July 30th Assignment

1. While I had intellectually decided that Acupuncture was a viable modality of healing, I hadn't quite had the felt experience prior to deciding to enroll in acupuncture school here at ACCHS. I think that I still had some part of me that was very skeptical and unsure as to how or why the medicine worked. This changed about a month ago for me.
      I have been having a pretty hard summer adjusting to living in a radically different place than what I was accustomed to back in Virginia in combination with missing my family and friends. I decided to give acupuncture a try and made an appointment. Wow! I felt stuff move that I am pretty sure had been energetically stuck in my body since I was a child. Whatever doubt or skepticism I may have had has been cleared out. I don't need to know in a reductive way how it works now that I have had the felt experience of it working.

2. I am still skeptical of Kirlian photography. On one hand, when I suspend that skepticism and believe that it captures the aura of living beings, I can see how it may be a useful tool in acupuncture, capturing how the patient's energy shifts from before to after treatment. On the other hand, given that this hasn't been a field that has been well articulated by science and doesn't appear to have any type of solid scientific basis for how it works, it could hurt our profession in the mainstream opinion to be utilizing this photography, potentially sweeping acupuncture into the perceived quackery of the photography technique.

3. Intent and trust are absolute pre-requisites to healing the human body in any manner. The placebo affect is a clear demonstration of how this can be effective in healing. As long as the human believes that the medicine they are receiving will help and has the intent to heal, they often do make a complete recovery. Sandra Ingerman, a shaman who writes about the soul retrieval work she does, has this to say about intent and trust: " I repeatedly emphasize that the keys to healing are intention and trust. I suggest that you might want to think about times in your own life when you brought to yourself something you wanted by focusing clearly on what you were calling to yourself and believing it would come. In other words, you expressed intention and trust."