When the Learning Curve is Steep—and Worth It

I’ve just returned from a six-day immersive yoga teacher training with Yoga Medicine, focused on traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and women’s health. For nearly a week, I practiced yoga alongside 25 incredible women, learning about Five Element Theory, meridian theory, and acupressure, and how these ancient tools can support women’s health—physically, emotionally, energetically.

Grab your playlist of self-care practices here.

I’m pretty familiar with women’s health. As an academic, I taught university courses and conducted research on women’s experiences in healthcare, including reproductive care.

As a CME writer, I’ve partnered with education providers to create accredited learning on abortion management, endometriosis, fibroids, and more. In short, women’s health is a space where I feel at home.

But TCM? That was a whole new world.

Learning Takes Repetition and Application

This training wasn’t designed to turn us into traditional Chinese medicine practitioners. Instead, it showed us how to apply foundational TCM principles in a therapeutic yoga context. It was empowering—but also overwhelming. Each day began with two hours of yoga practice, followed by didactic sessions and intensive, layered review. We were constantly asked to shift from basic comprehension to real-time application.

The content and methodology were sound, but the learning process? It was intense.

By the end of each day, I thought I had a handle on the material—until the next morning’s review session knocked all my internal “learning cards” off their neat little shelf.

Does this sound familiar?

Spaced repetition and active recall are shown to improve long-term retention and understanding.

It’s the same for participants in the WriteCME Accelerator program. One of our members—let’s call her Jane—is a brilliant academic with a PhD in Nutrition. She recently wrote a fantastic CME manuscript during one of our writing sprints.

Afterward, she confided that she felt completely overwhelmed by how much she still had to learn.

I get it.

But this is how learning works.

💡 What You’ll Learn

✅ Craft: What makes CME writing different—how to write needs assessments, learning objectives, and outcomes-focused content. (Includes a live writing challenge!)

✅ Knowledge: A guided walkthrough of the CME ecosystem—who the clients are, where the money flows, and where freelance writers fit.

✅ Business: How to avoid the 3 most common mistakes new CME writers make—and how to start building your business and portfolio right now.

✅ Well-Being: Why you don’t need to hustle your way to success. How to build a calm, focused writing business that supports your life—not the other way around.

We Build on What We Know

We don’t just absorb information—we layer it on top of what we already know. And when we don’t have those mental frameworks yet, we have to build them from scratch.

That takes time. It takes repetition. It takes application. Cognitive scientists call this scaffolding. Scaffolding helps learners build upon prior knowledge and internalize new material effectively.

Some of the overwhelm I felt is totally normal. When you're learning a lot of new information all at once, it can exceed what your brain can comfortably process. This is known as cognitive load, and understanding it can make the learning curve feel a little more compassionate.

In fact, one of the best ways to solidify new learning is to actively apply it or teach it to someone else. It’s called the protégé effect, and it works—because explaining something forces us to organize, simplify, and really understand it. (This article gets into more detail if you want to dig deeper.)

Deep Learning is Never Linear

What this immersive training reminded me is that deep learning is never linear.

It’s layered, experiential, and sometimes disorienting. But if we stick with it—if we revisit the content, talk it through with others, and find ways to apply it in real life—it starts to click. Eventually, those scattered cards get filed again, this time in a way that makes sense for you.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be revisiting for myself how the healing and protective tools I learned with Yoga Medicine might shape the way I support my students, my coaching clients, and myself.

But for now, I want to leave you with this: If you’re in the middle of learning something new—whether it’s CME writing, Chinese medicine, or anything in between—don’t panic if the process feels messy.

That’s where the growth happens.