Pacific Symposium is the largest acupuncture conference in the nation, and it allows me the opportunity to interface with acupuncturists from around the country.
2024 Pacific Symposium
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Why do we acupuncturists here at the clinic pay so much attention to diet, meditation, qigong, exercise, breathing, ergonomics, Marie Kondo-ing, and a lot more? Why are we “obsessed” (in a healthy way) with lifestyle changes and personal transformation? Because oftentimes, these parts of life are the root causes of your physical or emotional health issue! Our goal is to make you as sustainably healthy as we can—this means acupuncture to spark your healing process, and lifestyle changes and personal transformation to maintain and deepen it.
Tai Chi and Qigong
Explore Tai Chi and Qigong to enhance well-being, reduce stress, and promote balance through ancient, meditative martial arts practices.
Gender information
Gender identity is an individual’s internal sense of being male, female, or something else. Since gender identity is internal, one’s gender identity is not necessarily visible to others.
Give yourself a daily vacation with a meditation practice
Here we cover two vitally important things to keep in mind if you are just starting a meditation practice or continuing a pre-existing meditation practice. When NOT to get discouraged Here’s the first one: remember that the goal of any particular meditation “sit” is...
Prime your mind to investigate the BIG questions in life—with meditation
This article goes out to all of the deep thinkers, philosophers, spiritual seekers, existentialists and lovers of truth out there. Below we discuss one of the TOP reasons to have a meditation practice: to qualify your mind for insight and understanding. Meditation...
How to take the ‘problem’ out of your problems—meditation to the rescue
Let’s look at a very palpable (and most pleasant) effect of a regular meditation practice: stripping the “problematic-ness” out of the situations that you call your “problems.” In other words, with regular practice, things that felt beyond your capacity to handle with...
How meditation helps you be less judgmental—and more discerning
Here we will outline how to free yourself from one of the most common compulsions of the mind: judging. We’re talking about that incessant judgement of people, places and things. Here’s what we’ll cover: Why you’d want to cut down on judgmentalnessHow you can live...
Use meditation to generate and spread positive feelings
There exists a type of meditation specifically designed to change patterns of negative thought (sweetening the mind), cultivate the qualities of love, and send that good, positive energy out into the world. The Buddhists refer to this type of meditation as...
How meditation makes negative feelings more manageable in your day-to-day life
Here is an insight that you can apply any time you feel negativity as you go throughout your day. This insight has the power to: take the edge off of the negativity,help you “digest” the emotion with more ease,Bolster your confidence in your ability to accommodate and...
How meditation makes you more like Neo from The Matrix
You know that scene in The Matrix when Neo finds himself face-to-face with a spray of oncoming bullets? He expertly handles the situation by slooooowing everything down and neutralizing the bullets. They drop to the ground like pebbles before they ever reach...
Meditation gets you FOCUSED—and therefore happier & more productive
A capacity to focus is just one of the myriad byproducts of a meditation practice. Here we cover our mind’s tendency NOT to focus,the value of training it to focus,how meditation helps train your mind to focus. Either watch our video below, or read on. The crazy...
Sensitize yourself to the subtleties of experience with meditation
We have described meditation as an exercise that helps you develop “life skills” for your mind. Here we will look at life skill #2—sensitizing yourself to the subtleties (of experience): what these subtleties are,how meditation sensitizes you to them,the dangers of...
Cultivate the World’s Most Useful Attitude with meditation
This is our first micro-meditation lesson as part of our 10-Day Chill Pill Challenge. Read 10 Micro Meditation Lessons Livestreamed from Facebook for an overview of the lessons and challenge. You can also watch the Live Stream replay of this lesson below. One of the...
10 Micro Meditation Lessons
Welcome to this very first installation of our 10-day Chill Pill Challenge. A series of 5-minute mini-lessons on meditation that are available as Facebook Live Streams and instructive blog articles—like this one. The objective is to help you use meditation to...
Join the DAILY CHILL-PILL CHALLENGE
So here's what went through my mind yesterday evening at 5:15pm: "Oh, Jesus. Here he comes." Broad-shouldered, wild-eyed, screaming incoherently at the top of his lungs, the man a-few-sandwiches-short-of-a-picnic was coming straight at me on Connecticut Avenue. I did...
How to design your weekly routine
First, a provocative question for you... In the last month, what percentage of your free time did you spend doing things that are "important" or "meaningful" to you—things that matter? If you are like most people, your answer is WELL under 50%. To increase that...
The basics & benefits of mindfulness
Do you like to feel good? Me too. But the vast majority of us are conditioned to extract "feel-goodness" from something out there. We rely on external circumstances and internal thoughts/emotions/sensations to "make us" happy. For those of you interested in...
Does your sitting sit well with your body?
We do it 8 hours a day, and we're probably not doing it well... I like to think of myself as a sprightly 30-something, but I’m definitely no stranger to back, neck and shoulder pain. I notice it all the more that it comes up all the time at the clinic: an incredible...
Getting things done—an art worth mastering
Here’s another one for the “why-don’t-they-teach-this-in-grade-school” list—rock-solid organizational skills. Life as we now know it has so many of us feeling like we’re jugglers who never learned how to juggle. And while some of us have an innate (or even learned)...
The perfect warm up for Washingtonians
Here we’re using the word “Washingtonian” as a synonym for “insanely busy.” So part of this warm-up’s perfection is that it’s QUICK while still being thorough. Plus, it has a great dramatic name: The ***SPARTAN DYNAMIC WARM-UP***(followed by the DYNAMIC STRETCH, both...
Essential Breathing Techniques
Many patients in my Washington DC acupuncture practice have two goals in common—to experience fundamental emotional peace and greater physical well-being. And they want to find ways to sustain this peace and well-being in their daily lives. They may not call it...
