Bodywork – Bob Quinn Seminars

Posted on September 27, 2019 by Bob Quinn

Movement

A Blue Poppy blog post by Bob Quinn

As I write this I have just left a unique class we offer at NUNM in Portland, OR: Advanced Palpation and Perception is what we call it. I co-teach it with another colleague, Michael McMahon. There is a basic idea we pursue in this class, and it is that manual therapy has an important role in the practice of acupuncture. We study the integration of Sotai, myofascial release, qigong tuina, teishin use, Trager rocking, and assorted acupuncture strategies. The result is that students enter their internship year well equipped to help patients with diverse physical medicine complaints.

Posted on September 27, 2019 by Bob Quinn

The Field

A Blue Poppy blog post by Bob Quinn

“The field is the sole governing agency of the particle.”
Albert Einstein

I tried last year to write about fields and acupuncture but was unhappy with the result, so I did not submit it anywhere to be published. In October I taught Sotai with Jeffrey Dann, Ph.D. at the Zen Shiatsu Chicago Conference (Sotai was well received—it was an honor to work with Jeffrey). In that conference Michael DeAgro, a well regarded shiatsu practitioner and psychotherapist, taught two days on his approach to the sinew channels. He brought in an element of “spatial awareness” that he had picked up in his Zen and Quantum Shiatsu studies with Pauline Sasaki. I will not go into what this means right now other than to say it once again ignited my interest in exploring this concept of “fields.”

Posted on September 27, 2019 by Bob Quinn

Autumn

Here in Portland, Oregon even though our days are still warm, it is clear that we find ourselves firmly in autumn—fall air feels so different from summer air. The kids are back in school, and next week my teaching duties start again at NUNM with a new cohort of students eager to make Chinese medicine their career. There is a great poem from Rainer Maria Rilke that captures masterfully the feeling of the fall time (below is my translation):

Posted on September 27, 2019 by Bob Quinn

Gu Syndrome

While I was in the OCOM DAOM program I had the good fortune to observe many hours in the Hai Shan Clinic of Heiner Fruehauf, Ph.D., a noted classical scholar and sinologist. After I finished my DAOM degree I went to work in his clinic for a number of years. It was there in the Hai Shan Clinic that my still ongoing adventure/mission with treating chronic Lyme disease began.

Chronic Lyme is just one instance of what was called Gu syndrome in ancient times. Heiner’s first article on Gu syndrome, published in the late 1990s in The Journal of Chinese Medicine was a watershed moment for Chinese medicine in the West. It struck a chord that resonated with many practitioners who had, like Heiner, been struggling to help patients with strange constellations of symptoms. Gu translates as “demon possession”; when you work with chronic Lyme patients, you hear again and again statements like, “I feel possessed,” or “I don’t feel like myself”—all this from people who have not read Heiner’s work and who know nothing of Gu Syndrome. Obviously he touched on an important phenomenon that was being missed by the modern TCM system and textbooks. Paul Unschuld’s Medicine in China, required reading at many TCM colleges, does contain mention of Gu Syndrome, but from reading it one would not suspect that the ancient Gu literature was in any way relevant to modern medicine and its challenges.