Why I Chose Acupuncture School...
I get asked often, why I decided to go back to school with a full practice, where I already stick needles in clients. The answer I’ve found myself returning to over and over again was:
Integrity
Beginning in 2009, I developed a passion for needling. I pursued learning every aspect of dry needling (Western Needling) that I could. I spent about two years flying back and forth to Brighton CO to learn about how each the physical body responds to needling and how to safely apply needling to every part of the body. I was invested in grasping every bit of knowledge I could about this technique. By 2012, I was a very competent dry needler and it became a specialty in my practice.
Between 2012 and 2017, I refined my craft. I started needling in more gentle ways. I started to connect intently to the energy of the body. When I connected with the tissue through the needle, I developed the feeling of a sacred, almost ritualistic endeavor. Rather than forcing the body to find the optimal function and comfort that the client and even myself might have desired, I was having a conversation with the body, learning about where it needed a gentle push, a little stimulation to ascend to the next level.
The client’s pain and symptoms began to dissipate, but they started to feel better within themselves.
This is not something I’d experienced with pure myofascial needling. The difference in my technique wasn’t in the needle placement or manipulation so much as it was in the intention and the connection. I dusted off my notes from Oriental Medicine, a class I loved in Massage School more than any other with a teacher, Dottie Fong, who I admired more than any other and I began to study. The energy I felt was qi, running along the meridians.
Shortly thereafter, I began to study and eventually serve as a teaching assistant to a true Acupuncture Master, Ken Koles. I got to know the meridians, energy centers and developed a handle on the understanding of Chinese Medicine. I was toying with the ridiculous idea of going back to school to study acupuncture. One day after class, while eating rice bowls together, I asked him about the buzz I’d been feeling. After a short chat, he said the one thing he wished he could have done was go to acupuncture school (he learned in the day of the apprenticeship programs). And with that, I made the most difficult decision I had to make which was to take a break from learning from and teaching with Ken and go to school.
I realized that for several years, I’d been using needles as an instrument of healing on all levels of body, mind, spirit, and emotion, not just the body. It no longer felt right for me to call myself a Dry Needler or a Western Needler or a PT who needles.
Chinese Medicine and Theory had become a lifestyle that was birthed inside of me long before I committed to acupuncture school.
On the other side of school, so many years after I inserted my first needle into a body, what I feel inside myself is integrity. And that made it all worth it.