Love, inspiration and living Chinese medicine

So now Faith, Hope and Love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love. (Corinthians 1:13)

Have you ever found yourself frozen?

In private practice in Chinese medicine (as in other medicine – I assume) this happens. A particularly difficult patient walks in, presenting with something you've never seen before. Or perhaps they are a challenge to deal with personally, challenging your every move and demanding special treatment. At times, particularly when other strains are involved, this produces a frozen state – you don't know what to do, don't know what to say. Mostly, you get through it.

The same thing happens as students, of course. Whether during testing, or practical courses (remember needling the first time?) or just during the normal decision making process that comes up frequently in school (should I take this elective? what do I want to do with my life?) – sometimes you get caught. Unable to determine direction.

This same thing has happened to me over the last couple of years, in both of the situations above, but also with regards to this site. In an effort to serve my community the best I can, but also in an ego-driven desire to be "something more" and relevant enough to be paid for my work here – I've forgotten my own voice and my own love. Sorry about that. But there's a lesson, and an open door to a new world. So, there's that.

For some of you out there, Chinese medicine may compel because of its practical aspects.

The ability to treat recalcitrant diseases, or to treat on a level that is less invasive, less toxic. Maybe you are one of those who was just looking for something to do after college, and this seemed fun and interesting. Or perhaps you are one of those community health crusaders, hoping to transform the contemporary medical landscape with low-cost, easily available medicine.

Or maybe you are like me – transfixed by the mystery and the Earth-bound beauty of what we do as practitioners. By the stimulating, multi-faceted life of study this profession invites us all into.

Maybe you are like me (and other multi-potentialites) unwilling to focus so intensely on one little sliver of the world that you become known the world over as the expert in THAT.

Maybe you have too many interests – delving into philosophy and technology and permaculture and cosmology and language and productivity and herbalism and acupuncture and patho-mechanisms and Pacific Northwestern geography.

If you are like me, you might find, like I did, that the world prefers you focus. Want to market a business? Pick a niche, they say. Want to learn to treat auto-immune disease using Chinese medicine? Well, then, build a practice that treats nothing else. I have been entranced by this view, the mastery-in-focus view, for many years. However, despite being entranced by the mastery-in-focus view, all my life I've been good at a little bit of everything. All my life I've gone from one passionate interest to another, and have been criticized for it.

Only today did I realize that I've had enough of that attitude.

It's been killing my love for this medicine, it's been killing my businesses, it's been killing my personal life. Though the teachers in my life that I cherish most are masters at mastery, it's the case that my path lies elsewhere.

Maybe you're like me, and your path does, too. If so, I invite you in with open arms to this new Deepest Health. This place where we come to share how our diverse interests coincide to inform us as students, as practitioners, as people. This place where we are not afraid to confront our worries and fears head-on.

This place where we geek out about wise-use of technology, and music as healing, and the Shang han lun, and the best way to memorize Chinese herbs, and the magic of sensory perception, and the deep spiritual nature of being a healer, and the real cha-ching focus of being in business, and raising goats, and seeing the five elements in film and everything between, before, outside and beyond.

My love for Chinese medicine springs forth eternal – and that love breaks down all obstacles. May it be so for you, too.

Unmixing Chinese and Japanese fonts on the iPad and Mac OS

by John Pasden

Recently an AllSet Learning client came to me with an interesting problem: he was seeing strange, slightly “off” variations of characters in his ChinesePod lesson, “Adjusting the Temperature.” Once upon a time I studied Japanese, so I could recognize the characters he was seeing as Japanese variants:

What he saw:

What he expected to see:

[If you really care about the tiny discrepancy, you may need to click through and enlarge the screenshot to see the difference. I'm not going to focus on including text here, because that's exactly the nature of the problem: the text is subject to change based on your system's font availability.]

The really strange thing was that he was experiencing the exact same issue on both his 2010 MacBook and on his iPad 2. In troubleshooting this problem, I discovered that my client was running both an older version of iOS (4.x) as well as an older version of Mac OS (Leopard). I was experiencing neither on my 2008 MacBook (running Snow Leopard) or on my iPad 2 (iOS 5.x). But his system had all the required fonts, and switching browsers from Safari to others did nothing to solve the problem. So I concluded it was simply a system configuration problem.

Fixing the issue on the iPad

Here’s the fix. On the iPad, go into Settings > General > International (you might need to scroll down for that last one). You might see something like this:

Note that in the order pictured above, Japanese (日本語) is above simplified Chinese (简体中文) in the list. This is crucial! That means that if English fonts are not found for the characters on a given page, the system is going to match characters to Japanese fonts next.

So to fix this issue, Chinese should be above Japanese. The thing is, there’s no obvious way to change the order. The only way I found to do it is to switch the system language to Chinese, then switch back to English. [Warning: your entire iOS system interface will switch to Chinese when you do this; make sure you can read the Chinese, or you know where the menu position for this settings page is before you switch!]

(Hint, hint!)

Switching to Chinese makes the Chinese jump to the top of the list, then switching back to English makes English jump back above that, leaving Japanese below Chinese.

You should see something like this when you’re done:

Fixing the issue on Mac OS X

The exact some issue applies to Mac OS X system preferences. Go to: System Preferences… > Language & Text > Language.

This time, though, there’s an easier way to rearrange the order. Simply click and drag:

Notice the little message on the right about when the changes will take effect.

Does this really matter?

In the grand scheme of things, not really. It’s actually good to have some tolerance for font variations. But the detail-oriented may find this particular issue quite maddening. It’s good to have a simple way to fix it.

So why didn’t I have the issue, and he did? Well, I had at some point tried switching the system language to Chinese, on both my MacBook and on my iPad, but I later switched them back to English. So without even trying to, I had taught my system to prefer Chinese over Japanese. The problem appears when English is the only language ever used, and the system doesn’t know what to give preference to. In my client’s case, you would think that adding a Chinese input method might clue in the system, but apparently Apple isn’t quite thaton the ball yet.