Integrating Scholarship and Practice
Originally published April 18, 2022.
My dear friends,
With a bit of hesitation (see below) I am inviting you all to join me for another Tea Time Talk that will raise funds again, like the event with Brenda Hood we did in early March, to support the wonderful work of our friends and colleagues at the Classical Chinese Medicine Association (https://ccm-association.com) in Poland. Read more about the upcoming talk and register at https://www.imperialtutor.com/teatimetalks/2022/2/14/integratingscholarshipandpractice. This whole time, they have been giving free treatments with acupuncture and herbs to Ukrainian refugees who have been streaming into Poland with the clothes on their back and obvious physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual trauma from the war. These treatments have been supported, in part, by your donations from our last fundraiser, which went straight to purchasing much-needed needles and herbs at cost from local companies in Poland (see photo). I am going to share a case with you below that my local contact there, my friend and student Elzbieta Heland, the vice president of the Association, wrote up for me and you all, along with some pictures. If you are sensitive, you may not want to read it.
I mention my hesitation because I did receive some angry responses in response to the last fundraiser, which took me by complete surprise. A couple of readers expressed dismay that I strayed outside my traditional boundaries of being a historian of Chinese medicine. Some accused me of supporting political positions that are the very opposite of what I hold dear. But we live in a world where many of us operate from a baseline of very different “facts” and “realities,” and apparently some readers took my fundraising for a small Polish group providing free medical treatment to war refugees as an endorsement of NATO expansion or US militarism or even support for Nazis. So I want to make it absolutely clear, --and it hurts me that I even have to write this,-- that I am an unapologetic pacifist first and foremost, and, in ordinary times, a fairly apolitical anarchist-leaning country bumpkin second. While I may be a German who has immigrated to the USA, I am definitely no supporter of US militarism or imperialism or apologist for German Nazi history. And yes, I have also received some criticism about why I didn’t do a fundraiser for Syria or Burma or another of the many places where we witness horrendous injustice and need and suffering. My response to those critics has been that I hadn’t planned to do a fundraiser, it was a spontaneous decision made literally 36 hours before the event because I happened to be in touch with my student and friend in Poland and witnessed her grief and exhaustion and need, and I know her beautiful heart and integrity. So here was just an opportunity the universe placed in my lap where I could help someone in need who was doing such beautiful healing work with victims of war, and I knew every penny would be used for supplies for their volunteer work. And of course this particular war has been more triggering for me because it is taking place so close to my home. I grew up in Bavaria in a city leveled to the ground by bombing not so many decades ago, I speak almost daily to my elderly parents in Germany who are deeply concerned (my mom was a refugee from the east in WWII), and I have always had Ukrainians among my friends and neighbors. I am sincerely sorry, is all I have to say, I am not a political activist in normal times, and that is not my chosen path, but I feel in my heart that it is better to take this tiny little action in this particular case than to take no action at all. If the lessons of Nazi history have taught me one thing, it has always been that it is wrong to stand by and do nothing in the face of suffering when you have an opportunity to contribute to love and healing. This is my tiny little contribution. If you don’t like it and this is not your style, that is of course fine. This is my space, my newsletter, my life, and, as the title of my upcoming conversation with Pierce Salguero suggests, “Integrating Scholarship and Practice” is something I do take seriously.
In our upcoming Tea Time Talk on May 14, my very esteemed colleague Pierce Salguero has graciously agreed to participate in a conversation that is so appropriately titled “Integrating Scholarship and Practice,” a topic that he has been thinking and writing about for many years and that we had scheduled like this long before this war broke out. It’s a real honor to have this conversation with him, in which we are bound to do a whole lot more than just explore his two new publications on Buddhism: The more academically oriented A Global History of Buddhism and his Buddhish: A Guide to the 20 Most Important Buddhist Ideas for the Curious and Skeptical, which is written for the general public. Pierce is a rare professor who is not only an outstanding researcher and tireless author but is at the same time deeply engaged on a personal level in the well-being of his students. This is a combination that has never been more important, I would think, than during these two past years where young people have suffered on so many levels due to the pandemic.
And finally, here is just one case that was sent to me by Elzbieta Heland, vice president of the Classical Chinese Medicine Association in Poland and my personal friend and student:
Case: female, Anastasia, 32 years old with three children: 12, 9, and 5-year-old boy. She came to the consultation with her two younger children.
They had come to Poland 2 weeks earlier. They had lived in Kyiv before and spent many days underground hiding against the bombing. Finally luckily they had been able to flee to Poland, but her husband had to stay in Ukraine. They found a temporary home in Sopot (city next to Gdansk) where a Polish family took them into their house.
Since the start of the war, Anastasia has had major psychological - emotional issues, nightmares, very vivid dreams, for example that her arm has been cut off and is bleeding, and she wakes up, but still thinks it is real and needs to grab this arm for a while to be sure that it is there. Another repetitive dream is that her son is dead, again very vivid, she cannot judge if it is a dream or reality, so when she wakes up, she also wakes up her son in the night to make sure that he is alive. Also during the days when she walks on the street and there is some city noise, some loud car passing by, she needs to stop to look around for a while to make sure that it is not bombing. She has a lot of kidney fear.
Her 9-year-old daughter Maya also has a lot of fear, she goes to school in Poland and is normally very open, a happy girl, but now she is afraid if someone sits close to her, she needs to have a distance to everyone, but on the other hand she is afraid to stay alone, she even cannot go to the toilet alone.
The 5-year-old boy (he is in the one photo with Anastasia), at the beginning of the visit, was very silent, as the only symptom he had some belly pain, nothing serious. But it was very interesting what he did after Dr Li Jie consulted his mother. She cried during the talk but then she was smiling at the end and felt much better. This boy felt that, and at the end of the consultation he stands up, and gives a very strong hug to Dr Li and says in Ukrainian: “Thank you so much that you help my mommy.”
You can imagine how touching and heart-moving it was, even for Dr. Li. For Anastasia, of course she needs time to transform this shock, but herbs can help her sleep better and go through this better. Her daughter got herbs as well.
It makes us feel really better when we help them, and they are so grateful, there is so much love and compassion here… as an opposite to what is going on next to us across the border…
