There You Are
All the work I do is related, as much as it might seem a bit disconnected. I get quite a bit of, “You do small group acupuncture and also… facial acupuncture?” with resultant quizzical looks.
What can I say. I contain multitudes.
Because to me, it’s all rooted in the same thing: caring for a living, dynamic system.
A patient who’s nearly done with her series of Feminist Facials came in to her appointment, glowing. Literally. Almost from the inside out. To me it was like, “Ok, girl: dish. What’s the tea???” because like… what’s going on?? I’m expecting some great dopamine-producing love affair or something. (I am not above gossip, and I am beholden to HIPAA, which is always a win-win.)
And for her, she got right to it. “I don’t care if it’s vain. I look so good lately. And I’m stressed, and I still love the way I look.”
And I was like “OMG IT IS NOT VAIN AT ALL. YOU ARE ABLE TO FIND YOUR OWN STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY AMIDST REAL STRESSORS AND STILL RECOGNIZE YOURSELF IN THE MIRROR. IT JUST MEANS THAT IN THIS MOMENT, THERE YOU ARE, YOU CAN SEE YOURSELF.”
Because for me, it’s always that deep.
I view things through the five elements, so the idea of “integrity under load” — aka, how much of yourself do you remain, considering… **gestures wildly** — is interesting to me when I consider the Earth element: Earth, which is practically synonymous with mothering and femininity. Earth, which has to do with providing basic needs, nurturing, space holding.
Women are often socialized into, “Look at how much pressure I can withstand while being functional,” (see: modern motherhood), and I’m here to say that that is not the fucking prize.
And that's what makes her moment interesting to me: the stress is affecting her. The system is being acted upon in a significant way. And yet, she can still perceive herself.
I’ve been thinking a lot about integrity lately, because it has a lot to do with how we approach community. If, for instance, a man is an island, then his integrity doesn’t have much to test it. Boring. Because I think real integrity is the continuity that allows a living system to remain recognizable to itself, specifically through change.
I’m not saying experiences don’t change us: they certainly do. We are, after all, living organisms. It’s what makes the saying, “You are what you eat,” so stupidly (and partially) true. But through change, do you recognize yourself? Do you retain the thread of who you are?
So patient’s “I look good today!” doesn’t have to mean that she successfully prevented her circumstances from appearing on her face. That would lead us right back into the trap of the Earth element that women are often breadcrumbed into:
“Look at how much pressure I can withstand while being functional!” she croaks, acquiring an autoimmune disorder along the way.
Instead, it simply and powerfully means, “There I am.” Despite pressure and after change and in fact, while still changing.
Nothing in my Facial Re:Cognition ecosystem is out there saying, “Don’t let age show on your face.” (Again: boring!) I’m not hawking the idea that a face should be defended against life.
As humans, we endure load. Shit happens. So the idea is not that endurance itself is the goal. It’s so much more nuanced and annoying than that. It’s, “What does this load tell me about myself? Is the weight inappropriate? Is it damaging the structure? What requires repair? What needs reinforcement? Does the use exceed design capacity? Does the condition just need to stop?”
In acupuncture school, we’re trained to recognize patterns of pathology in bodies. Acupuncture can help those patterns, but then you send the person right back into the structures under which they live, including the ones that may have contributed to their depletion or stagnation in the first place. This was very clear to me when I worked on 23rd and 6th in the city: I would literally feel bad that I would have to send people back out into the madness of Chelsea after down regulating their nervous systems so successfully.
And now, over a decade after working in the city that never sleeps, I find myself in an interesting place as a TCM provider: I see so clearly how the ways in which our energies get all tangled up in and drained out of our bodies can be 100% affected by things outside of our bodies.
Successful adaptation to a pathological environment cannot be our sole definition of health.
This is actually one of the things I love about acupuncture: sometimes feeling better makes your life more uncomfortable.
I explain this to patients all the time. When you feel like shit all the time, a certain amount of shit in your environment becomes normal. But then, your body starts feeling better. Maybe you sleep better. Maybe something moves that had been stuck. Maybe you have more energy, or less pain, or simply more access to yourself.
And suddenly the things you’ve been tolerating feel terrible, not because they’ve gotten worse, but because you have changed. And you’ve changed in a way that actually brings you closer to yourself. And then the juxtaposition has become too great. Suddenly, something’s gotta give.
Treatment hasn’t necessarily made you better at tolerating the conditions that made you feel bad; instead, it restores enough capacity that your own discomfort becomes perceptible again.
Which brings me back to my patient’s face.
I don’t want her facial to make her look untouched by what is happening in her life.
I don’t want “I look good today” to mean, Look how successfully I have concealed the load.
And I definitely don’t want Facial Re:Cognition to become another tool for women to remain aesthetically pleasing while something is eating them alive.
I want something much more ordinary than that, and maybe much more radical: there I am.
Her face is changing because she is changing. Because she’s alive. My job isn’t to defend it against that fact. It’s to care for the living system well enough that the person inside it remains perceptible to herself.
And maybe recognizing yourself isn’t always comforting. Once you can see yourself clearly enough, you can also see the contrast.
The, there I am next to the, Oh. This doesn’t feel like me anymore.
Maybe that’s the distinction I’m trying to make when I think about Earth: nurturing is not the same thing as enduring. Capacity is not an invitation for more load. And being able to remain functional under enormous pressure does not make the pressure appropriate.
Because maybe that’s what I mean when I say all of this work is related.
Whether I’m encountering six different people in recliners or a bare face under my hands, I’m not particularly interested in helping someone become better at disappearing into the conditions of her life.
I want to help make the aliveness more perceptible.
There you are.
