Testimonials
Michael Max L.Ac., host of the Qiological Podcast
"One of the things about Engaging Vitality that I think is worth pointing out is that it's not a method of "how to" but more a set of tools that allows you to find out how it is for our patients.
It's a way of using your attention, sensing, and touch to see how a treatment is being received by your patients.
Regardless of the acupuncture technique or tradition that you follow, the EV skills will help you to calibrate and understand how your patient is responding.
This kind of cultivation of attention, it's radical in a way, as it allows for you to deeply engage in ways that will surprise you and perhaps shake up your mental models of the world."
From a Fellow Practitioner
"During my 25 years in private clinical practice, I have strived to “do more with less” in my treatments. I have practiced for the last ten years in the traditions of Japanese style acupuncture and trained to palpate and listen to the subtle energies of the body.
Learning the Engaging Vitality tools has taken my palpation skills and the efficacy of my treatments to a much higher level. I find my treatments to be thought-provoking, surprising, elegant and beautifully serene.
Rather than starting with a diagnosis and then treating with prescribed points, I now use the EV tools to assess by exploring, inquiring and appreciating what the patient’s body tells me.
I then let the findings guide me to the channel and the point on that channel that has the greatest systemic “tong” effect of settling the Qi, opening, connecting and unblocking multiple channels.
The points selected provide me with a deeper understanding of what is actually going on with the patient’s health condition.
The EV assessment toolbox helps the practitioner tap into the intelligence of the body and to facilitate the body’s innate healing ability. Studying EV has re-ignited my passion for practicing Traditional East Asian Medicine."
- Susan Eng, L.Ac., New York, New York
Competency in the Engaging Vitality (EV) palpation techniques takes time to develop. If you are at a place where you are overwhelmingly in the weeds when it comes to practicing this material, and fantasizing about dancing around a bonfire and lobbing your EV notes into it, take heart. We have all been there.
The Engaging Vitality (EV) training helps practitioners of East Asian medicine learn how to enhance their ability to directly perceive and make clinically effective use of qi in their practice. Now that registration has opened for the upcoming Fundamental Course Series, here are five essential reasons to take this upcoming training opportunity in 2020.
In EV as I understand it and practice it, we are in the business of elevating our perceptual abilities, so that these perceptions might lead us to a generally quite minimalistic treatment that will help our patients. Using the techniques of EV assessment I find myself quite often treating at points and on channels that normal discursive thought never would have led me to. I love this about EV, that it surprises me. I see it as a method of getting the patient's body to speak to me with specificity. And it is surprisingly effective—and fun and exciting and challenging.
This might be a familiar scenario: Your new patient comes in and you want to help them feel better. The patient's intake is complex, and there are many long and intertwining issues that have been in play for years. You wonder what technique from your acupuncture toolbox you'd like to use and you want to know that when the patient leaves, you've made some positive changes for the body to integrate until the next time they schedule.
Hi EV team,
I wanted to send a thank you to all of you - Rayén, Kailey, Marguerite and Dan for this weekend, as well as the whole course.
The class and toolbox is exactly what I had been looking for! As much as I love Chinese Medicine, I was frustrated by the gap between the theory and the practice, and the absence of a shared palpatory experience and relationship to qi. I've been using what I've learned in the course on all my patients in clinic, and it has been taking some of the "guess work" out of whether or not a treatment is working.
I have just finished the second of three modules in an Engaging Vitality (EV) training with Dan Bensky, Marguerite Dinkins, and Rayén Antón, L.Ac. Chip Chace was a part of the original EV team of developers and teachers, but he sadly passed last year—Rayén will teach the third module next month. This is the second time I have gone through this training. (I think for anything you want to learn, it’s important to expose yourself to it multiple times.)
It is a bit difficult to know where to start in describing this unique approach to acupuncture. It is so different that no other style approaches it in character or technique; it truly stands alone. Current students and seasoned acupuncturists with decades of experience are in the EV training with me, and both seem to pick up the work at about the same pace. Interesting that previous clinical experience in East Asian Medicine seems to not guarantee success in EV. What brings success is approaching the work with a spirit of openness and a willingness to follow the precise instructions given. Seeing the excellent performance of the students in the class, I find myself wishing I had come on this work long ago.
This year’s YUFB directly followed a 3-day Visceral Course with Dan Bensky. Dan lead the first day of review and practice while the EV European teachers crew oversaw the second day. For just coming off of a very full few days of training, everyone (and their very juicy livers) were remarkably focused and present.
Listening to the body can greatly impact a treatment. I have felt the profound effects, and these experiences have motivated me to persist in practicing the Engaging Vitality palpation techniques.
I have been exposed to Engaging Vitality work for close to a decade, but only now am finding the ability to dive deeper and bring the tools into my practice. In writing this, I want to share my experience and reflection upon the past years and most recent 6 months.
In school to study acupuncture and East Asian medicine, we start with the fundamentals. We study East Asian medicine’s understanding of the body. We learn about the pathways of the meridians, the concept of the Qi dynamic, the theory of Yin and Yang, the Daoist understanding of humans and their relationship to nature, as well as some of the cultural, historical, political, philosophical and spiritual ideas that influence and undergird this medicine.
Engaging Vitality is a acupuncture and palpation workshop developed and taught by Dan Bensky, Chip Chace, and Marguerite Dinkins. In addition to being longstanding practitioners of Traditional East Asian Medicine, the instructors have extensive training and expertise in osteopathic palpation methods, including visceral manipulation and craniosacral therapy. Engaging Vitality is the product of their many years of deep engagement, study, and practice of these various traditions.
I landed in my first Engaging Vitality Module I seminar a month after getting licensed as an acupuncturist. My primary reason for signing up was that I saw it as a chance to develop my palpation skills. I did not come to this profession with a background in any kind of bodywork. Beyond point location and surface anatomy, palpation was not heavily emphasized in my TCM schooling.
With steady engagement with the EV material and consistent practice and utilization of the palpation techniques, in time anybody can come to discover how the EV material can enhance their practice of acupuncture and herbal medicine, expand their capacity to flexibly approach patient’s problems from a multitude of viewpoints, and deepen their appreciation for the practice of East Asian medicine….