How to Fail the State Board Examination of California
by Al stone |
We pass, or we fail. Seems that passing the written portion isn't too difficult if you know your stuff.
Passing the practical exam seems to be a question of luck more than anything. Those who pass, fly off into the wild-blue-tomorrow to do what they were trained to do. Those who fail retain lawyers.
Those who fail must overcome the assumption that the A.C. is a corrupt, incompetent and uncaring institution. Who or what the A.C. really is, is not for me to say. Who or what we are is the important part. And part of the process of discovering who we are and what we stand for is in observing our responses to what happens in life.
I know that in the first 36 hours after learning that I've failed the state board, I'll cry out and seek to alleviate my pain through legal challenges to my score, I'll find a problem in every question or inaccurately located acupoint. I'll pull apart every possible shred of data to find one more point to pass my test. I'll upload scalding articles to the Internet attacking the state's acupuncture committee, and send out e-mail describing the holocaust that has visited the students of the Golden state. Then, on the fourth day, I'll rest. I'll have to, because I'll be sick. I know what this kind of thinking does for an individual. It causes pathology. It's anger that lashes out, but finding no clear honest real target, it returns only to its sender to become deeper pathology.
I'll spend one day in bed... letting go.
The next day, I'll get up and start studying again, thankful that I'm forced into another six months of coming to understand TCM a little bit better. Six more months of opportunity to get into the habit of studying every day, even after I'm licensed. Six more months to starve along with every other student of TCM I can think of. Six more months of time to add to a period that I'll someday turn back and look fondly upon.
This path of healing that has so much to offer our patients, must first be visited upon ourselves. We all know that the way in which we think can cause its own pathology. So why not treat ourselves with this same understanding?
Lawsuits may get you licensed, but they won't heal you. That's something you must do yourself, and the best opportunity there is, is in the face of failure.
All of the great Oriental mystical traditions are very clear in their rules regarding goals. Don't have any. It isn't the California state acupuncture license that is important to us as healers, it is the path that takes us to this test, and the test is not the one on the paper, it is the one that we take within ourselves after reading whether we passed or failed.
Don't be attached to the fruits of your labors. Studying TCM is learning how to live, and if we can, in the process of taking the California state boards, learn how to live, then we have risen to a higher level of competence than any government could ever hope to test for. And what greater an understanding for us to obtain then knowledge that can ultimately be used to save lives, beginning with our own.
Is it any wonder I believe that lawsuits aimed at the California Acupuncture Committee is like making war with something that has been given to us as a gift?
I will be taking the California State Board Exam on August sixteenth, 1997.
-al stone. 12/23/96
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