Needle technique is more than knowing how to insert a needle and count the turns in a particular direction. It requires more than the memorization of some protocols, or the rote following of a recipe of steps.

In this conversation we explore needle technique as a part of understanding how to feel into the tissues of the body. We discuss the creation of a treatment that relies not on someone else’s outline, but from your own understanding of first principles. 

Listen in for a discussion of using ourselves as much as using the pins when doing acupuncture.  

Head on over to the show notes page for more information about this episode and for links to the resources discussed in the interview. 

Well, do you think you need that needle and that needle?

Well, do you need all three of those kidney points or is one of

those the best kidney point to use?

And then can you stimulate that point to make it interact with the kidney systems

to do the thing you want it to do?

But there's this idea that more is on some level better than if

you saturate the kidney channel, it's more likely to respond.

Well, there's two flaws in that thing.

And this is qiological.

Hey, here we are.

At the beginning of the second year, I'm kind of mixing things up a little bit

as I move forward, playing around with the format a little bit, just try on

some new stuff out, you know, I mean, we do this all the time in clinic, right?

We're trying something new.

We're learning new techniques.

We learned something new about some points.

We read something we're always kind of noodling, noodling around with new things.

The other thing that I'd like to do with this little bit of time before we jump

into the meat of the show, sometimes I've got things that pop up for me in

clinic and it's stuff that I liked.

Share with my friends.

Have you had things happen in the clinic?

Sometimes you notice something you want to talk about it with your friends.

I thought I might also use the first part of the show here.

First couple of minutes, maybe bring up a few things that I noticed in clinic.

Have you noticed that sometimes people come in complaining of some kind of

problem, something that's wrong with them.

I'm using wrong and air quotes here.

And when you listen to their story and you get a bigger picture

of what's going on for them.

The thing that they came in with that is, again, air quotes wrong.

It's not the thing that's wrong with them.

It's actually maybe part of what's right with them.

You know, that raises a lot of questions for me as a practitioner and how we

approach people, how we work with them, how we comply or don't with

their request to take something away.

And it's one of the things I I'd love to have your feedback on.

One of the things that I love about qiological is that this is

an opportunity for us to listen to the voices of our community.

And as I move forward into this newer year here, I'd like to

have your voice on it as well.

You know, maybe we can get some little discussions going here.

Maybe we can even have a show come out of some of this initial riffing

that I have from time to time.

Anyway, if you've got some thoughts on this thing about

a person's again, air quotes.

Actually not being what's wrong with them, but what's right with them.

I'd love to hear your thoughts about it.

You can write me here at the podcast or turn on the recording application that I'm

sure is on your computer or cell phone.

Send me an audio.

Master's.

That would be great too.

Love to have your voices on the show here.

My guest today is Justin Phillips.

Justin is a long time Tygee and she gone practitioner.

He learned when he was just a young whippersnapper.

He's got a clinical practice at stone gate.

And he is also in the acupuncture department at Alma graduate

school of integrative medicine.

And he's the author of the book, the living needle it's

published by singing dragon.

It's about acupuncture technique, and that is what we're here to do today.

We're going to yak about acupuncture.

What else would you do on qiological Justin?

Welcome to qiological.

Thank you so much for having me

on.

So there's all kinds of places to start, but I'm going to start with this one.

Why write a book writing book.

It's a total pain.

It takes a lot of attention.

It takes lots of time, sleepless nights, endless editing, whatever

got you going on, writing a book.

So that's sort of a long-term labor of love for me.

Actually, my undergraduate degree was in creative writing and oratory, and

I had always wanted to be an author, particularly in the world of fiction,

which I, at this point actually have published a fiction novel as well.

And the second one is set to come out, hopefully later this year,

but as far as the technique.

That was a little bit more of an unplanned endeavor on some level, because

my background in writing, I think I had always expected that eventually I

would generate some sort of literature in the field, but I didn't have a, an

end game for that or a target insight.

I figured some point on down the line, I might gain enough clinical pearls

that it would be worth writing down.

But I guess it was probably about three years ago now.

I was hired on at ioma, as you mentioned.

And the class that they brought me in to teach was their

acupuncture technique one class.

So for the very, very first semester just started acupuncture school, don't

know anything, students, their very first encounter with needle technique.

That was the class that I stepped in and took over.

And I was delighted by that technique has been a longtime passion of mine.

I studied with Dr.

Robert Johns.

Who's the author of the art of acupuncture.

I studied with , who was one of the senior students and still teaches millennia

to long Julia, who of course was the coauthor of applied channel period.

So a lot of very active needlework.

So that was a class that when they asked me about that really suited me

and I was very excited to teach it.

And when I came in and took over from the previous teacher, I looked

over the syllabus of course, and tried to, to match it to some degree

because obviously you want to keep a continuity within the correct.

Yeah, up to and including looking at his selection of textbooks.

And at the time the textbook they were using it wasn't the worst textbook in

the world, but it was far from great.

The big reason that he was using it.

I spoke to him about it.

The big reason he was using it is because it came with a DVD

and on the DVD, they actually demonstrated some of the techniques.

So rather than it just being words on a page, they actually

showed you some things.

And so it was decent.

So I kept using it for a little while, but as I would teach the class.

The thing that I noticed was there was a lot of information that I thought

was conveyable directly via texts that the students didn't have access to, or

that I would say things in class that didn't have to be hands-on information,

but that they would then go back to the book and it wasn't in there.

They couldn't go back and read the source material and say, okay, well,

yeah, I remember when you said this in class and I can study with that and

try to grow my own practice of needles.

And so I decided that I was going to try to find a better needle technique.

What can I start looking around?

And what I encountered was there are a number of books out there on needle

technique, and some of them are, are relatively good, but the problem is,

is what they lacked in my opinion was a really clear focus on what you're

actually doing because of course, as you and I both know, needle technique

is a very manual thing you are doing.

So.

And what you got was, there were either very generalized

descriptions of needle technique.

Like two-tone, if I rotate the needle clockwise, it's like, well, that's great.

But that doesn't, that doesn't really tell me anything about needle technique.

That's a very abstract thought.

And the other end of that spectrum was they would have books on

the technique that really were books on acupuncture theory.

And they would talk about the techniques around that, but they really delved into.

Chief theory and the movements of the channels and things like that.

And again, left out that aspect of, yeah, but what am I

really doing with the needle?

Because here I have this physical object that I've put into a human body

and it's in tissue and I'm moving it and I'm wiggling it and I'm rotating

it and I'm lifting and dressing and I'm doing all these things, obviously.

I mean, something is happening there.

What is it?

And so there wasn't really anything out there that spoke to that.

And I was sitting around with several of my colleagues one day, grousing about that

mercilessly as we sometimes want to do.

And one of my dear friends looked at me and he said, well, you're still

bent out of shape about it just right.

Right.

And I thought to myself, well, yeah.

And so the living needle is what was born out of that.

And it is essentially, and if you talk to one of my students that went through my.

They will tell you, it is almost chapter by chapter my class.

I just sat down and put my class in book formats that when the students

went back and looked at that they would be able to say, oh yeah, okay.

I remember when you said X, Y, Z.

And when we talked about these tissue planes or what it feels like to engage

these things or what I'm actually physiologically doing with the technique.

And then I put that out there and I reached out to singing dragon.

Uh, again, I had several colleagues read it and look it over for contents.

And they suggested that it would be something that would be a

value to people beyond my class.

And so I reached out and singing Greg and was excited about it.

And one thing led to another.

And here we

are, if I'm understanding this correctly, you came and you

took over this class, she had notes.

You had a book, you started adding to it.

As you were learning to teach the class, you had all these notes and

you had this experience from class and you'd add this other stuff.

And, and that's really what became the.

It really is.

It really is.

And in fact, knobbly enough in relation to my other novels, the book

actually wrote itself very quickly.

It was not a lengthy writing process because it really was just sort of

sitting down and organizing my thoughts and typing them out in a meaningful

and useful way, as opposed to the novel that I wrote or some of the other work

that I've done, where it really was.

This act of dredging out the depths of creation to try to make something.

Out of nothing, this sort of preexisted, I just needed to actually put it on

paper, much user, a book to write isn't it.

Oh, it

really is.

I think the, the initial actual sit down from first key stroke to final completion

took me maybe three weeks to write the whole thing for the first draft.

Then obviously, as you suggested.

Back and forth and endless editing and showing it to peers and getting reviews

and changing and modifying until it was what it needed to be to send off to

the publisher as a possible manuscript.

But, but that initial writing actually went really

quickly.

Yeah.

Well, you know, I've heard that's true.

It's a creative process.

As well.

Many times people, they get caught by something, they get caught by an idea,

the muse kind of steps in, and you just go to work on the dang thing and you come

up for air at a certain point and go, wow.

There it is.

Yeah, very much so.

So

I find that if I'm trying to learn something new, I spend a lot

of time thinking about what I'm doing.

It's like, you know, I'm doing this, I'm doing that, my hands doing this,

you know, my attention is going here.

Sometimes I'm so busy, focused on what I'm doing with my hands.

I totally forget to pay attention to what's going on with.

Any suggestions for those of us that have this kind of a, an issue, how do

we work with our attention in such a way that we can be attentive to I'm

going to call it technique attentive to our thought process about the

technique and attentive to what's actually happening in the room with our

patient, as we're doing whatever we do.

Yeah,

absolutely.

And I think that's a really critical point.

And in, and amongst that, I think even beyond just that initial awareness,

even within the technique itself, there are so many opportunities in and

around the idea of needle technique that can be explored and added in.

And the book touches on some of those from order of insertions and needle

directions, to the patient's breath and what I encourage students to do,

particularly first-years that really don't have a lot of experience with this.

Pick a focus and say, okay, this is what I think is really important in

this instance with this treatment and then put some attention there, but then

also bride broaden the gaze a little bit to also take in the rest of that.

And as you become more comfortable with these techniques, as they become

more natural, as they become more internalized, then you can start to

add things in it's like driving a car.

You know, when you first, the very first time you drive a car, you're bundle of.

Every single thing you do.

If you're going to move your foot from the gas to the brake or the brake to

the gas, there's an active thought process there you're considering

how much pressure are you applying?

Every head check as a UN equivocated act of God requires absolute focus, but

the longer you do it and the more you.

The more natural that becomes, and pretty soon you stop thinking, okay, I need to

take my foot off the brake and I need to put my foot on the gas and I need to apply

about this much pressure so that I can get over there and you start simply looking,

okay, well, I want the car over there.

And the body then complies with this natural set of, I mean,

essentially neurologically programmed at that point sub routines that

gets you from point a to point B.

And the reality of it with technique is that there is no.

The only way to get better at it is to simply execute the techniques

over and over and over outside of clinical setting, inside a clinical

setting on friends that will let you practice with them on your pet.

If it will sit still long enough on an orange, on a bar of soap,

on a skin allegory practice kit, it doesn't really matter.

And the other thing to me that I think is really important in the process of

developing that natural fluency of needle technique is that I think a lot of people.

Their tendency is to focus on what am I doing instead of what am I feeling?

And I think that that's one of the big educational gaps in modern day

acupuncture, as far as teaching of needle technique is we really emphasize

the doing, but to me, the needle is not just a treatment modality.

It's also a diagnostic tool.

And in that I can put a needle into tissue and there I have this pro.

That is subcutaneous that is now experiencing body tissue

that I can't visualize.

There is a quality to that body tissue.

There's a sensation to that.

And because of a number of years in practice, I've gained a familiarity with

what different sensations might indicate in relation to a patient's constitution

when then compared to symptomology and pulse and tongue and all the other

fun things that we use to figure out what's going on with the patient.

But that understanding of the tissue then allows me.

Too, of course, initially when I did it say, well, the tissue feels like this.

I should do set the mountain on fire.

And so I would do that and I'd be very mindful of that technique.

But as I did that, I would try to also remain really mindful of what

the sensation of the patient's tissue was on the other side and feel those

changes and those shifts, and then go back and double check and see how

the pulse responded check in with the patient, see how they were responding and

over time, what that allowed me to do.

Was this almost conversational relationship with technique where

instead of me now having to be mindful of, okay, I am going to rotate

clockwise and emphasize thrusting while needling in an oblique angle.

Instead, it's this moment where I say, okay, that tissue feels very vacuous and

collapsed downstream from this point.

So I'm just going to engage that and try to bring some tonicity into this area.

And it becomes very natural and very spontaneous in that way.

And it's just, it's sort of a long uphill climb to get there.

It is, again, it's that going through lifestyle?

It's, I'm going to do something I'm going to cultivate that extensively.

So when

I hear you talking about the different sensations that you feel in

the tissue, and it makes me think about how we feel different things in the.

And I know that in my own experience, I have had similar things.

I put my hands on people and there's something that the tissue

says it kind of has a story.

Sometimes I give it its own name because we have names for

pulses, but we don't necessarily have names for how tissues feel.

I'm wondering if you could go into it a little bit with us about some of the

common sensations that you feel and what they mean and what you do about

it.

I think to take that from the simplest place, the, we can look at it in

just the basic concepts of excess and deficiency in that when I'm needling

a patient that has a deficiency in a channel system, the point will

by its nature often feel deficient.

There'll be an acuity there.

Uh, you could almost, depending on the degree of the acuity, it's almost like

you've put the needle into a vacuum.

There's just nothing on the other side of it, you know, that there's

physiological tissue there.

You can see the needle in the patient, but it feels like it's just in space.

It's just empty.

There's nothing there.

Or if it's not that aggravated, then potentially it has a sensation almost as

if you are a needling into soft butter.

There's a consistency there, but there's no tonicity.

Conversely, if you're needling into a channel system, that's very access.

Say for instance, a, a stomach channel that is full of flim heat

and you needle into a stomach 40, that point will then feel very tight.

It might even be difficult to pass the needle down into the deeper

tissue planes, because there's a resistance there that accumulation

that is present in the food system.

And again, the physiological or.

By its nature of the channel system has percolated out into the channel

and taken up residence in those points.

And as you needle in, you can really feel that.

And with both those, to me, my desire as a needle technician is to rectify that.

And so if I needle into this vacuous hollow tissue, my goal then is going

to be to wind that tissue up a little bit to create the body's engagement.

Okay.

You know, this is where I think some of the other technique books I looked

at, I think missed an opportunity to speak to some of these things,

because there's a physiological reality to the techniques that we create.

For instance, we, we know that , we wind the needle clockwise, but the

reason we do that of course, is because subcutaneous tissue actually winds

around the needle when we move it.

And interestingly, Almost every structure in the body all the way down

to the strands of DNA, wind clockwise.

And so when we're rotating this needle clockwise and we're drawing

this tissue with it, we are in fact, winding the body back in the

direction it is designed to be wound.

We are tightening the systems that have lost their tonicity by winding them

in the direction that they naturally.

And when we're emphasizing the thrusting and the, in a thrusting quantifying

technique, that needle is drawing the tissue downward and it is compressing it

towards the bone and that compression, if I reach over and I, I pushed on

your shoulder and held my finger there, what would start to accumulate

around the area of that pressure?

Because there is less space in the vasculature and in the lymphatics, and

there would be an actual accumulation.

I am tonifying that area.

And it's.

Goes there and stays there.

And we're doing the same thing when we're emphasizing the thrusting

and a ton of fine needle technique.

And that it's subtle because the needle is not so direct as a pressing finger,

but there is still that downward emphasis of movement that is pulling tissue in a

downward direction, creating compression.

And so it would be some combination of techniques like that in order to wind

the body back into a level of tonicity that was absent and to the contrary.

In the case of, you know, the, the stomach phlegm heat that I talked

about and I needle into stomach orients, it's very, very tight.

And at that point it just becomes the opposite.

We're going to unwind that tissue a little bit.

We're going to lift with the needle, which then of course, draws those

tissue planes open and allows more capillary movement, more lymphatic.

Uh, more cheeky movements if you will.

And that then is going to allow that space to move maybe even a little bit of

shaking or vibrating techniques, because of course, when you shake and to form

Fatia, it releases anti-inflammatory chemicals, it generates electrical charge.

And all of that, again, is going to bring down that hypertonic state and

hopefully normalize that back to a state in which there's normal movements.

And to me, the idea there being someone that's spent a bit of time

and most in the idea of channel.

The goal is that if I can come to this access point, this central node of

function within the channel, and I can create a shift there, then just like

putting something into a river upstream that will then travel along the channel.

And the channel will gradually normalize to that new pressure, whether it is

creating a tonicity that will then propagate up the channel to create

a ton of fine effect within the system, or whether that is clearing

a pressure that then will allow us.

To continue to clear and open and move because we've created

some space for that to happen.

And all of that is going to happen with that tissue response.

And I, I have people that ask me, well, how long do you retain needles?

My answer is always well till they're done.

And if you're paying attention to the tissue response, you can know

when that is, because at some point the body does the thing and then you

say, well, the body did the thing.

You don't need me anymore.

And

so when you're checking to know that it's done.

You're checking in on that, the feeling within the tissue, right?

If it's been vacuous, is it now full?

If it's been excess, is it now softer?

Right.

And I'll confirm with that as well.

And that I also, I frequently go back and retake the post multiple times during

a treatment second with the patient.

What sensations are they having?

Which I think is important anyway, because we live in a world where

people don't realize they have feet until they stubbed their toes.

So to me, one of the nice things about doing.

A lot of manipulation, a lot of technique is patients often do get

some sensation, not painful sensation.

My needling technique is very delicate.

Like I'm very gentle, but they'll often feel things.

They'll feel things moving.

They'll feel things shifting and the act of engaging them and saying,

Hey, do you feel anything over here?

Oh, you may feel a sense of.

Warmth traveling down your leg.

Oh, you may get a sense of pressure here.

Don't worry.

That's okay.

That's normal.

It gets them checking in with their body again, and it's

reteaching them to participate in their own healing experience.

And so I'm checking in with them.

I'm double checking with the pulse.

And then I'm also checking with the tissue there at the needle to make

sure that even if I do get the shift that I wanted there at the needle,

that needle may have done its work, but have we then caused this systemic

rebalancing the shift within the system.

Dramatic tension and dynamic hydrostatic pressure within the body.

Have we shifted that in a way that the overall constitutional

pattern that we're trying to address has also shifted with that?

Or do I then need to say, well, let me go over here and now work on this other

needle or do a manual therapy or cupping or whatever, because we need to continue

to move that tension within the body.

And so the whole system normalizes because sometimes one needle

will do that, but often not.

So

you're checking it.

At each needle, each sort of listening post, I guess you could say, and seeing

what's going on there in relation to everything else, you know, you do some

work down here on the stomach channel.

What did that do to say the large intestine channel that you

might have a needle in up above,

right?

Absolutely.

Absolutely cause those are all in communication all the time.

And we know that from the basics of this channel theory and that those repaired

Yangming or how, you know, if we look to the 10 balance method, there are so many

ways that these channels talk and relate to each other, even then beyond that,

even into the physiological reality, if there's no part of the body that isn't

connected to any other part of the body.

And so it is possible.

I look at a needle prescription as an architect.

Where each needle ideally is building and creating a movement in relation

to the other needle that then is going to create an overall structure

and movement within the body.

In order to normalize physiology, I very rarely will put in two needles

that I don't put in because they have something to do with each other.

It's very rarely woman to put in this, for this thing over here.

And this for this other thing over here and this, for this

totally other thing, it's always, they're talking to each other.

They're relating to each other, because again, this is not original thought to me.

This is, this is channel theory stuff.

There is this idea of the channels as these systems of dynamic movement that

are moving in relation to each other.

For instance, you know, the spleen channel moves up, therefore

the stomach channel moves down.

So if I have stomach Xi rebellion, it behooves me to also look to

see, okay, is spleen cheats.

Because of the stomach G is suddenly going up, is the spleen she's still going

up to, or has it fallen in comparison or perhaps did the stomach T rebel because

the spleen she wasn't rising and something had to go up and if the spleen wasn't

going to do it by God, the stomach would.

And so it becomes this process of looking at these dynamic patterns of movements

and trying to normalize those with some sort of pattern of needles that

then speak and relate to each other.

It's

great to listen to you.

I'm just, it's helpful to have the reminder that every needle that we use

needs to be in communication with the other needles that we're using, that

they're not these sort of separate things, but they're actually working together.

There has to be some kind of connection between each one.

If we really wants to say.

To respond.

Yeah, absolutely.

Oh, I drive the poor student interns that work under me as a supervisor.

I drive.

Because I come in and they tell me these needle prescriptions,

and I'm immediately like, well, by that one, what about that one?

Why are you using that one?

What's that one doing?

I mean, that's great stuff to get when you're a student,

right?

Absolutely.

Well, they typically come back and tell me that it had a lot

of value and they appreciate it.

But at the time they, they tend to get a little flustered and grumpy with me,

but I'm not going to stop doing it.

And they keep coming in as my answer.

And so I figure it's working out.

Why is it that you think students come up with these

prescriptions of points that.

Seem unrelated.

Yeah.

So I think that speaks to a lot about how Chinese medicine is taught and

even more so how it's tested today, you know, the students in a lot of ways, I

think going through school are prepared for boards, which is not unreasonable

because you've got to get through those if you're going to practice.

But at the same time, the board standard of course, is still those

point combinations in the back of.

And those point combinations are often sort of vague and not necessarily always

pattern directed in that, you know, you look at and says, well, these are

the 10 points for headache, and these are the seven points for indigestion.

And, and they're not really given any grounding into differential patterning

or into the channel system itself.

And so the students get this knowledge.

And I think that there's often this idea that, well, we've got to get them through.

Then they'll really figure out how to do it, then they'll figure

out how to put these points together in a more meaningful way.

Once they've jumped through the hoop, I guess, and to me, I think that's a little

bit of a disservice in that I feel like they have the ability to study for and

pass the test without us withholding any of the additional knowledge to say,

Hey, here's how you really do this.

And I think that part of that comes to.

I feel like needle technique in general is underemphasized in a

lot of our training these days.

And because of that, instead of this idea of I can put in a needle or a couple of

needles and really make those work with the body, there's this idea that if I

want to make a treatment work, what I'm going to do is put in enough of the right.

And so I'm just going to try to put in all the needles that might do a thing.

For instance, when I work with these students, one of the things that I often

ask them is what do you think you need that needle and that needle, you know,

they'll come in and they'll say, okay, whatever the pattern is, I'd like to do

kidney three, kidney six and kidney seven.

And I say to them, well, do you need all three of those kidney points or as one

of those, the best kidney point to use.

And then can you stimulate that point to me?

Interact with the kidney system to do the thing you want it to do.

You actually need all those points, but there's this idea that more

is on some level better than if you saturate the kidney channel.

It's more likely to respond.

But to me on some level, there's two, two flaws in that thinking.

And I guess I'll add the caveat right now of obviously I advocate for my

method because it's how I do it, but I also believe that there's a

lot of right ways to do acupuncture.

There's a lot of people that do it differently than I do and get great.

But I'm the one you're interviewing.

So I'm gonna tell you how I do it and that's what I want to hear.

Yeah, there you go.

So to me, the flaw in that is twofold.

And one is because of how I look at the channel system is the system of dynamic

movements and how I look at the needles as guide points or stimulus into that.

If I'm putting in a whole bunch of needles on a single channel, all

I'm really doing is muddling the signal I'm sending because now that

channel body has to try to figure out.

What I was telling in the first place, it's like being in a room with three

different people, talking to you.

It's very difficult to keep track of all of that.

Whereas if I can select the exact perfect needle on that channel, or

at least a pretty good needle on that channel and put in just one and then

through skillful manipulation, get the channel to respond in a meaningful way.

That's a very clear single message that I'm sending to the body of.

This is what I want you to do.

The other aspect of that is really about central nervous

system function because to me.

One of the things that we run into of course, is that most patients

that I encounter are at least in a somewhat deficient state.

Cause we live in a fairly tired and wired society.

Most people are a little bit run down.

And so because of that most healing and I guess this is true, whether they're

tired or not, most healing occurs in a parasympathetic nervous system state.

Okay.

Absolutely.

In fact, I don't think we can heal unless we're in a

parasympathetic nervous systems.

Right.

Precisely.

And so, and my needle technique is pretty good, but nonetheless, I'm still

sticking metal needles in a person.

And if I can put three needles in a person that's a little bit of an agitation to

the system and that might cause them a little bit of stress or what have you, if

they're a frequent acupuncture patient, they're probably totally calm about it.

But the more needles I put, the more opportunity that is for me to

overstimulate that patient or to cause an uncomfortable reaction or to make

them nervous, all of which then pushes them into a sympathetic nervous state.

So the least I can do to a patient is what I want to do because to me, that's,

what's going to keep them in that healing state with less gamble that I'm just going

to roll them over into this other state that I'm trying to get them out of in the.

Well, it sounds also that you're trying to send

one clear message to the body.

Right.

Very much so.

Right.

Your metaphor of several people.

I'll talk to me.

It's the same time.

I mean, that really makes sense more is not good or right.

Yeah.

It also occurs to me that sometimes I think this just because we're Americans

and we really do think more is good.

We think shouting might get more attention, but really if you really

want someone's attention, you

whisper.

Yeah.

All right.

Yeah.

I like that.

I'm gonna steal that.

I think speaking to sort of student expectations, one of the things

I've seen on several occasions is.

Either I will offer what I would suggest as a point prescription to students.

And I try not to just tell them, do it my way.

Here's what I would do.

I will give them my suggestions, but I want to let them build

their own, their own approaches.

They have to be their own clinician at some point, but every now and then

one will really take to heart and say, okay, I'm going to try it your way.

And they'll do three or four needles or a patient won't show up.

So I'll come in and do a treatment on a student as a demonstration or something.

And the response to that.

Is often this sort of wide-eyed miraculous awe that three

needles accomplish the tasks.

I remember a particular incident where I had a student that said to

me, you know, having seen how you treat, I really want to try that.

And I said, okay, well on your next patient, let's, we'll talk it through.

And we'll arrive at a very, very clear differential physic, you're

going to do very few needles.

You've got to have a crystal clear.

We're gonna arrive at a very clear differential diagnosis we're going to

make it should have anyway anyway, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

There's a whole other pet peeve story there, but we'll arrive

at this really clear diagnosis.

We'll come up with a very specific point protocol and then I'll talk

you through the manipulation.

You'll do that.

Okay, great.

So we did that and it was funny because not just the student, but the patient,

the student came up to me afterwards and said the patient was a man.

They actually, when they got off the table, they told me, you know, when you

only put in three needles, I thought that this isn't going to work at all,

but I feel even better than I usually do.

And they were just flabbergasted.

And I said, well, yeah, cause you didn't overload the system.

You did what was necessary and nothing more.

Well, you

know, this really makes me think about one of the

greatest spiritual texts of all time.

And of course we all registered.

No, the one I'm talking about.

Right.

And it fell in the taco factory

Goldilocks and the three bears.

Oh, Hey, there you go.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

I totally see where you're going with that.

And I think that's absolutely true.

Not too hot, not too cold.

Just rice.

Right?

Not too big.

Not too small.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And for each person for each different, well, I guess we could

say constitutional type or if we're talking Chinese medicine, right?

Yeah.

You know, I, I want to get back for just a moment, you know, your thoughts about the

students, you know, and I was a student once too, and I remember doing this right.

It's kind of like, well, we've got this buffet of points.

I'm going to take one of these and one of these or these, and you know, and

that sort of thing, a lot of this stuff that we learn, we learn it because

it is going to be on a test and we have to pass the task to get started.

I mean, I remember teachers saying this.

They said this kind of stuff.

It's going to be on the test.

It may or may not be helpful to you in.

But it's going to be on the test.

So you need to know this for the task.

And I remember going to other classes where the teachers would say the

stuff I'm going to teach you today.

Don't try to use this to pass the test with it.

You'll fail.

There's stuff you got to know because you got to know it because

they're going to test you on it and then there's everything else.

Right?

Absolutely.

And I agree.

I think the students are smart enough to get that.

I think that some of the challenges of the structure of how we

teach a lot of that is based on.

Really on some level, I think what Mao did to Chinese medicine when

he came through and sort of got it.

A lot of the conceptual frameworks out of how this stuff works, the

underlying really fundamentally spiritual concepts behind it, because

I think that those are whether you buy into the spirituality of it or not.

I think those are often the portals into that stuff.

In fact, I'm teaching a class at ioma right now.

That's just an elective.

It's not, it's not gonna help you with any test ever,

except the ones that your patients are gonna bring you.

Right.

And I called it psycho-emotional frameworks of Chinese medicine because

psycho-emotional health is something I work with a lot and it's a point of

interest to students, but really what I've tried to create with it as a class where

certainly we use that as the entry point.

But a lot of what we're talking about is what are these fundamental systems

in Chinese medicine really mean?

If I talk about the five phases.

What am I even really talking about?

It's not some dry chart on a page where I remember that the fire element is

related to red and the heart and the small intestine and better it's, it's a dynamic

system that has an implication to it.

And it has an implication to how we live our lives and how we think about things

and how we interact with our world and how we interact with our medicine and the same

with the extraordinary vessels and as on Fu and the channels and all these things.

And it's funny, cause I actually had a suit just yesterday.

She's fairly early on in the program, but you said to me, when I first signed

up for this class, I was, I was really nervous to take it both because I'm

sort of early in the program, but also because my course load this quarter was

really heavy already, but I knew that you were only going to be offering it once a

year and I really wanted to get into it.

And I'm now really grateful.

I did because, because of the way you're talking about these core systems,

I took a test in this other class.

And I got an a on it, and I don't think I would have done that otherwise, because

what happened was the, the questions that I couldn't, that I hadn't memorized.

I understood because I think that students have the ability to understand.

And to me, I think that that understanding doesn't actually limit their ability

to pass the boards and the tests.

I think that there is certain information that has to be memorized

as wrote simply here's what they're going to put on the boards.

But I think that one of the beauties of Chinese medicine and what I love about

it, because I'm too lazy to memorize.

A lot of stuff is that if you really devote yourself to understanding

these core concepts, you can build the system from the ground

up for almost any situation.

And it makes you incredibly adaptable as a clinician.

And I think that that's really why often those washes a point prescriptions crop.

Is because we're not necessarily teaching them how to understand from the ground up.

We're telling them this is what you need to know from the test.

And occasionally we pointed in that direction.

And so to me as a supervisor and a teacher, when I come to the classroom,

my goal is always to challenge their thinking, because if I can get them

to think about it, that will do them more service than I could ever do them.

Because now they're thinking critically about these things

and that's how you really move.

And that's true.

You know, even with the needle technique book, my goal was not to say here is how

to correctly execute needle technique.

It was to put together a text that said, here is my understanding

of the physiological realities of what you're doing with the needle.

Think about that.

And then you can do whatever you want with it.

Like it doesn't matter what kind of technique you use if you want to do master

Tung points or Japanese acupuncture or traditional Chinese acupuncture channel

theory or what it doesn't matter.

Because it's all the same type of body on some level, and we're all sticking

needles in the same tissue basically.

And so if we have the ability to understand and think critically about

what's happening on the other end of that needle, well, whatever technique

you want to use just got better because now you're thinking about it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, it sounds like what you're talking about is what I

like to think of as first principles.

I mean, you can look at a needle prescription and go, oh yeah, that's

pretty clean sheet efficiency.

But if you understand the dynamic of why this particular person has what looks

like spleen sheet efficiency, you'll be able to craft that prescription that

matches this person, because you're working from those basic principles.

You're not working from here's a prescription.

You know, I hear about prescriptions.

I hear about protocols.

You know, it's like, well, what's the protocol for XYZ.

And I'm thinking protocol protocols to go to first principle.

So I'm curious to know what are the first principles

for you?

I mean, really, I build a lot of stuff up from just the simple binary and the

scale that comes from that of just getting in young, because I think that if you

understand that and you recognize that that initial movement and historically,

you know, from the doubt to the one to the two and the movement of young

and the formation of Vienna and that division and the Ty G2 and all that.

If you can hold that lens up to these various systems, what it allows you

to start to do is see that dynamic movement because physics at its most

basic and certainly Chinese medicine at its core will tell you if something is

going up, something else is going down.

If something is moving in, something else is moving out, you should

be, or at least it should be.

And if it's not task is then to rebalance that.

To bring it back to the most corporates, but would be that because from there, you

know, I could spin that off into talking about design food and how those interact.

We could talk about, uh, the channel system and the six steps and all that.

But all of that, I think stacks on top of that, understanding that there's a

dynamism to the movements of the body, you know, speaking to the psycho-emotional

class, one of the first things I tell them is, you know, if you go back to the home

DNA DJing, when they talk about emotion, they don't describe how a person's.

They described what direction the CIMA routes.

And I think that fact right there is really central to Chinese medicine

that at the end of the day, what we're doing, because we're not a structural

medicine, I'm not cutting anything.

I'm not, unless I'm doing cleanup, I'm not even really massaging anything.

I'm sticking a needle in and wiggling tissue around a little bit.

But the, the actual effect of that should be almost nothing.

But instead it's human.

But that's because I'm interfacing with the body on the level of

movements and function and that can have this incredible effect.

And so that idea is really central to me.

I've started playing a lot actually with the idea.

And I don't know if you've run into the idea of tensegrity.

Oh

yeah.

But minster fuller.

Yeah.

And I've really, I've started building integrity models in my

spare time, actually, because to me, I hit this point where I

realized that the way I look at the.

Via the channels and be a Chinese medicine is very much it's integrity model.

Okay.

So for those people that are not familiar with

Bucky and his work, what is

tensegrity?

So it's integrity is the idea that a system can hold the dynamic

tension in such a way that even though there aren't hard points

junctures, like if I build a shelf.

Solid pieces connected to solid pieces, connected to solid pieces to hold a

shape, but its integrity model would be more like if I had cables attached to

the ceiling and attached to the floor and shelves suspended between those, the

whole thing would still hold its shape.

Even though the hard points aren't connected to the

hard points because there's.

Preloaded tension that holds everything in place.

And one of the values of the idea of sincerity, and I think this is

where it really started to play into the channel system for me is

that it's integrity structure is actually much more structurally solid

than an actual structural model.

Like if I have that shelf that I built out of heart points and I go over

and I bend that, or I twist that, those, those pieces, because they're

all solid pieces, they're going.

But with those dynamic cables, I can come over and I can twist that and I can pull

that and I can bend that out of shape.

And because there's some play within those cables, the system will adapt.

It will move to the stresses I'm putting on it.

And then when I let go, it just returns back to its normal shape.

Unless I have overstressed one of those members of the point where

now it can't hold that tension.

And within 10 Segretti, there's the seven laws of sincerity.

I don't remember them all perfectly off the top of my head, but there's this

idea that the whole system has to be pre.

And so to me, what you see there is that is the active interplay of lung sheet

of sins, kidney grasps, suici, ASEN, stomach Chidi sentence, you know, uh,

liver, smooth, cheap gallbladder anchors to, you know, it's like, there's the, all

these points where there's this dynamic interplay where one thing is going to

do something in relation to the other.

And if they're not both doing it together, then that creates

disharmony in the system.

And so to me, what it all comes down to with this tensegrity model concept

is how do I then rebalance that system?

And so for fundamental principles, that all comes back to yin and

yang, because in that sincerity concept, you've got two things.

You have soft structures that are deformable and you have solid

structures anchored between them that give it shape and that's yen.

And that's your.

Actually, I guess I got that.

I was young and yen, but either way you, you get the point.

And so when I then start to look at a system and look at that

imbalance, my question is, okay, where has the young Indian gone awry?

And then I'm going to localize it to a specific system and make that more and

more narrow and more and more specific.

Okay.

A patient comes in and I see that they've got, um, an esophageal hernia

and, uh, acid reflux and heartburn and.

And I immediately, okay, everything's moving up.

That's a problem.

And now I say, okay, now let me go to the pulse and the channels and say, well,

where in the system did that start from?

And right off the cuff, the two possibles that immediately spring to mind, and

we know there's plenty of them, but the two possibilities is okay, we've got

something going on in the stomach that generated some heat or some blockage that

didn't allow stomach Chita descendants.

So now it's going up.

Or the other possibility is there was a deficiency in the spleen.

And so it stopped going.

And because that changed that tension within the system, the stomach

turned upward to replace that.

And in either case, the response is to say, well, okay, let's put those two

things back where they should have been.

And so it really comes down to that very core yin and yang concept.

Right.

So if you can sort of whittle it down to that particular place.

Where it's out of balance.

Yeah.

You wouldn't need many needles.

Yeah,

no, not at all.

I mean, in the case with the dynamic.

Yeah.

And in the, you know, it's in the case like Dave, if I discovered that it is

in fact, a spleen sheet efficiency, uh, not ascending G in causing the

stomach to rebel upward, it's a simple pro you know, spleen three to a SIM

spleen, cheat, stomach, 36 Dizon stomach G maybe a do 20 to help the spleen.

She gets at the top and you're done.

And then it's just a matter of going and actively engaging the needles

to make sure that the spleen.

He is in fact, moving she up through the system, go up to the do 20 and make sure

that once you did that, it got there and you gave it someplace to hang out.

And then the stomach 36, you just make sure that the system is clear

and descending, and then you're done,

you know, this really is the beauty and poetry of acupuncturist.

It really is an acupuncture is very,

very much poetry to me.

I

want to get back to another thing here, and then I'm realizing we're

going to have to wrap this up pretty soon.

Although we could probably go a lot long.

Well, I would be happy to come

back or we may have to do a part.

Okay, fair enough.

I say that all the time.

Oh my God.

I'm creating like way more work for myself.

I just know it.

Well, you would want to get bored.

Well, yeah, no, not much likelihood of that.

You're a long time Tygee practitioner.

I wouldn't say I'm a long time steady Tigie practitioner, but I've, you

know, I've got a little bit of time, enough to know enough to know that.

Starting with the basics going over the basics, doing the basics again and again,

and coming back to it again and again, no matter how long you've been doing it,

no matter how skilled you are, there's something about coming back to basics.

That seems really important.

That's it?

I mean, that's a part of hygiene, right?

Absolutely.

What's a part of calligraphy.

So I know it's a part of IQ though, that I used to do.

So when we're doing.

Practices, it's kind of a capital P practice.

We never stopped doing the basics.

What are a couple of the basics that you would consider a central to working with

needles that we can all, no matter where we are, whether it's our first month in

school or we've been at this for 30 years, what are some of the basics that, uh,

that helped keep us engaged and keep us.

So since we've been talking in and young, I'll, I'll keep

the binary and I'll give you two.

And the very first one, and to me, the single most important thing

about needle technique is sensitivity is when you put a needle into

tissue, can you feel, and can you.

Meaningfully describing by meaningfully.

I just mean to yourself and to how you're then going to engage that tissue.

Cause the ability to actually verbalize it as relatively unimportant, because

most of what we do on some level defies verbal description, but can you

internally feel that in a way that it means something to you in that process?

Can you feel the tissue planes?

Can you determine the difference between I'm an adipose versus I'm in muscle?

Do you feel when you pass through.

Are you aware of what's going on around the needle?

And that sensitivity is really important.

And the second thing that I would say is a really key point.

That really is not different than that, but it's just an extension of that is

then can you dynamically influence that?

And can you feel when the change.

You know, and that gets into the idea of virtue of that arrival of chief

concept is if I put a needle into tissue and I start wiggling it around and

the tissue isn't engaging the needle and it's not responding, I don't have

cheap, but if I can move that needle and the tissue responds well, now

I have cheap because that's why the tissue has responded to the needle.

And so the two most fundamental things to name are, can you feel the tissue?

And then can you affect the tissue and no one.

And those are the two things that continually every day I think are worth

coming back to, because I think those are the things that, particularly as we gain

experience and fluidity, and even to some degree speed within our practices and

the ability to see potentially multiple patients and do quicker treatments and

all these things, those are the things that it's really easy to lose track

of to just put the needle in and say, okay, well, I'm trying to find with

this needle, so I'm going to put it in and I'm going to wiggle and okay.

Yeah, I got some engagement I'm gonna.

But that's not that mindfulness.

That's not that focus that arises out of the metal element.

That's not that going through the needle, that is, I am going to bring

my full attention to every single meal.

And so I think that that focus on the sensation helps bring us back into

that experience because, you know, I referenced earlier that we live in

this world where people don't know they have feet until they stub their toes.

But that's not just an externally directed statement because we are also.

It's really easy for us to lose track of our own experiences and all this,

particularly when you're doing something as cerebral, as the practice of medicine,

it's really easy to get up in our heads and be imagining the treatment protocol

or planning the herbal formula or cleverly surmising, the differential diagnosis.

Instead of in that moment with the needle, just being very present with the physical

reality of moving a needle in tissue.

And that sensation to me, just like insight, you just like teen genotype.

The engagement there to really get you present in the moment is to require

physical awareness of sensation.

That's really great advice.

You know, it's so doable.

It's such a wonderful, fundamental, Justin.

Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today about all this

and folks, if you want to know more, uh, the book is the living needle.

It's published by a singing.

Do you have a website for this or any other information that, that

people can come and find you at?

Yeah.

Well, so the book, you can find just your singing dragon or it's on Amazon or Barnes

and noble or any of the major booksellers.

If you want to get the book, my website is stone gate wellness.com.

If you want to find me or find out more about me, I'm in the Austin.

I teach a Tai Chi class on Wednesday evenings at PA on campus.

If you want to come do some sites, you with me, that's going on,

but all that's on the websites.

Don't get wellness.com.

Great.

We'll make sure that it's up on the show notes page.

And again, Justin, thank you so much.

Enjoy the.

Awesome.

Thank you so much, Michael.

Thanks for having me on.