Last year Felix was invited to teach Engaging Vitality in Indonesia. Below are some of his experiences and observations.
We all have connections to places in the world — by genes, by family history, or by our own travels. In my case it begins with family. Indonesia was a Dutch colony for 350 years, and my grandparents lived there for thirty of them. My father was born in Papua New Guinea and grew up mainly in Java, partly in what is now Jakarta (formerly Batavia). My grandfather was a medical missionary who worked in different parts of Indonesia in the first half of the 20th century, including more than a decade at the Petamboeran hospital in Jakarta — the city's first hospital, which is still standing today.
So as a kid I grew up surrounded by stories of Indonesia, Indonesian food, Wayang puppet plays, and Gamelan music. That was also the fertile ground that eventually pulled me into East Asian Medicine. My father had a long-standing interest in Chinese and Japanese culture and in Chinese philosophy: immortals on the mantelpiece, the Yijing, Laozi and Zhuangzi on the bookshelves, Chinese landscape paintings on the walls. My interest started young — before I could really read.
For a long time I had wanted to do something professional in Indonesia, beyond travelling there to enjoy the nature, history, and the extraordinary friendliness of the people. But other things kept me busy, including teaching EV in Europe over the last decade. At some point I noticed that colleagues of mine were teaching there — mostly Japanese styles like Manaka and Meridian Therapy — and I started to wonder if I could contribute something too.
My first thought was clinical practice, but in Indonesia acupuncture is restricted to medical doctors. My colleague Oran Kivity put me in touch with Drs. Andy Ishak and David Soeharto, who turned out to be very interested in Engaging Vitality. They invited me to teach in Jakarta, and last year I went.
The first class: a modified Module 1
The first class took place in Jakarta in February 2025. I taught a slightly modified Module 1 as a general introduction to EV. Since I wasn't sure whether there would be a follow-up, I picked a handful of techniques I considered broadly useful — things people could take into their practice even if they never studied EV further. I checked in with Dan, who told me to teach what I felt was right.
So I taught:
Shape of Qi — useful in its own right, and the imagery resonates with the pulse, which students were already familiar with.
QSA — in our experience, people pick this up quickly.
Yang Rhythm — also very useful, and a nice piece of feedback for Manaka practitioners, since amplitude and ease of motion both improve significantly when the match is right. A good number of the students had a Manaka background.
I also spent a fair bit of time on the premises of EV. Even a shift in mindset — opening the door beyond protocol-driven treatment — would be a real gain for any practitioner, regardless of their background.
I dedicated a lot of time to needling. In my experience, whatever someone's tradition, a more attentive approach to needling — angle, depth, internal and external alignment, stillness, openness — contributes to better outcomes.
We would normally introduce Local Listening at this point, but since this was a teaser I cut it and brought in Channel Listening instead. These were all acupuncturists, and channels are their main territory. Letting them feel whether they were on or off a channel, and whether the channel was open, seemed especially valuable.
That was the layout of the first introductory module. Three days seemed the bare minimum, especially since I was teaching alone with no assistants. No translation was needed — the students' English was good enough.
The students
The group was about twenty people, drawn from different backgrounds. Some had studied Manaka at various levels, some Meridian Therapy, others TCM, and several had done Medical Acupuncture — a three-year university program in Indonesia, evidence-based and protocol-driven, where doctors needle points for specific conditions according to research. So the group was diverse in terms of how they understood the foundations of TEAM. We see this in Europe too. One advantage here was that they are all medical doctors with a solid grounding in anatomy (which is not always the case with MDs).
I went in without expectations. I'd never taught in Indonesia and didn't know any of the students, though Andy and David had given me a rough sense of their backgrounds.
It was received remarkably well. I was struck by the openness and the eagerness to learn. People stayed engaged until the last minute of every session — only on the final day did a few have to leave early to catch flights. (Indonesia is roughly the size of Europe; some students had travelled long distances.) The kindness, warmth, and respect they extended were striking.
There are always individual differences, but my broader impression is that there's more openness and more respect for the idea that you come to a teacher to learn something, rather than assuming you've already got it. In Europe we sometimes meet the assumption that a few days of class is enough to master a body of work. My colleagues — Bart, Ferdinand, Rayen, and I — have repeatedly travelled around Europe to take Dan's and Chip's classes again whenever they were teaching. But many people seem to feel that once they have a certificate, the material is theirs.
What I've seen in Indonesia (and in Japan) is a different mindset entirely.
It can have its downside. I felt slightly uncomfortable being called Sensei. I told them I'm just an ordinary, blunt Belanda (Dutch, in Bahasa), and that my knowledge and experience remain limited compared to my own teachers. Two years on, they still call me Sensei. It's part of the culture — friends and long-time colleagues will address each other as "Dr. So-and-so." It belongs to what they call adab (literally "custom," an Arabic term but deeply rooted in Indonesian life), something I've encountered across Asia from the Middle East to East Asia. So you accept it.
The flip side of that deference, though, is that students can be reluctant to push back. If the teacher says it, it tends to stand — even when it shouldn't. Since the Enlightenment, Europe has cultivated the opposite reflex: question everything, including the person at the front of the room. That's a real strength, though we may have lost something in the process. The ideal is probably the middle path — genuine respect for the teacher and the willingness to think critically about what they're teaching. As it stands, I could tell my Indonesian students complete nonsense and they'd still call me Sensei.
I've seen the downside of rigidity in Japan. If the Toyohari headquarters in Tokyo decides where Lung 5 is located in a given year, that's accepted without discussion. But the openness, respect, and eagerness in Indonesia are real assets, and I think they make for a better learning curve.
Module 1 again, plus Module 2
The success of the teaser led to a repeat of Module 1 and an additional Module 2 in January of this year.
Whether the students will manage to integrate the material into their clinical practice is, at this stage, an open question. Only three of them repeated Module 1, but in all three I could see clear benefit from the previous round — at least some material had stuck. As always, people pick up some techniques more easily than others depending on how they're wired. Two went on to Module 2; the third couldn't come for logistical reasons.
The new Module 1 had around fifteen students, slightly fewer than the year before but plenty to run the class. Module 2 drew a similar number, with significant overlap from M1.
For some, attending was a real stretch. Travel costs are considerable, and although they're medical doctors with busy practices, income levels are far lower than in Europe — coming twice in a short period is a financial as well as a logistical commitment. Friday attendance was sometimes a problem because many work in other clinics. They came anyway.
Module 2 I designed differently. Since they hadn't had Local Listening in M1, I introduced it in M2, alongside Global Listening and problem-related Channel Listening — a set that hangs together nicely. The first day was a review of the M1 material, which worked well.
This time we needed translation, as some students had only rudimentary English. Andy did a fantastic job. Translation lengthens everything, so the days became real marathons — 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. with only short breaks. Everyone stayed glued to the material until the end.
The pattern across both modules was familiar: on day one people feel lost, on day two they start to find their footing, and by day three they begin to feel things. There are always individual challenges — some techniques are easier for some people than others.
I was very impressed by what people picked up. Some students were genuinely talented, and I was struck by how quickly some of them started to feel material that had taken me a long time when I first encountered it.
Teaching alone, without TAs, was challenging — running from table to table, making sure everyone got feedback, putting hands on theirs or having them put hands on mine, watching their posture, their relaxation, their soft focus. Images came back to me of Chip running around in the early classes I took fifteen years ago. Since then we've evolved a system with table trainers and a more structured transmission in Europe and the West. In Indonesia I had to revert in some respects to those earlier days.
You learn a lot yourself in this kind of setting. You have to deepen your own grasp of the material to transmit it, and you develop new ways to reach people from different backgrounds. There's also a field effect: students feel more, and so do you as a teacher. Unexpected things happen. You have to stay open to the possibilities. This was one of my most enriching teaching experiences.
Challenges, and what comes next
There are real challenges. Study groups, for one — there are no teachers or TAs on the ground. Students live far from each other, sometimes on different islands, with distances comparable to Barcelona–Berlin or much further. Even within Jakarta — by some counts the biggest city in the world, with an estimated 42 million people — getting from one side to the other can take hours.
Even so, Andy and David are setting up two regular study groups. Both are accomplished, eclectic practitioners with a lot to offer. We've created a WhatsApp group for everyone who has done M1 or M2, and I'll be running regular Zoom sessions for questions, answers, and the occasional demo. The EV book is also a resource, and Dan has made the technique videos from the book available, alongside other materials I'll be putting together.
This is a big experiment, but I'm delighted to be part of it and I hope we can keep it going. We're already planning M3 and probably another M1/2 cycle next winter. Given their anatomical grounding, visceral and cranial classes could be a possibility down the line. There's also a proposal to run introductory seminars at the Medical Acupuncture School in Surabaya — perhaps short bites like the Shape of Qi, the Art of Needling (what Chip called the Shape of the Needle), and the QSA, to introduce people to ways of practicing TEAM that go beyond protocol.
There's a personal dimension here too. In a small way I'm walking in my grandfather's footsteps. I'm not an EV missionary in Java; at most I'm a channel for transmission. If anyone becomes a better practitioner through this, it's because of their own intention, capacity, and willingness to learn.
We've already had one Zoom session, with another scheduled soon to keep the connection going and address questions as they come up.