Courses

Listening skills you'll learn:

Shape or Qi (SOQ): Direct palpatory experience of Qi. Learn about its normal and pathological qualities. Learn to listen and facilitate the conditions to the state of dynamic stillness, where the natural healing capacities take charge.
This is the first gateway that will lead you out of your head and into your hands.   
Shape of Qi needling: brief introduction to a way of needling consistent with the state of Qi we're trying to facilitate.
Qi Signal Assessment (QSA): active points and areas give off a signal, train your hands to feel it precisely. A tremendously helpful tool in point selection, even if you follow protocols, now you'll know when a point is active or not (and if it makes sense to needle it or not!), also will help you track when is time to remove your needles. Excellent tool to help you prevent overdose.
QSA is also used to evaluate the vitality of the 3 burners, giving you a sense of the overall state of your patient and immediate feedback about your needling technique.
Yang Rhythm (YaR): Palpatory experience for the yang qi in the body. Learn to identify normal and pathological qualities. Use as feedback for effective needling. Effective measure to prevent overdose.
 Local listening (LL): Learn to feel the place(s) where Qi is not open, the local restriction where everything organizes around.
 
 Instructors:
Local instructors from the European Crew (Germany, Holland, Spain) 
 Teaching Assistants: 2-4 depending on the size of the group 
 Days of training: 2 

Listening skills you'll learn:

Global listening (GL): After being exposed to Local Listening, now learn to feel the least open place from a global perspective. A quick way to get you to the least open place where you can start the conversation with your patient's presentation in the present moment. Global Listening will take you to Local Listening in seconds. It'll help you bypass the apparent conceptual contradictions by taking you to the place where Qi's flow is restricted and disturbed.
Channel listening (LL): Learn to feel the channels as a whole, start exploring their qualities and the experience of openness or blockage.
Channel Listening Selection: learn to feel the connection among a local listening and a singular channel, identify the distinct hallmark and work with this information to get to a profound and gentle resolution.
Refine Needling: Learn to accurately locate the point and the depth of insertion by refining the quality of your contact and attention.

Instructors: Marguerite Dinkins (USA)
Teaching Assistants: 2-4 depending on the size of the group.   
Days of training: 2 

 Listening skills you'll learn:

Yin Rhythm (YiR): After being exposed to the Shape of Qi and the Yang Rhythm, you'll be ready to engage a deeper rhythm, the Yin Rhythm. You'll learn to palpate the rhythm (yin tide, or yin rhythm) and the state (the fluid body). With this you'll have the gateway to a deeper state of dynamic stillness, and access to the palpatory experience of all fluids in the body, including Xue, JinYe, Dampness... you'll be able to feel under your hands yin deficiency as different experience than damp-heat or blood stasis.
Extraordinary Vessels: Closely related to the fluid body, the Extraordinary Vessels give us a means to engage with the deeper state of dynamic stillness and Yuan Qi.

Channel Listening Evaluation (ChLE):  continue deepening on how to listen to the channels, refine the palpaptory skills and grasp nuances.
Shape of Qi needling: Now with a better grasp of the Shape of Qi, this technique is presented in depth and practiced in all practice sets. The goal is to facilitate the engagement with Qi and be able to effectively work with the dynamic.

In this final module, you'll review all the topics you've been exposed to in the 3 modules.

Instructors: Rayén Antón
Teaching Assistants: 2-4 depending on the size of the group.
Days of training: 3 

 This module is not sequential. As long as you have completed the core training, you can take this class when ever you want.
 
 In this module Dan takes the quality of touch one step further, and brings one very delicate listening post into play: the cranium.
 In this class you'll learn to feel the restrictions and pathological patterns affecting the cranium. You'll start working with areas of interface, the sutures.
 You'll explore how to use this information in clinical practice, and to reboost the system. 
 Instructors: Jack Radner & Leon Gobert
 Teaching Assistants: 2-4 depending on the size of the group.
 Days of training: 2 & 1/2

 One of the most fascinating and useful results of the Engaging Vitality approach is the clear, palpatory realization that the yin and yang organs described in our core texts are clearly connected to the actual physical organs. These connections are palpable and extremely useful in clinic.

In this class series we will go over the living anatomy of the most important viscera, learn palpatory techniques to listen to them, and go over some ways to integrate this information into the practice of TEAM. This next step in Engaging Vitality, will aid in gaining a more complete and less abstract understanding of TEAM and its applications. It will have a significant positive impact on your practice.
Note: To be participate on this seminar you need to have completed the 3 Module core training or similar.
 Instructors: Ferdinand Beck & Gemma Casasampera
Days of training: 3

The Extraordinary Vessels are one fascinating piece of TEAM, with their overarching influence, connection with primal qi, and unique place as gateway between internal alchemy, Nei Dan and medicine. The direct perception of the vessels themselves has been largely overlooked in our field of medicine, relegated to the Nei Dan practitioners and their field of internal alchemy. More often than not, our decision-making process when selecting a vessel for treatment tends to be based on theoretical considerations and/or indirect forms of palpation (as the pulse or the abdomen). Few scholars have taken the bold step of exploring the Ba Mai from both perspectives, keeping a fluid and open-minded approach while rigorously pursuing clinical efficacy. Li Shizhen, the outstanding XVI century physician, was one of those scholars. Li Shizhen was himself a medical and Nei Dan practitioner, and in his seminal book Qi Jing Ba Mai Kao he approaches the issue from both perspectives, revisiting previous knowledge on the topic and adding his own interpretations. After a couple of decades working on the Ba Mai, and 11 years of work on Li Shizhen’s Qi Jing Ba Mai Kao, Charles Chace, who was a practitioner of both these disciplines and one of the core developers of Engaging Vitality, mapped out the Morphology of the Ba Mai on the Fluid Body. The Engaging Vitality palpatory skills served him to bring direct access of the Ba Mai back into the medical realm, allowing any practitioner of medicine-even without inner alchemy or qi gong training- to grasp them in a tangible and clinically useful way.

The Fluid Body and the Ba Mai share some characteristics.  For instance, they organize themselves around a midline, and they tend to layer.  This, and the palpatory training to be able to listen to the Fluid Body, are the starting point of the journey that takes us into engaging the Ba Mai in one of their most direct manifestations: The Morphology. 

We’ll be exploring yet another form of palpation for the Ba Mai in this seminar. Developed after the Fluid Body palpation and making use of the palpatory skills acquired with the Engaging Vitality training, the Inherent Movement palpation is a complementary approach to directly engage the vessels by listening to their movement. We can directly palpate or resonate with the inherent movements of the vessels; this offers another angle to approach them and another cross-referencing tool. 

In this seminar we will explore both of these novel ways to directly contact the Ba Mai and will be cross referencing this with abdominal palpation and simplified forms of Ba Mai pulse diagnosis coming from Li Shizhen. 

This class is complementary to the Ignition class taught by Felix DeHaas, where the Nei Dan and inner cultivation aspects are explored in depth, as well as the palpatory references for the midline and midspace, and the concept of Ignition. 

Course Topics: 

• Revisiting the Shape of the Qi
• Revisiting the Fluid Body 
• Revisiting pulse and abdominal diagnosis for the Ba Mai 
• The Ba Mai as fields of influence. General indications. Trajectory and treatment holes. 
• The morphology, mapping the terrain. 
• Walking the path: practice session on the morphology. How it feels under our hands. How to work with it in clinic. 
• Inherent movement: generalities and conceptual frameworks.
• Palpation and recognition: practice sessions to learn how to tune into the inherent movement of the vessels. 
• Putting it all together: practice sessions to cross reference the multiple ways of listening at the Ba Mai and work with it in clinic

Prerequisite Requirements to take this class:  Basic training
Days of training: 2 
Instructor: Rayén Antón
TA: 1-4 according the size of the group

 This module is not sequential. As long as you have completed the core training, you can take this class when ever you want.

Mid-space

In East Asian Medicine and Inner Cultivation traditions we find many references to the Mid-space. It is narrowly connected with the ideas about the Extraordinary Vessels which have developed over the last 2000 years. 

Thanks to great scholars as Li Shi-zhen who integrated knowledge from inner cultivation literature into the medical literature we have now access to a wider view of the Extraordinary Vessels. 

 We can see the Mid-space as the core of our system, or as the central axis, on which our whole system organizes itself around. In the clinical setting is the free flow in and openness of the Mid-space essential. If we are able to palpate the mid-space and are able to open it up, we can greatly improve the whole self-reorganizing ability of the system.

Ignition

 Ignition is a palpable process in which we perceive comprehensive transformations related to the influence of the Yuan Qi 元氣  (Primal Qi) on the body. These transformations express themselves as improved coherence, communication, connections and organization.

Ignition could be viewed as a kind of super De Qi 得氣 , a situation in which the whole system makes a major shift towards a therapeutic change. If it happens it is a pretty reliable measure that some significant and lasting shift in momentum of the health of the patient took place.

This is not something which can be forced and not necessarily happens in every treatment. But we can facilitate this process and once so often it can happen in a clinical setting. For being able to facilitate this process the practitioner needs to rest in the SSIO to the best of their capacity. By recognizing the Shi 勢 (propensity) and Ji 機 (Qi dynamic) the practitioner could estimate if he or she has an opportunity to facilitate the Ignition. It deserves a certain amount of Yi 意(Attention/Awareness) of the practitioner. 

Ignition is also closely related to the Mid-space and its dynamics. So a basic understanding of the Mid-space and the ability to palpate the Mid-space is crucial here at this stage.

This workshop has grown out many years of practice and experience of Charles (Chip) Chace who studied this material thoroughly and developed it in conjunction with other aspects of Engaging Vitality. At the moment this material will be presented by Felix de Haas a close student of Chip and because of his own background very familiar with this material.

 Instructors: Felix DeHaas 
Teaching Assistants: 1-4 depending on the size of the group.
Days of training: 2 

Palpation, as any other skill and handcraft (and eventually art) takes time to settle.  After completing the basic training, and once we've been practicing for a while, it's useful to refresh the full repertoire, so we call Review classes every year in the different locations. 
The specific topics vary according the particular groups, provided we stay within the framework of the 3 modules basic training. 
Topics we revisit: 
Shape of Qi - Qi Signal Assessment - Yang Rhythm - Local Listening - Shape of Qi needling - Global Listening - Channel Listening Selection - Channel Listening Evaluation - Fluid body and Fluid Tide - Use of Extraordinary Vessels at the service of palpation. 

We regularly have review classes in: 
Amersfoort - Barcelona - Berlin -  Munich 

Instructors: Varies according Location: 
Bart Wintjes - Felix de Haas - Ferdinand Beck - Rayén Antón 

Review and Expansion:
During the basic class we get familiar with the Fluid Body and the Fluid Tide. We continue to explore the Fluid Body in the Ba Mai class, where we dive deeper into the Morphology.
Yet there's another way the Fluids might present themselves, that we don't fully explore during the basic classes or the Ba Mai class: the Wave. This phenomena tends to be quite palpable when the system has reached a further state of quiescense, and it usually signals that it is ready to shift to Dian Hua (we explore Dian Hua topic in the Ignition and Midspace class)  
Requirements: Basic Training
Instructor: Rayén Antón 
TA: 1-2 depending on the size of the group 
Days of training: 2 

Since Engaging Vitality arrived to Europe by the hand of Chip Chace, we've been meeting annually in autumn in Barcelona, having a weekend to review, callibrate, share experiences and maybe adding a topic of research or deepening as a hub for the practice sessions. 

The goal  of this gathering is to mutually nourish our practice, meeting up with colleagues from all around the world, with different levels of experience. 
We bring into the table topics that arise during the study groups and the review classes, taking the time to deepen into aspects that usually lay beyond the scope of the basic classes or aside of the scope of the more advanced classes. This is the place to share discoveries and put them to test. 
Engaging Vitality is an alive community, and all of us practitioners participate in its development. 

Location: Barcelona

Guest  instructor: Varies according to the year. 
Coaching the practice sessions and gluing/organizing: Rayén Antón