A Beautiful Weekend

This past weekend Skip and I went to New York to do two workshops back to back:  a big workshop at PCOM on Sunday and a smaller one on Saturday for some students from the Swedish Institute who couldn't go to the one on Sunday. We took the redeye flight from Portland to New York on Thursday night and arrived bleary and mostly sleepless on Friday morning to find New York in the grip of what seemed to us (wimps from Portland) seriously nasty weather:  20 degrees, snow showers,  piercing wind. 

But it was a beautiful weekend.

I was a little worried about what it would feel like to teach the same workshop two days in a row. The Saturday workshop went really well: it was very intimate and focused, which is I guess what happens when there are only eight people and you are in someone's living room (thank you, Alison!). I left thinking how much I enjoy small workshops and feeling trepidation about the next day, because I knew that 50-odd people had signed up.

It was amazing. It was nothing like the small workshop, of course -- in fact it felt a lot more like a true conference than a class, because many of the people who attended came explicitly to make connections with other people who were interested in community acupuncture. When we went around the room at the beginning, with people introducing themselves and saying what they needed from the workshop, it emerged that multiple people were already doing community clinics and they were attending for inspiration, to feel the support of other acupuncturists, and to network locally. And it just got better from there.

Two of the people in attendance, Andy Wegman and Kevin Campopiano, have been doing CA for long enough to accumulate some really great experience. Both of them are treating around 100 patients a week, so of course we shanghaied them into being presenters. And fabulous presenters they were. For me, to listen to other people talking about how much FUN it is to treat a lot of patients in a community setting, and about how happy they are practicing this way, is pretty much the ultimate payoff -- along with seeing people in the audience lighting up with the hope that they can do this too.

Over the course of the day, listening to people talk about their plans for clinics and realizing that there is going to be a corridor of community clinics in towns along the Hudson River within a year or so -- not to mention two clinics opening up now in Brooklyn -- I realized that something amazing is happening. We really have built a grassroots network of acupuncturists who are turning to each other for advice and support. There is a groundswell of realization among acupuncturists that we can do this whole thing differently:  we can look on each other as allies instead of competitors, we can approach our businesses creatively rather than being oppressed by insurance companies, we can treat a diversity of patients that reflects the diversity of who we are as practitioners. We can have community instead of isolation. And all this really is happening in a local, decentralized kind of way.  It's not a top down thing, and it's not just about WCA or even CAN; it's rising up all over.

I wanted this so badly and yet it still knocks my socks off to see it HAPPENING. 

Thank you, everyone, everywhere. This is beautiful.