I was going to call this blog ‘Apprenticeship, a new approach Chinese herbal medicine teaching’ but then I realised (a) how academic that sound and (b) that this is really about how magical things happen in life.
While I was running the herb course at the College of Integrated Chinese Medicine (CICM) – over ten years ago now – I received an email about a new lecture series from China, translated by Susanne Robidoux. Now I should have ignored this, because I had just decided not to do any more CPD for a while (I am a bit of a CPD junky and love learning new things). However, I got a particular feeling about this lecture series. This feeling has never let me down in life, and I knew I had to follow it, so even though these lectures were at 2.00 am in the morning UK time(!), I decided to sign up.
Dr Feng opening JFA 2015
I was not disappointed. The moment the Chinese teacher started talking (this was my first exposure to Dr Feng Shi-Lun) I understood that there was someone who deeply knew his subject and that this was an approach immediately accessible to me. The whole thing was presented as case histories, which I loved, and I enthusiastically ignored sleep and participated fully.
Susanne then set up a clinical training in China with Dr Feng, and I signed up, travelled to China, and had my first extraordinary experience in his Beijing clinics. This was followed by two more years of clinicals in China – I couldn’t get enough of it! I also hosted Dr Feng and Susanne here in the UK, where Dr Feng opened the Jing Fang Apprenticeship in 2015.
How amazing is that?
So having had this exposure to Jing Fang clinical practice, and having previously run herb courses for over 10 years, I got to thinking about how to teach herbs in the UK. I had for years watched students struggle to learn this rather difficult subject in an academic way, and knew from experience exactly where the difficulties lay. Firstly there was not enough immediate clinical success, and secondly, there was not enough clinical exposure, especially to patients over time.
I now had the Jing Fang Classical Herbalism of Dr Feng – a new approach that is extraordinarily effective in practice, and that specifically gives us direction about how to respond to changes in our patients over time: ‘I did this, and this happened! What do I do now??’ This was revelatory since it made it possible to teach systematically how to be effective in practice over time.
JFA Graduates
I put this system together with my knowledge of how to run herb courses, and this was happening at a time when the apprenticeship model was making a comeback in many fields. What would happen, I wondered, if I took the apprenticeship model and applied it to the teaching of Jing Fang Classical herbalism? Well, the result was the jing Fang Apprenticeship, and the apprentices speak for themselves.
Jing Fang Apprenticeship
The JFA is a flexible training that can be easily tailored to the needs of an individual apprentice. Thus an apprentice can start and end any time – there is no attendance requirement, and there are no exams. However, there is an apprentice logbook of competencies that has to be completed for certification. This is no small task, and it usually takes an apprentice about two years to do it.
For more information about our apprenticeship, please click here.