Wizard Training, a.k.a The School of Classical Chinese Medicine at NCNM

It's official.  I go to school at Hogwarts.

Brandt Stickley

Seriously.  Today I had my first broomstick lesson (though I've maintained unofficial witch status for a while now, according to Bobby the Rooster)--levitation is one possible outcome of Jin Jing style Qi Gong.  There's actually a potions class (Herbs Lab with Eric Grey).  And clinical observation with Brandt Stickley--who bears a superficial resemblance to a certain Professor Snape--might as well be called shamanic training.

Fittingly, we Classical Chinese Medicine wizards-to-be are surrounded by Muggles: NCNM's  naturopathic students, a bunch largely steeped in scientific materialism.  Whereas we CCMers largely eschew quantitative methods and aspire to the level of the "superior physician," one able to diagnose through pure intuition and a quick glance at the patient.  We are leg in this lofty goal by an often Dumbledorean cast of characters, each with his/her own wisdom to offer.  And naturally, few of our head mages sing the same tune, or even seem to speak the same language sometimes.  We don't quite have four separate sub-teams, as per Ravenclaw, Griffindor, etc., but already in the second year we seem to be breaking into partisans of this or that teacher: the clan of Givens, the Heinerian order, and so forth.  We are distinguished as well by area of interest: acupuncture, bodywork, herbs and...let's just say 'other.'  Hey, Hogwarts had its partisans of Madame whats-her-name's crystal ball scrying class, and we have our fringe element as well.  (Though, ironically enough, Chinese divination and the I Ching is a relatively mainstream and undisputed topic for us.)

A fully trained acupuncturist

As of yet we haven't had much contact with the forces of darkness; I haven't even heard much in the way ominous rumblings from the OHSU medical campus on its stern, indomitable hill.  We do take our lives into our hands every day when crossing the "chicken run" at the corner of SW Kelly and Corbett, though, and we brave the hazards of the neighborhood food desert--a desert only in comparison to the absurdly gourmet bounty that is the rest of central Portland.  Still, a time will surely come when we will arm ourselves with 34-gauge, 2 cun stainless steel needles, high-grade Japanese golden moxa, and bulk (never granulated!) herbs and make a stand against the legion of doom clammering at the gates.

Until such a day should arrive, we bide our time, memorizing the esoteric significance of ancient Chinese anatomy and learning to recognize the 25 herbs of the Tang Ye Jing by taste alone.  Muggles, take heed; one day the fully-trained denizens world you never imagined will materialize in your midst to dazzle you with seemingly impossible feats of pattern recognition and symbol interpretation.

Don't say you haven't been warned!

Self-Correcting

Consciousness is a funny thing--I don't mean our basic animal awareness but the twisted-in-on-itself faculty of being aware that we're aware.  The whole language thing, really.  We express ourselves in symbols that can take on a life of their own and feed back into the processor until we're awash in mental chatter.  We like to think we're in control of ourselves, but our thoughts are plain evidence that we're not.  The introspective traditions of Asia have long been clear on this point: most of the time, most of us act as though enslaved by our desires, running from pleasure to pleasure while avoiding potential sources of discomfort. You with me?

I should come right out and say that I put myself in this category, too.  I am lucky and perhaps unusual in that I have been granted some perspective on this frank enslavement and some tools to do something about it.  I even take those tools out once in a while, polish them off, and give 'em a try.  Or just admire them for a while, get distracted, and forget about them again.  And here I am.  My overactive mind carries on with its self-involved life, and that understanding and those tools join lots of other interesting concepts and just plain random stray thoughts that fill up my mind day in, day out.

The mental chatter isn't entirely random; it's more chaotic, in the technical sense of having fractal-edged islands of order amidst the random sea.  Patterns do emerge, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. I find myself having eggs and toast 4 mornings a week for a few weeks, then stop having eggs.  I get in the habit of reading before bed instead of meditating.  Or my self-esteem inflates to the point of egoism for ten days before crashing back below its original level.  These sorts of patterns are happening all the time, like waves on the sea.  Some bigger than others and longer lasting, some with foam on top, some more hazardous (beware the mental tsunami).  All of them arising and passing away for reasons both complicated (tons of separate forces and conditions acting on the water) and simple (of course there are waves on the sea!)  Short of a coma (and perhaps even then), waves will continue to wave.  Nothing wrong with them.  What we have some realistic say over is our degree of awareness of the waves.

It took me an embarassingly long time to become aware of my own egg-and-toast eating pattern--not that I didn't know I was eating eggs and toast, but I didn't see the behavior in context and didn't identify it.  When I did, it was obvious, but the fact is I never stopped to consider it.  Same with the reading before bed and the egoism I am periodically prone too--but there, now I've identified it.  My busy mind has even gone one step further and identified the process of identification, and declared that it was good.  What I've been missing recently is insight into my own patterns, however silly and insubstantial they may be.

Since this is my blog, I'll tell you about those recent patterns, or the worst of them I'm aware of.  In essence, it's this: I've been rushing around like a chicken with its head cut off, doing this and that and never really stopping to smell the roses unless it's on my to-do list.  I know I need to relax, but actual relaxation is impossible when it's a something to be accomplished.  Man, I must have been pretty hard to be around these past days (weeks? months? yeah, and years, on and off).  Charming, witty, perhaps, but just not really relaxed.  Full of nervous energy.  School does tends to bring that out in me.  As this tendency has reached an extreme in the past few days, it's been gradually edging its way into my awareness.  Then during an acupuncture session today, the intern called me on it (based on my pulse!).  He actually asked me if I didn't find it difficult to relax.  Indeed!  I should heed 19th C Tibetan vagabond Patrul Rimpoche's advice to himself:

"Your mind is spinning around
About carrying out a lot of useless projects:
It's a waste! Give it up!
Thinking about the hundred plans you want to accomplish,
With never enough time to finish them,
Just weighs down your mind.
You're completely distracted
By all these projects, which never come to an end,
But keep spreading out more, like ripples in water.Don't be a fool: for once, just sit tight."
(for more click here)

Yes, clearly it was time for a shift, one of those periodic self-corrections (with a little help from the universe at large) that keeps me from going too insane in any one direction at a time.  In this case, my self-prescription was "slow down!  Just be."  The trouble is, insight is one thing, and actualization another.  The first is necessary but not sufficient.

Luckily there seems to be a cosmic law whereby if you take one step in the right direction, some universal helping hand effect reaches out and pulls you the rest of the way.  So it was tonight; prepped by a dash of insight and the inklings of an intention, I was ripe for the rest.  It happened to come in the form of a dharma talk by Keith Dowman, a British longtime resident of the Himalayas who is devoting his latter years to teaching a stripped-down Tibetan technique called Dzogchen to the West.  Actually, it's more of a non-technique, a non-meditation.  You simply sit.  As in the East Asian Zen traditions, the emphasis is radically on the here-and-now; there is nothing outside of the moment.  There is somewhat more to it than this, but as over-intellectualization is not the goal I will quit analyzing it while I'm ahead.

It's not that I stumbled upon some great new meditation technique that allowed me, in the span of an hour, to break out of an old habit and resume the recently stalled-out process of self-transformation.  Or rather, I did and it did, but the point isn't that Dzogchen is the answer to some perceived problem.  It simply came along when I needed to be reminded me that doing must be balanced with being, and that I don't need to try so hard to be.  The technique is no technique.  Being is happening at every moment, gloriously, whatever the manifestations.  Every thought that arises is an expression of the pure nature of mind.


Click goes the internal navigator as I veer a little further from neurosis.  My breath deepens a little, my mind remembers to laugh at itself.  Who knows what the next imbalance will be?  Lord knows it's hard to stay on the straight and narrow path of balance--if I do try and walk it, I veer into rigidity and tension, another pair of old friends.  Trying not to try...