Occupational Hazards in Chinese Medicine

A Pebble in the Cosmic Pond

What is the relationship between your personal practice of yangsheng and your clinical efficacy? Is it important, or even relevant, for a practitioner of Chinese medicine to embody the ideas of Yangsheng? In other words, can you be a good healer of others if you can’t take care of yourself? Are the short lifespans of many historical and contemporary Chinese medicine practitioners due to their failure to practice self-care? Or could it be related to the Wounded Healer pattern, to the fact that they started out with and were inspired by their own frail bodies?

Considering occupational hazards from a different angle, how do you meet a depleted patient without depleting yourself? What does a healthy or ideal interaction between the patient’s Qi and the practitioner’s Qi look like? Does the practitioner replenish the patient’s Qi, or is it a question of merely attuning the patient’s body, like tuning a piano instead of playing it, and leaving it up to the patient to replenish their own Qi?

For this episode of the Pebble in the Cosmic Pond podcast on “Occupational Hazards in Chinese Medicine,” Leo Lok and I invited our dear friend Michael Max to join us. As the host of his famous Qiological podcast and a practitioner with decades of experience, he was the perfect conversation partner. Become a member of the Imperial Tutor mentorship to receive related translated passages and listen to the continuation of this conversation as the Imperial Tutorial episode on "Dealing with Bingqi and Avoiding Martyrdom."

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