Arriving Home: The Medicine of the Center

If you have been feeling the heat this year, the sense that everything is moving faster than you can quite keep pace with, that the things you have been carrying are either catching fire or asking to be set down, you are not imagining it. We are in the Year of the Fire Horse, the first since 1966 and the only one for another sixty years, and it is yang fire stacked upon yang fire: the Horse already a galloping, restless, freedom-seeking yang fire, and the year’s stem pouring still more fire on top. It is a year of enormous momentum and forward drive, the kind of energy that ignites bold change and breakthrough, and the very same fire, left untended, that scorches, scatters, and burns out fast. And then, as if the cosmos wanted to make the point unmistakable, this past April and May brought a remarkable gathering of planets in Aries, the cardinal fire sign, the place of beginnings and bold first motion, amplifying the Fire Horse energy even further. So this has been a year that asks for both things at once: the courage to move, to leap, to begin, and the discipline to nourish the yin and the water beneath all that fire, so that there is something to hold it, so that it warms and illuminates rather than consuming us.

I tell you all of this because my own year has had exactly that shape, an ending and a beginning burning right in the middle of the most fiery year in six decades, and because, by a long and fiery road, all of it has carried me back to the center.

The Chinese name for Chinese medicine is 中医 (zhōngyī), the Medicine of the Center, or the medicine of returning to center. This was the quiet theme beneath everything on my recent pilgrimage to China, where I traveled with my teacher to honor our teacher, Master Wang Qingyu, on his eighty-ninth birthday. Again and again I watched people who have given their whole lives to this medicine return to center through the most ordinary daily acts. Through food, which is far less partial in nature than our Chinese herbs and so can be taken at every single meal as a gentle, continuous returning. Through qigong practiced every single morning, which is its own daily homecoming to the body and the breath. And through the heart itself, which in our medicine is the center, the emperor, the still point that everything else orients around. I came home understanding that the medicine of the center is not something you arrive at once and then possess. It is something you return to, meal by meal, breath by breath, day by day.

This is also the deepest meaning of 養生 (yǎxhēng), nourishing life, the phrase at the very heart of our tradition and the name I have chosen for what comes next. 養生 is not the medicine of crisis, the dramatic intervention we reach for only when something has already gone wrong. It is the patient, daily cultivation of vitality, the tending of the soil before the drought, the small and faithful practices that keep us rooted and supple and whole. It is preventive and it is relational and it is profoundly ordinary, and that ordinariness is exactly its power. To nourish life is to return to center again and again, on purpose, before we are forced to.

And there is one more idea I carried home that I want to share with you, because it explains everything about the choice we have made. In Chinese medicine we speak of 派 (pài), the lineage or current, the stream of transmission through which this medicine is handed down from teacher to student across generations. 派 reminds us that none of us owns this medicine. We receive it, we are shaped by it, and we are responsible for carrying it forward and giving it onward, in an unbroken current of reciprocity. The longer I practice, the more certain I become that medicine held inside a single lineage, practiced by one person working alone, is medicine that has been cut off from part of its own nature. This work was never meant to be solitary. It was meant to be shared, collaborative, passed hand to hand, held by a community. That conviction is the seed of everything I am about to tell you.

So here is the news, news that holds grief and joy in the same hand, in the way this Fire Horse year seems to insist that we learn to do.

At the end of this month, Kwan Yin will close its doors. This is bittersweet for me in ways I am still feeling all the way through, and I do not want to rush past it. Kwan Yin has been a true home for this work and for so many of you, a place where real healing happened, and I want to honor everything it has held.  Kwan Yin is where I received my first acupuncture treatment, and when I began my studies I knew Kwan Yin was where I would practice.

So in nearly the same breath, I get to tell you that I am opening a new home for this work alongside two practitioners I love and deeply trust: Nourishing Life Collective.

Above: Nourishing Life Collective, a new clinic in Portland Oregon opening this summer

Nourishing Life Collective is built around the convictions I just shared with you. It is a place where you are tended as a whole person, with the range of specialties you might need gathered under one roof, so that your care is not fragmented across the city but woven together in one space. It is a place where your providers can truly collaborate, because we are actually in the same building, able to talk with one another, refer to one another, and think together about your care in a way that is almost impossible when everyone is scattered. It is a clinic, yes, where we will see you one-on-one in the treatment room, but it is also meant to be a community hub, a gathering place, where healing happens not only in private sessions but in group settings, in classes, in qigong, in the kind of communal tending that this medicine has always known how to do. And it is, just as importantly, a place built so that we practitioners are nourished too, joyful and glad to be there, because I have come to believe that you cannot pour the medicine of nourishing life from a depleted vessel. When your providers are well, you feel it in the quality of your care.

I am so happy to introduce the colleagues who are building this with me. Dr. Valentina Benitez, ND, and Dr. Hayley Jensen, ND, LAc. All thee of us were in school together at NUNM. All three of us share a background in Chinese Medicine. All three of us even went to China together to meet Wang Shifu for the first time in 2019. This is 派 in living form, and it is 養生 as a way of building a clinic, not only treating within one.

Nourishing Life Collective will be in the exact same location where you already see me at Kwan Yin East, so you will be walking through the very same familiar door. We will continue using Athena, the same electronic health record you already know, so the only small task on your end is re-registering for a personal Athena account under the new clinic. Everything will look and feel familiar. There will be no gap in your care. Your appointments continue, the medicine continues, and I will be right there in the same room, doing the same work I love, now with even more support around me and around you.

We will have a soft opening on July 1, with a grand opening to come in September, and I will be sharing much more in the months ahead about our classes, our gatherings, and all the ways you can be part of this growing community. Check out our budding website, and sign up for our newsletter to hear about all of the awesome offerings we will be launching!

An ending, a pilgrimage, and a beginning, all of it burning right in the middle of the most fiery year in six decades. There is real grief in the closing and there is real joy in the opening, and I am learning, as the Fire Horse asks all of us to learn this year, to hold both at once without rushing to resolve them, and to keep returning, again and again, meal by meal and breath by breath, to the center. I would be so honored to keep returning there alongside you.