The Practitioner's Journey: The Path to Success for Alternative, Holistic and Integrative Health Professionals by Dan Clements

Author:Dan Clements [Clements, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780973978247
Amazon: 0973978244
Publisher: The Brain Ranch
Published: 2010-05-20T21:00:00+00:00

Archimedes, the famous Greek scientist, mathematician, and all-around smarty-pants, is best known for his “eureka” moment. During a bath he realized that he could determine the volume of an object by the amount of water it displaced. But Archimedes is also known for the first serious written explanation of the lever—an object that can be used to multiply the force applied to another object.

When you played on a seesaw as a kid, you were using a lever—you just didn’t know it. If you think back to your seesaw days, you might remember that the seesaw worked best when you and your friend were about the same weight. If your friend was too heavy, you spent most of your time dangling in the air, kicking your legs like crazy and trying to get your end to come back down. It was a pretty powerless feeling, being stranded way up there.

It’s not so different from the way we feel in practice when we face the boulder. We feel so small, and the boulder seems so big, that it’s as if we could never hope to move it.

But think back to the seesaw. If you experimented a little, you might have discovered that if you moved farther out on the seesaw—so you were just about falling off the end of it—then you could get your end to come back down. You could, in effect, apply a great deal of force with just your small weight by changing where you pushed on your seesaw lever.

What you were doing by shifting yourself around was effectively changing the length of the lever. That created the same effect as weighing more—or pushing harder. What also worked was having a second friend climb onto your end of the seesaw with you. That let you push even harder still on the lever and shift your heavier friend into the air.

Archimedes once said about levers, “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the earth.” Of course, he said it in Greek, but his point was this: levers are powerful tools. We may not shift the whole earth, but we’re going to pay homage to Archimedes not only because anyone who does his best thinking in the bathtub is okay by us, but also because the idea of the lever applies directly to your practice. It’s a tool for doing more with less, for taking your strengths and multiplying them for better effect. The same principles that allowed you to do more with less on the playground can be applied to your practice as well.

Let’s go back to the seesaw. Imagine that instead of having your heavy friend sitting on the other end, you’ve got it tucked under that boulder blocking the way to Success. Your seesaw is a lever, and we’re going to use it to shift that big rock.

We know from Archimedes that the longer the lever, the more force we’ll be applying when we push. A longer lever, then, is going to let us do more with less effort.

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