Not afraid of needles

I had my first acupuncture appointment last Tuesday, and have my second coming up this Saturday. Nothing is particularly wrong with me (just some minor stress symptoms like mild headaches and tense shoulder muscles), but I wanted to try it out regardless. My friend Dee brought her acupuncturist into the Cafe a few weeks ago, and I was a little intimidated at first, trying to have an informed discussion with an alternative health care professional, but I was able to really ask some intelligent questions. The spirit of San Francisco stands for everything I believe in, but sometimes when something valuable presents itself to me, I shy away because I think I'm "not ready" or that I "know it all" already. Not this time. We had a really great discussion on the topics of nutrition, professional ethics, whether acupuncture is just covering over other symptoms (like an energy pain reliever if you will). 

 

Fast forward to last Tuesday, when I arrived at her house for my introductory appointment, I was pretty nervous. Would it hurt, would I bleed, how deep do the needles go? I wasn't really thinking about the needles per se until we were getting ready to go into "the room". I was more interested in the evaluation: the tongue checking, the pulse checking. Maybe there was something wrong with me I wasn't aware of? Anyway, to make a long story short, I laid on the comfortable massage table in my boxers, the room was pretty warm, she would press on certain parts of my body and if they were tender, would have me take a breath, then she would tap in the needle on the out-breath. None if the needles really hurt, although the one on my left foot turned a little numb in about an inch circle around the puncture. While all the (10?) needles were in, she did "moxy" on me- lighting tiny piles of a special incense on certain parts of my body to bring more energy and flow to them.

 

All in all, it was really neat, and I was amazingly relaxed/out of it after the experience. I don't know whether it was my body recovering from the adrenaline rush of being so nervous or what, but I definitely felt something subtle from it.