“Being at ease with not knowing is crucial for the answers to come to you.” Eckhart Tolle
The other day, a friend said to me “Gosh Lena, you are so smart. When you taught us that lesson, I was blown away”. Despite coming from a good place, this praise sent me into waves of distress as my inner critic came to the fore. Being an acupuncturist is not an easy profession. You are the scorn of the medical community and the joke of the skeptical general public. You constantly sit with a feeling that you are being evaluated and have to justify the reasons why this long established and evidence based medicine is the real deal.
It’s been almost 20 years since I graduated from acupuncture school and I was grateful that it opened the door into a calling that transcended profession. I really love Chinese Medicine. Heck, I grew up with it. It’s in my cell tissue. Even a characters in my Chinese name are translated as “assist” and “needle”. However, I’ve never felt that I am a “good” acupuncturist. Yes, I get results but my point prescriptions are simple, I don’t read Chinese and only speak a smattering of colloquial Cantonese. Patients would come to me saying that they wanted to receive acupuncture “straight from the source”. I could weep.
A part of me wants to blame my training at the Northern College of Acupuncture in York, as the course was rudimentary at best. Yes, there was Zang-Fu theory, point exams on real people, a teaching clinic where members of the public would receive treatment from students. All basic and useful stuff but there was no discussion of the classics, no analysis of Chinese characters in relation to point action and a brief skimming over the very important 6 conformations. I also felt the teachers (except Chen who travelled from China to teach us in clinic) had inflated egos without the knowhow to support it. I hope that 2 decades on, things have improved.
Another part of me realises that that experience was necessary to put me on a certain path of my own self study. It’s not uncommon to discover the wealth of material that you don’t know until you start to gain some clinical experience. I dip in and out of textbooks, listen to podcasts, trawl the internet, read any articles that jump at me. None of it is enough. I would be of great disservice to my patients if I didn’t dedicate more of my time returning to the foundations of Chinese Medicine as taught by our ancestors. So, I have slowly started to learn Mandarin and I am enjoying learning Asian Herbal Medicine from Dr Cannon. I’ll be picking up a copy of the Huang Di Wei Jing Su Wen and will probably never finish it in my lifetime. All of these areas require me to start from scratch and pushes the boundaries of the comfort zone.
A former patient said to me recently that on a daily basis, he asks himself “how can I be a better man tomorrow?”. I liked this. It probably rubs people up the wrong way as nowadays, folk cite in a mantra-style fashion that “you are enough”.
My personal conclusion is that even in times of inner turmoil when that imposter syndrome is screaming loudly, try to do your best with what you have. Accept that you do not hold all the answers but endeavour to seek them out. And if that doesn’t work, change lanes. After all, stagnation is the source of most diseases, walk a few different paths until you find the one that resonates with you. Be a better version of yourself tomorrow.