Reclaim medicine with me
Greetings to you and your lineages 🙏🏼
I invite you to place a palm or two on your heart and check in with it. From the Tongva lands holding me, I send 🍯 sweetness to your heart. 💗💗💗
Like many (maybe most?) Taiwanese + Taiwanese diasporic people, I've been steeped 🍵 in both ☯️ Daoism and 🪷 Buddhism since birth. I grew up with our family's white porcelain statue to Guanshiyin pusa, she-who-hears-the-cries-of-the-world. This bodhisattva's oceanic compassion allowed them to take the form of a feminine goddess although they are beyond human constructs of gender.
The cries of the world are excruciating right now. It's not new - centuries of racial capitalist imperialism have carved crevasses of pain in the soil and our soma - but it's awful.
In Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, Gamba Adisa (the name Audre Lorde received in ritual towards the end of her life) writes,
"It has become fashionable to separate the spiritual (psychic and emotional) from the political, to see them as contradictory or antithetical."
As ancestor Gamba Adisa told us, the spiritual-psychic-emotional-energetic is not separate 🪢from the political. I see structural oppression both through its material impact and as psychic warfare. I am always simultaneously a 🤓 nerd, a🥷🏼peaceful warrior, and a🕯️ritualist; I approach this moment with all of me.
And I meet this era of aching loss with all of my ancestors: those whose footsteps 👣 I trace and those who showed me what I choose not 🛑 to do.
The generations of doctors 🩺 and medicine people in my 🧬 blood say that no matter what comes, our communities need healers. And I came here to use my name 道玲 - the pathway of ingenuity - to creatively leap over gatekeeping barriers 🧱 with all the drive of my year-of-the-horse 🐎 spirit.
On my journey to reclaim the medicine of my Taiwanese ancestors, I am committed to sharing what I learn with my communities.
“In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change.”
Besides POCA Tech in Oregon, Chinese medicine school tuition in the US costs roughly $72,000, not including the cost of being out of the workforce for 3375 hours of required coursework over 4 years. Upon graduation, many acupuncturists leave the profession or charge $100+ per session.
🧱 This wildly inaccessible infrastructure is the result of cultural appropriation and🚪gatekeeping that Tyler Phan, PhD documented in his dissertation (overview here). If you'd like to learn more about the "acu-pocalypse," you might start here or watch the recording of Orientalism & Chinese Medicine below.
This means that people who don't have $70k+ readily available either don't learn or dig a giant hole of debt. 🕳️I chose option two because I refuse to let one more generation of my family go by with us separated from the medicines of our ancestors, including our herbal remedies.
At every step of my ancestral reclamation, I have encountered barriers due to my gender identity (both perceived and actual), race, ability, sexual orientation, and advocacy for equity.
But grandma Suchin Lin Lee named me "the pathway of ingenuity," so I make my way through creativity. My next hurdle is the preclinical exam November 8th, which will allow me to treat patients (under supervision) in West Los Angeles starting next year.
To study for this test, I've designed a herbalism 🫚 curriculum that I am opening to my communities. This sliding-scale herbal intensive is designed specifically for communities impacted by structural oppression. Covering the 83 essential formulas in the California Acupuncture Licensure Exam,
this course mends a tapestry of ancestral wisdom that colonialism severs and racial capitalism commodifies.
Reclaiming the folkways of my Taiwanese ancestors is the work of my lifetime. Classes that cost thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of microaggressions are par for the course because acupuncture education in the US is rooted in racism.
I tell my inner child that the parts of me that make it hard for me to stay in school - my energetic sensitivity, my critical lens, my passion for justice - are gifts, not liabilities. And so with my inner child as my buddy, I've created an herbalism 🫚 curriculum to meet Chinese herbs and formulas as plantcestors (Layla Feghali).
The immersion welcomes People of the Global Majority on a sliding scale with a suggested minimum donation of $20 per class (no one turned away for lack of funds). Those benefiting from white privilege are specifically encouraged to make a monetary contribution because of the racial aspects of cultural appropriation and gatekeeping. This information covered in this course cost me approximately $5,760, so market rate for each hour of this intensive is about $175.