Starting a Practice:By Lonny Jarrett Part II

Expenditure of Resources
Think of each patient as having spent a certain number of years digging his
or her way into a hole. It can be tempting to want to climb down into each
resources in this way is not the most efficient use of your talents. Recall the
Chinese proverb that if you feed a hungry person a fish you have given him
a meal, but if you teach him to fish you have helped feed him for a lifetime.
If we use all our resources emotionally to help our patients, clinical
practice may become a joyless burden. If we are to pull each patient out
of the hole he is trapped in, how many people can we really treat effectively
before our own backs are broken? Rather than climb down into
our patients’ holes (that is, predicaments), it is more fruitful to walk
around the tops of such holes and throw down a rope long enough to
touch each individual patient. It is much easier to encourage motivated
people to climb out of their own predicaments on their own than it is to
build a practice of people who expect us to make them better.

Charlatan Attacks
In the course of clinical practice you will likely occasionally experience
what Thea Elijah has termed charlatan attacks. These come regularly as
you begin your practice and then generally with decreasing intervals as
your clinical experience increases. However, even after eighteen years of
practice, I still occasionally experience times when I feel I have merely
hypnotized myself into believing Chinese medicine is real, that I know
anything about it, or that I am capable of applying its principles to help
my patients. In part this has to do with my experience of awe when faced
with the depth of Chinese medicine itself.
These episodes of self-doubt are a healthy phase in the practice of any discipline.
I am always suspicious of people who express complete confidence
in the veracity of what they already know. Such an attitude is generally compelled
by the ego’s desperate attempt to maintain its hold over the person by
imparting a false sense of security. However, I am generally comfortable
when a person’s stand in life imparts an absolute comfort with the
unknown. After all, like all science, the practice of Chinese medicine is based
on a highly concretized mythology. It is useful over a specific range of life
experience for empowering specific virtues. No medical or scientific paradigm
holds all the answers, and it is healthy for our worldview to collapse
occasionally. Then it can re-form, less hindered by learned material that
proves to be inconsistent with our authentic clinical experience.
I believe new practitioners experience charlatan attacks because they lack
confidence and have not yet embodied the theory they have learned through
the discipline of clinical practice. In the experienced practitioner, such periods
of self-doubt often stem from the realization that the ultimate truth of
what occurs in our treatment rooms lies beyond our intellectual grasp
hole and lift each patient out of it on your back. But to expend your
a burden. The clearer you are about the conditions you need to practice
despite years of acquired knowledge and clinical experience. In any case, I
find such periods of confusion and self-doubt necessary on the path to mastery.
They indicate that our clinical abilities are integrating and being
embodied in deeper realms of being. When clarity returns after such an
experience, our practice and abilities have often improved dramatically.
So do not let such experiences hinder you on the path to mastery
through clinical practice. Rather, learn to practice with clear intention
when you are in this fluid place of not knowing. For it is in not knowing
where we find mastery of this and all arts.

Conclusion
Every acupuncture practice differs to the extent you have truly made your
chosen tradition of practice your own. The preceding is knowledge gained
from my own years of clinical experience, and I hope it will help you build
your practice in a way that is consistent with the values that flow from the
heart of your own connection to the beauty of Chinese medicine.