Living and dying and community acupuncture

My oldest brother, William, passed away on December 5th. I shut the clinic down down for a couple of days to be with my family and bury my brother. Just incredibly sad. One of my first thoughts was that I really couldn't afford to close again ( I had just been closed for five or six days straight for Thanksgiving ) - a sad testament to the world we live in. Of course I did close. I was, however, grateful to have work to return to, to occupy myself with.

William taught me art, my first love. As he was being lowered in the ground I noticed a 'T' had been left off his last name on the vault the casket was placed in. He would have appreciated this attention to detail, and the application of the letter with silver spray paint. A fitting final moment.

I have thought about community acupuncture as a great leveler before, but this thought seemed particularly poignant upon my return - my senses heightened by raw grief. In one chair is a patient who ultimately will die from the cancer they are fighting, in the next someone with a broken heart. One is just stressed, another has a headache. All receiving acupuncture together. All human. All suffering, each in their own way.

In the community acupuncture setting all these beings converge, each ones story unknown to the other - participants all in the large group nap that happens in the treatment room at South Austin Community Acupuncture. It is a profoundly dignified thing, in it's own perfectly messy way.

So community acupuncture brings us together. We hardly even have to talk about it. We are all human.
We all know what that is.

THANKSGIVING

We will be closed for Thanksgiving Nov. 25th - Nov. 30th, and re-open Tuesday Dec. 1.
Our first break of the year!

Thanks Mary!

Mary Lowry, patron and friend of the clinic posted this on her Dog Canyon blog recently... South Austin Community Acupuncture: the Other Healthcare Revolution

SACA turns 3

Nearly  9000 acupuncture treatments later, South Austin Community Acupuncture turns 3 years old today!
November 15th, 2006 we opened our doors for business. What a long, strange trip it's been...

Thank you to our friends and patrons.
It is with your support that we are able to keep this beautiful dream alive.

Speaking of acudetox, The Great American Smokeout is Nov. 19th

Ready to stop smoking? Join us Nov 19th for The Great American Smokeout. We'll be offering FREE acudetox treatments all day on a walk in basis for those who are giving up their smokes.

Acudetox at South Austin Community Acupuncture

South Austin Community Acupuncture is a sliding scale acupuncture clinic where treatments happen in a group setting. We are now now making acudetox treatments available for a flat $10 per session.

Acudetox treatment utilizes the National Association of Detoxification Acupuncture (or NADA) protocol developed by Dr. Michael Smith at the Lincoln Recovery Center in the Bronx. It is an extremely simple and effective treatment consisting of the insertion of five small acupuncture needles into points in each ear. It is used widely all over the world for all kinds of addictions, habituated behaviors, stress, and trauma.

One of the more salient features of the treatment is that it is a non-verbal therapy. You don’t have to talk about where you’ve been or what you are going through. Rather, you essentially do nothing. Hence the name: NADA (Spanish for nothing). In essence what happens in the treatment is you get to experience a few moments of inner peace. For most in recovery, this is a new experience – or at least one that has long since been obscured or forgotten. So the NADA treatment affords a glimpse of something we all possess innately inside ourselves.

We are separating the NADA treatments from our usual $15-$40 sliding scale acupuncture, and making them $10 because we want to make the process of getting acudetox treatments more straightforward, and because we want people to be able to get frequent treatments – which can be especially important early in the process of recovery.

Blawg, Blawg, Blawg, Blawg, Blawg

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, so the saying goes. And so, a month has just about lapsed since my last post. Well, a lot has happened in that time to take me away from cyber reality. We got new shirts. We got new bumper stickers. We had our grand opening party, which was nuts -  45 free treatments were given. Los Pinkys played. Strange and interesting people came and went. We lived to tell the tale.
More to come...