Our Continued Association: A Tribute to Dr. Hammer
Your master happened to come because it was his time, and he happened to leave because things follow along. If you are content with the time and willing to follow along, then grief and joy have no way to enter. In the old days, this was called being freed from the bonds of God.
“Though the grease burns out of the torch, the fire passes on, and no one knows where it ends.” - Zhuangzi, The Secret of Caring for Life (Translator: Burton Watson)
My dear teacher—and one of the first people who ushered me through the doors of truly loving East Asian Medicine—K. Brandt Stickley posted the above a day after our beloved teacher and mentor Dr. Leon Hammer passed away. The piece felt so timely and it touched me in a way that motivated me to sit right down and take in the moment I was feeling, to write about the experience of learning from Dr. Hammer in the ways that I have been able to, and to more deeply express my gratitude for his life and legacy.
Dr. Hammer is someone that I actually only ever dreamed of meeting in person. I always held onto the hope of making his acquaintance, but there was a very small chance that someone who hadn’t gotten to study directly with him in seminars (as he’d taught in the past) like my mentors did would meet him in the flesh.
I am so grateful I did indeed get to meet Dr. Hammer in person. And while I was dreaming of that day, I was already deeply affected by his life and work.
I knew Dr. Hammer through the stories that my teachers told me. I knew Dr. Hammer through Stephen’s recollections of the way he would describe the qi, blood, and organ depths of the pulse —and how they would go back and forth about what the interpretations at each depth meant for each specific position. And tears are brought to my eyes as I recall Stephen sharing his experience of sharing time with Dr. Hammer in his home in upstate New York, of late night chats, laughs, and connection.
Gwen would always speak about the time she was nervous about teaching the pulse and that Dr. Hammer reminded her that in order to do so she only needed to know just a little bit more than those whom she was helping. That this would be more than enough. It eased Gwen’s mind, and my own, when she told me the story the night before I began assisting her in her first Introductory seminar.
I knew Dr. Hammer through so many different stories Brandt has told us over the years, but most recently from the way he lit up so effulgently around the attendance of Dr. Hammer in his educational and inspiring Patreon salons and mentorship courses. To see just how much it meant to him to have Dr. Hammer’s presence there: this was another way in which I was able to know Dr. Hammer.
In 2018 I had the great good fortune of meeting Leon Irving Hammer, M.D. and it was an experience I’ll never forget. Huddled around his desk on the floor and in chairs in his warm Florida home office, with three of my dearest friends and colleagues, we listened to the most incredible stories, from the moment when he first wrote down the ideas for Dragon Rises Red Bird Flies, to the challenging and arduous relationship that he had with his own teacher Dr. Shen, to his plans for his last book (which you may have heard of, on the Sanjiao, linked here).
Dr. Hammer’s teachings and axioms have been and remain the cornerstone of my understanding of Chinese medicine. And in my years of studying with other teachers, I’ve never encountered another teaching that doesn’t align with these core tenets.
Dr. Hammer’s teachings are not just teachings—each of them is truly a tome in its own right.
Dr. Hammer has always known that the most important aspect of practicing Chinese medicine is to seek to understand how the person in front of us is experiencing life; that to the extent we can understand their lived experience, we will be able to be of use to them on their journey of health and healing; that we are to engage with them, human-to-human, in every encounter and each time we meet; that every person is seeking to make contact to stay intact, and that each symptom itself, is a message.
My second child was born in May of 2022, and that summer, I somehow managed to set up weekly Zoom calls with Dr. Hammer during my parental leave. To this day, I have no idea how I became so lucky to get that time with him, but we just kept returning to talk, and for me mostly to listen, to whatever he had to say that day.
We spoke about birth, about early childhood, and the impacts of life on our health. We spoke about his own early life, and what it was for him to grow up —and how that impacted who he was, and how he lived his life.
He was not concerned with the future of the Shen-Hammer lineage: he was concerned with the future of the world, and how we as practitioners were going to become stewards not only of the body but of our earth. He brought forward different articles and papers he had read in the 1980’s that forecasted what is presently happening to our environment in detail, and well. We spoke of our responsibility to future generations.
Dr. Hammer understood that the practice of Chinese medicine had to align with the way one practiced life and that, through this, we could change the way we relate to what is happening in ourselves, our earth, and our climate.
I am forever indebted to the life-force that was and always will be our beloved Dr. Leon I. Hammer, and I truly do look forward to our continued association.
