So nice

For the past few weeks I have been meeting with my potential new clinic partners and figuring out our vision for our collective CAP. It has been an amazing gift that so far we basically agree on all the really important stuff. It is a wonderful process to go through with fellow practitioners – a rich experience I recommend. I am learning so much and I feel very grateful to these two fabulous women for putting their energy, wisdom and hearts into this journey. Mostly I feel that no matter where we arrive in the end, each one of us will have reaped tremendous growth from the process.

Well, a discussion we had at our last meeting (yesterday) reminded me about something I have been considering writing on this blog.

We talked about who do we want and do not want to attract to our clinic, who is “our community”, who are our future patients. My colleagues bravely and openly expressed some of their preferences, fears and aversions around this subject, some of them based on past experiences in practice. They had concerns about safety and maintaining an atmosphere of peace and respect in the new clinic. This was a very helpful conversation for me. I have been working in the public health realm for some time, and I think I inadvertently developed a bit of thick skin around working with some of the so-called difficult or low-functioning patients. Also, I just haven’t really been thinking about this part, in planning this clinic. Since discovering the community acupuncture model, I somehow decided that the whole idea was to open up your practice far and wide and lower the barriers way down instead of thinking about who you do not want to come. My idea was that the people for whom the community practice set up fits, will show up and stay, and all others will either not show up or will not hang around. I wasn’t really expecting to have to do about anything specific and deliberate around this. I thought that with the community acupuncture model we no longer had to think about such things as target market or who do you want to reach out to as your potential clients / patients. The discussion with my new partners was a good reminder that of course, we have to think about this. But how do we do it without putting out a negative or restrictive or prejudicial energy? How do we preserve and respect our personal boundaries and limits? At which point do we decide it’s time to stretch them? How does our individual biases and class habituation fit into the picture? I am looking forward to exploring this more as we go along.

I was really impressed and enlightened by Lisa’s recent posting http://www.communityacupuncturenetwork.org/forum/read.php?6,6128,6141#ms... about “acculturated niceness” with regard to cross-class alliances. I think her posting gets into the inner subtleties of this work, the part where we get to grow as individuals and as healers. Since reading that post, I have been observing myself being “nice” to patients in various settings and questioning my motivation for the various expressions of niceness, trying to see the source of it within myself, testing the authenticity of it, looking to the patient’s face for clues on their unspoken response, their experience of our interaction. I have been observing a little closer how I act the same or differently with different patients based on their age, gender, class, and race. I have been periodically asking myself the very useful question that Lisa posted: “How much energy are you putting into being nice that you would be relieved to just drop?”

I think it’s a good question to ask because it encourages us to be more genuinely loving in our interactions with patients, while it also can help point to places where we need to stretch our hearts, where our buttons get pushed. Plus, as we know, our energy is limited, and if the question helps us to put less of it into being extra nice, we will perhaps have more left over for doing acupuncture, we can treat more people.

It also occurred to me that there is a bit of a somatic paradox between the idea of being nice to someone and sticking a needle into them. The act of sticking a needle into someone has edginess and sharpness (ha-ha) to it; it just isn’t that nice by itself. Getting acupuncture can often bring up strong emotions and sensations; it can be a deeply detoxifying experience, which is not so nice at times. Maybe that’s one of the reasons so many of us work so hard at being so nice, extra nice. It makes sense to me that this type of niceness could be experienced as a class marker and sometimes alienate working class people, who are perhaps more comfortable with simpler and matter-of-fact interactions.

Obviously, there is a direct relationship between figuring out who we want (and do not want) to come to our clinic, and the (in Lisa’s words) “energetic resonance” we create as we interact with clients. It seems to me this takes some time and experience and trial and error. It feels like a dynamic process as we learn to be acupuncturists in a new way, a way that no one taught us before (until now). So far I have no wisdom to offer, just a lot of questions, but as Rachel Naomi Ramen eloquently put it: “An unanswered question is a fine traveling companion. It sharpens your eye for the road.”