Proof of Life®

I am always doing acupuncture. There just aren't always needles involved.

I'm an acupuncturist, which means I was trained to look at a living system and recognize patterns: what is moving, what isn't; what's depleted; what's compensating’ what is doing way too much fucking work; how all of those seemingly disparate things might actually belong to the same pattern.

Then, in person, during an acupuncture appointment, I put needles in you.

Except early on, I noticed something: the patterns don’t stop at the skin. I could see them in relationships, families. work, money, beauty, motherhood, grief, ambition, the systems we build, the systems we live inside, the systems we mistake for reality.

Proof of Life® isn’t a departure from my work as an acupuncturist; it’s what happened when I realized I could keep doing the same work even when there wasn’t a body on the table. Patriarchy, Instagram Face, household labor, business, grief — whatever happens to stand out as this is part of that pattern —I’m still trying to understand what they’re doing to a living system, and asking what changes once we can actually see them.

I learned how to see by practicing medicine. Then I looked up.

Same acupuncturist. Bigger “patient.”

Taking the work out of the treatment room changes what can become the “patient,” because patients are just the subject within which the pattern is occurring.

A behavior can be a patient. A family dynamic can be a patient. A beauty standard can be a patient. A business can be a patient. An entire cultural assumption can be a patient once I can see enough of its pattern to start asking clinical questions about it:

Where are the pain points? What keeps happening? What are we circling around but not addressing? What looks like it’s working only because something else is compensating for it? What is being depleted to keep the whole thing functioning? What is this living system actually trying to do?

And underneath all of those questions is one I was never explicitly taught to ask, but which has become central to Proof of Life®:

What is all of this doing for Life?

That’s where things get interesting. Because sometimes the “problem” isn’t that something isn’t functioning. Sometimes it is functioning extremely well… just, in service of something that is draining the larger living system.

and for that, there are No needles required.