When I was in Japan in the summer of 2007 to study Meridian Therapy I recall an incident with an MD in our group. He had practiced acupuncture, as I recall, for 17 years at that point and was really quite good. He practiced the Toyohari style. One day when he saw up close how advanced Shudo sensei’s treatment skills were, he had to be “talked down off the ledge” so to speak because he wanted to quit practicing. He thought: “I am never, ever going to be even close to how good Shudo is, so I might as well quit.” Luckily we did talk him out of quitting and he is still in practice, and I am sure he is helping many people.
The same thing happened in Portland a few years ago. We hosted a seminar with a senior practitioner who is certainly on my short list of the very best we have produced in the US. His skills were amazing to witness, and again someone spoke up (oddly this person had also been in Japan with me in 2007) and said he thought he ought to just throw in the towel, there was no sense continuing… The presenter replied that he himself still went through that same kind of negative self-talk. I was surprised to hear this, because the treatment skills and scholarship of this doctor are truly impressive.
I suspect most practitioners have had similar experiences, have wasted time going through this sort of self-defeating talk. For some I bet it is an almost daily dance. I certainly walk this path with great regularity; I am probably my own toughest critic. But somehow I manage to keep my hand in the game, somehow I manage to continue to work on advancing my skills, albeit more slowly than I would like—sometimes though it seems a path of two steps forward, one step back.
There is a short piece by E.E. Cummings I would like to offer that I think offers some insight into why this might be, why we find it so easy to criticize our efforts and abilities.
A Poet’s Advice
A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.
This may sound easy. It isn’t.
A lot of people think or believe or know they feel—but that’s thinking or believing or knowing, not feeling. And poetry is feeling—not knowing or believing or thinking.
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught how to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people, but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.
As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time—and whenever we do it, we are not poets.
If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed.
And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world—unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.
Does this sound dismal? It isn’t.
It’s the most wonderful life on earth.
Or so I feel.
We are in a profession with so many different styles of treatment that it is dizzying. It is hard to find one’s way in this wilderness. We copy what one person is doing, and then a few years later we switch, maybe even radically, how we work. A style that might work brilliantly in the hands of one acupuncturist, might fail miserably in yours. That is just the way it is. Some of us were born with the gift of working gently, others with the gift of mastering the muscle system from a more scientific standpoint, others still with the gift of unraveling difficult emotional challenges. We each come equipped with unique gifts and reference banks of experience nowhere else repeated in the universe.
Is it any wonder that in this marketplace of ideas, we need a little time to find our way, to get our feet planted in a way of working. And then we come to the e.e. cummings message of tending to our own feelings. We are going to eventually need to separate ourselves, at least to some degree from our chosen style. Why? Because we have unique experiences we need to pay attention to, and those experiences are just our own. In the end, even though we might feel we are a loyal adherent of some particular style, we will practice in a way like no one else. That is just how it is.
If we do not realize however that this is the way of things, and we measure ourselves against what others seem to be accomplishing, then we risk not paying attention to our unique experience. We risk wasting time in a self-defeating attitude.
I want to be clear. I am NOT advocating everyone invent a new style and go out offering seminars in it. I don’t think we need that. I am merely trying to explain why I think the e.e. cummings piece is relevant to our situation. We are each unique, just as every leaf on a tree is unique, and because that is so, it is not relevant to compare ourselves to others. If there were somewhere a perfect clone of you, then it might make sense to look at a comparison. But that is not the case, obviously.
So, pick a style, study it thoroughly (for some years, I mean) and practice it as a good student would, but never forget to pay attention to your own unique experiences and perceptions and insights. That is your gift to offer, and it your experiences are nowhere else repeated in the entire universe. Work hard on your skills and trust that you have value as a practitioner. Don’t waste time in self-defeating downward spirals. We need you.