Another year passes and all of us here at CommuniChi are honored to have the opportunity to work with every one enters this space seeking health and wellness. I feel uplifted by the trust that people have to seek out our acupuncture clinic and a sense of grace participating in each patient’s journey, bearing witness to both your pains and joys.
Perhaps 2012 was a struggle for you or mundane. Perhaps it was magically fulfilling. Whatever your experience, you are not alone. The beings of this world – human or animal – are all going through a shared experience right now, entering a time of great change. And for every tragedy we pass through, there is the possibility of stepping into a circle with wider awareness of our interconnectedness.
I’m still grieving the tragic shooting of children, teachers, and staff in Newton, Connecticut not long ago. I received an email from MoveOn.org asking me if I’d like to set up a candlelight vigil in my neighborhood to send prayers to the deceased and to raise consciousness for more effective gun control in America. I immediately thought: “I can do that”. It took all of about 10 minutes to organize it and email my social networks. Fifty people came! Under a light evening drizzle, with everyone bundled against the cold, holding a candle in one hand and an umbrella in the other, we stood on the sidewalk in silence for about an hour before forming a circle on the wet grass, sharing our prayers for healing. A friend played his ukulele and we all sang a few songs together before the circle dissolved.
We are all connected and although media and social conditioning often highlight our differences – skin color, age, size, ability, income, class, sexual preference, food choices, religion, and so on – these are like different colors of dye dissolved in water. It’s still water – wet, innately clear, the basis of all life. Similarly, we sentient beings in all our beautiful diversity, all share the same desire to be happy, to feel connected and to hold fast to a sense of meaning or higher purpose. Those aspirations and spiritual qualities are there, even if buried at times beneath our mental-emotional afflictions.
I love coming to work here every day, bringing my highest expression of life vibration, and I am proud of my fellow practitioners here – Lisa, Sam, and Cynthia – for their contributions to that resonant energy. But community acupuncture isn’t really about us – the practitioners. It’s about all of you, and a room charged with community energy. Besides the pain relief people seek, there is a deeper yearning – at least among the regulars – to sit in a circle of chairs amongst anonymous strangers (all of our mothers from previous lives the Buddhists would say), and to wake up to looking at the world in a different way, less focused on me and more open and fluid and connected to a larger ecosystem, neither wallowing in our own seemingly isolated depression or difficulties, nor gloating egotistically in all of the wonderful things that are going for “me”, but aspiring that everyone can be happy, healthy, and free.
As we near our six year anniversary at CommuniChi, I wish to thank all of you for supporting our clinic, for recommending us to your friends, family, and co-workers. The work of healing ourselves and our world is a shared undertaking and a community supported, low cost acupuncture clinic is no exception. We need your support in order to continue to offer this service to the community. Blessings of peace, health, and fulfillment in the new year.
Jordan