Sherrie Black pulls her white Toyota 4Runner into the parking lot of a large, boxy building in Laurel off Route 29. It looks like any other sterile suburban office until she steps inside the tranquil lobby, quiet but for the gurgling of a serenity fountain, and passes a bookstore/coffee shop with wind chimes, organic tea and titles like Touching Peace: Practicing the Art of Mindful Living. The Tai Sophia Institute for the Healing Arts feels more like a refuge than a school and treatment center.
Some 300 students -- average age 40 -- are studying here for master's degrees in acupuncture, botanical healing or applied healing arts. At 58, Black is one of them, shrugging off a 30-year career as a lawyer to become an acupuncturist.
At 58, Sheerie Black has decided she'd rather poke and prod clients as an acupuncturist than as a lawyer.
(Photograph by Pilar Vergara)
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On this particular Monday morning, she heads around a corner to her "Point Location" class, a sort of advanced anatomy course; then to "Being a Practitioner," where students take turns evaluating a patient; and on to a potluck lunch with classmates. By midafternoon, she has donned a white lab coat and is prepared to spend the rest of the day listening to clients describe not only their ailments, but also what's going on in their lives. What she hears will help her determine where to insert the slender needles that acupuncturists use to influence the movement of energy (chi) in a patient's body. At Tai Sophia, acupuncturists treat everything from migraines to back pain to drug addiction with this holistic approach.
Black, a petite woman with neat chin-length hair, loves the work but says she's had to make a definite mental shift since she began classes more than two years ago. Unlike in law school, competitiveness is discouraged. ("We carry each other," one student explains.)
"I've been competitive in my life," says Black, who lives in Columbia. "I've had to be. It was, 'Am I going to beat this guy in trial?' and . . . 'What can I do to cut this witness down and undermine his credibility?' "
Her new career demands a much different set of calculations: Where is this person hurting? What can I do to help him or her? An acupuncturist needs to listen, intuit and connect. She's learning, she says, how to "craft joy."
SHERRIE BLACK WASN'T SOME CRANKY, DISENCHANTED LAWYER when she set out to change her career -- and her life's purpose -- almost three years ago. Practicing law, she says, was challenging work, and she was good at it. She also had an ideal set-up, a 20-hour-a-week job-share at the Maryland attorney general's office that allowed her to balance her work with her family.
It wasn't that she was fed up with the law. It was simply that she'd fallen in love with acupuncture.
She had her first brush with the ancient Chinese practice in 1996: On a whim, she and a friend signed up for a tai chi class, where they heard about Tai Sophia's acupuncture clinic. Emotionally worn after the recent death of her mother, she was open to anything that might help her heal. At her first session, she says, "I noticed less tension in my chest. I remember saying that I felt like I could cry."
She went for treatments every week for years, a process, she says, that made her see "expanding possibilities" and "that you really have choices in how you live your life." She slowly reached the conclusion that this was something she might be able to give as well as receive. "I realized I could get closer to who I was by doing acupuncture," she says. But it was "an evolution, not an epiphany."
She first had to consider whether she could commit to three years of study at a cost of $42,000. "It's not chicken feed," she says. And she also had to think about how going back to school would affect her family. She and her husband, Roger Meade, had recently adopted a daughter, Masha, now 12, from Russia. They also have a son, Tyler, 16.
Her husband, a labor employment lawyer in Washington, had "some apprehension," she says, "like, 'Am I going to lose her to something I don't understand?' " Meade concedes that his wife's new vocation has taken some getting used to, joking that during a recent visit to Tai Sophia, he thought, "It's like a Woodstock reunion. Lots of hugging, lots of ponytails."
But he says (and Black affirms) that he was thoroughly supportive of his wife's career-switching decision. And it was actually Meade who tried acupuncture first. His lower back was perpetually going out, a souvenir from his long-ago stint as a Navy SEAL, which, he says, involved such body-wrenching activities as being "thrown out helicopters."
"I turned to acupuncture because it seemed that traditional medicine wasn't doing it," he explains, though he had only modest success with pain relief in those initial sessions. Now he visits an acupuncturist twice a month, with better results.
