Kim Blaufuss, EAMP, Dipl Ac. Best Acupuncture, LLC |
Helping You, Help Yourself, Help the World
It started a long time ago. It began with my mother and her breast cancer. She was diagnosed when I was in High School. She did chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery. All her hair fell out. Then, her fingers turned black. The surgery went deep into the muscle and the lymph nodes. Yet, she became a survivor.
When her cancer returned, she shied away from Western Medicine, unwilling to experience the pain and sickness of Western Medicine again. This time she flew to Boston, Massachusetts. She studied with Michio Kushi learning the ancient knowledge of food and the healing properties. She followed his rigorous program and returned to her Western Medical Doctor three years later to realize she was in complete remission.
My mother’s experience left a powerful impression on me. I was puzzled that something as simple as food could heal something as serious as cancer. All the medical science that came from the brightest minds could not cure cancer. How could something as simple as food fix something Medicine could not.
I thought Michio Kushi’s knowledge was magic. Someday I wanted to be able to understand the magic he knew.
Decades later, I would finally start down that path. Graduating from one of the top Traditional Chinese Medical (TCM) schools, Oregon College of Oriental Medicine, and attaining my National Certification from NCCAOM, I took off with my Chinese Medicine career.
When I started my career, I had a very narrow idea of what was involved in Chinese Medicine. The boundaries created by Mao Tse Tung when he supported the creation of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) limited my understanding. I didn’t realize until much later that TCM focused on the physical symptoms and a little bit of the emotions. And it didn’t matter because I thought I was never going to be one of those practitioners who believed they could use energy to help heal someone.
Then one day, a client came in with a strange request. He wanted to use Acupuncture to help heal an emotional wound that had haunted him since childhood and negatively impacted every action of his life.
I wasn’t sure there was anything I could do. I had never tried this before, but I knew that Chinese Medicine worked on patterns. I thought if I could find the pattern, I might help. So, I thought hard and made some choices that happened to be correct. He got off the table one day and realized he wasn’t feeling that old hurt. It was gone for the first time in his life. It felt like a corrections officer had opened the door to his prison and set him free.
I thought I got lucky. I knew I needed to find more information, which started me on the trail to Classical Chinese Medicine. I started with history. Then moved to study the three legs of thought in Chinese Medicine: Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism.
I resonated with Daoism. The core beliefs and ideas felt natural to me. I found what I was looking for when I looked in this direction. All the Classical Chinese Medical information seemed to be associated with Daoism.
I discovered that I had the wrong concept of health. I had this vision of health based on my Western background. I live my life, and I go to the doctor when I get sick. That meant that poor health was limited to being physically sick, and the only cure was outside of my hands and in Western Medicine.
I was using Chinese Medicine in the same way. Being ill was only if your physical body was sick, and Chinese Medicine helped return you naturally to health. Yet, I had missed the big picture.
Health in ancient China was comprehensive. Ancient China realized that each individual was unique and came into this world with specific strengths and weaknesses, preferences, and abilities. This would be your personality and your physical constitution. These two things help define how you like to interact with the world and how you contribute to the world. The information can be found in the Ba Gua.
Understanding your personality and physical constitution also highlights your destiny. Destiny is not fated. Destiny is an opportunity based on free will to choose your path. Classical Chinese Medical thought is focused on helping you attain your destiny. Health is something totally different in ancient China. Health is living the best life to complete your destiny.
O.k., so if health is about helping you attain your destiny, then physical illness becomes a very small piece of your health.
Part of living your best life is making the best decisions for you based on the circumstances. The I Ching helps you make wise decisions. This ancient book of wisdom shares wonderful insight to help you make decisions that are in your best interest.
Acupuncture and Qi Gong help tap you back into balance when life has tipped you one way or another.
Acupuncture for emotional health focuses on rebalancing the many levels of emotions. In the West, emotions are limited to the daily feelings of happiness, sadness, fear, anger, stress, and anxiety. TCM can help rebalance these daily emotions. Yet, there is more to emotions.
Acupuncture for emotional health focuses on rebalancing the different levels of emotions. Not all emotions are daily emotions. Most of the work I’ve learned in this area comes from different Daoist lineages from China and Taiwan. What other types of emotions exist? Many people experience deep pains from childhood that negatively impact their life. You may hold core beliefs about who you are that make it challenging to change your life. How about the knee-jerk behavioral issues that hurt your interpersonal relationships. What about chronic stress or anxiety that has become ingrained in your personality? And there is karma.
After I had learned about the different layers of emotions and how to address them through Acupuncture, I turned my attention to Qi Gong. Qi Gong is a unique type of energy healing that can help with more than just physical symptoms. It can help remove negative attachments, clean out your aura, clear your chakras, improve your overall wellness and immune system. It can be done in person or through teleconferencing.
This has been a long road, and with every step I take, the road expands and reaches out in front of me. I will always be learning because there is more knowledge than one person can consume in a lifetime. And there is flexibility in Classical Chinese Medical thought because there is more knowledge than one person can consume. You will see things I can not because your destiny opens up different doors from mine. And by sharing expertise and experience, the pile of shared knowledge is expanded. That is important because much of this information has almost been lost. It won’t be because of me, you, and many others who feel the urge to share information so each of us can reach our full potential.