Q&A with James Catermole, Miller's Way
Well, our first Q&A with a guest. As the name suggests, it will be a chinwag between James Catermole and I. We will drive the conversation but we very much want it to be an open discussion with all attendees, more of a round table discussion instead of the standard interview or lecture. So we look forward to questions, interactions and general contributions that will guide this conversation into territories we cannot predict. This is awesome! This dialogue is super valuable to us.
Background:
I have been coaching from and collaborating with the lovely people @millers_way_project for a few months now. James is one of the founding members and was the main reason for me getting involved. He has had a huge influence on me as of late and provides tons of inspiration and guidance on my conceptualisation and articulation around moving with the seasons.
In short, he is my mentor to all things Chinese medicine but it is more than that. His unique approach of decoding and as he puts it ‘reverse engineering’ Chinese medicine to help articulate with language more relevant to today and make clear it’s usefulness is one of the things that set’s him apart. I have found that the unversal principles of Chinese medicine has started to resonate with me more and more of late. Initially through the decoded and embodied practice of @fightingmonkey_practice (although their teaching has always been presented in such a way that you bias of whether chinese medicine ideas resonate with you or not, does not matter). I didn’t realise I understood (somewhat… from embodied practice at least) and resonated with certain ideas until they came up and where explained to me by James through our many fascinating discussions. So my journey into Chinese medicine thus far, begun unintentionally as a reverse engineered entrance, experiencing the distilled and evolved knowledge from Fighting Monkey’s years of study without realising I was being exposed to these ideas…
James has and is serving as the perfect guide into taking this reverse engineering into new layers of depth and I think his overview of transformations, change and connections will be interesting and useful to anyone. No interest in Chinese Medicine is necessary. In fact, one of Jame’s goals is to share his experience with universal language “unconstrained” by cultural perceptions. I leave you with this quote from him:
“Once you strip away the cultural specifics of Daoism or Chinese medicine, you are left with a highly sophisticated recognition of patterns and principles and a way of problem-solving which is ideally suited to dealing with ever-changing sets of circumstances. This represents a very different way of problem solving to the ones we are familiar with because it allows us to see every situation as unique, but without having to start from scratch every time to find a solution. Rather than just repeating set responses to do the things “right”, (i.e.according to limited previous experience), it gives us the opportunity to do the right thing for each unique occurrence,having identified and applied recurring patterns and principleswhich are always present.”
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