ChapterEight

Dictionary

ac·u·punc·ture

/ˈakyo͞oˌpəNG(k)(t)SHər/

noun

A system of integrative medicine that involves pricking the skin or tissues with needles, used to alleviate pain and to treat various physical, mental, and emotional conditions. Originating in ancient China, acupuncture is now widely practiced in the West.

I learned to do acupuncture in 1976. I’d read about it with fascination when I was in medical school (but wasn’t in a position to do anything about it then as needles weren’t available.) I’d heard about it from colleagues after going into practice (whom I imagined might be talking from ignorance.) I was a cautious but eager Early Adopter, in Geoffrey Moore’s sense of adoption.

Moore’s argument is that there is a chasm between the Early Adopters of the product (the technology enthusiasts and visionaries) and the Early Majority (the pragmatists). Moore believes visionaries and pragmatists have very different expectations, and he attempts to explore those differences and suggest techniques to successfully cross the “chasm.” Malcolm Gladwell argues in The Tipping Point that Moore’s chasm happens with all new revolutionary ideas.

Acupuncture* which has existed far back into antiquity some 10,000-years back, became a “new idea” in 1971 when it reached North America. I’d read about it being discovered by army medics during the Vietnam War. By 1976 I couldn’t resist, though I pretended otherwise by refusing to read books or literature about it. But after learning it formally at the Acupuncture Foundation of Canada I, like other students, developed an ability to get results - “ like they were going out of style.” Through hands-on experience I crossed the chasm from being the skeptic to being firmly on the pinning bandwagon. If it had been found to be a placebo, It’d be a welcome one.

• Acupuncture was first introduced to North America during Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1971 when a reporter for the New York Times was given acupuncture after having an emergency surgery. Modern acupuncture may involve insertion of very fine needles through the skin, or placing TENS or a low power laser over various points found on the body. Anatomical acupuncture is a more modern approach used by some acupuncture therapists. Clinical studies have shown an 80 % success rate for symptom relief when treated with acupuncture. It has also been indicated that acupuncture may be even more effective when combined with other treatment techniques. Acupuncture works by causing the release of the body’s natural pain killers “endorphins”, which blocks pain messages from being sent to the brain and influences the nervous system.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276152358_Acupuncture_journey_to_America_A_turning_point_in_1971

QUESTION: How does one get across Moore’s chasm?

ANSWER : By doing it, despite one’s doubts, and seeing the results

I was perhaps the placebo (or perhaps more accurately, the catalyst) for patients joining me on the bandwagon. My general practice patients loved it from the outset and obliged by being strong responders. My Early Adapter colleagues loved it too. And, it has been the same with AcuDestress.

Even though I knew as a fledgling psychotherapist in those early general practice days that building enthusiasm around an idea was how to get it adopted, I also realized that the end result needed to be a patient who no longer needed treatment. I didn’t wan’t to be “selling a pig in a poke.” I was unhappy with the practice of keeping patients within one’s psychotherapy practice any longer than they absolutely needed. Same for acupuncture. In 1976, If I didn’t get results after six treatments, I tried something else.

But not everyone can become an acupuncturist, and not everyone wants to. Without a medical background it takes five years. With an MD, four years of weekend workshops. Michael O. Smith addressed this well by convincing one American state after another and eventually one Canadian province after another, by showing his

results, to allow lay persons with only two days of NADA training, learning only Smith’s 5 acupuncture points, to practice it.

In Ontario, where it became exceedingly popular through being featured at the three Toronto hospitals, it eventually passed into legislation in 2013 (the Traditional Chinese Medicine Act, Bill 50 ) stating that persons treating addiction could put pins in, as long as it was in a “health care facility.” This latter provision was important so that 5-point ear acupuncture fell under a jurisdiction where the practice was overseen by a professional college.

What is the experience of 5-point ear acupuncture?

Well, let me start with my first experience of it. I was at Dr. Smith’s daylong presentation of it at the University of Toronto in 1990, having sat through a day of revelation. Smith was most charismatic in an offhand Robin Williams way. Our group was in the palm of his hands in short order. Then he announced one final demonstration. Everyone in the room was an acupuncturist physician. He assembled us theatre-style, and asked for a volunteer. As skeptics become believers by volunteering for hands-on exercises, soon I was sitting in front of my colleagues with 5 acupuncture pins in each ear. Smith handed me a paper and asked me to write the names of any 3 body acupuncture points on it, then told me to fold it up and put it in my pocket. He hadn’t seen what I wrote. Then he went from row to row, pinning everyone else in the room. It took 30 minutes in all to pin 65 people. Then he gave those in the audience a similar piece of paper to mine. He asked them to write down the acupuncture points I’d chosen. Some gasped in disbelief. Probably I did too. But when my points were revealed the audience had scored 80% correct. There are some 400 points in all.

Many of you may never have had regular body acupuncture, but a large portion of you have experienced 5-

point ear acupuncture. That’s probably why you’re reading this. Body acupuncture can be applied without the recipient knowing that something intuitive is happening, but the day when my severe ankle sprain was treated with acupuncture and I was told to go out and walk around the block, I had sensed exactly where to put my next step, exactly how to space my steps. I could see that this was happening intuitively. I certainly didn’t know logically how to do it.

So, if you’ve done 5-point ear acupuncture you probably do know that intuition is involved. So, what is intuition? Well, here, it’s the appearance of phenomena, strong hunches that bear fruit.

in·tu·i·tion

/ˌint(y)o͞oˈiSH(ə)n/

noun

noun: intuition

1.the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.”we'll allow our intuition to guide us"

◦a thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feeling rather than conscious reasoning.plural noun: intuitions
"your insights and intuitions as a native speaker are positively sought”

So, 5-point ear acupuncture, as Dr. Smith was trying to demonstrate, spurs intuition, but we don’t see this right off. I was once asked by a clairvoyant, who was teaching a class on intuition, to “take over.” I thought the idea was preposterous but intuitively I thought of a can of Coke I kept around because it had been manufactured half full. I put it carefully on a tray and showed it to the group, saying “What’s this?”Two people said: “Yuck! Sugar!” Eighteen people answered “It’s half full.” I sometimes, as some of you’ll remember, talk about phenomena as being like a bunch of old friends sitting around a kitchen table. One of them remarks: “Anybody heard from ol’ Sally?” Twenty years have passed and nobody has. And then the phone rings and it’s Sally.

I thought that had make-believe ring to it but two clients over the years took it seriously,. This was what they were to do. They came back with a story of it happening to them. I was so taken with this that next it then happened to me too. It harkened me back to my instant ankle cure. What was that? Was I a placebo? Was I a catalyst? Surely I played some role. Intuition isn’t just an internal single person phenomenon, it’s an extra-corporeal, pulling-of-all-reality-together, a transpersonal experience as well. It was the brain (or better the mind) rising to a new level of complexity. It didn’t stop within what a person experienced personally. It exists everywhere.

I’ll quote here from a paper I wrote to introduce Silva Mind Control which is heavily about intuition too. A teacher I met, named Lee Pulos, had been a longtime student of José Silva:

I wrote:“Some people are thanking me for the results of their recent fast-track learning of José Silva’s deceptively simple way of having the universe dance to your tune, as long as it is positive. You will remember, I hope, my story of encountering Silva’s work decades ago (’70’s) when I met one of this students, Lee Pulos, a professor at the University of British Colombia. I met Lee in the most mind-bending way, having signed up for his “Further Frontiers of Hypnosis” five day course at Esalen Institute. I was in general practice and was teaching the hypnosis of resistant subjects for the American Socially for Clinical Hypnosis, and I always yearned to know more.

But this was more than I bargained for. I was relaxing in my dormitory room at Esalen when a wild-eyed man came barreling into the room exclaiming “Who’s in the Pulos seminar? Who’s in the Pulos seminar?” Soon I was to hearing his incredible unlikely story. He was from Monterey, some 45 miles up the coast. He was passing by the Monterey airport, on his way, when he spotted a hitchhiker. It occurred to him that it was strange to see a hitchhiker, as hitchhiking is illegal in California. “Must be from out of state,” he thought, but he impulsively stopped to pick the hitchhiker up. Who was it but Less Pulos who was about to be his hypnosis teacher in a few hours. Pulos, was indeed from out of state - from British Columbia and had never been to Esalen before. He’d simply gone over his class list and seen the name of the one person from the city he was flying into, Monterey, and had mediated on his flight, invoking his name. Getting off the plane, he’d collected his baggage, crossed the nearby highway and stuck out his thumb. The first car that passed was his student, who, incredibly, stopped to pick him up.

Pulos had a lot to teach in those 5 days, ending it up, as Silva does in his book, by teaching us how to “work cases.” That means that when one is given the initials, age and geographical location of someone only known to one’s exercise partner, that in a semi-hypnotic state, one can scan the person’s body and pick up on even subtle details of ways in which the person deviated from perfect health. Pulos even held up a (Canadian) hundred dollar bill, offering it to anyone who couldn’t do the exercise perfectly. No takers! But the credit here goes to a school drop-out, José Silva! “

Where Silva teaches people to “work cases” AcuDestress teaches people to work their own case. Power of Eight teaches one to “work everyone’s case.” By finding a way to access our right brain - and later in the process, our guts, we find ourselves connecting with other people’s right brains as well. And if we are women, as seen in the picture on the left where the three cars are driving across, this is named the corpus callosum, the connection between the left and right brains, which is thicker in women, suggesting that women are quicker in transferring from left to right brain thinking. All in all, if you can’t talk things through, you can still learn to think and feel them through. And his turns out to be highly valuable.

Acupuncture centralizes bodily balance, leading to diverse brain and body areas to contribute to each other - and to others. If I place an acupuncture needle at BL-60, as seen one page back, I am connecting your peripheral nervous system, spine to differing brain areas, and, if needed, to other brains as well. This keeps it interesting, requiring the provider, but not the receiver to be in a receptive frame of mind.

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