Today I thought I would share the story of how we got to be teaching and practicing in this beautiful leafy venue in South Oxfordshire, and how the space to create the School of Classical Chinese Herbalism and the Jing Fang Apprenticeship began.
The first miracle
The story of how we found this place is one of those extraordinary life events that you look back on and can’t quite believe. My partner Mark and I wanted to move out of London, and took the opportunity when I got a job as Director of the Herb course at CICM, the College of Integrated Chinese Medicine, in Reading. We had never heard of Cholsey and were just looking along the railway line north of Reading for accessible places to live. Of course, all the places were far too expensive, and we were just about to give up and go south, when Mark said ‘let’s just look one stop further’. We turned off the main road into the outskirts of Cholsey village, and suddenly the houses looked like the sort we could afford. We stopped by one which had a for sale sign, and even though this wasn’t eventually to be our house, we chatted to the owner, who sang the praises of Cholsey, and we saw we could find something there.
A second event
The second miraculous event in this story is that after we had moved in, my partner thought he was seeing things, because he kept seeing someone he trained in acupuncture with wandering around the village with his dog. Eventually we went to an event in Oxford, and this acupuncturist, John, was there with his partner – so it was him after all! But that’s not the end of this extraordinary affair – it turns out that his partner, a doctor and acupuncturist, was at University with my sister for six years and that they had known each other well, and that she knew of me and my former career in music, and had even met me back in the day. How amazing is that?
The final miraculous event
The third miraculous event is that not only were these two living in Cholsey, but also they were involved in the local community. And what was happening at that time was the re-building of the Cholsey Pavilion, which had been destroyed by fire some years before.
Creating a complementary health centre
When we arrived in the village in 2011, the building was almost finished. As part of the new build, there was space for a doctors surgery, which was something the local community had wanted. However, by 2013, when the building was finished, none of the local doctors wanted to use the space because it no longer fitted with the new structure doctors were working under.
John suggested to the Pavilion committee that this space could be used as a Complementary Health Centre, and when they agreed, he invited all the complementary and alternative practitioners in the village to join him in setting up a clinic. Six of us responded to that call, and we set up the Cholsey Complementary Health Centre, which is still going strong today and part of village life. Not only are there large clinic rooms suitable for teaching, and a huge reception space that can house a whole herb dispensary, but also there is a lovely sunny hall opening onto a park, which is a delight to teach in. I couldn’t want for a better place to live and work. What a gift from the universe.
