Engaging Vitality, Module 1
October 15-16, 2016, in Amherst, MA at White Pine Healing Arts
13 CEU’s Available

This will be the first weekend of a three-weekend series.  It will be a hands-on introduction to a variety of palpation techniques that put you directly in touch with your patients’ qi.  These techniques originated in the world of Osteopathic Medicine, and when incorporated into the practice of East Asian Medicine and Acupuncture, they allow you to get more information and understanding every time you put your hands on a patient.  They compliment pulse diagnosis and abdominal diagnosis, but give you a fuller picture, and more directly inform your choice of channels and effective points for treatment.

I was introduced to this material in 2000, by Dan Bensky, when I started as a student SIOM.  There are many palpatory tools that are part of the Engaging Vitality system  and though I worked with some of them from early on in my practice, they didn’t all come together in an organized and meaningful way until Dan Bensky, Chip Chase and Marguerite Dinkins reformulated their methods of teaching into the current three-weekend Engaging Vitality program in 2012. That year, I attended all three classes in Portland, OR, and began to use the all of the material every day in my practice. I have since hosted a three-weekend series in Amherst in 2014, and have more recently attended classes in Seattle and North Carolina. I invite you to read a blog post that I wrote in 2014 to describe my experience with this material. Jennifer Spain, a long-time GMP student, also wrote her own blog post about the Engaging Vitality series. I can’t overstate what this teaching has done for my practice! At the most fundamental level, this class will bring new understanding into your hands.  You will know where, and how the qi dynamic in your patients bodies is stuck, and you will know when you have engaged that dynamic and created a shift, and when you haven’t. Having these skills in your hands will deepen your practice, no matter what style of acupuncture you practice. It will allow you to better assess your treatments, and to hone your skills. It will also deepen your understanding of East Asian Medicine as a whole, as the findings in your hands will bring theory and physiology to life in new ways.

I am really excited to teach this weekend course! The class size will be small. It will be heavy on hands-on practice, and light on talk and theory. There will be lots of time to practice! You will leave the weekend having learned many different ways to connect with and assess your patients’ qi. This is an introduction to the Engaging Vitality System, which will prepare you for the second module weekend, taught by Dan Bensky.  I look forward to hearing from you if you’re interested in registering for the workshop, or if you have any further questions.

You can find more information about the Engaging Vitality Curriculum at Engagingvitality.com.