Now Teaching & Paradigms of CM

March 27, 2003

Quite a few confided to me that they had been unable to study in the past week due to stuff that came up. the problem with this excuse is that they should be studying herbs many hours every week. All I hear is how hard the subject is, yet very few actually putting in the recommended study timeTodd

Hi

First of all, the above is something I've heard for 17 years of teaching science and 26 years of teaching meditation. I'm fortunate to have quite a few students at the other end of the spectrum. I tell all the students that I teach as if they had senior standing at the most prestigious university in America. That way no one gets bored. We go to the forward march of science in any given topic. All tests carry extra credit so that 21 question tests are graded so that 20 correct answers = 100%. That way everyone can find at least one question to be ambiguous, yet they won't be hurt by it. I also tell them "thinking" is for rehearsal. By the time they get to the test, they should be "performing". No great athlete, dancer or musician stops in the middle of their moves to think about what they should do next. That bit of philosophy/psychology leads me to my next commentary.

I sense that you as the moderator of this group are best able to hear this commentary regarding views of CM and parse its meaning and significance for various members of the list. You've already done a bit of parsing today regarding your personal interests and possible directions of inquiry for this list. Thank you.

My own observations are secondarily scientific, primarily they are philosophical/psychological and possibly poetic. It's interesting to me that some practitioners on this list may view the phenomenological/ontological boundaries of CM to be essentially identical to WM. That is, the experience of practicing CM is not different from practicing WM. Others may view or experience quite different phenomenological/ontological boundaries. You commented on this from your perspective today.

My own training in the healing order of the school of meditation to which I belong indicates that the "magnetic" body or meridians are somewhat of a gross feature of the body. Their presence is quite easy for me to accept and grasp. There are more subtle ways of attending to and balancing the body, but these no doubt would be viewed as purely metaphysical by most members of this group. Also my training is from an oral tradition wherein training is by transmission from one person to another ... so writing about it at any length is without meaning and is inappropriate.

Ta-Ya's employment as a 5-element practitioner in a WM setting is one that I could identify with. Especially so as she has training in WM and is viewed as a WM physician while practicing CM. I experience that wide spectrum of consideration when I teach Western science. Because I view "basic science" as all of reality (especially as compared to clinical science), I free myself and challenge myself to attend to topics from perspectives that would include philosophy/psychology, CM and my own meditative training. I must teach the curriculum, but I also present information from a broad perspective with the hopes that people can make connections from multiple perspectives.

My hope from your comments today is that this larger perspective is permissible on behalf of myself and of others who share this interest. And that's my request. I deal well with dismissive attitudes in that for me they are presentations of clinical and developmental signs. The attitude belongs to the person expressing the attitude and is about that person rather than about me. My response is my best attempt at compassion, and that too is a sign of where my own development is at in any given moment.

In Gratitude for your consideration of my requests.

Emmanuel Segmen