Letting our Interests Guide Us

10/19/2022,

My path in medicine was from the first destined to be a hands-on one. When I was only 5 years old my mother started to pay me a nickel a day to brush her hair every afternoon for ten minutes. I had four older siblings, one of whom, an older sister, one would think, would be the natural one to choose for this job. Why me? What set me apart as the one to choose? The quality of my hands was my strength; they had a sensitivity and an ability to perceive, even at that young age. I tried to do a good job for her each day, and she gave immediate feedback as to what worked best. It sounds funny to claim this as the beginning of my healing path and my forte, but I do think of it that way.

There was a pioneering researcher at the University of Oregon when I studied there. Her area of interest was identifying the interests of young elementary students and tracking those interests over the years, i.e., were they maintained, or did they change? Her research showed that those early interests were largely continued over time. This seems to have been the case with me. Even though I was the type of student who always did well at school, my interests were more in line with carpentry and stone masonry and landscaping, i.e., working with my hands.

I first bought a massage table in 1983. I was living in Atlanta at the time working as a wholesale organic produce buyer. Quite a different career from TCM. My interest in herbs and bodywork traced back to an even earlier time; in the mid-1970s when I was an undergrad at a SUNY campus in Upstate NY, some friends taught me basic massage techniques and how to harvest common wild herbs for food and medicine. This is where my interest in healing really began to take on a focus. In the summer of 1984, I would take my first formal step by attending an herb school in Utah. I followed it a few years later by joining a half-year long wildcrafting class in the Oregon Cascades. Every week we went out into the forest and harvested wild plants and made medicines from them. I was also at this time still doing bodywork on friends, even though I had never trained to be a massage therapist and held no license.

It wasn’t until 1995 that I took the big step of attending a TCM training program in Portland. It was this twin interest in herbal medicine and bodywork that got me to the front door. At that point in time, I had received only four acupuncture treatments, so I had no deep experience, or draw for that matter, to that modality of TCM. The four treatments had been mildly helpful but had not excited me in any way. Because acupuncture is a manual therapy though, I quickly developed a love for it during my training.

I have a decent brain. It was capable of upper-level college math and logic courses I had a full scholarship in fact. That heady-logical way of looking at the world wasn’t the way I wanted to practice Chinese Medicine though. It is a good tool to have, but it is not the only way to work. I know we have many TCM theories and that it is necessary to have a theoretical base to our work, but my love was to put my hands on bodies and find information there that the patient would not be able to share with me verbally, to learn to have a conversation with the patient’s body. This is what motivated me, this was my interest—and even, my love.

Reading this you can guess that TCM as a style was not a good match for these interests. And that was certainly true. In TCM we analyze the signs and symptoms and proceed from there to identify a syndrome, and this in turn leads us to our point prescription. It would not be overstating the case to say that I was bitterly disappointed in our program, because it was so oriented to memorizing didactic information. My classmates in general, to be fair to TCM, were mostly thrilled. For me though, I needed more of an invitation to and a training of my hands. We had some of this, for instance, a term of jin shin do. I took to it like a duck to water, and my patients really responded to the little I had learned. In general though, my TCM education was overwhelmingly intellectual and only minimally manual.

What about those classmates for whom the TCM training was fulfilling? Well, they had what they had signed up for, and more power to them. I am happy for them that they had a clear path. To pursue their TCM training further would only necessitate finding a mentor in that style who could take them further. And there are plenty of senior TCM practitioners around who can assist people in that way. I have nothing against TCM as a style at all. I know great practitioners who work within that style and help many patients; my only point here is that my interests took me in a different direction, and I hope here to encourage others to listen to their own true interests.

Like the research from the University of Oregon (I wish I could recall the researcher’s name so I could credit her properly), if we think back over time, we might be able to discern a long-held interest that can be brought to bear in Chinese Medicine. Perhaps we were interested in education, and so in addition to practicing we work hard to become a good instructor at a TCM college. Or maybe we were always interested in divination and so dive into a scholarly study of the Yijing. Maybe we always loved art and now help others with their clinic websites in addition to our own private practice. It could be that we also studied clinical psychology before our TCM training, so that we specialize now in working with traumatized patients. In our earlier life, maybe we were heavily into sports, and now we love doing sports acupuncture. There is no end to the way our earlier interests can become a part of our TCM life.

For me though, I had to find an entirely different path, but it was not a blind casting about that needed to happen. I had my interests, my loves to guide then way. I just needed to find a mentor and a style that could help me to follow this love of touch. I thank my lucky starts that I indeed found some core mentors to help me along. Chief among them would be Jeffrey Dann, Ph.D., L.Ac. and Dr. Bear (Iwashina Anryu Sensei). Both have CE classes available through Blue Poppy. In the case of Dr. Bear, I think it is the only such class anywhere in the world that showcases his work. He passed away on September 1, 2022, so there will be no further chance to study with him in person. (here are the links to the two classes: ) My debt to these two teachers is deep, as is my gratitude to them for their willingness to take me under their wings over a long period of time.

So, the message here to share is that we should trust our interests and find a way to pursue them from within Chinese Medicine. We each have unique gifts, talents, and interests—just as we each have unique fingerprints, unique irises, unique voices, and so on. As Buckminster Fuller put it long ago (I paraphrase.): “We are each crucial functions of Universe (he always wrote “universe” in upper case without the definite article) with experiences and talents nowhere else repeated.” These are our unique gifts that we need to develop and bring forth, if we are to best serve our fellow humans.

Kind regards all around,

Bob Quinn