Come in for A FREE TREATMENT (one per person) from Sunday Feb 22 through Friday Feb 27th between 12pm and 3pm. Call to set up your appointment: 272-2288
Why on earth are we offering treatments for free? We so like people sitting quietly together in a cozy room with needles in their body that we’ve made it our jobs.We like it so much that we’ve helped start clinics like ours across the continent. And yeah, we like it so much that we’re offering free treatments for a week.
A key premise of community acupuncture is that the community, the being connected, is big part of the acupuncture actually working, actually changing lives. It’s not just the idea of some rarified swirl of invisible energy enveloping everyone in the treatment room, though we very much do subscribe to that being a real thing. It’s that the DISconnecting that so often characterizes our lives as we work incredibly hard, live separately, spend lots of time in cars and in front of screens, is damaging not just to our proverbial hearts but to our actual bodies and minds. Loneliness and social disconnection are part of what provides the disease foundation for our connection-seeking bodies. If you add all the kinds of trauma that many of us have experienced or are experiencing (war, racism, sexual violence, battering and bullying, poverty), the need for re-connection becomes even more vital to recovery and rebalancing, joy and health.
Catching up to this very old idea is much western research. The subject of addiction is one example. Have you seen the work done with lab mice where, in short, the ones left alone and in uncomfortable physical setting became addicted to the offered heroin? The ones who had lots of space, food, and other mice to run with did not. What’s more, if you improved the conditions for the addicted mice, they overwhelmingly refused the drug. They recovered. Read about the implications here.
We tend to think about addiction as something that happens to an addict, that is, something involving a particular substance or behavior that is widely recognized as addicting. But what about all the ways we get stuck in patterns we can’t find our ways out of? These could be behavioral patterns related to our relative sense of power or powerlessness, or to images of ourselves or our bodies that were ascribed to us. Of course these patterns can be very destructive to our health when they involve hopelessness or not being able to reach out for help, or putting oneself in risky/dangerous situations. They can also be related to our place in the economic world: the amount of over work or under work with which we’re saddled.
What we’ve been saying with our whole business model and our whole model of treatment is: come let your body rest in a place where there is nothing asked of you but the resting. Come frequently and be not by yourself in a room with a diagnosis and a prescription, but with others also allowing healing to happen. Come regularly and let the needles re-connect your organs, reconnect your insides to the universe, reconnect your mind to the hope that your body can actually recover. Sometimes it can recover quite quickly. Stick with it and it can recover quite completely.
We offer treatments for free because we know that this all seems too good to be true. Many of us are so trained to think that our health situation is just our inevitable lot that we can’t even remember how the acupuncture treatments last year or last month actually made that problem go away. Well, the acupuncture still works. And part of why it works is because we’re doing it together.
