Yesterday in my Acu-Points class I had a moment of pure contentment.

As much as I love learning overall, especially Chinese medicine, there are classes and days when it feels like I’m just doing what I have to to get by. Dragging through, studying for the quiz and not to master the material. I’d say it’s a pretty normal phenomenon, and to be expected. I also often think of school as a means to end, it’s about getting through the program so that I can treat people.

That’s why this moment was noteworthy. I was lying on the table while my friend placed sticky dots on my Urinary Bladder channel on my leg. Gazing around at my classmates, it just struck me how wonderful everything was, in the present moment. All of us just hanging out learning where points are and what they do. Ironically, I thought of the moment in terms of my future memory of it. A few years down the road, after I graduate, I could be thinking back to this moment with nostalgia, I best cherish it while it’s here.

I’ve written about some practices to stay present, but it’s nice when things just happen on their own. What was important about this moment was that it gave me a glimpse of what it feels like to treat everything as the ends, rather than the means. In that moment (and hopefully from now on in many more moments to come) I was no longer in school to graduate, I was able to be purely in the experience of being in school, just to be in school. Our actions always have results, but like they say in the Bhagavad-Gita, we need to focus on doing the actions and let go of the outcome of the result in order to achieve at the highest level.