Healing Is Relational: How I Found Chinese Medicine and What Consistent Care Makes Possible

I often tell people that healing is relational — not transactional, not mechanical, not something administered to you, but something cultivated with you. I didn’t come to that belief from a textbook. I came to it from lived experience — one that arrived during a chapter of my life where everything felt like it was spinning far too fast.

Years ago, I was running a wildly underfunded nonprofit, wearing every hat in the organization, and living in a state of stress that made my nervous system feel like it was running on exposed wires. Nights became long, sleepless stretches — the kind where your bones feel awake, your pulse hovers just beneath the skin, and your thoughts buzz so loudly you forget what silence feels like.

After about five nights without sleep, I hit the kind of desperation all my insomniacs know too well. The kind that makes you willing to try anything — even something you don’t yet understand.

Enter acupuncture.

I booked with a practitioner named Susan — a calm and gentle woman who carried both wisdom and humor in equal measure — and walked in ready, frankly, for a miracle. What I got instead was something softer: space. An hour where the world slowed down enough for my breath to find me again.

After that first treatment, I noticed something I hadn’t felt in months: my breath dropped below my diaphragm. After the second, my wrist — injured months prior — stopped hurting for the first time, a particularly wild sensation given the fact that Susan hadn’t needled my wrist at all. After the sixth, I felt like someone had rewired me from the inside out. Not changed me — returned me to myself.

And because I am, at core, a science-adoring, endlessly curious, borderline-annoying question-asker, I interrupted Susan mid-check-out and said, essentially:

“Okay, but how? This is clearly working — but what is actually happening here?”

Bless you, Susan, for your beatific patience, and for handing me the book that changed everything: Between Heaven and Earth.

I devoured it in a single weekend, sitting on my porch with a highlighter and the sense that some ancient part of me was finally being given vocabulary. These weren’t just ideas — they were truths that felt older than language. Truths that explained not only my symptoms but the world itself.

I was reminded that:

• The same tides that move the moon move through the fluids of our bodies.

• The same cycles that govern the seasons govern our hormones.

• The same currents that shape weather patterns shape emotional patterns.

Chinese medicine reminded me — or maybe revealed to me— that we are not separate from nature. We are nature. Indivisible from it. Subject to the same laws, buoyed by the same rhythms, restored by the same quiet invitations to soften and return home to ourselves.

And it was this remembering that shifted everything.

Why Consistent Care Matters

and Why Acupuncture Works Best in Rhythm

My insomnia didn’t resolve in one session. It shifted in one session. It healed in six.

That distinction — between shifting and healing — is everything.

Acupuncture is slow medicine in the way nature is slow: layered, rhythmic, cumulative. It doesn’t force the body; it coaxes it. It expands the container of what the nervous system can hold.

Each treatment teaches your system a new possibility:

This is what safety feels like.

This is what regulation feels like.

This is what breath feels like when it is not barricaded by stress.

Consistent treatment allows those possibilities to settle, to root, to become the new normal.

Nothing in nature heals instantaneously.

Not forests.

Not grief.

Not fascia.

And definitely not the nervous system.

Even stars — brilliant, blazing, celestial beings — move through slow, predictable cycles of contraction, expansion, collapse, rebirth.

So do we.

And acupuncture, in its own quiet way, mirrors that cosmic cadence: a little more light, a little more coherence, a little more remembering each time.

Over the years — through grad school, cross-country moves, heartbreak, reinvention — acupuncture has continued to return me to myself. It teaches me the same truth again and again: that transformative healing happens when we slow down, listen, and give the body time and space to let the light in.

The Heart of the Matter

Chinese medicine teaches that joy is the emotion of the Heart — and physiologically, joy slows the pulse, opens the chest, and creates a spaciousness inside us where connection can take root. Real joy dilates us. It makes us available to life again.

Stress does the opposite. It exiles us to the mind — where we cling, analyze, manage, over-function, and eventually forget that the sun exists, being alive is actually astonishing, and that our heart beats for us without being asked.

In Daoist thought, this is a forgetting of the Shen — the spirit — the spark of consciousness that animates us. When the Shen is unsettled, the tongue tip reddens, sleep becomes elusive, the mind races, and our sense of belonging — to ourselves, to others, to the world — quietly frays.

Healing, then, is not just symptom relief. It is a return — to presence, to rhythm, to relationship with the world that shaped us.

Every nervous system is a unique snowflake. Every body is a masterpiece.Every life is a constellation of patterns, memories, and meanings.

And when we treat from that place — from the heart, from the Dao, from the remembrance that humans are ecosystems, not machines — healing becomes not just possible, but inevitable.

This is why acupuncture works best consistently. Healing is not a one-time intervention. It is a relationship — with your body, your practitioner, and your becoming. Like nature, we, too, thrive in rhythm. Treatment entrains the nervous system into slow, steady coherence. It mirrors the seasons: gentle repetition, layered support, returning again and again to what nourishes.

Why I Practice the Way I Do

Over the years, I’ve learned that each human is a constellation — complex, shimmering, ever-evolving — and that healing happens when we approach people not as problems, but as ecosystems.

To me:

Symptoms are sacred messages.

The body is a profound storyteller.

And medicine is not an event — it’s a conversation.

Chinese medicine didn’t just change how I sleep or breathe or live. It changed how I understand what it means to be human.

If there is anything you glean from this musing, let it be this: You are not separate from the Dao — the great wonder that holds all things.You are an expression of it. A unique pattern in the tapestry of the whole.

When we remember this — when we stop outsourcing our health to the future and come back to the heartbeat that lives only in the present moment — something profound happens. We return to ourselves. We return to joy. We return to possibility. We return home.

May you be and live well —

xx LB