About Us
Well Collab Acupuncture has changed a lot.
But it’s alive.
It’s supposed to change.
We started back in 2016 as Acupuncture of Tarrytown (by we, I mean me and my bestie, Erikka). We’d been acupuncturists building out respective practices in the city for a couple of years when I moved up to Tarrytown from our railroad apartment in Gowanus (a railroad apartment in Brooklyn a place where, if you can live there joyfully together, you can do damn near anything together). So, we opened a business in Westchester together.
We also knew that as women, the only way to “have it all” was to have each other, so part of having the business was so that we could build our own families with our partners at the time. I had my kid in 2018, Erikka had hers 9 months later in 2019 (babies are contagious!). The business changed in that time because our lives changed. That was kind of the point.
And then 2020 Happened.
Like basically every business on earth (especially hands on, face to face ones), ours was destabilized by COVID. The ways we'd practiced, worked together, treated patients and organized our lives suddenly didn't fit the conditions we were actually living in.
Eventually, Erikka moved away. By 2021, the business was fully mine. Acupuncture of Tarrytown became Well Collab Acupuncture: because we collaborate for you to be well. (And I didn’t want to be tied to a location with my business name, especially since I had already moved it to Sleepy Hollow).
And the business kept changing!
At the time, I mostly thought I was responding to circumstances. Looking back, I can see something else beginning too: the boundaries of what I thought of as my work were starting to move.
Because apparently being an acupuncturist was doing something to the way I looked at everything else.
First, there were faces. During COVID, I spent more time online than I ever had before, trying to do business virtually. (Trying to do… acupuncture business… virtually…) I was also approaching 40, which meant the internet became increasingly concerned about my face. For starters, surely something was wrong with it? It was aging, and that was clearly a no-no, and I was taking in these advertisements in the absence of actual human interaction which made the products and procedures and injections and routines and interventions available to help me correct this unfortunate development — of what, not dying?? — feel so dissonant and echoey.
At the same time, we were all covering our faces with masks. Once we were back in the office, it quickly became apparent how disorienting half-covered faces were for me. I had always prided myself on being able to read people, and suddenly I was trying to do it from their eyes alone, and I couldn’t. (This, apparently, is a foreshadow to my autism diagnosis 6 years later.)
Somewhere in there,
I had the idea that maybe I could
teach quirky little facial exercise classes online
as one way to keep the business afloat.
This required me to actually look up facial exercises, which turned out to be horrifying. I had assumed that something marketed as natural and non-invasive would have a fundamentally different relationship to aging than injections did. It did not. Different method, same underlying assignment: your face is moving away from what a desirable face is supposed to look like, and you should probably intervene.
And that was interesting to me.
Because now I wasn't just thinking about whether facial exercises worked. I was looking at the thing they were being asked to accomplish. I was thinking about faces as something we use to perceive each other while simultaneously being taught to alter them according to increasingly standardized ideas about what they're supposed to look like. I was thinking about what aging actually does to a face versus what we have decided aging means about the person whose face it is.
I did not think, Ah yes, I am clearly developing the intellectual framework that will eventually become Proof of Life®.
I thought I was trying to figure out how to make money when I couldn't do acupuncture.
Which, in retrospect, is very funny.
The Patterns Don’t Stop at the Skin.
Chinese medicine trained me to look at living systems and recognize patterns.
In the treatment room, the living system is a body. Something hurts, something isn't moving, something is depleted, something else is compensating, and my job is not merely to make the symptom disappear. I'm trying to understand the pattern the symptom belongs to.
Eventually I realized I was doing the same thing when there wasn't a body on the table.
I was seeing patterns in beauty. In motherhood. In relationships. In work. In household labor. In money. In business. In the expectations we place on ourselves and each other. In systems we've lived inside for so long that they can start to look like reality itself.
I hadn't stopped practicing acupuncture.
I had started taking it out into the wild.
The Form Kept Changing.
This is the part I can see much more clearly in retrospect.
The original form of this business existed because two women wanted their work to make room for their lives. Then our lives changed, so the business changed. It’s business, so people left. But people also arrived. Offerings appeared and disappeared. Questions I thought belonged in a treatment room followed me home. Things I thought were side projects turned out to be the beginnings of something else.
For a long time, I thought changing the business meant I hadn't figured out what it was yet, butI don't think that anymore.
A living business should be allowed to respond to the Life happening inside it.
The form matters. It gives us somewhere to work, somewhere to gather, somewhere to receive care, somewhere to put the things we make.
But the form isn't the point. The Life inside it is.
So What is Well Collab Now?
It's still an acupuncture practice. You can come here with a body. We will treat it. There will be needles. And importantly, “we” actually means we.
Well Collab Acupuncture is becoming a practice held by multiple acupuncturists, rather than a collection of ways to book Chryssa. The people who practice here bring their own clinical experience, relationships and ways of working to a shared practice built to support both the people receiving care and the people providing it.
Proof of Life®
And then there's the work that grew out of acupuncture but doesn't necessarily require an acupuncture appointment. Proof of Life is what happened when I followed those patterns beyond the treatment room. It's where I write, teach, make Field Guides, and use the medicine I've spent years practicing as a way of looking at ordinary life. Sometimes that means thinking about grief. Sometimes beauty standards. Sometimes household labor. Sometimes patriarchy. Sometimes business. I don't necessarily know what the next thing will be until something catches my attention and I think: Wait. That's part of the pattern. I learned how to see by practicing medicine. Then I looked up.
And I’m still here, too.
I'm Chryssa. I'm the founder and owner of Well Collab Acupuncture, an acupuncturist, a writer, the person behind Proof of Life, and the person who has apparently spent the last decade building a business and then repeatedly changing its shape when the Life inside it required something different.
There are ways to work specifically with me; there are ways to receive care from Well Collab that don't involve me at all; and there are ways to take something I've seen out into your own life and see what becomes visible to you. All of those things belong here.