We have 4 practitioners working here at White Pine Healing Arts.  One practitioner, Jack Radner, has been studying with Dan Bensky, Charles Chace and Marguerite Dinkins on the west coast and is now organizing to bring them here to White Pine Institute.  The course is:

Engaging Vitality:  A Palpation Workshop for Effectively Working with Qi in the Clinic, with Chip Chase, Dan Bensky, and Marguerite Dinkins.

We are all very excited about this course happening right here!

This workshop offers a really thorough, practical, and accessible introduction to the use of Osteopathic palpation and sensibilities in the context of Acupuncture practice.  It is a workshop about feeling Qi; feeling where in the body Qi is most stuck, feeling what channels are involved, feeling what point or points resolve the stuckness and free the flow of Qi in the body.  It’s also about knowing how much treatment your patient needs; when you have done enough, and when you have done too much.  And this is a hands-on workshop, with lots of practice.  You will leave this workshop with this learning in you hands.  You will be able to put your hands on patients and feel all these things, and you will discover things in you clinic, with your patients, that you would not have discovered before.  You’ll find yourself using points and channels that you might not have thought of using before.  And you will be able to evaluate the effectiveness of your treatments as they are in progress, in a way that you could not have before.

It is a workshop designed to give you lots of tools to deepen your understanding of Chinese Medicine, Acupuncture, Physiology and your acupuncture practice, all through palpation.  I took this course last year in Portland, OR, and I can say that, indeed, it had all of these impacts.  I studied periodically with Dan Bensky throughout my three years at the Seattle Institute of Oriental Medicine, and I was introduced to many of the ideas that will be presented during this course.  Over the ten years between then and now, I have been working with them in my practice.  In 2010, Chip Chase came to Amherst to introduce many of us to his ideas on working with the Extraordinary Channels.  Much of the material he presented was also fruit born of the combination of Osteopathic palpation and Acupuncture practice.  In this course, they have redesigned their way of teaching this material, material that Dan Bensky has been working with and teaching since the mid 80’s, to make it easier for students to grasp and to be able to integrate into their own practices.  The class will start with the most fundamental material of this system, and will be taught over three weekends, with plenty of time between to return to your practice and work with the material with your patients.  Each weekend will build on the prior weekend’s material.  You really will leave the last weekend able to put this learning into practice.

I left this class amazed by the possibilities it introduced; the wealth and scope of the information that you can gather, very quickly, by putting your hands on your patients.  I find now that having a tactile sense of my patients’ Qi is key to giving a good and appropriate treatment.  I expect to be able to feel how Qi is flowing in each of the channels, how the Qi dynamic in the whole body is feeling and where it might be stuck, which points are most available for treatment, how needling each point affects the overall Qi dynamic, and when I’ve done enough.