practitioners. Among the best is Eric Grey’s blog called Deepest Health. His excitement about the medicine is contagious and reading his blog reminds me of why I started studying the medicine in the first place, and why I was such an overzealous student. There is a forum called TCM Student, which while not very active, is loaded with opportunities to help struggling students. The most import thing I do, however, is take long breaks from ANYTHING related to Chinese medicine, history, philosophy, language, or culture. The latter is hard giving that I live in Taiwan; if I need to, I can just go to Starbucks, read Harry Potter and forget that I am surrounded by the culture.

Given that the book is coming out in a month or so, I am looking forward to a little break. I have had my nose in medical texts for the last several months, both for the book that is coming out and selecting texts for volume two. I still need to finish the introduction, so it will be a few weeks before I can find a nice beach to lie on and forget, for just a while, that I know anything about Chinese Medicine. When I get back, hopefully the medicine will be new and fresh again…as it always is.