A soft-spoken man with bare feet pads up to my chair and pulls five needles out from his apron. While coaching me to exhale, he gently inserts them into my outer ears — each one sending a little zing through my body.
I take a cue from the others seated next to me in the circle and close my eyes. A strong gravitational pull draws me in and down. My mind reaches to make lists and chase memories. Something balloons in my chest: fear, sadness, grief? It accelerates and accumulates until I let it bubble over and out — my face now wet, brow no longer furrowed.
My awareness has settled into a fresh expansiveness. My ears cool. I notice ambient music has been softly playing. A woman sits peacefully in a golden patch of sunlight on the floor. I mop up my face with my sleeve. All is calm.
Supported by the National Capitol Area Chapter of Acupuncturists Without Borders (AWB), this free acupuncture and bodywork clinic at Joe’s Movement Emporium serves about 10 to 15 people each Tuesday.
According to Hyattsville resident Alaine Duncan, who chairs the board of the AWB chapter, its mission is to “offer acupuncture and integrative medical care to restore vitality and renew the spirit of people suffering from traumatic stress arising from their migration experience, refugee status, or exposure to racial or ethnic bigotry. We create peace for one family, one community, one world — one person at a time.”
“Western medicine tends to be specialized,” Duncan said. “You see the gastroenterologist for your gut problems and the neurologist for your chronic migraines. But they’re just looking at fixing symptoms.”
Acupuncture, said Duncan, uses Chinese medicine to support the body in healing itself in a holistic way. Activating pressure points can help our bodies come back into balance after we’ve experienced stress, according to Duncan, who has explored this concept more in her recent book Tao of Trauma.
Community members can drop in to the Tuesday clinic any time between noon and 1:30 p.m., when three acupuncturists and one bodywork practitioner are available to provide stress-reduction treatments.
Mount Rainier resident Lynnie Raybuck has attended the clinic regularly since February. “It has been useful to find the discipline to return to my center, to release tension and allow the world and my own needs to assume a more balanced space,” Raybuck said. “After the treatments, I always feel more relaxed, centered, connected and grateful.”
Raybuck also finds a sense of community when sitting silently in the circle receiving treatment. “That was what brought me back permanently,” she said.
Duncan designed the clinic’s treatment based on what she learned during her 12 years running clinics for military veterans in the D.C. area, where she developed an auricular acupuncture program for those dealing with trauma.
Out of the 12 standard acupuncture points on the ear, Duncan chose five that she calls “the high five for restoration and balance.”
One of these points, Duncan said, supports the external hippocampus, which communicates sensate experiences of memory. “There’s the classic story of the vet that hears the helicopter and dives under a car. Or, for me, I smell sugar cookies, and I think of my grandma,” Duncan said. “If we can soothe the external hippocampus, then we can be more present and less influenced by these images and memories.”
Another point helps soothe our fight-or-flight reaction and has become, according to Duncan, especially vital at this time when people are feeling threatened.
“I think that our own inner regulation is really critical to being able to sort out what are the most important things to do as far as cultivating a culture of resistance,” said Duncan. “I think that’s the main job of healers today: to help people cultivate capacity in their ventral vagus nerve and to think strategically and thoughtfully.” She has observed several benefits in her clients, including improved sleep and emotional stability, as well as experiencing less pain and the need for fewer medications.
“Working at Joe’s Emporium continues to remind me how valuable community is,” said Sue Berman, who has volunteered with AWB since 2017. “The fulfillment that comes with supporting people who often come in with tension and leave with peaceful, relaxed bodies and minds is a gift that binds me to this wonderful work.”
Seating clients in a circle while they’re treated, said Duncan, is to promote kinship which can also help mitigate experiences of threat.
“Acupuncture supports the regulation of the vibration in the room as well as the vibration in an individual,” said Duncan. “When people are experiencing it together, say in sports, community theater or line dances, these are all things that are vibrational in nature. When we do it with other people, we’re cultivating embodied experiences of kinship.”
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The free acupuncture and bodywork clinic is offered every Tuesday — no appointment necessary — from noon to 1:30 p.m. at Joe’s Movement Emporium, 3309 Bunker Hill Road. Acupuncturists or body workers interested in volunteering at the clinic may contact awb.nca@gmail.com.
Jessica Arends is the arts, culture and lifestyle columnist for the Life & Times.