Sometimes people ask whether they’ll be able to “incorporate” classical medicine into their practice, after study. Classical acupuncture involves the use of dozens more channels than in the modern acupuncture repertoire, so entering this world is really entering new territory for many. It also has fully intact theory and practice of the key concept of latency. The answer I give to students is often something like this:
“Practice in the classical style for 100 days. If you decide that you prefer your old way, go back to it, love it, and practice it with all your heart—you will do plenty of good. But if you decide to move further into the vastness of the classical arena, be sure not to mix it with a style or with different training. Only then can the instructions to the body be unequivocal, a requirement for decisive responses by the body. You’ll feel that you’ll be plumbing the depths of classical medicine for decades because it truly is limitless. But the principles are not endless. They are clear and clean, logical and direct, understandable, and even beautiful and inspiring. If you practice with that lens in front of you and hold it there no matter what, the development in your practice knows no bounds.”
Because I had the incredible luxury of Jeffrey Yuen being my first and primary teacher for decades, I didn’t have to shift from one way of practice to a classical point of view. But I am absolutely certain that anyone can do it if they want to. Many difficult things can be achieved with a disciplined mind. I had a good dose of making a major shift with something difficult just this year—for me a massive shift that I didn’t think I could make. I’ll tell you the story…
It’s rare for me to have extremely vivid dreams. But in May of this year I had a big one. In the dream, Andrew was driving us in a 550 horsepower electric car with the pedal to the floor. We were traveling through an unlit, one lane tunnel. The tachometer, which electric cars of course do not have, was red lining at 30,000 RPM and there was a strong smell of rubber burning on bitumen even though we were not braking. In the middle of the dash was a huge screen, showing not where we were, but where we were headed. Andrew was looking straight ahead and I was looking at the screen. Suddenly the screen showed several cars coming toward us in the tunnel which meant that we were going the wrong way. A notice in red letters came up on the screen, “20 second to impact”. Andrew! There are cars 20 seconds away. We have to reverse now! He pressed a button with R on it and the car immediately went backward. Andrew’s foot remained on accelerator pedal, unmoved, flat to the floor. Soon the oncoming cars caught up and we all exited the tunnel and entered beautiful sunlit countryside. I woke up immediately, sweating and with heart thumping, and strangely, I had an utterly complete understanding of exactly what I was being told.
In late March I was hired as a substitute flute player in the Philip Glass Ensemble, for their May performances of Koyanisqaatsi in Belgium and Germany. Koyanisqaatsi is a music and cinematic masterpiece from 1982, directed by Godfrey Reggio, with an astonishingly moving score by Philip Glass, a composer with whom Andrew has been playing all over the world consistently for 33 years. Koy, as the band calls it, has sections of dramatically sped up film and so there are times in the piece where the score requires the performers to play extremely fast, with nowhere for the woodwind players to breathe for twenty solid minutes. You have to be physically fit to do it. It takes me a while to prepare for its performance and one of the reasons for the lengthy preparation is that I tend to lift my fingers too high when I play, as though I’m thinking that the harder I work, the better the performance will be. It’s a ridiculous quirk but not very unusual. At the time of the dream, I did not yet have Koy up to tempo, but I’ve played it many times over 26 years as a sub in the band, so I wasn’t worried at all—I knew I would make it. But the dream was telling me to change, with such force that it felt like a life or death ultimatum: “Go backwards all the way, pull your technique apart, and learn to play the flute in a completely different and more efficient way, without all this silly excess movement in your fingers. Or you will crash in Europe two weeks from now.” These were actually not new instructions. Various teachers had told me the same thing and were perplexed at my ability to play well with fingers flying, but I took no notice; it was so deeply ingrained, change seemed impossible, and fortunately, up until the dream, not apparently necessary.
The dream rocked me so profoundly, that I heeded the warning immediately. I have to say that in the first hours disciplining the almost imperceptible micro movements of each finger, the undoing of 47 years of concreting a habit to a point of complete automation, felt on the verge of impossible. And with a super demanding part to play in two weeks time, it was a real test being able to trust that I had the time to begin playing extremely slowly, changing notes by pressing a single finger every two or three seconds. I figured that the only way to achieve the goal of efficiency in technique was to forbid the lifting of any finger off the surface of any key whatsoever—to create a kind of spell over the fingers. But amazingly, things went quickly; within the first hour, I found that the errant movement was actually not a gross one as I had thought, but a very tiny one: I was lifting each finger for a fraction of a second before pressing a key down. And I was lifting each finger up actively at the end of its pressed time, but flute keys are on springs—there’s no need to lift a finger, simply intending the release allows the key to push the finger back up. Once that was understood, it fell into place easily, and in a matter of hours it was as though the previous 47 years had all been entirely different.
Maybe changing one’s practice from one type of acupuncture to another can be that like that, too. You study it and it seems impossible, but you hold to it firmly, you decide that you are going to practice that way and that you will not default. You hold your mind firmly in the principles. How can I see this patient through this new lens? By keeping the lens in place. How can I take pulses this new and profound way? By keeping the lens in place, unwavering.
The concerts, by the way, were beyond thrilling. And why was the dream so specific about this exact concert? Koy is played with no click track in the players’ ears. Michael Riesman, conductor of the band since 1974 watches the movie and keeps the band in alignment with it, conducting with his head since his hands are on keyboard. He alone sets the tempo, while the movie plays at its fixed pace. At one point that night, due to an electronic glitch, the band slowed for a while, and Michael then had to make up the lost time, resulting in a surge in tempo beyond the usual quasi-impossible one, and to my amazement, my fingers just did it faultlessly. I sat back and just experienced the miracle of allowing the fingers to move instead of working the fingers with effort. It was at once the most demanding and also the easiest performance I’ve ever done. As we stood up, and the inevitable Koyanisqaatsi thunderous applause began, I leaned over to Andrew and yelled in his ear, “I could play the whole show again right now!” And he said, “Yes, my love, that’s how it is!” The audience at the Elbphilharmonie leapt to its feet wearing the classic Koy audience look of sheer openness, having been changed forever. Few things are more powerful than music. Is channel work one of them? If it were a competition, they’d be neck and neck…
Ann Cecil-Sterman
Honolulu, Hawaii
26 July 2025