At Tai Sophia Institute for the Healing Arts, each needle is awareness.
"Ah!" breathed patient Ashley Litecky as veteran acupuncturist Dianne Connelly swiftly and expertly inserted a sterile, hair-thin needle. "That was a good one!"
Dianne Connelly inserts needles in the back of Ashley Litecky at the Tai Sophia Institute for the Healing Arts. Over the last 30 years, the Tai Sophia has emerged as a nationally recognized center for teaching and learning.
(Jessica Tefft - For The Washington Post)
|
|
The needles ran up and down Litecky's back, calling forth small blushes of pink in her white skin.
"The needles," Connelly said, "go to the points she's had all her life."
They constantly speak of points at Tai Sophia, of points along the energy pathways that run throughout the body. They say the needles help awaken those points -- and, through them, the patient's awareness. They say that in that way acupuncture can restore balance to the flow of energy through the body.
"I tap them a little, to call the body's wisdom forth," said Connelly, brushing the needles lightly. "Health is the body remembering what it already knows."
It is an understanding of health and healing drawn from thousands of years of practice. Acupuncture has come into acceptance in the United States only in the past three decades. In the early 1970s, President Richard M. Nixon visited China, opening a channel of cultural exchange. Soon, other westerners, including Connelly and her colleague, Robert Duggan, were visiting the country and bringing the practice here. They then began to build their clinic and school into what they envisioned as a community of healing.
"The dream was to create a university that would change ways of thinking about health care. It met a deep hunger in our culture for health and wellness," Duggan said.
When they were getting started in the United States, acupuncturists were greeted with fear. Yet these days, the august National Institutes of Health reports that more than 8 million Americans have tried acupuncture
And Tai Sophia, which will celebrate its 30th anniversary in May, has emerged as a nationally known and accredited center for teaching and learning. From its small beginnings in a Columbia office building, the institute -- whose name means "great wisdom" -- has grown to encompass a 12-acre, $10 million campus in Laurel that includes a 22-bed treatment center and a school with more than 300 students earning master's degrees in acupuncture, applied healing arts and botanical healing.
"It will change your life," said student Charlene Muhammad of Columbia. A Head Start director and mother of two, she is in her second year in the school's botanical healing program.
Muhammad hopes to use her degree to help others. The program already has transformed her approach to her own health and that of her family, she said.
"Physician, heal thyself. That's what we do here," she said. "It's extraordinary."
Downstairs from the sunny treatment rooms overlooking snowy fields, a roomful of students in white coats were discussing a patient's symptoms with Duggan. It might have been a medical school classroom, but the conversation took a more mysterious turn, with elements of psychology -- and what might sound to an untrained ear like alchemy. Down the hall in the herb room, staff member Matthew Persico poured an aromatic blend of extracts of white cedar and pulsatilla into a small brown bottle.
