The Local Healer Acupuncture

03/17/2026

And she’s back!

02/23/2026

Chinese granule herbs from .herbs.ms are looking so pretty this morning. 🌿

11/27/2025

Whether this week brings celebration, fatigue, grief, or quiet repair, may nourishment find you, in whatever form you need. Love to you. 💕

11/07/2025

Late autumn evenings at the clinic are dreamy dark with swirly wafts of moxa smoke heading up to the dome while Olive drifts to sleep by the fire and animal friends visit us from a box of cards.

10/23/2025

A beautiful day. Olive and I send our love and gratitude.

10/21/2025

Happy Tihar and Blessings to Yama, the God of Death, and to all the Crows who serve him. 🕯️

10/14/2025

So happy for the season of Fires and Sweaters!

09/30/2025

The last couple of weeks, folks are reporting that they’ve got “sluggish digestion,” as well as some sleep disturbance. Some folks are adding that they are trying to clear up their schedules because they are feeling more like being at home and don’t have the energy to be out socializing as much as they did this summer. So, I wanted to return to the idea of the Autumn season and how the gesture of this time might be reverberating through our lives.

Right now, the climate is shifting from the expansive warmth of summer toward the containment of winter. Autumn is this in-between time: some days are still hot, others suddenly cool. This back-and-forth unsettles the balance of evaporation and condensation. Clouds gather, heavy with moisture, preparing to release.

In Chinese medicine, autumn belongs to the Lungs and their paired organ, the Large Intestine. The Lung is associated with Gathering Qi (Zong Qi), the form of Qi created when the breath we take in mixes with the nutrients from our food. The Gathering Qi supports both Lung function (breath, chest opening/closing) and Heart function (circulation, rhythm). I’ve written about the Qi Cycle here, in case “Gathering Qi” is something you’ve never heard of and want to read more about it.
Grief, the Po, and the Body’s Wisdom

Each organ has a corresponding aspect of mind. For the Lung, it is the Po, often translated as the “corporeal” or somatic soul. I sometimes describe the Po as our inner “scuba gear” for being alive on earth: it regulates the background functions that keep us here, like the breath, heartbeat and peristalsis of the gut, without our conscious effort.

Read more...

The Lungs and the Cycle of Release

09/30/2025

As I wrote earlier this year, I’m now out-of-network with Providence because they decided to start using a third-party to manage their acupuncture benefits.

I know this is frustrating, especially since many of you signed contracts with Providence for the year. If you’d like to understand your rights or file a complaint with the Insurance Division of the Oregon Department of Financial Regulation1, please email me. I spoke with my contact there and can get you his direct email and phone.

09/30/2025

New batch of soap 🧼 I’m cutting to cure. It’s a celebration of the PNW forests and so much of what I remember growing up: cedar, nettles and hazelnut. It’s going to be ready for the holidays. 🥹
Making soap is one of the things that brings me a little extra joy in this one beautiful life. I hope you’re getting to do some of your joyful things to keep your spirit fed while you keep fighting the good fight.
All my love 🐙

09/28/2025

What AIM and similar trials really offer is not final proof, but evidence that acupuncture can help some women through one of the hardest parts of menopause: safely, and sometimes profoundly.

What AIM and similar trials really offer is not final proof, but evidence that acupuncture can help some women through one of the hardest parts of menopause: safely, and sometimes profoundly.

09/13/2025

When the world is a dumpster fire, sometimes it feels better to make pretty things to gift to the hearts and bellies of the people we love.
This is a little version of Thomas Keller’s Ratatouille (“Confit Byaldi”) that Remy serves Anton Ego in one of our families favorite animated films.