My visit to the acupuncturist yesterday was one of the weirder things I've done. Lily drove me over, with Joe, to the little Chinese (I think Chinese...) man in an office that reminded me half of a maternity ward and half of a *cough* "massage parlor". It was incredibly comfortable and relaxing. Some kind of ambient asian new-age music played everywhere you went, and the whole place smelled clean. By clean I don't mean hospital clean, but rather the kind of clean you get in a beach house - sand, wind, salt, and nothing overtly human.
The man was small, and obviously very into what he does. He told me to go lay down in the examination room, which I did. A cusioned, papered table/bed, my first thought was it was more comfortable than my own bed. There were pressure-point charts on the wall, and pleasant pictures of nothing I can remember. That soothing bamboo and flute music was the only sound.
He came in and asked to see my tongue. Ignoring the inate resistance I had of being rude, I stuck it out and he asked if Joe could come in and take a look as well. Joe is a student of his, so this made sense to me, or at least as much sense as anything else.
So he came in and the little man began to quietly machinegun comments about the markings on my tongue. He spoke of how I drink too much coffee and you can see how I chew on my tongue and I probably have post-nasal drip from the looks of the back of it, and I have too much fire in the brain and not enough in the belly and the flow of energy is locked in my head so it's going to make me spend too much time thinking and not enough time acting and relaxing, relaxing being more important than anything else, and on and on.
I can tell you that the sound of his voice was infinitely more relaxing to me than anything he was saying. Comprehension not being my strong suit right now, when he said something about relaxing being important I was relieved and happy to oblige by unfocusing on his words and just letting the pleasant sounds of his voice waft over me. It's possible I fell asleep for a bit while he was talking.
Then he got out some needles, which thankfully I didn't see, and popped them into my ankles and my forehead - one for each spot. I didn't feel a thing. He said something about relaxing and "mind like sky" and off I went into a nice, relaxing rest. I fell asleep for a while, which apparently is good, and after a long while he came back and popped them out and told me to sit up and breathe deeply, to get my brain activated again.
I noticed a few things immediately. One, I was not better. The sense that I have, where I can feel something wrong in my head, was still there. Two, I felt a LOT better. I wasn't nearly as imbalanced, I felt much more calm and happy. Three, I was very, very hungry. So we went off to get food.
Posted by Matt at July 22, 2005 12:35 PM