Acupuncture Contributions by Will Meecham

I'd like to point out that in addition to licensed acupuncturists, more and more physicians are getting trained to perform acupuncture. The <a href=http://http://www.medicalacupuncture.org/>American Academy of Medical Acupuncture</a> has more information.

Many sectors of our health care system now recognize acupuncture as an effective treatment for a variety of physical and mental problems. Less well known is that the technique also works well as a support for spiritual growth.

There is more to wellbeing than physical and mental health. A person can feel unwell in a sound body. It is also possible to suffer without emotional turmoil, but simply from feeling purposeless and cynical. Some people enjoy spontaneous spiritual contentment and readily embrace their path in life, but many of us need to work to attain such equanimity. Acupuncture can help patients connect with their inner senses of unity, rightness, and love, which are the touchstones of spiritual health.

Spirituality gets discussed so often it has lost definition, but we know it when we find it. Whenever we feel peaceful despite tragedy, injustice, and chaos, we have found a deeper center. Whenever we realize our hearts will grow no matter what fate brings, we feel profoundly healed. This is the Health of Spirit.

A person can be gravely diseased in body and severely buffeted by circumstance, but remain at ease in that still, small refuge at the center of the storm, where divine light shines. The rational mind may seek to explain this abiding comfort: Is it the hand of God or a bracing mix of neurotransmitters? Logic cannot answer this question, but fortunately the words we use to describe Grace are less important than the peace we find when we accept it.

Acupuncture stills the mind and opens it to larger horizons. The needles stimulate deep energies in the body, brain, and spirit. At times, a fuller realization of one's purpose, one's loyalties, and one's wholesome desires can result. The ordinary pains of life can be transcended as they are understood as enlightening lessons rather than meaningless torments. Tectonic shifts in perspective may occur.

Such earthshaking changes do not happen every day or for every patient. But acupuncture works a bit like meditation and prayer, awakening the heart and mind to forces latent in the human being. When a person is on the verge of a paradigm shift, acupuncture can be the catalyst to bring it about.

I would echo Peter Shark's observation that acupuncture works more reliably, or at least more promptly, for anxious/agitated depression than for low moods presenting as apathy and withdrawal. But another effect of acupuncture, beyond any alteration of mood, is its ability to bring greater harmony into the bodymind system. Sometimes what gets labelled as depression and behaviorally expressed as apathy is really a kind of rejection of grief and the ordinary pain of life. In particular when combined with meditation, acupuncture can make such states more tolerable, without necessarily decreasing the underlying sorrow.