s p i r i t g a t e

Community Acupuncture in 2031

I wrote this almost 3 months ago, referring to my then 27 month old son.

 

 

Julian said “acupuncture” very clearly this week. Also inserted a needle at my LI10 with force and tenderness, using a guide tube. Walks through clinic and looks straight at each patient with relaxed curiosity, gets beamed at by almost all. In this context, he must recognize the different energies in what his daddy is getting to do, the power in the whole situation, recognize the love, must think that’s natural.

 

This is a letter I’m writing now to Julian. Maybe its to him now. Maybe to him in a few years.

 

Dear Julian.
It was delightful getting pine-needle acupuncture from you today along that blue and orange blazed path by the pond. It’s really fun playing acupuncture games with you. I love all the places you go, the different jobs you have when we pretend. Its generally amazing getting to be with you while you discover the different things that capture your interest and imagination.

Spending time in the clinic, my workplace as you call it, you seem to already know a lot about how the acupuncture is to help people feel better, to heal, to get re-connected, but I wanted to tell you about ways its been really important to you and me and mama.

Once when I was halfway between your age and mine I got pretty sick. I couldn’t stop coughing, and I coughed so hard I broke a rib. I was wheezing like you did when you had the croup, but for many months. I also had a lot of pain in my back. It made it so I couldn’t do much. It made playing soccer or laughing or singing too painful. I got really, really sad at the same time, but the kind of sad where you don’t want to cry. Crying hurt, too. I decided to try acupuncture, and, boy am I glad.

It made it all feel better really fast. At first I thought it was something special or magic this man had done to me, but the more I read about acupuncture, the more I realized that it worked for me because acupuncture just works. Then, along with being happy that I had discovered it, I started feeling disappointed and confused that no one had told me about it before. I didn’t understand why acupuncture wasn’t everywhere, or why everyone was just being given really strong drugs for everything. I told everyone to try it.

I decided I wanted to be someone who does acupuncture to others. To go to acupuncture school, I used all the money I made from my children’s librarian job and I’m still paying every month for those three years of school.

I met mama when I was half way through acupuncture school. We fell in love writing love notes to one another every day. We created our own language where we talked about our bodies as made up of rivers and pipes and moments in time. Our minds were made up of the northern lights and the ocean floor. The whole wide world was made up of poems and stories and blood and turnips, and of animal breath. I think we fell in love with each other because we both saw that everything is inside a tiny rock and that we are inside everything. I like thinking about this now, Julian, and thinking about how you came from those love notes, and the stories we told each other.

When I finished acupuncture school, I made most of my money as a gardener, and I did acupuncture in the evenings. I had thought that I was going to be somehow different than thousands of other acupuncturists who weren’t giving acupuncture to many people, and who weren’t making any money. We were all confused. We were all thinking that we were special or magic and this made us a little selfish with how we shared our skills. Thank God, a couple very important people came along a few years before you were born to remind us that we’re not special, (well sure we’re special but not because we know how to do acupuncture) but that we have a very special and magical tool that everyone needs, that we should take this really seriously and go out and tell everyone we know about the tool of acupuncture and tell them to come get some and to keep getting some because it will change their lives for the better. And these two people also showed me and hundreds of acupuncture do-ers that we CAN have acupuncture be our real jobs. Because of them I have a wonderful and useful job that I get paid for. Though this should be true for everyone, it is not.

Because of these people, Skip and Lisa (you met them at the house where we lived with Uma and Ellen, and at Andy and Karen’s this fall, and you’re gonna get to see them again in May), there are clinics like my workplace all over the wide world where lots and lots of people are getting acupuncture with each other. It seems to us that the more people that come sit in the clinic and get poked the more special the tool of acupuncture becomes. You have seen that when you come in; and,you have felt how just you showing up and walking around the clinic makes the lovey and healing energy even stronger.

Remember your playgroup in Philadelphia, up in the firehouse? Remember playing and snacking with Ida and Oscar and Rose and Sunny and Nina and Saj? That place felt really nice, huh? That’s another acupuncture place that’s an important center for thousands of people around it. Me and mama and the other parents always felt relaxed and pleased to be in there with you and the other young people. We all had lots of help with our bodies in there, including the moms when they were pregnant with you little guys. Right now, there’s probably lots of people in there getting needled by loving acupuncturists. And, there’s so many sweet clinics like that in our world now. And they’re all connected like a gigantic playgroup, or workgroup. Its one of my favorite things about this world. I can’t wait to introduce you to more people like Cris and Ellen and Skip and Lisa, people who make up this group and who created all these acupuncture centers.

Not only are these people really fun, but they’re really good at fighting to change things so they make more sense. Like making it so that as many people as possible can get acupuncture if they want to. One of the things we’re fighting to change is how people learn to be an acupuncturist. Like, right now, lets say you were 19 years old and you decided you wanted a job being an acupuncturist, you probably couldn’t because the school you’d have to go to would want way more money than your mama and I have or will have. It shouldn’t be that way. You have dexterity and grace in your hands and fingers, and a heart full of love, and you’re really good at listening and connecting with people. You should get to be an acupuncturist if you want. So, we’re trying to change it so that you or any of your friends could afford to go to acupuncture school. And, better than that, we hope to make it so that you could become an acupuncturist just by learning with the great people in our playgroup/workgroup. And this means that all the things you’re already learning and will probably keep learning from me will actually mean something for your future. And, that is just SO incredibly cool.

 

Love, dada 

 

Free Acupuncture for Veterans in Philadelphia

Check out the website for the Philadelphia Area Veterans Acupuncture Project here.

Obama, Baltimore Avenue, The Electric Slide, and Acupuncture Theory

Here's the article I wrote for The Community Acupuncture Network.

Here's some videos i shot at 47th and Baltimore.
Here's some photo's of 47th and Baltimore, post election, taken by local resident, Margie Politzer.

Amy Walsh

These are by my wife, artist Amy Walsh.

Ceremony

I went to a performance/art installation recently as part of the Philly Fringe Festival. I thought it was sublime, fun, full of wonder and mystery. It changed how my body felt and the thoughts in my mind. It connected me to the hundred and fifty or so other people in the room.

The artists, The Headlong Dance Theater, figured out how to lead a whole bunch of strangers into really participating in a conscious ceremony with a beginning, middle, and end. Neither an exact trajectory nor the outcomes of the event could be predicted. However, the combination of the compassionate and curious intention of the artists, the way they stayed committed to their best creative thinking, no matter how daring, and the way an already beautiful and intentionally holy space was infused with the love of the artists created a huge opening. And, given each audience member’s natural desire to connect and to heal, it was hard for most everyone not to go ahead and walk through towards a transformative and hopeful experience.

It was also hard for me not to walk out thinking about community acupuncture, the spaces where it takes place, and the caring, artful intention of those making it happen. Holy.

The performance was partly about the tension between our wanting to watch, on one hand, and the choice we have, on the other hand, to participate. For most people, each gentle encouragement was enough to go ahead and join as an active part of what was unmistakably ritualistic in nature.

All attendees were asked to wear blue. Most did. Everyone was divided into four groups before entering the old abandoned Christian Science rotunda. I was in the first group. In the foyer, we were told a story and invited to think about an unexplainable event in our lives, and, then, led through a fabric membrane into the huge domed cathedral where the old wooden floor had been cleared of everything. Explore the space freely, we were told, walking in. A short piece of music played while 6 dancers in orange made swirls of movement around the gigantic space. We all seemed tiny under the ocular window at the zenith of the towering dome. The dancers’ movements were lovely or silly or solemn or rhythmic or not, connected to the others or not.

The music ended, and we, the first group were divided further into a few organic collections of individuals and invited by the artists to create, when the music begin again and the second group entered, patterns of movement of our own choosing which related to the space and the music. This was just the beginning of a long series of group motion-poems facilitated brilliantly by the dance troupe, which all eventually linked together into a fluid ceremony.

One thing that got revealed was our relationship to the space around us, how Everything is intimate and touching. That as energizing as it is when we’re open as individuals to the universe’s qi, when we’re inviting hand-holding with a hundred people, or at least not actively avoiding one another, the energy is even more vast, complex, awesome, potentially delicious.

Some audience members had initial resistance to being led toward this kind of activity. There were slumped shoulders, puffed chests, turned heads, and nervous laughter. Most of these folks got swept up by fun and beauty, not by peer pressure.

About a week after we opened Philadelphia Community Acupuncture, Ellen and I were readying the space for another day. It was five minutes or so before our first scheduled patient and in my excitement I shouted like a carnival barker “it’s show time!”.

I certainly don’t think we’re creating fiction or illusion, or that Ellen or I are playing some role other than ourselves. I do believe there is a delicate choreography we undertake to make the clinic click and flow. And, in best moments, patients find themselves floating not only in the acupuncture-induced Shavasina-like state within their own bodies, but also in a collective swirl of benign reality, a real relief from the just barely capped terror, or sadness, or rage we all walk with quite often.

I just thought how interesting it would be to create a time-lapse bird’s eye movie of a whole shift’s activity, the clockwise flow of patients around our space from coming to going and everything in between. You’d see a constant and calm orbit of arriving, checking in, heading around the corner to the bathrooms and into the treatment space, and out the other way back to the reception area. Inside that circle, you’d see the spoke tracing arrows of Ellen and I moving decisively between needle stands and patients. You’d see the subtle movements of the front desk person in the middle of it all, reaching out to every patient, the shifting light from sunbeams across surfaces and textures lovingly and skillfully prepared by Ellen’s artist husband who had to anticipate at least some of this celestial-like symphony.

Art need not hold the beholder away from its body. Religious experience doesn’t happen for me when being told how I’m supposed to feel gets in the way of connecting with mystery. We get to act with the kind of intelligence and love the Headlong Dance Theater showed me. We get to do something that allows this kind of holy space to move through. We get to know that we join all kinds of artists/medicine people doing this work today and all kinds of ancient traditions where opening and listening and moving to the stars with one another makes sense and mends the world.

Breathing ALL the way.

Bicycling to my very first clinical assistantship almost 10 years ago, I felt pretty jazzed, a little scared, and hugely hopeful. I was looking forward to connecting with patients as a caring student of Chinese Medicine with lots of attention to spare.

Within the first twenty minutes of my time at this hundred-bucks-a-pop clinic with multiple waterfall dioramas, I had all the contact I would ever have with the owner and principle acupuncturist. He asked me to take needles out of a patient in room #6, and then he told me to put on deodorant and to never ride my bicycle in if I was going to smell like sweat. I was asked to do some filing for the rest of the shift.

OK, I thought. Yeah, that must be right. I’m a big fan of paying a lot of attention to what makes patients comfortable and uncomfortable, and of generally being a conscientious community member, where sometimes it makes as much sense for me to get out of the way as it does to be very powerfully who I am.

But, the interaction left me really angry, even spiteful. I couldn’t quite tell why.

The feelings I had that day cascaded out in a manner much out of proportion to the present situation. So, they must have been in me, like a fear smell, waiting to come out. It went something like this: Oh no! I’m dirty and don’t smell right… My clothes are all wrong….I don’t know what I’m doing…. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to afford a car (even if I don’t want one)…. Can I be an acupuncturist if my hands won’t warm up in the winter?… I hope the smell of my breath is OK… I hate this guy.

I wanted to never come back and to generally just forget about my first assistantship experience. At least until I could get some perspective on it, which I finally did this week, during the very first day we were open at Philadelphia Community Acupuncture.

Usually a good crier, I think my lung energy has been a little rigid as I’ve hatcheted away at various critical-seeming tasks these last few weeks before we opened. I figured that at some point during treating people on our first day, I’d probably have another kind of opening, that I’d realize what Ellen and I have created, and be able to cry. True, it was. But, it didn’t happen when I was looking at our beautiful room full of people in recliners, nor from any glance or hug with Ellen. It happened in one of those moments that moved in slow-motion dream speed, and it happened through smell.

I was treating a beautiful middle aged man, an ex professional dancer who’s current (traditionally male) job puts him in a lot of physical danger, makes him witness to a lot of violence, and discourages any self-care. He wasn’t aware I’d be asking him to take his shoes off, and was very reluctant to do so, saying his feet weren’t too pretty, and they didn’t smell too pretty. After some ear points and yin tang and a root treatment, he called me over and said if I really needed him to take his shoes off he was willing. It felt to me fairly unessential for a good acupuncture treatment but like a good opportunity for him to take a step towards healing a very specific self-image injury.

When I needled his feet, I think I did a good job of making him feel he was totally perfect and his presence was welcome and treasured in this space. Without thinking, I also really opened up my smelling, and my breathing in general, with simple curiosity about what part of this man’s physical humanness and qi got attached to the oppression which told him something was wrong with him. He still had his recliner un-reclined, his body curled in, and his feet on the floor.

I could kind of identify a subtle but particular odor from his feet. Slightly fishy. The smell of ……well…..feet! It made me laugh inside. Sitting in the same circle of chairs was a young woman I’d needled earlier. She was on the 1st day of her period and had been sweating a lot before coming in. I could smell a metallic odor from her.  I was finally dropping into really being here, and out of all the preparing-to-be-here. Now, I could also smell Chinese food from across the street. It was only then that I noticed my own smell, the fear one, which apparently follows me into every circumstance that feels like I’m doing something for the first time, just like my first assistantship.

But, this is was different in just about every way. An incredible relief. I looked back at the male patient sleeping like a baby with his recliner extended and his perfect smelly feet pointing in to the middle of the circle. I felt really connected to all the people in the room. It felt like there was space enough for everybody’s humanness, and not any space for shame.

This was when my lungs really let go and I got nice and cry-y. I could see the contrast between what was happening here and that first day of “assisting”.

I know that all the not-good-enough and not-normal feelings I had that day were rooted in false conclusions I made as a direct result of the classism I experienced as a very young person. The whole set-up of this clinic, it’s location, décor, services offered , and prices-per-treatment, all made me feel like I definitely did not belong I’ve worked a lot on the feelings and would probably be in better shape now to not be as personally hurt by what was said to me.

But, I would still be mad. Not for being called smelly, but because of the whole dominant clinical dynamic, borrowed directly from the technologically based bio-medical model, in which great emphasis is placed on shielding each patient from the real world, and, consequently, incarcerating him or her in an artificial environment, disconnected from real human experience in ways that have a significant impact on a that patient’s ability to heal.

Because the one-and-one, private-room treatment scenario refers so directly to kinds of intimacy which create a lot of unspoken confusion, and also to other medical procedures, a practitioner may find it important to erase a lot of aspects of the self to make room for a clinical relationship. In my private practice over the last 6 years, I’ve wondered to what extent can I heal, repair wholeness, and help liberate a patient into his own body and senses and intelligences while simultaneously expecting both he and myself to disappear enough to be safe.

I recognize that there is a natural link between our rational expectation that our healers practice good hygiene and an innate understanding that body odors can clue us in to someone’s cleanliness. I also am aware that culture and religion have a lot to do with various personal understandings about smells and the body and cleanliness, and that we’re responsible to keep learning about these norms and thinking flexibly about our relationship to them. (There are a lot of Muslims in my neighborhood. Will it make sense for us to have footbaths in our restrooms?)

I want to make choices about relating to my patients, about how I carry myself, based on my good thinking about them and the community, not on rigid, unexamined and oppressive rules.

Philadelphia Community Acupuncture health resource center and community room

PCA's community room will provide a relaxing space for people to congregate, ask questions about acupuncture, learn about natural health, get info on affordable care in Philly, use or contribute to our library, and enjoy a cup of our delicious tea.

Taoist yin-yang theory holds that each body and interior self is a reflection of its environment. You can not take care of yourself without taking care of your community. Health care not only happens to you as a consumer but is something we all cultivate and maintain the more we're connected to one another acting powerfully towards goals of our own choosing. Bodies and minds work better and feel better when they have real security: liberation from fear and isolation.

While acupuncture brilliantly smooths the flow of information (qi) within the body, PCA also hopes to contribute to the strengthening of connections between the different elements in our community. So, we'll house classes, performance, other gatherings generated by the vast collective knowledge and inspiration of Cedar Park and West Philadelphia.

Along with information about affordable health resources, we will also keep contact info for organizations and individuals thinking about ecological and economic justice, international solidarity, art, spirit and play.

February update on West Philly's People's Neighborhood Health Center

Since the summer, I’ve been building a small team of West Philly folk committed to creating a health center which will be rooted in a community supported acupuncture clinic. Mostly, we've been really getting to know each other, our visions, the skills we bring. Occasionally, a friend will ask “hey, you got a building yet?” which is their way of showing interest and curiosity about the project. But, I want to say to them “stop asking about a building. Ask me about how it’s going with my collaborators.” I only want to do this if it's about buildings relationships, movements and webs and networks to be a part of and supported by. And, it feels like this is going well.

Things have really moved steadily since I attended  the October conference on community supported acupuncture hosted by Portland, Oregon's Working Class Acupuncture. The conference and it's organizer's book,  "The Remedy: Integrating Acupuncture into American Health Care" made space in my mind for some answers I couldn't get to before. Answers about getting to be fully a Doctor of Chinese Medicine in my community and in a society that needs what I have. I had some working models and visions in my mind already of an acupuncture-centered neighborhood health clinic where the emphasis was on the health of the neighborhood. Where I got really challenged and liberated in Portland was the stuff about what I can go ahead and give up on: having to create a spa-like environment for individual treatments, and, relatedly, needing to get 60 or 70 bucks a treatment from at least some of them, and waiting for funding from someone who doesn't know me, etc.

I came back to Philly with tons more clarity about my project. Of course, it was Working Class Acupuncture's economic model making acupuncture accessible to working and poor people that made the difference. Every person I now talked to about my dream was not just casually interested but wanted to know more and was ready to talk about how they could be involved. The right people seem to be coming to me as word gets around to those who are natural allies to the project.

We’re a group that includes myself, a yoga teacher/nutritionist, a pilates/creative movement teacher, and an acupuncture student who has administration skills. All of us have really good Philly roots and a love of this part of town. Everyone has read Lisa Rohleder's "The Remedy", and no one is unclear about what we’re going for. The other three are women in their twenties. They bring energy and hopefulness and leadership and organizing abilities along with their individual critiques of the stuff we’re up against. I feel most blessed about this.

I’ve been trying to facilitate our really knowing each other, so we’ll be able to support each other, and think well about each other (therefore others), especially around issues of class and race. We’re four white people, so far, working in a neighborhood which is an interesting ntersection of class and race, and has historically been home to many more African-Americans (and Africans) than whites.

A lot of our discussions, including those about location, are about how we can put lots of attention on having a clinic that’s useful and attractive to populations with identies different than our own, while trying to always come from an authentic place. Obviously, we won’t figure this all out before we open. Being raised in a racist culture makes this a life’s work.

Here’s an example of trying to strike this balance between authenticity and being thoughtful about what we’re communicating/offering. When I came back from Portland, I felt super committed to the community supported acupuncture having the central role in the center, with maybe yoga having a peripheral role. The idea of partnering with Pilates in the same building seemed way out of the question. I wantavoid doing anything that will make a patient feel like a consumer in a spa, instead of a community member with the Right to good powerful natural medicine. But, I love what my collaborators in this project, including the pilates instructor, bring to that idea of community medicine; and, they are inspired and committed to the CSA model. Now, I feel like we should just support each other to be our biggest, baddest healer selves.

Things are moving along at just the right pace. None of us have money, but significant financial resource for purchasing and renovating a building or for rent has appeared in a kind of miraculous, or, at least, surreal form. I don’t know what you call this kind of fortune. But, I’m knocking on a lot of wood… and metal, snow and mud. I don’t knock on fire, but I wink when I walk by.

We need your help:
green builders, homeopaths, pro-bono legal assistance, bookkeepers, artists, gardeners, property owners, activists, etc.

Community Supported Acupuncture

I just attended a conference on Community Supported Acupuncture led by the folks at Portland's Working Class Acupuncture. I see their hugely succesful clinic based on ideas of transforming healthcare in the U.S. as the key model for creating a Cedar Park health collective. Here, we'll be able to really insist in our practice(s) on radical change in the delivery of and access to health care. Soon, anyone who can get to the clinic will be able to get great acupuncture for 15 - 35 dollars. This means I'll be able to tell people to come once a week for the next 4 months, for example, and have them be able to do it.

A large community of acupuncture patients, who also may be volunteers, means that the health information we make accessible, the other modalities at the clinic, the space to gather we provide will all be well used, which will further expand the community of patients and people interested in contributing to the clinic.

The question for me was how can ALL people in my mixed neighborhood of middle class, working class, and very poor people get as many treatments as they need? How can I move beyond my profession's whining about not being recognized by the Western medical establishment and not being covered by insurance. The point is that acupuncturists have an incredibly useful and marvelously simple and cost effective way of treating most of the health conditions that underlie illness in this country. What we need to do is to follow acupuncture's Taoist roots of simplicity and altruism. Get acupuncture to people. Treat people. Really open our doors to my whole community. And, my community is full of tradespersons, artists, the unemployed, whole families, college students and professors, bike messengers and mechanics, gardeners, clergy, activists, etc.

So far, acupuncturists in the U.S. have looked at setting up our clinics and fee structures as an impossible choice between charging people 75 a session, or treating people for free. The former is prohibitively expensive for almost every patient, and isolates and exploits the practitioner. The latter is financially unsustainable for the practitioner and actually disrespects patients, most of whom do not want charity for health care.

The way its going to happen is neither to go for the wealthiest patients nor to rely on outside funding. It's going to be a simple fee-for-service relationship that everyone can afford. Turns out, that in order to lower treatment fees that much, what I have to do is to treat ALOT more people, which of course is exactly what I want. My most satisfying and effective work has been treating people in group settings (post-Katrina Louisiana, Aids Care Project and Dimock Health Center in Boston). Every time I do this work, I wonder why we're not making these group treatment settings available at a permanant community level, not just to respond to social and individual crisis. Of course, this is a very traditional East Asian model of doing this medicine.

Working Class Acupuncture in Portland, www.workingclassacupuncture.org,  has kind of revolutionized this approach by bringing it smack dab into U.S. mainstream culture. Go to their website and check it out. They treat hundreds of people every week in a group setting. As a patient, your care is not less because you're not getting private attention, per se. It's dramatically more because of the opportunity to sit in clean, quiet, peaceful, safe, healing space with neighbors and strangers. It's more because you can afford to come and see your acupuncturist weekly or daily for that matter, to have a long-term relationship with Chinese Medicine, and all the ways it can help you. The effect of each treatment multiplies with the abundance and intermingling of people's qi in the room. Every patient, as well, has the opportunity to volunteer at the clinic, which adds to the aspect of healing the whole community while healing your body.

More to come on these pages and in the neighborhood.

I need a space, by the way, between 42nd and 58th and between Woodland and Lancaster, preferably right around Cedar Park.

I would like to share space with a yoga or Tai Qi / Qi Qong studio, and/or nutritionist(s), or possible others.