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Archive for January 4th, 2012

Learning acupuncture can seem daunting. There seem to be many details and lots to do all at once. This is mostly because the courses that teach acupuncture are badly organised (yes, I am in the midst of writing a better one). However, that is the topic for another article. This article is about finding your way of learning.

To find your own individual way of learning there is only one way. That is to remember how you have learned things in the past. Make a list of ten things you have learned – a variety is best, (things that took a long while or were quick, things that were easy or were hard, different areas of your life – sport, friendship, speaking your native language etc). Examine these things to find out what helped you learn and what didn’t. Then look for common elements about how you learn best. You will then have a list describing your own way of learning that you can apply to learning acupuncture.

When I do this I find that what helps me learn best is clear and simple instructions: just do this, just keep doing that. So with acupuncture I look for the vital skills and concepts. The details that I use I’ll remember and anything else I can look up. Others of course are the opposite. A friend of mine at acupuncture college loved the details – all the ins and outs of the different points were what he loved. My approach to learning was completely useless for him.

I’d also like to give you some general approaches to learning. The most useful I have found is three styles of learning: head, heart and hand. Head means ideas and abstractions, heart means people and feelings, hand means moving and doing. All of these will usually be part of learning. However each of us usually has a preference. The more we can use this preference the easier our learning will be. Because acupuncture has ideas, it is about healing people and the concepts refer directly to our experience it can be learned pretty easily by a person with any of these preferences.

If you are a head person like me it will help to organise the concepts. My way of doing this is: health, sickness, treatment. Health consists of the channels (and their organs) and vital fluids, sickness is what interferes with health (the devils and thieves) and treatment is diagnosis, point selection and needle technique. There are only about 40 ideas you need to know (yin and yang, the five elements, the 12 channels and organs, the six devils, the six thieves, the four examinations plus a few miscellaneous).

Forty can seem like a lot but it is only one a week for less than a year. It can also help to write a brief bit about the idea and stick it up where you see it frequently – above the sink, on the back of the toilet door, wherever. In this way it becomes part of your life and not something you have to sit down and focus on – it can be a lot easier.

If you are a heart person it will help to learn with and about people. Talking over the ideas with others can help (as long as you just don’t confuse each other). It will help to think about how the ideas affect people, how you can use them to understand people, and how you can use them to help people. You can imagine helping someone reorganise their life or imagine saving someone’s health by using this acupuncture point (or combination of points), you can imagine saving someone’s life with you diagnostic skills. The more you can practice on people or think of how it affects your friends and people you know the easier it will be for you to learn.

If you are a hand person you will understand by moving and doing. Unlike much western schooling acupuncture lends itself to this style of learning (though this isn’t understood by those who organise the colleges). Acupuncture speaks about our experience, of hot, cold, dry etc of qi (that feeling of liveliness) and the organs with their command of the different parts of our lives.

Here are some examples, yin and yang can be experienced by opening and stretching and then curling up. The five elements pertain to different movements and senses. In acupuncture even these very abstract parts of the theory refer to our experience. You can learn the channel pathways by tracing them on yourself and others – there is even a qi gong routine that follows these pathways. Learning diagnosis and treatment probably won’t be hard for you.

Learning acupuncture can be easy for anyone if they can find their best way of learning. I hope this has given you some ideas about how learning acupuncture can be easy for you. You can see the progress I am making on writing a better acupuncture course at acupunctureiseasy.com).

I introduced in my last article the concept of intestinal health and detoxification of the body as key principles behind weight loss. I think to many people this will be common knowledge, and to many others it will be news. However even if you’re au fait with the virtues of detoxing, it might be worth reading on to hear how I have detoxed myself.

Detoxing should be to my mind a gentle progressive procedure which we use to degunk our systems. Unfortunately modern living exposes us to so much junk, in every sense of the word, that we all really need to take steps to look after ourselves in this regard.

Now, I am really going to get technical here, because to my mind it cuts to the quick of the matter. There are all sorts of junk, non-foods basically, that we eat in our modern Western diets, things like trans-fats, which cause our bodies huge problems. But I will cover all this later. I want to speak right now about “adipogenesis”. Adipogenesis is the formation of fatty tissues, and there is now scientific evidence coming out that the all the chemicals floating around our environment cause adipogenesis.

These chemicals are everywhere, washing powders, air fresheners, food preservatives, paints, etc etc etc. Many products these days are chemically treated, and the scary thing is that the chemicals used are fairly unregulated, so we have all sorts of things to which our bodies are now exposed. Now there seems to be a clear link between these chemicals, and our putting on weight.

One explanation for this is that when our bodies are exposed to high levels of toxins, our livers become unable to handle the load, and therefore the toxins are sent to a safe place in our bodies where they can do less damage. I.E rather than floating around our essential organs, they are sent to our fatty layers, where they are effectively stored until our body is able to process them. Of course if we are continually under toxic stress, then we will never process them, and we will just continue to put on weight.

This model makes sense to me personally, since I have suffered from obesity and MCS, Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, for the last 10 years.

So the solution is relatively straightforward. Cleanse your body properly, and you will allow it to start getting rid of toxins. Once the toxins go, then the fatty layers become redundant, and can also go as well. It is as I say relatively simple, but it is not the orthodox view of weight loss either.

Cleansing as I say should be progressive and gentle. And I should also add, on-going. Once you start maintaining your body to a higher standard than previously, you might as well carry on that way. After all, our environment is not getting any cleaner.

The first step in detoxification is normally intestinal cleaning. But we can step back I think and do a deeper clean. The bloodstream can be a source of life… or death. If it is the latter, it’s best dealt with. My first detox suggestion is to rid your body of mercury and heavy metals. There is a society for mercury free dentistry where you can learn about how awful having mercury, nickel and cadmium in your mouth is, and how to safely and effectively remove it. Ok, I’ll see you in my next article.