coming back from Boston

Posted on: Mon, 09/03/2007 - 23:09 By: Tom Swiss

Now I'm on the way back from Boston, where I just attended the AOBTA conference. Always a good time, just some of the best people, plus great leaning opportunities.

Just before I left I got a message from Robin on my answering machine. She had been mugged! She wasn't hurt, but her computer was stolen, her cell phone too. It was after midnight when I checked the machine, so I didn't call back until I was up here, and it took me a few days to be able to reach her. But it looks like they've caught the thieves (they used her cell phone to make a call - not the brightest crooks), so it seems to be resolving as well as it possibly could.

Friday I took a great class in "Tai Chi Easy", a well-constructed simple set of qi gong exercises from the 108 move Tai Chi form. Just what I needed to get my stuck energy moving. There was a class on marketing your practice, that I got a few good ideas from, and a neat class on doing research that talked about a statistical method that I think could be a good alternative to the double-blind clinical study (hard to do in bodywork, or psychotherapy, or surgery...).

This morning I took a class about the "Twelve Officials", personifications of the Chinese Medicine organ systems. I had an interesting encounter with my Lung and Spleen, who revealed that everything, even grief, transforms. Particularly relevant: the theme of the conference was the Metal element, which is associated with grief. And I've had some of that coming up, reflecting on the whole thing with Cathy. She (and her new boyfriend) might be joining in with the new set of Moon Circles that Joe has started rolling. So that's had me thinking.

Anyway. It was on the way back from Boston a few years ago that I first read Thich Nhat Hahn's book "The Heart of Understanding", which first turned me on to his work and which contains a passage that was critical in my understanding of the whole Zen/Paganism connection. He write about "talking" to a leaf, and uses this to illustrate the notion of what he calls "interbeing". (And on this trip, I brought the latest _Shambla Sun_, with him on the cover.)