I have been seeing an acupuncturist for the last three weeks. My initial session with her was for a 90-minute craniosacral massage. I knew of her as a somatic yoga coach substituting for my regular coach who is off hosting a retreat in Mallorca.
What I didn’t know was that she also has a master's in Acupuncture and Chinese Herbal Medicine has done doctoral research on women's health through Oriental Medicine. She was reading between the lines the whole session … which lasted three hours.
As we've been talking, as she’s been figuring out the combination of modalities she wants to use to help my Qi flow, I’ve been noticing some changes. Not dramatically. More like someone quietly turning down the volume of the background noise.
I’m sleeping better. My breathing is more regulated. She’s given me tools for when I start spiraling — because I have so many ideas moving through me at any given moment, and the challenge has never been having them. The challenge is that they all arrive at once and none of them get to breathe.
What she’s helped me understand is that the ideas were never the problem. The interference was.
A few months ago, I cut up a large sheet of paper into token-sized pieces, postcard-sized pieces, and then let them sit on my table. They just sat there. The ER happened. The appointments accumulated. The pieces waited.
This past week, I picked them up again. And something was different — not in the paper, but in me. I knew exactly what each one wanted to become. I spent hours with them, gave each one layer after layer.
That’s new. Or rather — it’s old. It’s how I used to work before I started making content for an algorithm where everything had to be finished fast for an imaginary deadline.
I’ve taken my time with these.
I’ve been trying to find the right word for what I’m arriving at about myself. Trailblazer feels borrowed. Disruptive innovator sounds like a LinkedIn headline for a version of me I have no interest in becoming. What I actually think is simpler and harder to say: I don’t see the world the way most people around me see it, and I’ve spent a lot of years wondering if that was a deficit.
I’m starting to think it isn’t.
Maybe what needed to happen first wasn’t more clarity or more confidence or more strategy. Maybe what needed to happen was for the nervous system to get quiet enough that I could finally hear what I already knew.
The acupuncturist hasn’t given me anything new. She just turned the volume down.
And what I am hearing now is: keep going exactly as you are.
I’m sharing new work in this week’s video update — pieces from the second Ripple Set, too. Come see.
માનસી
