One of the most common questions we get asked during treatments is, “How did you come to know you wanted to be an acupuncturist?” It’s so common we decided to write a blog post on it with all of our personal accounts of how we came to be needle throwers. It’s natural to be curious about why a person would buck mainstream medicine and decide to learn about a tradition so far from what most of us in the west grew up knowing.

Hillary- For me, it was a personal experience, not once, but twice (I’m quite stubborn) that convinced me to hop onto a completely different career path than what I thought I was headed for. From the ages of 11-21, I was convinced that I was going to be a surgeon. In hindsight, this original career aspiration came from watching my grandfather lie in a coma for 11 days after a cardiac event and then watching my family have to make the decision to take him off of life support. It also fueled my curiosity about consciousness. I was certain that he could hear me and was trying to respond by squeezing my hand or opening his eyes when I would talk to him even though the doctors were telling me it was all involuntary as the oxygen loss had caused him to be brain dead. In my young mind, it made perfect sense to become a surgeon and “save people.” It was a way to direct my grief and avoidance of loss into something worthwhile and to hopefully save people from the pain of losing someone they loved, even though my adult self now knows that death is the only sure thing in this life. Unbenounced to me, I was being shaped for a different kind of career in that tragedy.

A few years later I was lucky enough to be exposed to acupuncture through a family friend in high school, even though I wouldn’t try it until college. This was way before acupuncture was accepted or even close to mainstream and was a seed that would lay dormant, waiting to be fertilized and blossom when the time was right.

Like many people, when I finally caved and gave acupuncture a shot it was out of sheer desperation. In my junior year of college, I had been getting continuous urinary tract infections and had developed a wicked case of insomnia which was like nothing I had ever experienced before. After about 6 trips to the infirmary, 7 rounds of antibiotics, and an offer to try antidepressants I knew I had to try something else. I was depressed, but not because of my mind. I was depressed because I was in constant pain and fatigued from fighting continuous infections that seemed to have a mind of their own. The offering of another pill seemed like a slippery slope to me, so I quickly found an acupuncturist in the yellow pages (remember those days, pre-google?)

Much to my delight, I slept like a baby the night after my first session. But a rather curious thing happened. Not only did my urinary issues subside, but all of a sudden I could poop every day! This was an amazing side effect to me because I had not even mentioned that for most of my life I had been constipated to the point of thinking it was normal to only poop once a week. I felt like a new person! The fatigue, bloating and headaches I had learned to live with vanished as a result. Those around me may have even commented that I was not nearly as irritable. A few weeks later, I noticed my digestion was going back up to its old normal so I saved up my money and worked up my courage to go back and ask, how she knew that it was a problem and could she please do exactly what she had done before? I had tasted wellness and needed to know how to repeat it. Like so many of our patients, what had brought me to acupuncture was not what kept me coming back.

Fast forward 5 years. I had decided not to apply to medical school (that’s another story for another time) and found myself selling blood-derived injectable pharmaceuticals all over the country. I know the irony is deep. I got a first-class education in the pharmaceutical arm of American health care and after 16 months found myself drinking a lot of alcohol and running marathons to cope with what I was seeing on the daily. Long story short, drugs that were in short supply were going to the highest bidder, not the sickest person. I ran so many marathons trying to run from myself and my newfound place in what my mind saw as a major problem in healthcare that I broke my leg. I would crutch into acupuncture, and after an e-stim treatment be able to walk out weight-bearing. That would last for a few days and I would crutch back in until it was finally healed. Did I mention I was stubborn?

No longer able to run from myself, I picked my meditation practice back up (that I had learned at 19) and started to try and figure my life out. The Universe had me right where it needed me to be-finally still and listening. One day on the treatment table, I had one of those cathartic divine meditations that might only happen to a person a few times in decades of practice. I saw myself on a path with an opportunity to get off onto another. It showed me what type of person I would be at the end of both paths. One was in the direction I had been heading and the other involved me going to acupuncture school. Let me just say, they were starkly contrasting versions of me. I had an immediate knowing that I had to summon the courage to walk down the unknown path. The one that all of my friends and family would initially tell me I was nuts for doing. The one that was not accepted as “real medicine.” The one that would take me from a lucrative job at 26 into a lot of graduate school debt. The path that I knew would bring me into alignment with the essence of myself and my purpose and away from the societal shoulds I had been letting run the show. It was terrifying AND so worth it.

Emily- Sometimes, I’m not sure how I got here. Had someone told me I would be who I am today even a decade ago, I would called them crazy. It was just nowhere on my radar.

I think it began with falling in love with plants…I bought a house with a big yard and started growing things. I would read about things I was growing and started learning about more and more crazy amazing things that plants do and can do with us. Initially, I selected for the look of a plant, or its native hardiness (why I have about 100 buddha bellies at any given time!) This then led me to start learning about growing herbs and food and then by association our global food industry and everything wrong with it and the food we eat, so I was slowly gaining an understanding of what my own diet and lifestyle were doing to my health and mood. I spent hours at Haslam’s finding books on gardening and herbs and essential oils and kitchen herbalism. I got a glimpse of the world of fungi and had my mind blown wide open. I began making my own everything, from deodorant to toothpaste to dog food to pesticide. I’m also, meanwhile, discovering yoga and meditation and I started toying with doing a product line of all-natural body care products, but wanted (and felt I needed) to learn more than self-study could give me. I was opening to the possibility of a new path for myself, one that was not spent behind someone else’s bar all night. I searched for a program, of which there are a great many online options, but I’m kind of old-school and felt I really needed a teacher, a classroom, a pile of textbooks along with some sort of schedule I had to stick to.  I was, at this time, really focused on western herbalism. I found a local 2-year program with a manageable time commitment locally with Dr. Bob Linde (owner of Acupuncture and Herbal Therapies), however, it focused on Traditional Chinese herbals and diagnostics with a clinical internship that I wanted absolutely no part of. I had no plans to work with people, I just really liked mixing up concoctions and making things. Nevertheless, it was calling me somehow. Meanwhile, during this period of time, I have found out that my uterus was just ate up with fibroids and we needed to part ways, like yesterday. (Most of us, I think, got here through some issue with our own health/body.) So I am also now learning about all the things that could have been done dietarily and herbally that could possibly have prevented years of pain and moodiness and the ensuing hysterectomy had it been properly diagnosed years before. Stars align and two months after surgery I start taking classes with Dr. Bob, who really was the perfect bridge for me, as he is insanely passionate about both western and Chinese herbalism. I learned there is no such thing as a weed (it’s just a plant we haven’t spoken with yet) and there is an absolutely mind-blowing interconnectedness to all things. My view of the world and myself started shifting.

I surprised myself and not only really enjoyed the clinical internship, I was good with people and I began to see myself as a practitioner. (Bartending actually prepared me really well in many ways for clinical practice, I can talk to anyone about anything and am pretty unflappable.) I also just started basically hanging out at the clinic all the time soaking it up and working for free, gleaning what I can from the practitioners. The product line I thought was my path begins to pale in comparison to the passion erupting for healing people. 

Then I have my first acupuncture treatment with Hillary, already a teacher of mine and future mentor, and am hooked. At least, hooked on having acupuncture. By some divine intervention, I had two amazing powerful female mentors who saw something in me that I could not. They were gently, but insistently, urging me to go back to school to become an Acupuncture Physician and REALLY practice this medicine. Eventually, I could see a glimmer of what they could see in me. I took the leap into graduate school. I had the experience we all had of needing to take out my western mind completely, read things that made absolutely no sense repeatedly for over a year before they gradually, beautifully began dawning on me (and not just being literally Chinese) and then had to reintegrate my western understanding back into new eastern thought paradigms. I have continued to find amazement and an endless supply of things to learn forever. (I also still get to spend a ton of time getting my hands dirty making all of our tinctures, salves, decoctions, teas, and steams-satisfying that need to concoct things!) I am blown away on the daily by what we do and what we can affect with acupuncture and herbals. Traditional Chinese Medicine is something I can study and practice the rest of my life, never tapping out the infinite knowledge base. The longer I practice the more I fall madly in love with it.

Kecia- I started my career in holistic health in 2001.  Prior to that, I had been working in the tech industry and I was miserable. Surrounded by machines and people who were constantly frustrated because their machines and networks were not working properly. I knew that was not the place that I wanted to be – in spite of the fact that it was a very nice paycheck.  I worked with a lot of guys who just could not get enough screen time and tinkering time.  They would work on computers all day and then go home and work on them more, until the wee hours of the night.  But they gave me a gift of clarity ~ whatever I was going to do I wanted to be THAT passionate about it.

I went home one night and made an “if I could do anything in the world” list.  A couple of things that I would not have foreseen showed up on that list.  One of them being “massage therapy”.  I knew that the thing that gave me the most joy within my tech job was talking to people.  Helping them to understand what was happening, calming them down, and seeing them smile at the end of it.  I was good with the people part and I enjoyed it.  So, I put myself through a night program for the next year and a half while working full time doing my tech job. Two days after I graduated from that program there was a terrorist attack, and life as many of us knew it was forever changed.  My thoughts were along the lines of “is it really necessary for me to continue to suffer through my day to day when we have no idea what tomorrow even brings”.  My original plan had been to continue to work full time at my corporate job with my corporate paycheck until I had built enough of a massage practice to leave. I promptly submitted my notice to leave that company with no job or plan (I hadn’t even taken the national board exam yet) and let the chips fall where they may, so to speak.

This sudden turn of events motivated me to take the exam quickly and find a place to practice.  I landed an assistant position at the massage school, which wasn’t much but it helped. I came to teach anatomy and physiology for the massage program and build a successful therapeutic massage practice.  My client base was full of post-surgical cases, spinal fusions, Autoimmune conditions, and athletes recovering from injuries. No matter what the condition was that the client was presenting with, I often found an underlying history of trauma which led me to deeper exploration as to how to really treat them.

Somewhere around 12 years into that career I came to an understanding that I needed to treat those cases on a deeper level. There was only so much I could do with just my hands and I needed more tools.  After acceptance into the master’s program at Five Branches University in Santa Cruz, California, and embarked on a new journey into the human body and its workings.  It was here that I quickly came to realize that everything I thought I knew about the body, meant nothing. I had to completely turn that part of my brain off until I had some groundwork for this new understanding. It took me a year to a year and a half before I was ready to start bridging what had been so deeply ingrained in my mind as a westerner and the eastern philosophy of Chinese medicine.

Even still there are times when I need to gently remind myself that it is not necessary to compartmentalize sections of the body and how it works.  That it’s all connected and when it is disconnected, we start to see pathology present.  Chinese medicine is really about strengthening the infrastructure of the body and I have experienced this both personally and professionally. I have gained many more tools to treat my patients on all levels – mental, emotional and physical. I now have even more soft tissue tools along with acupuncture and Chinese herbs to treat the internal and underlying conditions of my patients. Gently leading them back to what their bodies already know how to do. I not only love what I do, I feel incredibly blessed to be able to do it and my mind is blown daily by the human body and its innate intelligence.

Honu- Growing up in Alaska in the 90s, before cellphones and widespread internet use, I was exposed to very little that wasn’t within my visual periphery, or what I could pull from the local library in Craig, Alaska. A ferry trip, and the decision to move to the Lower 48, to Colorado, started my journey towards Acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine. As a 20-year-old, fresh out of the US Navy, eyes wide, heart open, and bags packed, I settled in Colorado and signed up for Massage Therapy school, without knowing much about the subject. The modalities and teachers changed my perspective forever. One very short and spunky massage teacher talked about Qi and how to use it to your advantage, it piqued my curiosity. My favorite courses were Shiatsu, Acupressure, and the modalities that involved course-correcting of one’s energy. Upon graduation, and the birth of my son Waker, we decided to move to Portland, Oregon.

Insert all the things people imagine of Portland and the Pacific NW- rainy, artistic, active, holistic, expansive, and dynamic. I was exposed to every healing modality, all the types of yoga, different foods, new languages, and people who were seeking answers. My kids’ father’s physician suggested he try Acupuncture at the OG Community Clinic in the USA, Working Class Acupuncture. He came home floating. I liked to float, so why not try it?! I booked an appointment. Went in ASAP, was examined, diagnosed, got comfy, got poked, and drifted off into Aculand—that place somewhere between sleep and meditation. The place we go when the Qi starts flowing. After the homebirth of my daughter Opal, we decided to move to Minnesota to be closer to the kids’ father’s family.

I sought help from the local Acupuncture school for my debilitating menstrual cycles. I could hardly function and needed help. The Acupuncturist took my pulses, asked questions she could not possibly know and pursued to give me an Acupuncture treatment. After a few sessions, she suggested that I sign up for school. She said I would make a great Acupuncturist and that it was my true calling. More school?! a Master’s degree? It seemed wayyyy out of reach and impossible for a mama with 2 kids under 3 years. NOPE. Two weeks later I was accepted into Acupuncture School in Roseville, Minnesota. As I worked on my own health issues and studied this beautiful medicine, I received an invitation from a professor post-QiGong class, to drive him and his wife (both Chinese professors) to Florida for their big move. Challenge accepted. It was nice to be in 70-degree weather and away from the harshness of a Midwestern Winter. The family and I packed our bags a few months later and moved to Florida. I met the co-owner of Art of Acupuncture at East West College of Natural Medicine; we started a friendship based on a deep understanding of one another (that doesn’t require a lot of attention) and our love of this medicine.

In 2016 I decided to pursue my Doctorate Degree at the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine in Portland, Oregon and spent 2 years studying women’s health and aging populations, gaining knowledge from some of the country’s best Acupuncturists, and honing my skills with other practitioners. This medicine has helped people in ways that continue to amaze me on the daily. It brings empowerment back where that was lost. It gives freedom from pain that lingers too long. It gives babies to people who thought they couldn’t have them. It soothes digestion to create flow and more energy for life. It answers questions that other modalities cannot. Eastern Philosophy has given me a beautiful lens to see what cannot be seen and to change what can be changed to make a difference.

We would love to hear from you in the comments below. What brought you to acupuncture and what keeps you coming back?