Ep. 25: Becoming a Curable Person, with Jason Moskovitz

0:00:04 - Alexa Bradley Hulsey

Welcome to Notes From your Acupuncturist, the podcast for anyone who's interested in acupuncture, complementary medicine, holistic health and self-care. I'm your host, alexa Bradley-Hulsey. If you enjoy this show, you can help other people discover it by leaving a rating or a review, by following or subscribing on your favorite podcast listening app or simply by telling someone about it. And if you'd like to support this show financially, you can become a paid subscriber on Substack for just a few dollars a month. Just head over to substackcom and search Notes From your Acupuncturist or click the link in the show notes. And one more thing before we get started, just a disclaimer that this podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a replacement for medical care from a qualified healthcare provider. Okay, on with the show. 

Hello and welcome to Notes From your Acupuncturist. I'm Alexa, and my guest today is licensed acupuncturist Jason Moskovitz. Today we are talking about meditation, self-care and the concept of root and branch in Chinese medicine, which is one of the guiding principles that makes our medicine so beautiful and effective. So a little about Jason. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of California, los Angeles, and studied acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Yosan University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, also my alma mater and also where we first met many years ago. In 2009, jason joined the world-renowned Dow of Wellness in Los Angeles and was a partner in opening their second clinic location. In 2016, he moved his family of four to Vancouver, washington, and took over as owner of New Harmony Health. Jason utilizes a wide range of treatment modalities in his practice in addition to acupuncture, and he is certified in nutrition, infinity, energy healing, qigong and tai chi, and he's the co-author of the book Arthritis Secrets of Natural Healing. Jason welcome. 

0:02:14 - Jason Moskovitz

Thank you so much, Alexa. I've actually been really looking forward to this conversation for quite some time, so thanks for having me. 

0:02:21 - Alexa Bradley Hulsey

Good, I'm so glad you're here, and I'd like to start by talking about something I mentioned in the introduction what I consider really one of the defining characteristics of Chinese medicine and one of its true strengths, which is the concept of root and branch. So why don't you start just by telling our listeners what do we mean by root and branch in Chinese medicine? 

0:02:46 - Jason Moskovitz

Well, root and branch, like many things in our medicine, is a metaphor for a problematic tree. And this tree, in this situation, is going to be us, and many of us who grew up in Western society are used to seeking help when we feel a thing that we don't like. It might be anxiety or an upset stomach or back pain that causes us to seek help, and so often we like myself, grown up in these environments where we feel a thing, go ask for help, get that symptom reduced and we're kind of shuttled on our way back to our lives. And what's interesting about being a practitioner for a good part of 20 years now is that concept of root and branch has become sort of more complicated in a really wonderful way For a long time. 

As a human and as a practitioner, I would see a branch, a problematic, symptomatic branch, as being what I mentioned already a bunch of symptoms. 

And this root may be being another physiological process going on in the body. 

And so in Chinese medicine we see that all the time People might say, goodness, I've got a lot of gas and we can say, well, maybe we should look at what you're eating or even look at the stress going on in your life and, as I mentioned, being in practice for sort of a mid-career span of time. Now the root has become a little bit broader. For me and I don't know if this is as a result of my own interests in energetic medicine and mental health care or being married to and practicing with a psychotherapist but in the definition of a root, I think can go way beyond just our physical body to mean really what's going on emotionally, energetically, spiritually. So this relationship between root and branch doesn't necessarily mean the physiologic body or the physiologic tree alone, but can really expand to our entire experience of being a human being. In fact, one of our shared teachers, I believe, Ni Hua-Ching, is, I believe, quoted as saying that there is no incurable disease, there's just incurable people, which I still giggle when I say that to myself. 

0:05:23 - Alexa Bradley Hulsey

That sounds like something he would say. 

0:05:27 - Jason Moskovitz

When I say that to myself or say it to patients, I still find it funny because, well, we laugh, because we know there's some truth in that. 

0:05:35 - Alexa Bradley Hulsey

I love the way that you're describing the root and branch as the problematic tree. You're really expanding my thinking here and how you're talking because, going back to that tree metaphor, what you're saying is that the root isn't just the physical root of the tree. The root is the soil that the tree is in. The root is the air that is around the tree and maybe everything in the tree's environment that it interacts with. It goes actually beyond the physical tree. The root is beyond just the tree itself. 

0:06:17 - Jason Moskovitz

Absolutely yeah. The health of this tree is going to depend on all of those factors. 

0:06:23 - Alexa Bradley Hulsey

Yes, because a tree is part of an ecosystem and we as humans are part of a community. Absolutely, the light bulb is going off. 

0:06:36 - Jason Moskovitz

Absolutely. We as human beings are not all living in caves. That might be a nice retreat, but we are living as a community. So are those metaphoric trees. To relate it to our teacher's famous quote there when I first heard that there is no incurable disease, I got really puffed up in my chest and felt so very egotistical about this medicine I was studying, thinking that's right, this is a panacea for all, it's going to cure everything. After a short while I realized that's a pretty silly notion, because plenty of people are going to progress in their illness and their lives irregardless of our wonderful treatment. 

I recognized in the latter part of that quote that there are no incurable people. What does that mean? That means that all of those environmental factors to the tree in our life are going to affect us. We might come into their lives as practitioners and do our best work, and work that makes all the clinical sense to us. The 99% of a patient or a person's life outside of the office is going to be influenced by all of those other factors their food and water and relationships and environment and toxins, etc. And so a person is a conglomeration of all of those things and maybe also none of those things and the influence of people like us on other human beings seeking help, I think, does actually have some shortcomings, and that is really our influence. I'm not here to take on another human being's entire life and influence every little aspect. 

I've definitely seen many people come in for back pain and have their entire life changed. That's personally my goal. But to bring it back to the quote again, I don't think, using cancer as an example, I'm not really allowed to treat cancer itself. I'm not here to cure cancer. I'm not here to cure disease, despite my effectiveness as a practitioner in my chosen specialties. I'm here to change lives. 

So what walks in is back pain, what walks in is side effects from chemotherapy and I do my best to achieve those results for those chief complaints. But my true desire is to illustrate to somebody that they're an entire person outside of their roles as a parent and a worker and a patient. And oftentimes people will come in for these branch problems but will leave with their root conditions being treated that may have absolutely nothing to do with that branch issue that brought them in. So again, the incurable person might be someone who is so ingrained, maybe even multi-generationally, with trauma to be engaging with the world in such a way that keeps them from being receptive to help from quality practitioners, that there's really not a lot we might be able to do for a certain person, and that is nothing wrong with us as practitioners or even them as people. It's just about right time and right place. 

0:10:00 - Alexa Bradley Hulsey

Right. This all makes me think about a larger conversation that I see happening in the healthcare community not just in the Chinese medicine community, but the broader community is that we're finally starting to talk more about social indicators of health and the social aspects of health and the impact of trauma. As you mentioned, the impact of environment, and someone who grows up on a busy street with a lot of traffic, in a home that's not well ventilated, is going to maybe be more likely to develop asthma because of the environment that they grew up in and which is beyond their control, and so I am heartened to see those kinds of conversations happening, but I think they need to be happening a lot more, and I think Chinese medicine practitioners are so well suited to be leading and having those conversations, because we've always looked at patients in a more holistic way and we look at the totality of the patient and the context in which their life is unfolding. 

0:11:17 - Jason Moskovitz

Certainly. I think that's a wonderful point. The social indicators of health, I think, point to that. Using that same idea of the tree, who's visiting the tree? Is that tree next to an agricultural center? Is it next to an industrial center? And it's going to be affected in relation to those. And so we are just as dynamic as any plant, we are just as dynamic as any animal, and we could argue about who's on the list of importance here. I think we're all important. But as far as your point, yeah, there are indicators that affect us outside of just the body, just the mind. And so I think patients are hungry. They're hungry for experiences in healthcare I mean in this country, for sure, because it's so difficult to get healthcare sometimes for practitioners of all kinds who are willing to look at their entire being instead of just their back pain, for example. 

In fact, I mean this is what happens every day Most of my professional life. 

People will come in and explain about the back pain that's been with them for years, and then they'll be upset that all of the conventional doctors who might be doing their wonderful job prescribing physical therapy and medication aren't interested in them as humans, aren't treating them as people. 

A lot of patients seem to be frustrated, feeling like they're just a number on somebody's list for that day and that there's really no connection. I have come to terms with a truth inside me as a human being and as a professional, that when we seek help from others we're really looking for relief and connection, and I find that that relief tends to not come at all or 100% to completion if connection isn't there. And so the art of connection is, it's an art, and so that means the way one person is going to give it, the way another is going to receive, it is unique to that relationship. And again, practitioners like ourselves, who are engaged in the whole of a relationship, with their body, with their mind, with the patient and practitioner, I think again are well poised to recognize the importance of connection and providing that holistic relief. 

0:13:58 - Alexa Bradley Hulsey

I love that and I love how you say that connection is an art and that that, to me, makes me think that it is something to be, it's something to be cultivated and developed, and it might not come easily or naturally, and that's okay, because it's something that we can practice. Those of us who are practitioners or anyone, can practice the art of connection. So I'm curious then, as a practitioner and you've been practicing for many years how have you developed that art of connection in your own work? 

0:14:33 - Jason Moskovitz

Well, this is actually, I think, a perfect segue into the word you used cultivation and self care and meditation. I have recognized myself as a professional, as a parent, as a partner, that the better I take care of myself, the more I can be present and connected to those that I care about in the office and at home. And I started out with meditation as a kid, never did it seriously, took kind of a break from that and moved into Zen, buddhist drumming. I was part of a Japanese drumming group for close to a decade and that kind of transitioned me into Chinese medicine and studying movement arts and so exercise and mindful movement and really in the last few years meditation has really been my kind of full circle moment in caring for myself, in sort of all of these realms. 

Movements crucial, nutrition's crucial. I think most of our modern society's aware of that and is actually having a growing awareness about meditation. But I find self-cultivation in the forms of meditative movement and meditation itself is still a little taboo, simply because of the way it's communicated, the way it's sold, the way it's talked about. It starts to get into psychospiritual, religious words and kind of becomes a turn off for some Clearly not all because it is very growing, and so the biggest tool for myself in being a better human practitioner, parent and partner has been meditation and regular meditation. 

And so when I talk to patients who have a fraught history with it or just hate it like I did when I started. 

I started for hours on end in a strict position in a Buddhist temple and it was painful and I hated it. And a mutual friend of ours named Ferran actually was one of my first acupuncturists and he introduced me to a different way to meditate and I thought there's got to be a different way to do this. Sure enough, there's just as many ways to take care of oneself, just as many ways to meditate, as there are methods of communication or taking care of ourselves with food or for other modalities. But yeah, the prescriptive nature of meditation is just as diverse, as a Chinese medical practitioner, as the unique prescriptive abilities of an acupuncture formula or an herbal formula or a nutritional formula. So my own work on myself through Tai Chi, Qigong and meditation has allowed me to strengthen myself in his work I plan to do for the rest of my life in the hopes that I can inspire those close to me and those new friends I meet as patients in the clinic every day until I stop working. 

0:17:43 - Alexa Bradley Hulsey

Yeah, I'd love to hear a little more about your particular meditation practice and what you have found that works for you, because, yeah, I hear from people who practice meditation and it works for them and some who try it and they can't stand it, and so, yeah, how does your meditation practice work? 

0:18:09 - Jason Moskovitz

Sure, I mean I'll get into sort of what I like and what I do in a moment. But I believe that even the word meditation is so incredibly gray and a lot of people will approach things like acupuncture or meditation because they're looking for relief and connection connection from another person and maybe connection within ourself. And what happens is we're often looking for relief from some sort of stress another enormous gray word that's relatively meaningless. It's meaningless Still we find out. Well, my stress is this thing in my back that I can't make go away, and your stress is that person you work for that you just want to. You know, every vacation is your only happy place. So everybody's stress is different and the way people interact with meditation is incredibly different. There are thousands of schools of thought, hundreds of thousands of different types of meditation and ways to do it. 

I'm in the middle of a multi-year training program through the International Daoist Meditation Institute right now to further my self-cultivation, and the organization of their program is really wonderful because they've broken it out into various what they call pillars, really their different things to focus on with each month, and they repeat from year to year. So one might be visuals, visualization, one might be sounds as far as sound healing, one might be gratitude, which is the focus for this month, and we just got finished with words and vocations that spark a change within us. And so moving around this, this potpourri of senses and ideas when it comes to traditional Daoist study of meditation and this has nothing to do with Daoism specifically, because these exist in many cultures and many systems allows me, as a consumer of meditation, to kind of go what feels good and, honestly, not all of them do, and not that doesn't necessarily mean that those that don't feel good are a bad thing, because if we as holistic practitioners know, the difficult things that I find inside me tend to be the thing that I need to focus on the most. The most difficult relationships that I have need to be focused on the most by me to learn something. But we, as consumers of life and consumers of meditation, often approach something, see a difficulty and tap out and stop, and it's a reactivity in us as Westerners. 

I believe, to have that instant gratification that crosses over into choices of health care or choices in how we cultivate ourselves. 

So I believe, actually the biggest idea when it comes to engaging in all of this is to recognize challenge, recognize pain and go I see you, and to keep going to move through it to find what works for you, as opposed to going. This is too difficult, and to stop Now things might need to change, because maybe you're doing something incorrectly, maybe your posture's wrong, maybe you're taking the medication too high of a dose, or whatever it is. So we've got to ask for help, and that's another humongous thing that a lot of us do it yourself or feel like, well, I've got this all by myself. And so, as a community of humans, we need mentors, we need teachers, and so, as a teacher, I become a better student, and as a student, I desire to be a better teacher, and so that's what I advise all my patients and students to do is to be a teacher and a student ideally, and I'm so thankful for my teachers because they've really impressed that upon me as my careers progressed. 

0:22:19 - Alexa Bradley Hulsey

Do you teach meditation and Tai Chi and Qigong in your practice or for your patients? 

0:22:26 - Jason Moskovitz

At the moment, since I'm pretty busy with juggling lots of different modalities. I do one-on-ones, I have great desires to do classes, which I've done on occasion in the community, and I have plans to do larger things online later, but with two small and or medium kids. I'm pretty busy being a parent and definitely plan to do that much more later. 

0:22:55 - Alexa Bradley Hulsey

So a common response that I hear from people when I talk to them about meditation is that they say their mind is just too restless, they have a hard time relaxing, they can't quiet their mind and so they don't do it because it's just too hard, kind of like how you mentioned. So what is your response to that? 

0:23:19 - Jason Moskovitz

when people say that, it's a universal problem, one I share, one I've seen myself progress through and, just like you, 90% of the people I talk to have the same complaint that keeps them from moving forward. And to that I say experiment. I have a handout that I give. You know. It's got five really simple, pretty much self-guided things to do and they're really quick, they're really simple. That self-guided doesn't work for a lot of people. So I've got to say, okay, you've got to try these four, five or six apps and videos on YouTube and just date. I like to talk about things. When I'm trying to communicate, finding chemistry with a thing or a way of life, I always come back to dating for some time, for some reason. 

0:24:16 - Alexa Bradley Hulsey

It's something we can all relate to. We've all had bad dates and good dates. 

0:24:20 - Jason Moskovitz

That's true and that's the idea is, you sit down with a meditation, you go how does this feel Now? Again, just because it is challenging, it doesn't feel good doesn't mean to give up on it, but maybe after two or three dates with the thing, you're like this isn't my thing. You keep going until you find a spark inside that says I'm moving in a direction, I'm progressing, I see change. I mean, even if it's really small and that can be a challenge, because most people want everything right now. I want to lose 50 pounds today. Well, that's not realistic unless you get some extreme surgery done. 

I want enlightenment, whatever that means today, but my personal belief of enlightenment is what we've already talked about. It's this road that we're on. It's this path that we're on, step by step, small change by small change. If we're aware enough to recognize those small changes, because they often happen and because we're so attached to these big now type changes, we totally bypass all of these small progressives that are happening. But we feel like that's not good enough, that's not big enough, that's not immediate enough, and we give up. This is just as much about patience. 

0:25:33 - Alexa Bradley Hulsey

Yes, that is so true, and you mentioned. I like what you said about the spark, like listening for the spark or looking for the spark or being open to feeling the spark, because that, to me, makes me think of intuition and if you feel that spark, then that's your intuition speaking to you and trying to guide you and to be your friend. Do you feel like meditation helps people be more in tune with their intuition or helps people to hear their intuition or feel their intuition more fully? 

0:26:17 - Jason Moskovitz

100%. I was actually kind of hoping that you would ask me a question like this before we were setting this up Absolutely, intuition as an idea. 

We think of this thing being a sixth sense, some other way of knowing a thing, and this is again such a very foreign concept for modern Western culture and humans who are used to living our lives externally, materially, and so to have an intuition would essentially mean to learn something from a place that isn't from another person, that isn't from a book, that isn't from a thing that I can hold in my hand, but it's from generating a truth from inside your own being, and that's such a again a very foreign, sometimes scary concept for a lot of us that are very attached to ways of living, ways of utilizing our mind and our systems of belief sometimes too, and so not that we have at all to remove any of our cultures or systems. 

I think we simply need to complement all of that with a world that's going on inside of ourselves, that we can utilize intuition itself to find intuition and to grow that intuition to a point where we can go oh my goodness, I just figured something out by myself, in complete darkness, and it didn't come from anywhere else, it didn't come from outside of me that I can be my own ever flowing university to learn from when it comes to being on this planet and relating to others and caring for myself. Meditation has been an enormous guide in generating that, for me anyway. 

0:28:19 - Alexa Bradley Hulsey

Yeah, and I think, like you said, we're so accustomed to drawing upon the external world for everything that we need and to live out our desires, and I think one of the things that we have to do too is just to sort of quiet the noise from the outside and try to step away from that. And I think this is why you talk about generating an idea from the university of you, or I'm not quite sure how you put it, but this makes me think of why people tend to have great ideas when they're in the shower. It's because I feel like the shower is the one place where people don't use their phones, because it's kind of hard to use your phone while you're in the shower. 

0:29:14 - Jason Moskovitz

Yeah. 

0:29:15 - Alexa Bradley Hulsey

Yeah, exactly, I know, seriously, Somebody's going to invent the shower phone. 

0:29:20 - Jason Moskovitz

For sure. 

0:29:22 - Alexa Bradley Hulsey

But yeah, it's just you in the shower. It's nobody else talking in your ear or texting you, or you're not watching a YouTube video, it's just you, and so it's amazing what could come up when it's just you. 

0:29:37 - Jason Moskovitz

Yeah, it's super interesting that you mentioned the shower. Having been a sufferer of panic and anxiety for a good portion of my life, it was actually a morning shower. That was actually the most difficult thing for me to do, because there wasn't any other external thing occupying my mind. That was when my mind would go nuts. 

0:30:00 - Alexa Bradley Hulsey

Wow. 

0:30:01 - Jason Moskovitz

I would essentially utilize that time to replay really awful images and scenarios for the five minutes and I'm basically setting up myself for a really awful day every day for years. Wow, wow, it was pretty awful. It's like you know, warm water. It should be pretty relaxing. 

0:30:23 - Alexa Bradley Hulsey

Yeah. 

0:30:24 - Jason Moskovitz

I came to actually Not enjoying taking a shower because of how anxiety provoking it was. And now I and now I'll literally Like recite invocations while I'm showering. It's another opportunity to focus and because if I'm not on my a game I can, those bad habits might want to peek in and say, hey, I'm still here if you're not, you know, taking care of yourself, but you're right and to kind of respond to your. You know the. The common Challenge that people have regarding that active mind, it's really to find a way to To disengage. You know, all of these thoughts. They, they want to knock and go look at me, I want attention, I'm, I'm gonna be your focus for the next few seconds or few minutes or few hours and to simply saying you know, I see you there, but I'm not interested in engaging with you anymore. And to generate that habit. 

And I've, I've improved my ability to shower and I have improved my ability to see what can come in those quiet moments, like inspiration. And absolutely I think that's when people are what people will call the the zone in sports, or They'll call it a Zen moment, maybe when they're doing some repetitive activity like doing the dishes or painting the house or chopping wood. And that's the inherent Benefit of engaging in the mundane aspects of life is that we can be in that intuitive space when we're Engaging in life in that way, as opposed to running away to pleasure activities only, because that's really trying to escape from that part of life and we really do need a balance of work and rest, not just rest. 

0:32:22 - Alexa Bradley Hulsey

So yeah, yeah, and we really short change ourselves when we Are constantly engaging in distraction. We miss out on so many opportunities to engage and cultivate our intuition and, you know, find out what else might be inside of us. 

0:32:44 - Jason Moskovitz

Absolutely yeah, if we're aware, of course right those that those that love their, their, you know Distractions and and sensory stuff, they might have no idea that there's any other way of being. That's true. And that's okay. That's for them to learn in their own time. But it is a wonderful thing when you realize that you know there's this entire universe inside to explore and improve and, Honestly, it makes Life much more worth living. 

0:33:11 - Alexa Bradley Hulsey

Absolutely Well. So we've talked a bit about meditation. I would like to talk about Tai Chi and Chi Gong as well, because those are Practices that you have spent a lot of years learning and practicing. They're not the same as Meditation, but I feel like they have a meditative aspect to them, but they involve movement. So I'd like to hear sort of how you, what do you feel like are the different benefits of Tai Chi and Chi Gong versus something like meditation, and what's the role of each in in this process of healing and caring for yourself? 

0:33:55 - Jason Moskovitz

Sure, I'll just Kind of define the two a little bit. So Tai Chi and Chi Gong are both movement arts, and Chi Gong is like saying sports and Tai Chi is like saying baseball. So Tai Chi, which, I believe, loosely translates to push pull, is a form of Chi Gong, which is loosely translated to energy work or energy discipline, and so there are again thousands of different families and ways and forms of each of these types of movements. Tai Chi is often more a Consistently moving set of movements, where Chi Gong can be a little bit more broad and can have moments of stillness, moments of even meditation. The word meditation often connotes a standing, lying, sitting position where we're really focusing on the internal world and our breath and our intention, where Tai Chi and Chi Gong often have much more specific postures and movements related to them and they are different and they have some similarities to Often times when we're engaged in moving activities like Qigong. 

It's actually quite difficult to think of anything else when we are engaged in stillness. That is the experience of sitting meditation, for example. It's actually very easy to think of many, many other things, and so both need to be trained when it comes to our body and our mind, because those help each other as well. If we have a body that's not working very well, it's hard to have a focused mind, and vice versa is true, and so I believe we need a little bit of both. We need movement, we need stillness, and so, while I shared a story about meditation recently being sort of a boon for me, I wouldn't say that one is necessarily more important than the other. I would actually consider them both to be part of the same energy work. 

That is one of the five main pillars of Chinese medicine internal work, like meditation, internal work like Tai Chi or Qigong, and then there's medical energy work, like medical Qigong and infinity, as you mentioned earlier in the intro. So, just like somebody who's wanting to lose weight right, they're hearing about food and movement and really nothing else, and very often, if stress isn't being managed or sleep isn't very good, you can have a quote-unquote perfect diet or perfect exercise routine and get absolutely nowhere. So I believe meditation, in terms of still practices, and Qigong, and the most popular example being Tai Chi in movement practices, are, I would say, both needed ideally, but even in my experience, I started with movement and enjoyed it for many, many years as my primary mode of self-cultivation and now I'm doing a little bit more of the still practices. But I'm always trying to find a balance of doing both. But again, with the multiple roles one engages with being a parent etc it makes it hard to do all the things I want to do. That's okay. 

0:37:24 - Alexa Bradley Hulsey

Right Yin and yang you know the movement and the stillness. 

0:37:28 - Jason Moskovitz

You got it. 

0:37:28 - Alexa Bradley Hulsey

Before we wrap up, I would like to give you a chance to talk about your book a little bit, because you have co-authored a book called Arthritis Secrets of Natural Healing, so are you free to share any of the secrets of natural healing on this podcast. 

0:37:49 - Jason Moskovitz

Or is that what we've already? 

0:37:50 - Alexa Bradley Hulsey

been talking about this whole time. 

0:37:52 - Jason Moskovitz

I would say we have, and I think I can speak for my co-author, Dr Maoshing Ni, that there, you know, that was part of an effective title. We're not looking to hold anything from anyone. There truly are no secrets. But you know, truthfully, the secret is the thing that we don't know, and so when we engage with a book of any kind and we learn something, it becomes it feels like a secret. It feels like we're being, you know, given a gift. 

0:38:23 - Alexa Bradley Hulsey

Yes. 

0:38:24 - Jason Moskovitz

And so this particular book, while the title is Arthritis, ends up being a lot about pain, a lot about inflammation, and we go into a lot of the things we've talked about, that whole problematic tree. And so somebody who's going to go into a bookstore and look for help with their achre pain or arthritis, they'll see that title and go, ah, this is what that's about, Just like when people come to us and go, Alexa, my back hurts, and then you start talking about their poop and they're like why are you doing that? Clearly because, like I've heard you say in other episodes it's a phrase that I use all the time is that none of this is living in a vacuum. 

That's right, that's right, your guts aren't you know. Your guts actually are right in front of you, Right in front of your back. 

0:39:12 - Alexa Bradley Hulsey

Right, they're right next to each other Exactly so they've got to be connected somehow. 

0:39:17 - Jason Moskovitz

For sure. And so, yeah, the book is really about how your joints are connected to your metabolism. Your joints are connected to your hormones, they're connected to your mental health, they're connected to your nutrition, they're connected to your immune system, and so when we show up and go, my knee hurts. Well, we're going to be asking about all of those other things because of the hundred plus different types of arthritis out there In the Western diagnostic world. We as Chinese medical practitioners can you know, recognize that there are thousands of more different types of people than there are types of diagnoses and the way that those things kind of come down to a person in a clinic going I have a knee problem, just like that person has a knee problem, and we as practitioners understand that the fix might be just as unique as the person showing up. So the book is not just about joint pain. It's really about taking care of yourself and it's about the pain experience and how we can engage with all parts of life to help ourselves. 

0:40:21 - Alexa Bradley Hulsey

And that really gets back to what we started this conversation by talking about is root and branch, and what is at one person's root is going to be at a different person's root, and the root, as you said, extends beyond the physical structures of the body. It's everything around us, too Certainly, yeah, well, before we wrap up, is there anything else that you would like to add? 

0:40:47 - Jason Moskovitz

We've covered a lot in such a short period of time, and again I want to thank you for the opportunity. These are the types of things that I don't get a lot of time to talk about in the clinic, so I hope patients out there are enjoying some of the stuff we're talking about, and if you're interested in the work that I do in Southwest Washington and are interested in getting acupuncture, you can find me at New Harmony Health, that's at newharmonyhealthcom. We also do phone and video stuff for those out of state or internationally as well, and hopefully over the next years or however long it takes me to slow down my parental duties, I'll probably be doing some more online teaching of Qigong and meditation at some point too. 

0:41:29 - Alexa Bradley Hulsey

I would love to see that. Yeah, that would be great. We'll put a link to everything in the show notes so that people can find you easily. Jason, I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. It is just so great to hear from you and hear your perspectives on our medicine and the many ways that we can heal ourselves. So thank you very much. 

0:41:54 - Jason Moskovitz

Thank you so much, Alexa. I hope you're well and look forward to talking again. 

0:41:58 - Alexa Bradley Hulsey

Likewise Thanks, as always, to our paid subscribers for helping keep this work sustainable. You too can become a paid subscriber for just a few dollars a month. Just head over to substackcom and search notes from your acupuncturist, or click the link in the show notes. Until next time, this is Alexa Bradley-Hulsey, your acupuncturist, signing off with love and gratitude. 

Transcribed by https://podium.page