By Kailey Brennan L.Ac.
“… the way that we have come to think about what acupuncture does is to see it as giving information to or engaging the body’s self-healing mechanisms and mobilizing them to improve the health of the patient and treat problems. Palpation that allows us to directly feel and engage the qi makes this work much easier.” - Dan Bensky D.O. and Charles Chace L.Ac.,
The Engaging Vitality (EV) training helps practitioners of East Asian medicine learn how to enhance their ability to directly perceive and make clinically effective use of qi in their practice. Now that registration has opened for the upcoming Fundamental Course Series, here are five essential reasons to take this upcoming training opportunity in 2020.
1. The palpation tools taught in EV seminars enhance what you’re already doing in your practice
EV teaches palpation tools that can enhance your ability to perceive and make clinically effective use of qi in your practice. The emphasis in EV seminars is to support students in successfully integrating the palpation tools into their own way of practicing acupuncture. For this reason, the EV system can be integrated with any style (or styles) a practitioner is primarily orienting from and utilizing in their clinic on a daily basis.
This is an important point. The EV system doesn’t constitute a style of practice. It’s a system of palpation tools situated in a context that, amongst the numerous ways it can be worked with and utilized, can help practitioners thoughtfully discern if their therapeutic interventions are optimally working in the service of enhancing and supporting the self-healing mechanisms of the body with the aim of supporting better treatment outcomes for our patients.
A tenant of the EV mindset is that patients are best served when practitioners have a variety of theoretical tools and practice styles to be able to flexibly orient to and treat from. Whether your background and study is in Dr. Tan, Korean 4 Needle, Master Tung, Classical 5 Element, Meridian Therapy, or the Toyohari method, the EV system can act as an enhancement to how you are already working with and implementing these styles in your practice.
2. Palpation as practice
“Practice is a life-orienting discipline in which the process itself is the goal.” - Chip Chace L.Ac.
The palpation tools you will be introduced to and the support that you will receive to develop this skill set will expose you to a learning edge that you can continue to develop throughout the course of your entire career as a practitioner. You can make a journey with this material for as far and as wide as you can look out onto the horizon of your professional career.
Although the palpation tools can take time to learn before you start to feel comfortable with them, diligent and committed practice starts to pay off sooner than most people anticipate. I am consistently struck by how when I meet someone in an EV seminar and then we meet up again a year later to take another class together just how much the practitioner has grown and developed in their relationship with this material in just a year’s time.
3. Your treatments will start to get really interesting
“Palpation is most useful when the information is unexpected.” - Dan Bensky D.O.
The practice of palpation offers acupuncturists the opportunity to offer a unique and comprehensive perspective to their patients. As practitioners of East Asian Medicine we understand that the body operates as a functional unit, and palpation really starts to make this reality come through in a vivid manner. Working with the palpation tools on a daily basis, your life in the clinic will be anything but boring.
Although it has taken me time (and continues to) to put the pieces together and figure out how best to implement these palpation tools in my clinical practice, I am continually inspired by how interesting the practice of acupuncture can be when I’m taking the time to pay attention to what’s going on. More often than not, my original thoughts were wrong in regards to what I think may be the diagnostic issues for a patient, and having the touchstone of palpation to orient from and come back to allows me to make course corrections when necessary and respond flexibly to the nuances of the clinical picture in the moment.
4. An enriching community
Without sounding like too much of an ooey gooey mushball, there is something really special and lovely about the community of practitioners who are working with the EV material. I find that the people I meet in these seminars are all kindred in that we are all really inspired by the opportunity to offer acupuncture to our patients and are always trying to find ways we can more thoughtfully work with this medicine and develop as practitioners.
The EV context allows us all to have a consensual language and framework to work from when we are discussing with one another what it is we are feeling in regards to our experience of qi. There is an online forum where we can discuss clinical cases with one another, and there are practice groups through out the country that meet up on a regular basis in order to support practitioners in continuing to develop and hone their palpation skills. Although the material can be challenging for us on many levels, it’s a supportive context in which we all work in, and it’s a lot of fun.
5. Pacing the void
If we are honest with ourselves and paying attention, we are always and regularly encountering anxiety, uncertainty, and unknowing on some level as practitioners. This can range from trying to discern what may be the most useful therapeutic intervention for a patient on a given day, to being really perplexed by what may be going on for a patient, to feeling overwhelmed or impotent in the face of a complex and entrenched clinical presentation.
The great news is that all of this is okay. It’s normal, it’s human, and it’s just how it is sometimes. There are ways that we can hang out, be patient, and work with our sense of unknowing. We can learn to widen our window of tolerance for this stuff and become more comfortable with meeting ambiguity and uncertainty both within ourselves and in our clinical practice. The reality of this kind of thing is openly acknowledged and worked with in EV seminars.
To the extent that we can become more comfortable with the reality of unknowing in our clinical practice, this can really be beneficial for the patients we see. Very often when patients come to see us they are in a place of deep unknowing and uncertainty in their own lives. There can be real tangible therapeutic benefits to being able to hold the space and understanding for this kind of (very human) experience.