Learning acupuncture can seem daunting. There seem to be many details and lots to do all at once. This is mostly because the courses that teach acupuncture are badly organised (yes, I am in the midst of writing a better one). However, that is the topic for another article. This article is about finding your way of learning.

To find your own individual way of learning there is only one way. That is to remember how you have learned things in the past. Make a list of ten things you have learned - a variety is best, (things that took a long while or were quick, things that were easy or were hard, different areas of your life - sport, friendship, speaking your native language etc). Examine these things to find out what helped you learn and what didn't. Then look for common elements about how you learn best. You will then have a list describing your own way of learning that you can apply to learning acupuncture.

When I do this I find that what helps me learn best is clear and simple instructions: just do this, just keep doing that. So with acupuncture I look for the vital skills and concepts. The details that I use I'll remember and anything else I can look up. Others of course are the opposite. A friend of mine at acupuncture college loved the details - all the ins and outs of the different points were what he loved. My approach to learning was completely useless for him.

I'd also like to give you some general approaches to learning. The most useful I have found is three styles of learning: head, heart and hand. Head means ideas and abstractions, heart means people and feelings, hand means moving and doing. All of these will usually be part of learning. However each of us usually has a preference. The more we can use this preference the easier our learning will be. Because acupuncture has ideas, it is about healing people and the concepts refer directly to our experience it can be learned pretty easily by a person with any of these preferences.

If you are a head person like me it will help to organise the concepts. My way of doing this is: health, sickness, treatment. Health consists of the channels (and their organs) and vital fluids, sickness is what interferes with health (the devils and thieves) and treatment is diagnosis, point selection and needle technique. There are only about 40 ideas you need to know (yin and yang, the five elements, the 12 channels and organs, the six devils, the six thieves, the four examinations plus a few miscellaneous).

Forty can seem like a lot but it is only one a week for less than a year. It can also help to write a brief bit about the idea and stick it up where you see it frequently - above the sink, on the back of the toilet door, wherever. In this way it becomes part of your life and not something you have to sit down and focus on - it can be a lot easier.

If you are a heart person it will help to learn with and about people. Talking over the ideas with others can help (as long as you just don't confuse each other). It will help to think about how the ideas affect people, how you can use them to understand people, and how you can use them to help people. You can imagine helping someone reorganise their life or imagine saving someone's health by using this acupuncture point (or combination of points), you can imagine saving someone's life with you diagnostic skills. The more you can practice on people or think of how it affects your friends and people you know the easier it will be for you to learn.

If you are a hand person you will understand by moving and doing. Unlike much western schooling acupuncture lends itself to this style of learning (though this isn't understood by those who organise the colleges). Acupuncture speaks about our experience, of hot, cold, dry etc of qi (that feeling of liveliness) and the organs with their command of the different parts of our lives.

Here are some examples, yin and yang can be experienced by opening and stretching and then curling up. The five elements pertain to different movements and senses. In acupuncture even these very abstract parts of the theory refer to our experience. You can learn the channel pathways by tracing them on yourself and others - there is even a qi gong routine that follows these pathways. Learning diagnosis and treatment probably won't be hard for you.