01/12/2026
When I talk about patriarchy, I’m not thinking about it as a purely theoretical concept. I’ve watched it structure my life in real time:
How I grew up.
How my family was (and is) shaped.
How safety, worth, and legitimacy were (and are!) defined.
So of course I see it in my business, too.
I started Public Acupuncture with a simple premise: more acupuncture, at a lower price point, is a public good.
But something interesting has emerged.
Private pricing carries an implicit consent to depth. People arrive expecting structure, intensity, expertise. There’s a clear container.
When that barrier is removed, something unexpected can happen. For some nervous systems, “accessible” starts to feel nebulous: less defined; less containable; harder to trust.
Patriarchal medicine has trained us to associate value with cost, formality, and optimization so when one or many of those things are intentionally removed, suspicion slips in.
So what I’m seeing isn’t necessarily resistance to the idea: in fact, based on how wonderful the idea seems to people, this should be the breakout hit of 2026. But what I *am* seeing is hesitation at the threshold.
Curiosity, but it doesn’t feel fully safe yet.
For context: I’ve been practicing in this community since 2016. Acupuncture, meditations, breathwork, sound baths.
literally tends of thousands of treatments at this point. Entirely word of mouth.
Someone recently told me she booked after overhearing two people on Main Street raving about my work, which obviously made my whole week. 🥹
But we are deeply conditioned to believe that care must look a certain way to count, and Public Acupuncture simply (through not easily) asks something different of us.
That difference can feel surprisingly edgy.
Which is exactly why it matters.
