Becoming a Master of Chinese Herbs

Training and efficiency

If you want to become a master of prescribing Chinese herbs, you’ll either want to learn how to use Chinese herbs from the ground level up, or improve how you already use them.

If you:

- have gone to acupuncture school and want more herbal training

- practice another form of medicine

- want to learn about Chinese herbs, but don’t necessarily want to make a career out of it

- want to help yourself with Chinese herbs

- want to learn about Chinese herbs for any reason

all you need is a sincere desire to learn it and some patience. The rest is about training and efficiency.

Exploring a solid methodology

Prescribing Chinese herbs is a profound medical art. You will not learn it instantly. It will take a lot of serious work and dedication to master it, but you can do it if you really want to.

The first and most important step is to get out of our modernist ‘quick and easy’ mindset.

There are some medical systems where a master directly passes on the ability to heal to a student like magic. That’s not what we’re doing here.

What we’re doing is exploring a solid methodology around using Chinese herbs.

Cutting through the dogma

In my research, practice and teaching I’ve found that students of Chinese medicine usually want two main things:

1) to be healed

2) to heal others

But usually not in that order.

The focus of the Min Jie system is on practicing from the inside out, becoming a cultivator/practitioner, first to be healed and then to heal.

Min Jie training can help you cut through the dogma of Chinese medicine to get to its dharma, the practical core where the real gems are.

Nobody is going to give you the power to heal when you learn Min Jie medicine. Instead, you will develop some serious skills that nobody will be able to take away. The hard work that you put into mastering the art of prescribing Chinese herbs will yield rewards that will be yours to enjoy for the rest of your life.

All the latest research

I’ve seen that many herbal students desperately try to connect the dots in the herbal world without much success. They cobble together all the ‘latest research’ only to come up with a ditsy bricolage of herbs that does not treat the disease pattern nor the patient within a holistic context. So the formulas these practitioners come up with don’t tend to be very effective.

Becoming a master of Chinese medicine

You don’t automatically become a healer by:

-Picking up a few tools here and there and using them randomly.

-Having more than your share of psychedelic drug, sexual and/or religious experiences.

-Having a difficult childhood.

-Making a fortune in tech and suddenly realizing that you’re here to help the world.

-Being somewhere on the spectrum of autism, schizophrenia and/or sociopathy.

-Going to Chinese medicine school.

Some people are natural born healers. If that’s you, Min Jie training might not be the right thing for you. Yet if you want a completely new set of tools and an orientation to medicine and healing that puts what you do into a very comprehensive and coherent structure, Min Jie training could be the best thing for you.

Some great news about Chinese medicine

If you’re not a natural born healer, I’ve got great news for you: one of the many wonders of Chinese medicine is that any idiot can practice it. I know it sounds shocking, but it’s true. You can learn Chinese medicine and help people to heal even if you have no innate abilities in the healing department or any intelligence whatsoever. That’s one of the most amazing things to me about Chinese medicine. It can turn anybody into a decent healer.

Now if you want to practice Chinese medicine well, that’s another story. It requires developing many different talents and the ability to use them flexibly on command as the clinical situation demands. You’ll need a combination of academic and practical experience that will be measured in decades, not diplomas.

If you want to become a master of Chinese medicine, it takes all of the above plus genius. The beauty here is that you can train yourself to become a genius at this level if you really commit to it and have some good guidance.

An entire worldview and its tools

I’m using the Min Jie school to pass on what I’ve learned to the next and future generations of medical practitioners who sincerely want to become the best that they can be and practice this profound healing art at the highest levels they can.

We’re not here to just learn a few things. We’re here to take in and take on an entire worldview and its tools, transform ourselves with them and then transform the worlds around us.

Coherent, consistent and traditional

There’s a set of fundamental relationships at the bottom of Chinese medicine. Once you learn what these relationships are and how to apply them, you’ll have the ability to treat and help virtually any disease.

Many practitioners, even very learned practitioners of Chinese medicine, are using a jumble of tools and techniques in their practice that lacks a coherent and consistent methodology. Yet the ancient masters of Chinese medicine had and used at least one consistent methodology. This is the basis of Min Jie.

Min Jie is an integrated system of using Chinese herbs in a coherent, consistent and traditional way.

Genuinely effective alternatives

My herb suppliers have told me that the vast majority of Chinese medicine practitioners outside of Asia are using generic formulas in pill, powder or liquid form. Although there’s nothing too wrong with this practice, there’s nothing that great about it, either. In my estimation these practitioners are harnessing 5-10% of the positive potential of Chinese medicine at most.

My only issues with using generic formulas are that they aren’t effective enough and they frequently create annoying and/or dangerous side effects. If we want to avoid these issues, the best method is to use Chinese medicine in the way it was originally intended; as profoundly individualized medicine.

I advocate a complete departure from the modernist industrial model that Chinese medicine has become back to its roots as a personal medicine. This means medicine that is completely tailored to the specific needs of each patient.

Our current and future world situations demand more effective medicines than what we have right now. When Chinese medicine is practiced as a personalized medicine for each individual patient, it becomes a true alternative treatment system.

This is why I’ve opened the Min Jie School, so practitioners can develop and utilize genuinely effective alternatives to the current medical options.

This is about technique

Many practitioners use herbs in the same way they use acupuncture. They prescribe pills and patent formulas, close their eyes, hope for the best and believe that if they pray hard enough, something good will happen. Well, if prayer is what they’re really doing, they don’t need any technique at all, so they might as well just skip the Chinese medicine part and stick with the prayer. But that’s another discussion.

We’re here to talk about technique and what can happen without the prayer. Once you master the technique you can enhance it with prayer if you like, but I guarantee the better your technique is, the more effective your prayers will become.

Structuring your integration

Information is only one small dimension of becoming a master of prescribing Chinese herbs. After that it’s about practicing how to use the information in the best way.

Having a mentor can be very helpful in this phase.

Knowing about herbs and formulas will only get you so far. After a critical point, getting more information about the herbs becomes detrimental rather than helpful to your progress as a practitioner. If you become obsessed with knowledge about herbs, once you reach that critical point it’s easy to lose your human connection with the herbs and your patients. These connections are where so much of the power of healing resides.

Remarkably after you pass that learning threshold, studying more can actually harm your practice. This is when it’s time to integrate what you know and really begin to use it. Min Jie training gives you a structure to this integration process to help it work more efficiently and effectively.

Min Jie is a coherent system that you can use in each and every clinical situation.

A collective and interactive process

Maybe you’re happy with your acupuncture and Chinese herbal training and want to take it to a new level. A strong section of the Min Jie school consists of practitioners who want to become masters of prescribing Chinese herbs and using Chinese medicine.

Min Jie is a collective and interactive process of mutual discovery and learning.

A world of natural information

Maybe you practice another form of medicine and want to diversify your medical toolkit. Be careful. If you use Chinese herbs without knowing and applying the principles of Chinese medicine, you probably will not be able to harness the true healing potential of the herbs we use. If you want to begin to tap into this potential, you’ll want to develop skills in traditional diagnosis and a perceptive and discerning knowledge of traditional Chinese medicine before you start learning about Chinese herbs.

If you learn all about herbs and apply them using the paradigm of Western medicine, you aren’t really practicing anything different from Western doctors, are you? All you’re doing is trying to practice Western medicine with herbs, which really isn’t that efficient, safe or effective. It also misses the most important point of doing something different.

If you use the tools of an ancient system with a modernist worldview, all you’re doing is perpetuating and validating a modernist worldview, the one that has created virtually all of the problems that we face today. Why would we want to perpetuate that?

What if there is a distinct and independent paradigm, one that comes straight from nature?

Min Jie training takes you deep into a world of natural information.

Now is the time to begin

If you want treatment with Chinese herbs, what could be more powerful than studying them yourself? You don’t need to go to school or practice it as a profession. There’s no need to go through all of that drama if you just want to learn or to treat yourself. I’m not saying it’s easy, but it is possible. The biggest questions are around time and energy.

If you’re already not well, then time may be the critical issue. Can you learn Chinese medicine quickly enough to heal yourself? It all depends on how much time and focus you have.

The same is true of energy. If you don’t have the energy to put into your studies and application of Chinese medicine, then nothing is going to happen.

If you’re in either of these situations, you’ll be much better off going to a qualified practitioner of Chinese medicine and learning as much as you can as you go along with your healing process.

If you are young and healthy and have lots of time and energy, now is the time to begin your studies. That way, bit by bit and over time, you will be able to accumulate a wealth of knowledge and abilities that you will be able to use when and if you need them someday.

Again, now is the time to begin.

Reinforcing and incubating what is honorable in our medicine

Chinese medicine, like so many areas of life, is bound by politics. Schools, medical boards, board exams, professional associations and the entire edifice of modern medicine all have their own agendas that don’t necessarily fit with your desires as a patient, student, or practitioner who wants to master the art of using Chinese herbs and Chinese medicine.

Chinese medicine is becoming trivialized, corrupted, controlled, capitalized on and betrayed by each of these systems. This makes it progressively difficult to learn anything of value within the boundaries of the games of manipulation, control and extortion that they play.

Our dreams, noble goals and aspirations can get crushed so easily when we are forced to deal with toxic entities such as these. The Min Jie community is here to reinforce and incubate what is honorable in the practice of our medicine and its vast ability to help our communities and our world.

We’re helping to bring the visions of our practitioners back, vivify them and make them real.

Inspiring and challenging

Min Jie training provides a direct route to some of the deepest secrets of how to use Chinese herbs most effectively. It will give you what you need to know to practice as a master herbalist, and also give you a format to continue to improve and enjoy what you do for the rest of your life.

Min Jie classes will teach you how to read between the lines of my books, and of any books on Chinese herbology, to get their inner teachings and train you to become a master of prescribing Chinese herbs. You’ll learn how to use all your senses to discern and appropriately apply the best possible diagnosis, treatment principle and formulation of Chinese herbs for your patients.

My students co-explore the Min Jie material with me in my classes and books to create an experience together that inspires and challenges us to go to new and improved levels every day.

I look forward to meeting you.

The Min Jie School