As much as it might seem a bit disconnected, all the work I do is related. 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 — I actually strongly believe in it for community, relationships, and building rapport with patients — and I am beholden to HIPAA, which creates a safe space. Win-win.)
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.
In health, Earth energy — despite being equated with mothering and femininity — isn’t endless giving. If it becomes that, it creates a dynamic where the person providing these things becomes an object; a power source; a battery pack to be depleted. Instead, the person providing the Earth energy necessarily needs nourishment that actually supports the living system: taking in what it needs, processing it, being sustained by it, and having enough to participate in what comes next.
Healthy Earth isn’t individual self-sufficiency, either. It’s the ability to remain a living participant in a system of nourishment and support without becoming neither the source nor the drain for the system.
Women are often socialized into, “Look at how much pressure I can withstand while being functional,” (see: modern motherhood), which to an acupuncturist smacks of Earth pathology. In acupuncture school, we’re taught to recognize what happens when the functions associated with Earth — processing, nourishing, holding — become depleted through overuse. We are not taught, “And the socialization of modern women is emblematic of this pathology,” but as a woman and as a pattern-recognizer, it’s not hard for me to see. So professionally and technically, I learned that baked into the Five Elements is the health of the natural world, and my experience practicing that has me saying that the way our energies are used and abused is not the fucking prize.
And that's what makes my patient’s moment interesting to me: the stress is affecting her. Her system is being acted upon in a significant way. And yet, she can still perceive herself.
I’ve been thinking about integrity lately, because it has a lot to do with how we approach community. If, for instance, a person is an island, then their integrity doesn’t have much to test it. Boring. What kind of architecture is that, existing but being unburdened? Surely not one couched by others. Real integrity exists in relation to the things around it. It is the continuity that allows a living system to remain recognizable to itself, specifically through change.
And I can’t really separate that from healthy Earth, which encompasses the idea that I am necessarily constituted in relationship with my environment. I am being changed by it. The question is whether I remain perceptible as a participant in that relationship, rather than disappearing into the demands of the system — without needing to silo myself.
This is part of why my offerings of small-group acupuncture next to luxurious acupuncture facials make perfect sense to me. Care doesn’t stop being care because other living systems are present. If anything, it’s Earth almost comically on the nose: individual bodies being supported in a shared environment. You do this in relation to others while also remaining yourself.
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 my patient’s “I look good today!” doesn’t have to mean she successfully prevented her circumstances from appearing on her face. That would lead us right back into the Earth trap 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 can simply and powerfully mean: there I am. Despite pressure. After change. While still changing.
Nothing in my Facial Re:Cognition ecosystem says, “Don’t let age show on your face.” (Again: boring!) I’m not hawking the idea that a face should be defended against life. Life is circulation, and circulation promotes constant change, connection, and vitality.
As humans, we endure load. Shit happens. But when we begin to believe that endurance is the goal, we lose sight of the questions that are much more nuanced and, frankly, annoying: 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? Do the conditions just need to stop? It’s annoying to have to think about ourselves in relation to others, when the pathological Earth energy that we are stewed in ushers us into lives of convenience and solitude.
In acupuncture school, we’re trained to recognize patterns of pathology in bodies. Acupuncture can help move those patterns into health, 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 first made clear to me when I worked on 23rd and 6th: I would literally feel bad sending people back into the madness of Chelsea after down-regulating their nervous systems so successfully.
And it becomes clearer in the nuance with each continuing day of my practice, now in its 13th year. Because I see so clearly how the ways our energies get tangled up in and drained out of our bodies can be affected by things outside our bodies — and how those patterns can be held in place by structures that have pathologies of their own. I use the Five Elements to think about those pathologies, too (you can learn more about what I mean by that here).
And I see how healthcare as a whole often treats that: deal with it. That’s why so many people are disillusioned with our healthcare system: it’s not really about health at all.
But I don’t think successful adaptation to a pathological environment can 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. You create more inner stability and then you look outside yourself at your life, your relationships, your work, your family, and there can be a bit of a reckoning.
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. So when your body starts feeling better — maybe you sleep better; maybe something moves that had been stuck; maybe you have more energy, or less pain; maybe you simply have more access to yourself — then suddenly the things you’ve been tolerating feel terrible.
You have changed. And you’ve changed in a way that actually brings you closer to yourself — not toward some idealized version of yourself, but toward greater access to your own signals. 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 is alive. My job certainly isn’t to defend it against that fact; that’s why my first facial is called the Feminist Facial. It’s to care for the living system without asking it to disguise the fact that it is living.
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.
The foundational healthy Earth energy runs through all of the work I do.
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 her aliveness more perceptible to her.
There you are.
