Lets take a trip a few 1000 years
Before industrialization and other harsh effects of human kinds ever upward reach to financial gain, there were forests in China full of Pandas. The beauty of nature was as rampant as strip malls are now. In the 1800’s during the Opium Wars, the Emperors Palace was burnt to the ground as a senseless ‘lesson’ spurred by ‘yellow fever,’ and something of an Asian garden of eden was forever lost.
While it may sound silly to us today, the origins of Chinese Medicine are based on an intuitive sense that ‘discovered’ the meridians and acupoints, not only that but the needles may have originally meant to be like spears driving out evil spirits. It’s an indigenous medicine that may beckon images of Amazonian tribes at times, but that isn’t what China is, or it is? It originated naturally using the herbs of the land and the intuition of the spiritually in tune. We believe at Sitting Swan that we are all indigenous to somewhere, and the current of “native” peoples honoring their true nature and roots which were all at some point ‘indigenous,’ we can honor and receive the healing gifts from nature
They used to be called Barefoot Doctors across China and Southeast Asian traveling from village to village, or being the village doctor who was reciprocated or ‘paid’ (as we say today), with an item such as chicken to cook for dinner. It was only customary for the patient to reciprocate when the patient was well, while this seems backwards, the thinking was that if the patient is well then the doctor had done his job but if the patient isn’t well, the doctor must be failing somewhere.
Strained relations between the US and China go back to 1949 when the US supported Chinese Nationalists who opposed Mao ZeDong’s communist regime. The scene in Forest Gump where he’s invited to China to play in ping pong tournament marks the turn towards the better for U.S. and China relations. Next, in 1972 was a big moment for acupuncture when Richard Nixon took a trip to China, and we didn’t waste any time touting and learning it’s benefits, after it was a critical component to his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s recovery of appendicitis that occurred while in China.
