Creating (or illuminating) a monster

I set out to write a blog about loving my working class job, liking how the hard physical

work of doing CA connects me to more people, to my family, and to my own body, and just

to work itself. I will WORK on that entry. But, in starting that, I ended up writing something

that probably should be its own entry. Here it is.

The discussion about class that's being generated
through CAN is a vitally important contribution to
acupuncture and acupuncturists. It's just getting
started. You can tell because much of the dialog so
far has taken the form of screaming and shouting and
otherwise showing our feelings about the basic terms
of the discussion: words like 'classism' and
'oppression' and 'working class'.

We talk here about our relationships to acupuncture
and making a living, and each other. We talk about our
identities, and those of our patients. By simply using
one or more of some specific descriptive words or
phrases, we risk setting fires (many of them of the
perniciously rising liver yang variety) in the
collective mind of the CAN community and in the minds
of our visitors and our professional neighbors.

I think it's good. Sometimes, a good treatment can
bring on strong symptoms temporarily as part of a
healing crisis. We reAlly do need to keep working with
the basic terms, figuring out how they can be elastic
enough to use creatively, but precise enough in
definition to be a tool for identifying and
illuminating things like classism and racism and
sexism and homophobia which we've been trained not to
see.

Not that everything that gets said is rational or

constructive. If we were lucky, all of us would have

our own group of trusted and loving allies with whom

we could work on different kinds of oppressions and

the way we were both hurt by and are

agents of them. We'd then arrive at our connections to

the larger world and to people from different

backgrounds a little more prepared to actually listen

relaxedly. We might be able to contribute something to

the group that moves everyone more towards liberation

and less towards the fear and panic and desperate

domination thats been institutionally forced upon us.

But, short of that set-up, this forum apparently
serves to, at least momentarily, dislodge some of the
more un-useful junk in our minds; and that's useful,

(which I guess is easy for me to say when the junk is

not being hurtled directly at me.)

In CAN's best moments, though, courageous people

consciously work through stuff right in front of our

eyes and share their new perspectives.

Mostly, people who are using or visiting CAN try to

think well about each other while

appreciating it as one place where mistakes get to be

made as we stumble along towards our own real

intelligence(s), the creative and collaborative kind

of intelligence we were all born with.