New direction for my teaching

The same Viennese friend of my family, Dr Oskar Adler, of whom I wrote in my last blog, The disappearance of things (27 June 2016), was the author of several extremely interesting books on astrology.  In them he often talked about life and the destinies life chooses for us and those we choose for ourselves.  One of his sayings has inspired me over the years.  He said that we have a duty to humanity to pass on to others anything we have ourselves learnt, however small and insignificant it may appear to be in our own eyes.  We will never know who may be out there waiting to hear our thoughts, and how these may add something to their life, changing it in some way that we may be completely unaware of.

Many years ago, an acupuncture student who came to observe me in my practice happened to say to me, somewhat frivolously I thought, “I think I learnt more from you in this one day, Nora, than I learnt in a year at acupuncture college”.  However exaggerated this comment was, it proved a turning point in my life, giving me, who was then a rather uncertain only recently qualified acupuncturist, the necessary courage and impetus to think of teaching others.  And that one remark has stamped itself on the last 25 or more years of my life, as I have endeavoured, through one form of teaching and another, to hand on as much as I have learnt from my own practice to as many people as possible.

During these years I have moved on from the first informal teaching of a few students in my practice, to founding my own acupuncture college, where I taught 10 groups of students over a period of 12 years or more, to more postgraduate work, running seminars and visiting practitioners’ clinics in various European countries, before what I regard now as probably my final reincarnation as a teacher of many hundreds if not thousands of Chinese practitioners.

With Dr Adler’s dictum in mind, I have now decided that I need to grasp another nettle, on-line teaching.  I am thinking of running a webcast where I can reply to questions about five element acupuncture that are sent to me.  I should probably have been thinking of doing this long before now, as I know that all the people I teach are completely at ease with their mobiles and their tablets, and are used to the constant interchange of ideas which this allows them.  

I would be very pleased to hear whether this of interest, either through comments posted in the comments section below or on my Facebook page.