The significance of doing nothing – Joan Duveen

During treatment, I advised a patient to do nothing for half an hour a day. He looked at me with fearful eyes and said: ‘What should I do?’ Doing nothing was no option for him. He told me that he was too scared. He was afraid to have time because emotions would then reveal themselves and become too intense for him. With some insistence on my part, he started doing nothing for one minute a day. It was terribly difficult for him but, after a while, things slowly got better and he could ‘do nothing’ for 30 minutes; just stare out of the window without it having any function. He began to like to ‘do nothing’ and he had more time to perceive himself and discover what feelings were coming. This reduced his overload. The experience with this patient led me to investigate ‘doing nothing’ more intensively. I started to delve more into the Daoist philosophical concept WuWei. I soon realized that ‘doing nothing’ is more and includes practicalities that were important to my patients, but certainly also to me as a practitioner and that acupuncture can contribute to ‘doing nothing’. In this webinar we will discuss the different aspects of doing and ‘doing nothing’. What is ‘doing’ actually, what is the reason we ‘do’, what is the relationship between the five spiritual sources shen, yi, po, zhi and hun with ‘do’ and ‘not doing’. To do or not to do, that is the question.

Joan Duveen has worked in healthcare since 1972, he has practiced acupuncture in his private clinic since 1980 and has taught Chinese philosophy and acupuncture internationally for almost 40 years. From an early age Joan was fascinated by Eastern philosophy, meditation and the relationship between body, mind and spirit. He believes and experiences that self-understanding through self-reflection and internal development is an integral part of Chinese medicine. He is inspired by his teacher Dr J.D. van Buren, a pioneer in the field of applying heavenly stems and earthly branches acupuncture in the clinical practice. Joan recently shared his experience and understanding of this significant but historically often forgotten approach to acupuncture in a book: Applying Stems and Branches in Clinical Practice; Dynamic Dualities in Classical Chinese Medicine.

This lecture is part of #ICCMMEET project

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