Two Roots Acupuncture

I didn't get any pictures of the beautiful souls that joined in our magical Winter Solstice Celebration, but love was infused throughout: the seed of inspiration, the dreaming, the creating, and the sharing.

I am so grateful for our community and I have so much gratitude for the hearts that found themselves infusing the fire within our community circle.

We honored the darkness on the eve of the Solstice through the embodied retelling of the myth of Inanna and her descent into the underworld. This storytelling was infused with primal wisdom from a soul
who knows these layers and gates in her bones and Matt serenaded our bodies with heart infused rhythms guiding us all within our own journeys into meeting ourselves more deeply within the space of mystery and penetrating depths where we may not have even yet met ourselves.

The darkness invites us to meet ourselves, honor our ancestors, and embrace the more difficult and challenging aspects of our journeys more deeply. It is within these layers of which we could not know if we never went, that we merge with surrender and trust, allowing ourselves to feel the holding that the night provides. Sometimes we're taken to these darker spaces abruptly and seemingly without choice. But Inanna's myth invites us to feel the consciousness within, that chooses to descend - turning our inner hearing to the 'Great Below'. In Sumerian the word for ear is the same word for wisdom.

What are you turning your ear toward? There is always more space for listening. I invite this continued honoring of this Solstice in the depth of continued listening. What you hear may surprise you.

We're all called forth within our journeys to embrace the night. And in the underworld, a transformation is guaranteed.

As we enter into the Solstice portal together tomorrow, feel Winter's wisdom and guidance. This wisdom lives in your bones and it has much to teach you - hold each other close, feel the embers of your heart.

We are each here to tend the warmth within so that even in the darkest hours it is love we feel and share again and again.

Before systemized education, all holistic medicine was apprenticeship based - passed on from wise elder and Master to eager student or most resonant child for generations and generations. This is how lineages of knowledge and medicine were preserved and maintained. There was a powerful direct mentorship at all aspects of the learning and transference process. Without this one-on-one transmission the medicine and the primal wisdom can become watered down and too standardized. It loses its mailability when it is academized in this way and we lose the pure potential of freedom and flow in each creative exchange. This is why I believe true medicine is indeed an art form. It is co-created together at the precise moment two souls come together - a convergence of preserved lineage and skillful practice in alignment with the unique and on-of-a-kind individual the medicine become in relationship to.

My teacher Alexander Love, Acupuncturist, Life Coach, and Cultural Luminary says often “Anything that is passed down and not allowed to change is a religion, not a lineage.” This is incredibly important to remember when we talk of holistic medicine and wellness, as the conditions change based on location, environment, weather, individual needs, culture, etc. etc. as to what ingredients make up wholeness for the person seeking support. And it is paramount that we are continually contributing, enhancing, and evolving our practices.

This is one of the reasons I’ve spent so much effort seeking out mentors to obtain this more intimate transmission through my years of study, and why I will continue to do so.

I stand on the shoulders of giants and I am forever grateful for the amazing teachers & mentors that I have been fortunate to have on my journey. It is a key ingredient to mastering oneself while continuing to provide service to the ones who choose you to accompany them on their journeys.



photo:

Winter Solstice Ceremony 2022 — Two Roots Acupuncture

https://www.tworootsacupuncture.com/events/2022/12/12/winter-solstice-ceremony

Winter Solstice Ceremony 2022 — Two Roots Acupuncture Join Jenna Pfingston, Jaqueline Allen, and Matt Hakala for a magical evening of rooting consciousness and remembering our wholeness as we come together to honor the darkest time of year.

And I'd add "the way we see ourselves shapes the way we treat it" - every inch of your being is sacred.

We owe it to ourselves to remember - out there and within.

Some wise words from David Suzuki..

Contained within each of us is the courage to face life and ourselves. We can trust in this. In Classical Chinese Medicine the Qiao Vessels represent the courage and willingness to "stand up" to ourselves (Yin Qiao Mai) and stand up to the world (Yang Qiao Mai). The Qiao Vessels circulate through the bones. It is through faith (represented by Kidney-8 "Jiao Xin") and the power to step and walk (Bladder-59 "Fu Yang") that we face life and all of its changes and keep stepping forward, connected to our essential selves.

“Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.”

Winter Soulstice Celebration

A sacred time to come together to go within. We all experience winters of the soul. The Earth moves into her soulful depth in the heart of Winter on the solstice, the day where darkness is at its greatest. She reminds us of the beauty and necessity of embodying this inward motion, the descension to go deeper, the rooting down – so that we can indeed rise. “Slow” and “down” are modes of the soul, they are connective modes, and a way to grow down towards the roots of one’s being. Slowing downwards creates opportunities to dwell more deeply in one’s life. There is winter wisdom within these portals of consciousness that we can all tap into, that we indeed tap into everyday with our exhale, with our sleeping bodies, and with the “dark knights” that meet us on our journey to guide our path of remembering ourselves from within.

Join Jenna Pfingston, Jaqueline Allen, and Matt Hakala for this nighttime consciousness of re-membering our wholeness. We will honor this time with sacred story-telling, with mantra, with primal movements & sound, while we empower our bodies to lead the way for our hearts to lean into this curling inward, this spiraling down, meeting the wisdom within, deep within each of our breathing bodies, lives, and dreaming stories.

Trust your heart & lean inward.

Our first snow of the season is a perfect day to resupply Two Roots Apothecary with our homemade Winter Solstice Salve.

Skin care for the Heart of Winter ❄️.

❄️

"It's been said that the Mother
Earth was the first Indigenous
Woman.

After all, she is the original life
giver. Her blood our fresh water,
flows like so many veins and
capillaries, forming rivers and
tributaries that sustain us.

We evolved to exist in unison,
forever linked and connected as
relations. We are a part of her,
star-dust children of the Sky and
Earth.

She is the Divine Feminine,
Creator, and Mother.
✨
There is no humanity without
her."

🌙 Ruth H Hopkin
🎨 Annie Hamman Artist

Sometimes we're not meant to garden and domesticate - to control, adjust, change, or improve - there are parts of us that should forever remain wild and free, untilled and untamed. Can we appreciate those parts with the same fervor as we appreciate the forest?

Soulpreneur Retreat FEBRUARY 2023

For female entrepreneurs looking to thrive inwardly, get back to nature - your nature, and gather with other like-minded souls!

We will come together to explore the depths of our own hearts - collectively planting seeds of abundance, creativity, and purpose from within - to embrace thriving in its fullest expression as not just achieving success but living fully and living well!

Reawaken the Divine Feminine within you, reignite your passion, and attune to your own healing powers.

www.soulpreneurretreat.com

https://mailchi.mp/0e96c750d0ab/soulpreneur-retreat-february-2023

This cannot be overstated enough.

May we all remember again and again...no matter how many times we forget.

Guided Dream Journey - Ancestor Activation — Two Roots Acupuncture

Each year at the Equinoxes, the Sun and the Earth sit in relative axial alignment, with the Earth tilted in neither direction toward the Sun. This means that twice a year, everywhere on Earth will experience equal night and day hours for a brief window of time together. This powerfully realigns us to our center and balances our energetic vibrations, providing a global attunement to the electromagnetic field of the Earth that our very hearts mirror in frequency. And with the Autumn Equinox at 0° Libra, we are gifted access to a collective harmony of souls, an opportunity to reconnect with our relations, both past and present, of this world & beyond. We can briefly peer beneath the veil of time and reacquaint ourselves with our Ancestors - meeting the past so we can better create our future. Peering into this Ancestral mirror, we can more clearly see what we are truly made of, empowering us to show up fully to our Truth of this moment, allowing us to carry on our sacred lineage - remembering we are truly connected to all there is, has been, and ever will be.

Gift yourself a journey beyond space & time to connect more deeply with the Earth, Yourself, and the Wider Universe.

*Half off - 1 week only*

Guided Dream Journey - Ancestor Activation — Two Roots Acupuncture A dream journey activating ancestral wisdom to reconnect you with Spirit & your sacred lineage.

Motherhood is a transformation - and transformation is both a death and a rebirth. Something must not entirely exist as it was before in order for something new to arise into being. I am with you my dear soon-to-be Mothers in all your wholeness. "If we resist change, we resist life" - may there be more safe space to be fully present with the change.

And no matter how many "births" (literal and figurative) you've had - there will always be a transformation - and the form that once was deserves an acknowledged loving goodbye before we can fully embrace the form to be.

"They tell us how to grow a baby. What to eat.
What not to eat. What vitamins to take and what bras to buy. Allll the prenatal yoga moves to do.

But they forget to tell us how to put ourselves back together once that baby is born.
They forget to tell us how we might feel like we’re drifting.
Afloat. Alone. On a life raft with leaky breasts and sore stitches and a tiny little being dependent upon us for survival.
They forget to tell us how weird and wild it feels to have loose organs shifting about inside of us. How there will be so much softness still.

I get it. You don’t want to startle us. You don’t want us to be scared about what’s ahead.
But….a little heads up would be helpful
We’re brave enough for the truth.
And those things you find so scary- loose skin and leaky breasts and big feelings- we might just be bold enough to welcome them.
To see the beauty there.

So here’s the truth mama-
Your pelvic floor will probably need work and attention. You’ll have to put in some effort to regain that muscle strength, no matter how gentle your birth. Your breasts and belly will probably never be the same. Love them anyway. Love than more than before!! Celebrate them! Buy bras that make you feel sexy. Then move on.

Your identity and sense of self will change radically. Buckle up for the ride. You’ve got this. Your partnership and friendships and general relationship with the outside world might feel foreign for awhile. Or forever. Those relationships might crack and break under the weight of new parenthood. Live your truth. Leave the rest behind. In love.

The whole world might feel shaken up.
You’ll probably feel shaky and raw
That’s normal (they just forgot to tell you.)

You’re new here. In this skin. In this role. In this love. You’ll find your way. You’ll find your rhythm. It will all fall into place- with time.
Until then- breathe.
As deeply as you can.
Drink your tea before it gets cold.
If you can.
Rest -
whenever you can.
And love on your new self.
As deeply as you can."

❤️

It's freeing to know there is always so much more to discover and humbling to know we could never explore it all. Trust the journeys you're navigating and break out of those containers, ceilings, walls of mind-body-spirit. The cosmos is vast and our spirit vaster.

Let the realm of infinite possibilities liberate you.

😀

All holistic systems of medicine contain at their core a deep awareness that the human body consists of more than just fluids and tissues and bone. Traditional East Asian Medicine views the body as an organized fusion of spirit, energy, and matter. Among the various modalities of this ancient medicine, pulse diagnosis is one of the ways we perceive the present climate of mind-body-spirit.

The pulse is ever-present throughout our life. It does not need our mind to maintain its rhythm. It is a deep reflection of the internal song of one’s being. It is the eternal flow that is mirroring our animated consciousness.

A river indeed flows through you. A river flows through each of us. As Rumi reminds us, we are absolutely the entire ocean in a drop.

Sitting with one’s pulse is like sitting on the banks of an ocean, unique to the vessel which encapsulates it – listening to the rhythm, texture, and landscape of waves forever rolling in, revealing swells of information.

Beyond rate and speed, within the different layers of our being, the pulse is communicating our entire lives as it continually shapes to the contours of our lived experience.


📷

Goodnight Poetry lovers ❤️❤️
(Pinterest)

Dance, dance, dance!

Dancing is medicine and we indeed are all fools ❤.

"Despite the common desire to rise to the top, moments of essential change can depend upon a willingness to descend. A deep connection may be drawn between those who face the truth in themselves and the discovery of valuable pearls in depths of the ocean. Those who desire pearls must dive into deep waters; once there they risk darkness and isolation and the confusions of the murky depths. Similarly, those who would find the inner pearl must enter the treacherous waters of the soul and face the darkness found within. They must crack the hard shell of their little-self and come to know themselves from the inside out."
- Michael Meade, "Fate and Destiny"

The planets, just like the moon dance in cycles. There are phases to each one's journey. The term Mercury Retrograde gets thrown around a lot these days, but it is often from a place of deep misunderstanding.

At present we are smack dab in the middle of two mercury retrograde periods...this we could aptly refer to as the "Full Moon" phase for mercury or as I like to call it the "Full Mercury". His roughly 120 day cycle is trackable and learnable - just like the roughly 28-day cycle of the Moon. And currently Mercury is with the heart of the Sun, invisible to our eyes, descended from the morning and eastern skies so he may reappear in the coming week in the evening and western skies just after the sunset. A clear view of the horizon helps to see him, as we often miss the moment of viewing mercury here in the mountains.

And come September 9th, Mercury will enter his infamous 3-week retrograde journey and thus start the completion of the cycle he is in now, while sowing the seeds for his next one to begin.

Mercury influences us all and shows up for us in variable unknowable yet perceivable ways, if we're willing to listen. Attuning to his dance allows for the seeds that are meant for us to take root in our body, psyche, and soul.

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If your soul feels called to intimately discover his next transition of cycles (retrograde) from within, then this offering is for you.

***We will meet for 3 classes 6:00-8:00pm, live on Zoom: Th 9/8, Sun 9/18, Sun 10/2*** -----> coming together the day before the retrograde, meeting from within, and our final class being on the day Mercury turns direct.

This will be an embodied journey through Mercury retrograde - as together we distill the medicine of death, rebirth, and transformation as Mercury transitions from an evening star to a morning star - meeting endings so that we can grow new beginnings. We will incorporate astrology, astronomy, myth, dreams, intention-setting, and ample room for sharing of our lived experience, so we may conjure up an entirely new brew of this planet’s medicine together.

Attempting to explain Acupuncture and Traditional East Asian medicine more often than not leaves us with more questions than answers. And that which cannot be easily explained can in other more eloquent terms be called magic, spiritual, or an experience of the ineffable (that which is unable or too great or extreme to be expressed in words).

We've all experienced connection and a feeling of oneness beyond the limitations of words - as we do when we're in witness to the glory of the natural world: a sunset, stars aglow at night, or deep in the majestic womb of the Grand Canyon or in the presence of the Ocean that merges with the horizon as far as the eye can see.

Magic and spirit also arise when we're under love's spell or when we meet a newborn baby. These moments are touching on our existence outside of linear time and space and this happens in Acupuncture on a regular basis.

The more we can access these liminal and non-linear spaces, the greater our whole self can have access to all of itself and so too the journey of its greatest well-being and well-living. When we remember that we are not limited to our concrete ideas of reality and that the unseen parts of ourselves often crave this deeper layer of perceiving of both ourselves and the unexplainable natural world, sensations, and phenomenon, then we start to reclaim our access to magic and to Spirit.

As western medicine and language attempt to "understand" the function of this medicine, I more readily wish to free it from rational constructs even more so that we can really elevate the function of the Heart and Spirit and the realms where truly, undeniably, anything is possible.

Ancient acupuncturists knew there was no separation of spirit and physicality or of us from nature or the divine. It is in this holism that our wholeness is remembered.

May you allow yourself the sacredness of non-knowing, the opening to possibility, and the remembrance that there is magic in every moment.

Photo: Taylor Jones Photography

Happy Friday. Have a wonderful weekend!

Link to any of my five books in the comments below. 💚

Anupa IV Hydration offered at our clinic in BV, Saturdays 12-5pm and by appointment throughout the week!

It was great to have Mark Morris and Jed Selby stop by the Anupa IV Lounge in Buena Vista at this week. Everyone in town for at Surf Hotel make sure to hit us up and Get Hydrated and definitely check out Rapidgrass !