Hamwee - Acupuncture for new practitioners

Intuitive Acupuncture

by the same author

Acupuncture for New Practitioners

John Hamwee

ISBN 978 1 84819 102 0

eISBN 978 0 85701 083 4

Zero Balancing

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Foreword by Fritz Smith, MD FCCAc

Illustrations by Gina Michaels

ISBN 978 1 84819 234 8

eISBN 978 0 85701 182 4

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Intuitive
Acupuncture

JOHN HAMWEE

LONDON AND PHILADELPHIA

First published in 2016

by Singing Dragon

an imprint of Jessica Kingsley Publishers

73 Collier Street

London N1 9BE, UK

and

400 Market Street, Suite 400

Philadelphia, PA 19106, USA

www.singingdragon.com

Copyright John Hamwee 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, Saffron House, 610 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Applications for the copyright owners written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the publisher.

Warning: The doing of an unauthorised act in relation to a copyright work may result in both a civil claim for damages and criminal prosecution.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Hamwee, John, author.

Intuitive acupuncture / John Hamwee.

p. ; cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-84819-273-7 (alk. paper)

I. Title.

[DNLM: 1. Acupuncture. 2. Intuition. WB 369]

RM184

615.892--dc23

2015021616

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 84819 273 7

eISBN 978 0 85701 220 3

For Cathy

Acknowledgements

My first debt is to my teachers: Meriel Darby, Angie and John Hicks and Dr Fritz Smith.

I am grateful to those who, by generously sharing their wisdom and experience, have made it a much better book than I could have written on my own: Myra Connell, Jenny Craig, Sophie Mitchell, Frances Turner, James Unsworth and Allegra Wint.

Jessica Kingsley has been a wonderful publisher and I could not have written this without her support, encouragement and expertise.

And finally my thanks go to all my patients who have allowed me to practise on them and learn from each treatment.

Contents

Preface

This is not a how to do it book, still less a how you ought to do it book. My aim is to help you become more aware of your own innate skills and to appreciate some of the things you already do in the treatment room, though perhaps without fully realising what they are and how valuable they can be. I hope too that it will increase your sensitivity to those skills so that you can use them more often and with more confidence; partly because there is satisfaction in that, but also because I think it will enable you to meet the needs of your patients with more accuracy and clarity.

A colleague I much admire and respect, a more experienced practitioner than me, commented on an earlier book Id written that she really liked the quotes. I almost took offence. I almost heard her say that the only parts of the book she liked were precisely the ones I hadnt written. But then I saw the value in what she was saying. In the course of my reading I had come across wonderful ideas, remarkable perceptions, flashes of brilliance by writers with deep wisdom and a command of language. Why wouldnt I want to use their words instead of mine? Thats why youll find so many quotes in this book. Here is the first, by Ted Kaptchuk:

Stephanus, a sixth century Greek doctorsaid that medicine suffers from a fundamental contradiction; its theory grasps universals while its practice deals with individuals. (Kaptchuk 1989, p.104)

As we struggle to find the right diagnosis or to understand why a treatment seems not to be working as it should, it is a comfort to realise that we are indeed on the horns of a dilemma, and an inescapable one at that. Most of the time we just live with it and manage to get by. But one of the gifts of intuition is that it can swerve us past those horns. In a moment of insight you can suddenly arrive at a diagnosis that is in all the books and also fits the unique patient in front of you perfectly; or you craft a highly individualised treatment for an unusual condition and later realise that what you have done is an exemplar of something described in the Nei Jing.

And just in case you suspect that intuition is something only for rather weird or way-out practitioners, here is what one genius, J.M. Keynes, said of another. Writing of Sir Isaac Newton, perhaps the most famous scientist of them all, he commented, I fancy his pre-eminence is due to his muscles of intuition being the strongest and most enduring with which a man had ever been gifted (Keynes, cited in Myers 2002, p.61).

CHAPTER 1

Intuition

Thirty years ago a woman sat at her kitchen table. She looked up and saw a man she didnt know walking past the window. She said to herself, Im going to marry him. She did, and they have been married ever since.

A well-known novelist recently spoke of a similar experience. I walked up a field Id not walked up before and over the brow of the field there appeared the ridge line of a house, and by the time Id reached the house, and I cant explain this, I knew it was the only place I could possibly live (Garner 2014). And he has lived there for over fifty years.

Perhaps the reason these examples are so striking is simply because the predictions came true; maybe we all have what we think of as astonishing insights, but the overwhelming majority of them turn out to be wrong and so are forgotten. Even so, there is something compelling about these stories. They seem to open a window onto a truth that we dont normally encounter in our everyday thoughts and plans.

Experiences like these are highly valued in a number of Eastern traditions and whole disciplines have been developed to foster them. A well-known example comes from the practice of Zen Buddhism, where the student is instructed to ponder such imponderables as the look of her face before she was born or the sound of one hand clapping. There is no possibility of finding an answer through the normal processes of thought and enquiry which is, of course, the whole point. Sartori [Japanese for awakening] really designates the sudden and intuitive way of seeing into anythingone seeks and seeks but cannot find. One then gives up and the answer comes by itself (Watts 1962, p.181).

If not exactly fostered by conventional medical practice and procedures, there is at least a recognition that the times when the answer comes by itself are both common and valid. The best [doctors] seem to have sixth sense about disease. They feel its presence, know it to be there, perceive its gravity before any intellectual process can define, catalog, and put it into words (LaCombe, cited in Mukherjee 2011, p.128).