Are you a Coach now Dr Tran?
“Dr Tran, do you still practice acupuncture?”
“So are you a coach now?”
“Have you evolved your classes into the direction of spirit cultivation?”
These are the types of questions I’ve been receiving since the recent revamp of my website.
In this article, I shall clarify what I do and share with you a discovery with far reaching implications for creating the health outcome that you or your clients are seeking.
What do you do Dr Tran?
A few years ago, a patient who’d regularly come for acupuncture treatments, came out of a session with me and asked my partner, Ago, who was managing our practice, “Do people come for acupuncture for physical conditions with Dr Tran as well?”
That made me ask myself - What do people really come to see me for? What do I actually do?
So here’s an interesting paradox I’ve observed over my time in clinical practice.
Sometimes, despite the most well thought out and crafted treatment protocols, my patients didn’t get as well as they or I had hoped. At other times, despite very simple, almost effortless treatments, the patients reported a remarkable shift in their symptoms. In some instances, I would not see a patient for a few years. And when they got back in touch, they said that the last treatment had such a lasting impact not only on their health, but that their life had significantly changed as a result of that session.
What was so special about the treatments that had the biggest impact?
There had to be something else going on that I hadn’t seen yet.
It then dawned on me that maybe it could be how I was ‘being’, and not so much what I was ‘doing’ or saying, that most likely made the biggest impact.
This insight was both liberating and uncomfortable.
You see, I had become so strongly identified as a reputable and highly qualified physician. I had become an expert at crafting focused treatments. My advice was grounded in Western scientific medicine and the Classics of Chinese medicine. I’d apprenticed and was trained by the best. I’d also trained in one of the finest medical schools in the world, and even went to one the best schools in the country. I didn’t undergo all of that just to ‘be’!
In fact I had unknowingly assumed full responsibility for my patients’ health and healing. And trying to uphold all that was exhausting.
Then came a subtle yet significant insight…
Whilst people very likely came to see me based on my credentials, they certainly did not get better because of them. Nor did they get better by what I did or the advice I gave per se. Here’s the thing, they got better because they had a life-changing insight from within themselves. Whilst my expertise and advice were sometimes useful, these were nowhere nearly as powerful, long lasting or transformative as their own insights and realizations.
This revelation gave rise to further questions (and discomfort).
What then is my role in the light of this?
What could I do to give my patients more insights?
There was still a missing piece of the puzzle.
I knew I couldn't take my patients further than I’d traveled. I needed to first undertake a journey to discover the deeper drivers of change and transformation.
To help me, I enlisted coaches and mentors, read books, and enrolled on training sessions that were informed by the Three Principles of Mind, Consciousness and Thought. These principle were first discovered and articulated by the late Sydney Banks (more on that in future articles).
As I experienced the cumulative and transformative effects of this process over the weeks, months and years for myself, I came to see clearly that my role was to create the conditions necessary for my patients to develop their own life-changing insights.
So are you a coach?
Well, not really. Coaching is a tool for the purpose of facilitating life-changing insights in my clients.
What do you do?
What I essentially do is Insighting.
That is, I create the space in which my clients can stop thinking for a moment. And it is in the space between their thoughts that life-changing insights occur.
How does this help me get better?
I hold my clients fully capable of getting themselves better, and to remind them of this power, even when they believe they can’t or forget. My job isn’t really to make them better, but to facilitate and empower them to see the miracle of the design - that they are innately well. I point them to the fact that symptoms are indicative of that innate well-being, and to get curious rather than reactive about their state of dis-ease. What is calling for their care and attention right now? And as we gently look together in that direction, they get to see themselves in a whole new light. They realise that they are fully able to respond in a way that takes them back on their path of health again.
How does this apply to acupuncture treatments?
The Classics of Chinese medicine, written over 2,500 years ago, emphasise that the patient is fully capable of getting better. And that the physician’s role is to create the necessary conditions to activate and facilitate their recovery and help them to get back ‘doing their Dao’, or path of wholeness again. This is imbedded in the transmission of the medicine. The sequencing of the complete channel system of acupuncture, rooted in the Classics, provide a map for the physician to do just that.
If there is a health concern or personal topic you’d like Insighting on, write to me, and I’ll include them in future articles and podcasts.