MY FIRST ACUPUNCTURING
I decided to visit an
acupuncturist yesterday, after hearing many good things said about him from a friend.
When I arrived I was not surprised to find that this was a house and a remodeled back building. Perhaps it was once a garage. It was now fully carpeted with a maroon hue. There were windows, with sun coming in, and various sacred paintings around the walls.
There were also six chairs, which bent backward easily. There was a square of white track lighting around the room. A computer in the left corner. A little stand for putting the sliding scale cash into an envelope, and then into a mailbox right next to it. I wondered about the secrecy of this. Who was he keeping a secret from?
The acupuncturist is tall, with a kind of straw-headed, shocked-out hair. It seems perhaps dyed, but maybe not. He is thin and smiles a lot. Though it is the full smile, full of mischief, of a Buddhist, which he is as well. He is 6 ft 2 in, I would guess.
The first thing to do is to remove my watch, shoes and socks. I sit in a chair, which is flexible but firm. He is working with another client, who I can see, just across the room from me. This is a community acupuncture time. She already has pins in her. Is resting her eyes. Gentle music, song unknown, but certainly Indo-Asian, emerges from some unfound speaker.
I am slightly apprehensive. I’m a little worried about the acupuncturist’s qualifications, though I soon learn it was needless. He tells me, as he’s dabbing various areas on my body with alcohol, that he did a four-year post-grad degree in acupuncture. His diplomas do occur on the walls.
I can’t remember if he felt my wrists first or looked at my tongue second.
Anyway, he did both.
The
tongue tells much about the body’s health.
The pulse in the wrist is actually six different pulses—he searches and listened to, by feeling, three on each side.
He made a remark to me on one of the three pulses on my right wrist, that there was blockage there, that it was “puffy.”
Next he had me roll up my pants to my knees, my long sleeve shirt up past my elbows. Then, he began sticking. Well, to be honest, they were kind of tapped-in to place, into the very specific acu-points. Though acupuncture is 3000 years old, they are still finding new acu-points.
He began by putting three thin needles in my left foot and ankle. Then two on the side of my knee. Three more needles in my left wrist and lower forearm. Two around my left elbow. One in my left ear. Then one in my right ear, one in my right elbow, three in my right wrist, hand. Two on the right knee, and then, the killers, the three in my right foot and ankle.
The three that hurt in my right foot were, he said with an “Ah,” the Liver’s meridian. And the liver was not happy. It was blocked up, and in pain. This process would release this. It should be noted quickly in passing that I am on some medication, which does make the liver work very hard. As well, and as I’ve recounted here probably enough by now, that I am a recovering alcoholic, sober nearly thirteen years now, and so this may also be why the liver was stuck.
It was pretty mysterious, pretty poetic, the process. The pain of the three pins in the Liver’s path was an electrical, dull throb. The other pins didn’t have this component. The only ones with some slight discomfort were in my right wrist and lower forearm: here there was a lesser form of the dull throb. He said this area, the area of the wrists, was the area of the Triple Burners. I can’t explain what this means, but I got the sense that the channels around the Triple Burners had phlegm around them, and this caused stress in the Triple Burners. My Qi was disrupted.
Once they were all in place, I just sat back further, and paid attention to what might be happening.
It seemed the great activity was all in my
Liver Foot, the right foot.
It was making me aware of its unhappiness.
I tried to scratch my face with my right arm, but the Triple Burner pins sort of prevented it—felt a little zing when I moved them, so I just left everything alone.
I remained this way for about forty minutes. I became quite peaceful, sleepy. Which is common, I guess. Three other people entered during this time and he got them ready for the pins. By the time he came back over to remove my pins, I told him that it felt like I had been meditating for an hour. “I know! Isn’t it great!,” he said, as moved from my elbow to my feet.
I took a little bit to get mentally prepared for standing up, and then did so. My head felt like it was in the clouds, and it did feel, no joke, that things were circulating better in my body.
I asked him as I was leaving, truly enamored with what had happened, “How does this work?”
He gleamed mischievously, grabbing more pins for another client, and said, “No one knows, but it works.” He smiled his full sincere Buddhist smile, and any last hint of my cynicism fell away.
I’ll be back. My liver already called for the appointment.
