The Forest for the Trees
or, Why a Pop-Up Clinic Is a Good Teacher
Sometimes everything just comes together at once. Like ALL of the themes of this newsletter, in the space of an hour and a half, on a Tuesday afternoon at a pop-up at Linfield School of Nursing! Here’s what happened and why I love having this Substack to unpack it:
One of the bright spots for our acupuncture school in the past couple of years has been our partnership with Linfield. Since May 2022, we’ve been taking small groups of our student interns to “Lunch and Learn” sessions for Linfield student nurses, hosted by Linfield Student Life. They provide pizza, our acupuncture students get to practice doing a presentation to their nursing students, and then our students treat anyone who wants to try acupuncture. From the beginning, it’s been an integrative medicine love fest! Everybody comes away feeling inspired.
We’ve had several groups of interns take advantage of this uniquely educational opportunity. As part of our school’s focus on leadership development, I handed off organizing the Lunch and Learns to POCA Tech students. Our most recent student organizer of the pop-ups is a nurse herself (not to mention a stellar contributor to this Substack, thank you Jen! ). Really all I do for these events is to show up as a clinical supervisor to sign paperwork and otherwise make it legal. Sonya, one of my co-Directors, attends to help organize the paperwork and generally support the interns, but the goal is for the pop-ups to be a student-led project. Because at POCA Tech we believe in learning by doing.
And wow, did we learn a lot last Tuesday. Spoiler alert: everything turned out fine. The truth is, I always learn more when things don’t go to plan than when they do. So I’m grateful for every Linfield pop-up that has been easy and sweet, and extra grateful for one that was challenging — but still a good experience for everyone (particularly our hosts!)
A couple of days before the event, we got an email from Jen letting us know that 19 Linfield students had signed up, which is almost double the highest number we’ve ever treated in the past. Sonya and I had the exact same reaction, which in hindsight is comical — we thought to ourselves, “Wow, what a great turn out!” We did NOT think, “I wonder if we’re prepared to double our capacity?”
We also had a crew of student interns who had never done a Linfield pop-up together before: one third-year student and three second-year students who were all relatively new to clinic, period. Let me take a moment here and describe how a pop up is exactly like a community acupuncture clinic shift, only more so.
It’s all about holding space.
Community acupuncture fundamentally requires making peace with limitations.
Community acupuncturists recognize that it’s often a struggle for people to find the time and the resources to get acupuncture, so it’s our job to make it work for our patients as best we can. A pop-up means setting up a clinic in a place that ordinarily isn’t a clinic — like a classroom — and making it possible for people to have a good experience with acupuncture there, in the sliver of time they have, before they need to get back to class or to work or other obligations. A pop-up represents a carved-out bit of space and time for healing, and it’s delicate; unlike a WCA clinic, it doesn’t have a brick-and-mortar building as a buffer.
Community acupuncture also fundamentally requires seeing the clinic space as more than just the sum of its parts.
Community acupuncture isn’t a matter of treating a bunch of individuals one after another in one room, or it’s not only that; something cohesive arises out of the shared space, something larger and weirder and more healing for everybody, that the acupuncturist also has to take care of. The most basic aspect of taking care is paying attention to the room -- the whole room, not just the patient in front of you. This means that sometimes, as an acupuncturist, you don’t get to do exactly what you planned; you have to adjust in the moment, you have to be responsive and flexible (while remaining calm and centered), you have to prioritize your patients having a good experience over fulfilling your personal agenda, whatever that might be.
One of the major frustrations that led us to make our own acupuncture school was the difficulty of retraining acupuncturists who couldn’t pay attention to the room, who couldn’t see the forest for the trees, so to speak. (Community acupuncture is exactly like a forest, now that I think about it!) Before we had POCA Tech, community acupuncturists all had to retrain ourselves as best we could. We all went to acupuncture schools that not only didn’t teach us how to practice community acupuncture, they taught us NOT to practice it because it was at best a lesser version of “the real thing” and at worst it was devaluing/degrading/destroying the acupuncture profession. And when we got our own school, it was surprisingly difficult to translate what we ourselves had learned from intuition, rebellion, trial and error, and turn it into an educational program.
For example, being able to pinpoint the moment when a student learns to see the forest and not just the trees.
The Lunch and Learns run from noon to one pm. Last Tuesday afternoon, Sonya and I realized at the same moment — about 12:16 pm, right after our interns had finished their presentation — that we hadn’t spelled out that they had to needle ALL of the Linfield students by 12:30 pm so that they would have enough time to relax into the treatment. Our interns didn’t have an hour to ponder what they wanted to do with one patient at a time, they had fifteen minutes to treat the whole room. And at the speed our group was moving, with all the Linfield students waiting to be treated, they weren’t going to make it. Not all of our students were seeing the forest for the trees, and our delicate sliver of healing space was about to get crunched.
Sonya looked at me and whispered, I feel like I should lend a hand. I whispered back, Yeah, you should. Do it. So she picked up a packet of needles and got to work, and by the time it was 12:35 pm, all the Linfield students were resting with needles. A little blanket of peace settled briefly over the whole room. We all felt it. After a few minutes, some latecomers appeared and some of the first people to be needled were ready to get up, and the room was in motion again. Although it looked dicey for a bit, in the end the pop-up did exactly what it was supposed to do: that larger, weirder, more healing thing showed up and knit us all together for a moment.
As I noted in an earlier post, this Substack is where I try to make my own learning curve visible via reflective writing, the same thing we ask students to do in their clinic journals. The pop-up that almost fell apart had so many lessons that I want to keep in mind as WCA works on building more organizational partnerships.
With every organizational partnership we have to ask ourselves, are we truly ready to increase our capacity? Have we thought through all of the logistics and have we communicated enough (which is always more than we think)? Holding space with and for our partner organizations is a skill that takes practice; like all skills, we learn by making mistakes (and unpacking them).
For decades I’ve been unhappy with the acupuncture profession and its dominant narrative because in all sorts of ways, I feel like acupuncturists resist seeing the forest for the trees — especially when it comes to making connections with communities. But learning to see the forest for the trees is a leadership development task that ALL of us have to commit to, over and over. It’s not going to happen without focus and intention, and it’s also the only way WCA can grow into its next phase. Thanks to everyone who’s sharing in our learning and growth.