Dear Patient,
Last week I did something I hadn’t done in a long time: I got an acupuncture treatment.
I nestled into my chair and told my coworker Ali what I’d like to work on—sore muscles, and stress. I felt the press of Ali’s fingertips on my wrist as they assessed my pulses, and already I could feel the shift happening, like a portal to a parallel dimension opening, drawing me in, my body becoming simultaneously heavier yet weightless. I noticed the warm, buzzy sensation I always get around my ankles during a treatment, near the point Kidney 3. Ali left me to rest, and I cycled through stages of sleep, wakefulness, and some in-between state. I knew where I was and what was happening around me, but none of it mattered. Some time later, a jolt of phantom needle pain in my right forearm brought me back to full consciousness, and I knew my treatment was complete. A few minutes later Ali came over and removed my needles.
An hour in a chair, and I was changed. “I feel like a new woman,” I said to Ali. I was refined, the edges of my stress polished away, yet also back to my elemental state, my old self.
The experience is so comforting and familiar, yet it takes me to some undiscovered place every time. Each treatment is a unique combination of my own energy, my practitioner’s, that of the other people in the room, the points used, the depth of the needles, the time spent resting, the alignment of the stars in that particular moment. Even if you get treated every week on the same day, at the same time, with the same practitioner, and they use the same points, no two treatments are ever really the same.
It’s a journey along a well-worn path, which still holds surprises every time. So that’s my answer to last week’s discussion question of Why Acupuncture—because it transforms me, thanks to the yin and yang of the familiar and the unknown, and the alchemy of its ephemeral ingredients.
Love and gratitude,
Your Acupuncturist
I really have to find a new practictioner!