On Recognizing the Right Thing

why we chose to work on 5NP for Oregon

Photo from this weekend’s 5NP training

Last week’s paywalled post was about making leadership decisions in relationship to big, ambitious projects with uncertain outcomes. I wrote,

My job is to say no and I say it quite a lot — more than I say yes, actually. The only time I take on a huge daunting project is when something about pursuing it will be good for us collectively — 5NP in Oregon is the definitive example, when I did in fact point us toward what looked like an impossible goal. Unpacking why that was the right thing to do is probably a whole other post (does anybody want to read about that?)

And people said, yes they do. So here goes.

There was talk of a 5NP law for Oregon for years before we took any action. People in the POCA Cooperative have successfully passed 5NP laws, or amended regulations, in other states: Arizona, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Utah¹, Virginia. (Apologies if I forgot anyone, the list keeps getting longer!) When people brought it up with me, though, I said no. Sometimes I said HELL no. Sometimes I snapped, Can’t you see we’re busy?

Starting in 2013 we were indeed very busy with our bootstrapped little school for licensed acupuncturists; it’s not like we had energy to train more people. But mostly, a 5NP law for Oregon just didn’t seem possible. Historically, the biggest resistance to 5NP has come from states where there were acupuncture schools (New York being the notable exception, but 5NP originated in New York before there were any acupuncture schools there). Oregon had two other acupuncture schools besides ours and I didn’t think our chances were good.

So what changed between then and 2022, which is when we started to work on a 5NP law? In a nutshell: the relational landscape around us changed.

COVID was the hardest of hard re-sets. WCA was closed for five months; there was plenty of time to contemplate our future. I had a gut feeling that we needed to open ourselves up in new ways — IF we survived. Which is when NAYA (the Native American Youth and Family Association) showed up.

I knew about NAYA because I’ve lived in the Cully neighborhood since 2001 and NAYA does enormous good in the community. (Like, literally enormous — building 165 units of affordable housing, running a farmer’s market and a Green Workforce Academy, supporting the Neighborhood Prosperity Network, and that’s not even half of it.) When COVID hit, they set out to save all the small businesses in Cully — and they succeeded. Not one closed during the pandemic. They accessed federal funding that we couldn’t have gotten otherwise; they interceded with landlords; they took business owners out for coffee and gave us pep talks and basically held our hands through all the worst parts. I’d never experienced anything like that kind of support for my small business.

That was my introduction to indigenous cultural values: extraordinary generosity plus active commitment to community prosperity. COVID plus NAYA shifted my sense of what was possible.

I knew that in the Pacific NW, 5NP was being practiced on tribal lands by people who weren’t licensed acupuncturists, but I didn’t know much more than that. I also knew that most Native Americans in Oregon don’t live on tribal lands. So when students in Cohort 8 expressed disbelief that Oregon didn’t have a 5NP law and then volunteered to work towards one as their Capstone, instead of reflexively responding “no way”, I thought, “Hmm, I wonder if this might be an area of mutual benefit for us and for NAYA?”

Photo by Edy Martinez of a meeting at NAYA’s community economic development office with NAYA leadership and Portland City Council members. I got invited, along with our famous neighbor, chef Alexa Numkena-Anderson of Javelina, to talk about small business in Cully.

Dolores Jimerson described the relationship of 5NP and indigenous cultural values in Making Relatives:

On tribal lands it’s all about community. We are there for each other. 5NP and the idea of acudetox resonate with so many tribal people because of our cultural values… My people are the Haudenosaunee and we say: When we were created, Creator blew breath into us and gave us our original instructions, which include things like: be grateful; do no harm; be generous. Remember that everything has life and is interconnected. Everyone was meant to have family. If you meet someone who doesn’t have family, you make relatives with them, you make connection.

If you think of people who are living on the street, they’re disconnected, they’re dysregulated. If they can show up to that circle of 5NP — and that’s all they have to do, just show up — it’s a feeling of I can be connected to community again. It brings people back together. 5NP expresses our value of generosity: we give back, we share, we make connection.

So the first element in choosing to work towards a 5NP law was recognizing the pivotal role of indigenous cultural values. NAYA’s generosity meant that 5NP in Oregon just might be possible, where before it had seemed impossible. The second element was recognizing that even if we didn’t succeed, collaborating with NAYA to try to get Oregon a 5NP law would be good for both WCA and the school. Even if was a ton of work, it would be the right work. It would be the learning curve we needed.²

Maybe the hardest thing about teaching acupuncture is helping students not get lost in the weeds. The sheer quantity of information to memorize, not to mention the basic time management challenge of getting through graduate school (most of our students work full time), makes it easy to lose sight of the big picture. Similarly for WCA, actually treating people in clinic is straightforward and joyful, but we sometimes get lost in the weeds of running a small business and the million details thereof.

The beating heart of our whole enterprise is creating access to acupuncture for our community. Aiming for a 5NP law, even if we couldn’t hit the target, was such a pure, straightforward, uncluttered effort that I knew it would be good for us. I knew it’d be a shot of mission and passion straight into our organizational bloodstream. It would focus us directly on what WCA is for.

Also, as I’ve said in earlier posts, we’ve seen the acupocalypse coming for a long time. 5NP seemed like a good opportunity to learn first hand about how acupuncture legislation and regulation work in Oregon.³ 5NP was a beautiful goal in its own right, but it was also like a dress rehearsal (with NAYA once again holding our hands) for something much scarier.

Apparently not a minute too soon.

Last week I wrote that one of my basic leadership responsibilities is to protect us from projects that will burn us out, no matter how noble they sound. I constantly think about fuel, how much of it we’re burning and whether it’s toxic (some fuel is too poisonous to use). The third element in deciding to work towards 5NP was recognizing that the fuel for the work would be self-renewing and safe for us.

For community acupuncturists, the Big Bang — the explosion that gave rise to our universe — was the Lincoln Acupuncture Detox Collective which formed as a result of the occupation of Lincoln Hospital in the early 1970s. The Lincoln Acupuncture Detox Collective created 5NP — and also led to NADA, and BAAANA, and the first community acupuncture schools, and public health acupuncture in Oregon.⁴ The waves traveled out in every direction and down through time to us. Working on a 5NP law for Oregon was a direct way to honor our ancestors. We were plugging ourselves into the energy of the Big Bang.

Even when opposition appeared, we weren’t working against anybody or anything, we were always working for something that mattered deeply to us. We were affirming our lineage and that made us stronger. The fuel for our work was devotion, so it replenished our resources instead of draining them — regardless of whether we succeeded or failed.

There’s something I notice that other acupuncturists often misunderstand about us: We’re not driven by an abstract idea, or ideal, about how acupuncture SHOULD be practiced. Community acupuncture isn’t about obligation or martyrdom — we like it. This is what we want. Working on 5NP for Oregon was so much fun, even the hard parts, that I’ll remember it fondly for the rest of my life and I bet that’s true for other people too. It was a profoundly regenerative experience.

Members of the House Committee on Behavioral Health receiving 5NP, photo courtesy of Cree Bort

Something I’ve learned about the art of making things happen (aka leadership) is that processes and outcomes aren’t separate. And it’s not just that they’re related or connected: if you look at processes and outcomes from a certain angle, they look like the same thing, but at different stages of unfolding.

I’m probably not going to do a good job of explaining this, and the materialists in the audience are going to roll their eyes. (Sorry, materialists.) For me, the entwined nature of processes and outcomes is similar to prefigurative intervention, where you try to enact the future you want to see, even if it’s only for an hour or a day, so that you can live inside it and thus expand its life force. It’s also like magic, where you’re acknowledging that what you want is already present and you’re just asking for help opening the door to it — but also, you are the door. (It’s a great gig, being the door.)

As Letty Dogheart put it, 5NP is a healing and magical technology that folds time. 5NP in Oregon was already real before we started to work on it. (Obviously, that was literally true on the material plane because people on tribal lands were doing it.) Everything about working towards the law, every single task, was exactly like wanting the law and having the law; everything was aligned and consistent. 5NP in Oregon was the right thing for us to do because it was always part of us and we were always part of it.

1. Utah Acudetox has a gorgeous website.

2. There’s a whole other post (coming soon) about organizational partnerships and why we’ve been leaning into them so hard over the last few years.

3. More here about how working towards a 5NP law was good for our students:

4. Endless thanks to Rachel Pagones for writing Acupuncture as Revolution; this was all so much harder before we had a book about the history of 5NP.