Intention + Container
on working through things via acupuncture, coaching, Substacks, etc.
This weekend at POCA Tech we had another class about holding space, and a question came up about what to say if a patient tells you that they want to stop drinking coffee, or a variation on that theme: They confess that they tried to quit coffee but they’re still drinking it, or they cut back for a while but it didn’t last, or they’ve gone cold turkey and now they’re craving everything coffee-flavored — they just bought a box of espresso cigars and they don’t even smoke, etc.
In the POCA Tech program, unlike pretty much every other acupuncture school I can think of, we specifically caution students NOT to give lifestyle advice. As for why, that’s probably a whole other post; let’s just say there are lots of good reasons why an acupuncturist shouldn’t try to tell a patient how to live their life. So in this case, our students would not say, “yes, coffee is terrible, you SHOULD feel guilty about drinking it” but also it’s not appropriate to say “coffee is fine, I drank a quart of it this morning myself”.
(If the patient adds, “I have an awful caffeine withdrawal headache”, that’s easy, you stop talking about coffee and treat their headache.)
Maybe you have no opinions about coffee one way or another. In general, neutrality is a virtue and a tactical advantage for community acupuncturists. The busier you get in clinic, the more you need it.
One way to use acupuncture with neutrality is to recognize treatment as a process. Getting regular acupuncture is a way that people can work through something, and it doesn’t matter what that something is. It could be their relationship with coffee (or any other substance), it could be a divorce, it could be recovering from surgery.
A series of acupuncture treatments can be a container for navigating change.
It doesn’t matter if the change is welcome or unwelcome, planned or unplanned, acupuncture can help you through it. Acupuncture is an adaptogen.
So for the patient who wants to quit coffee, you could offer them the opportunity, at the beginning of their treatment, of setting an intention for their healing process. They can hold that intention in their minds as they receive the needles, letting it be the last thing they think about before they get deeply relaxed/fall asleep. It’s all about relaxing into, or around, their intention. This is also a way of removing pressure, because putting pressure on oneself never helps the healing process.
And then they can just see what happens, see where intention + acupuncture takes them — which probably won’t be in a straight line. Maybe acupuncture will help them drink less coffee, or maybe it will help them feel more self-compassion about drinking the same amount. Maybe acupuncture will help them resolve whatever’s causing them to drink coffee, or maybe it’ll bring them the realization they just really enjoy coffee as a low-key pleasure and they WANT to keep drinking it, who cares what that naturopath told them. Maybe they’ll share with you how their coffee journey turned out; maybe they won’t, and you’ll never know. That’s okay.
You can offer them the opportunity to use acupuncture as a container for their intention while staying entirely neutral on the subject of coffee itself. You don’t have to worry about it one way or another because acupuncture knows what it’s doing. Acupuncture is flexible and forgiving and can hold almost anything.
And as often happens with acupuncture, maybe some other non-coffee problems that the patient wasn’t even thinking about and didn’t mention will get better too, like their ankle pain or their anxiety.
Which reminds me of this Substack, and also of coaching.
The idea of WCA having a newsletter came out of our coaching process with Camille Trummer. We asked her to help us develop more organizational partnerships because we knew WCA needed to grow in a different way, we needed to get out of our bubble, but we didn’t know how. In the middle of one of our sessions with her, when we were talking about building relationships with new organizational partners, I blurted out, “We need a newsletter!” Sara looked at me from across the room, raised her eyebrows and said, “And whose job description is THAT going to get added to?”
It was a fair question, especially since we had just been talking about how everybody at WCA already has too much to do. But just like acupuncture, I think coaching is a container for working through problems. When you put your intention into it, you don’t really know what will come out. If the process is going well, all kinds of things might emerge that you weren’t expecting.
When we finished our series of sessions with Camille, we had sketched out a road map for exploring relationships with potential organizational partners. There were a lot of jokes about dating and swiping right vs. left, etc. One thing we didn’t anticipate, though, is that most organizations would want to do the exact same thing on their first date with us: a pop-up acupuncture clinic. Apparently it’s the organizational equivalent of dinner and a movie.
Since we’d never given much thought to pop-up clinics as a means of connection, we didn’t anticipate that we’d have to work on our capacity to deliver them — though Camille talked a lot with us about it, we didn’t really get the capacity issue until we experienced it first-hand. But here’s the cool part, we also had no idea that pop-ups would be the solution to some long-standing problems with WCA’s most demanding organizational partnership, POCA Tech itself.
Pop-ups are pretty much the best teaching tool ever for community acupuncture, and we never would have figured that out if we hadn’t dug into the partnerships project with Camille.
Last Friday we did another pop-up clinic in our classroom treatment space with another organization that shares our building: Collective Roots APG. Here are POCA Tech interns A. and J., ready to introduce community acupuncture to a roomful of teenagers:
And let me tell you, offering acupuncture to a dozen skeptical teenagers is an educational experience that no ordinary clinic shift could ever match. (See also: “Can we scream?” “Am I going to get paralyzed?” “Are you lobotomizing us?” “DUDE, you look like a pincushion!” “DUDE!”) J. and A. were shining examples of teamwork, flexibility, and patience, and the feedback afterwards was that the teens loved it and want to do it again.
As for me, writing this Substack is a way to work through the internal and external steps that WCA needs to take in order to grow. Writing a series of posts creates a container for navigating change. I didn’t expect it, but this newsletter has made my job a thousand times better. Thank you for sharing the journey.