Hello everyone! Welcome back to the show. I am genuinely so excited to share today's interview and conversation with you. I interviewed my personal acupuncturist! He is so amazing and wise and inspiring and I just think that this conversation is going to help a lot of people who listen to this. So I am just so excited to share this with everyone.
My Story with Acupuncture
Before I open up that conversation I wanted to start this episode off by sharing my own personal story with how I got into acupuncture and how it has genuinely changed my life. I think this is really important because if you know me or if you worked with me, I'm sure I’ve even said this in a previous episode. I recommend and encourage acupuncture to everyone. It is such an incredible body work tool, to help so many people get to the root cause of issues of so many different things.
Let me just share with you my story. I'm going to bring you back at the end of 2019. This is right at the peak when I was entering my own burnout. I was going through burnout. I was pushing myself really really hard to hit certain career goals for myself and my business. I was reaching those goals, but I was also doing it at the expense of my own health.
I was kind of losing myself in the process of everything that I was working so hard, like hustle hard, to achieve. It was at that time that Michael, my husband and I had just purchased our first home that we had manifested up in the mountains out in California. Michael had just actually quit his consulting job and started his own company. I'm growing my own business at the time and I was really going into my retreat business side and hosting more retreats and my courses.
It all kind of came to a head in December of 2019. I just finished a very grueling 3 months of travel like back-to-back travel and we had just hosted family for Thanksgiving. Right after that family left, I had hosted a couple of VIP days for my clients at my house. I remember after my last VIP left I collapsed in my bed and I could not move.
I could not move and it was pretty scary actually. It wasn't like oh I’m so tired, I just need to lay down. I collapsed and I couldn't move. I thought, oh my gosh I think I have hit burnout. There were so many other things that were happening, but in that moment I just was a little freaked out that I couldn't move.
I was also extremely stressed with everything that I had pushed myself through for so long. I mean that entire year was basically in fight or flight, just non stop. The next morning I woke up and I had found under my armpits I had these lymph nodes that were the size of golf balls. I had two of them under one of my armpits.
Then I kind of start to panic right now. I'm like oh no, oh no, now we've entered a whole new territory, the whole new arena of this stress impacting me. So I talked it over with my husband and I thought well what should I do here? If I go to the doctor they're just going to prescribe me some medicine to bring the inflammation down, but I would really like to get to the root cause of this in a natural way if possible and only have to go that route if I have to.
I personally think we should be doing it for every aspect of our health and not just going straight to a pill to fix things. There was a local acupuncturist in the town we are living in, a mountain town in California, and I was able to get in like the next day.
I didn't know what to expect, but I remember leaving the session a couple hours later just feeling like I could take a deep breath. Looking back I could see that I was actually able to finally access my parasympathetic nervous system. I was able to breathe and rest and digest.
I remember the acupuncture appointment was towards the end of the day and I went home and I went straight to bed. This was pre-baby, so I was able to actually sleep. I slept 14 or 15 hours straight. I woke up the next day and the swollen lymph nodes under my arms were gone. That was all it took.
I remember after my appointment I was sitting with my acupuncturist in California and he said “what we consider your condition in traditional chinese medicine is your spirit being beaten down.” Apparently that lymph node is connected to my heart. I remember I almost cried sitting there because I knew he was right.
I was just so grateful that he was there and acupuncture was even an option for me. Then I even tried it myself. The lymph nodes were gone the next morning and I felt a lot better. I spent the next month healing, resting, and completely recovering from the burnout I had experienced.
I went back every couple of weeks after that. As this is going into 2020, about a week or two after lockdowns had officially happened in the U.S., I got pregnant. We had just started trying a month or two before that. I deeply believe acupuncture not only helped me to heal and recover from burnout, but it also helped me activate my fertility.
I continued going throughout my pregnancy and I felt very supported. I know that it helped the pregnancy in so many ways. I went after I had Melrose to help with postpartum as well. At that point it was just a part of my self-care routine. It was just another thing that I was committed to doing for the rest of my life.
When we decided to move on a whim almost a year later I was concerned I wouldn’t find a great acupuncturist. An acupuncturist who does traditional chinese medicine and was really similar to the one out in California. So I prayed about it and asked God to bring me the acupuncturist that could help me.
I remember I did a search and found someone who had a traditional Chinese practice. I booked an appointment and got in. The first thing that I talked about with him was my previous acupuncturist in California and funny enough he knew him. They actually studied a little bit together because my current acupuncturist, who you will hear from today, lived in Southern California for a while. They both knew each other and so I said thank you to the universe for guiding me to him.
Here we are today. I have continued to go to acupuncture with my acupuncturist, Justin. I am just beyond grateful for practicing acupuncturists and passionate acupuncturists. It’s such a needed and underrated practice that more people need to look into it for so many reasons.
If this sounds interesting to you, we talk a little bit about acupuncture and healing your spirit, healing your body, who it’s for, what exactly it looks like, what happens in an appointment, what are they actually doing, how is it helping you. All of these questions are answered and it’s truly amazing.
I cannot wait for you guys to check this out. If you like this episode please be sure to consider giving us a 5-star review. Leaving a written review would also help us out a ton.
Let’s head on into the show. Thank you so much for being here and I will see you next time, namaste.
Interview with Justin Penoyer
Alisha Leytem: Hello everyone. Welcome back to Unlock Your Well-Being. I am so excited for today's guest. I have been wanting to bring him on for a very long time. He is both mine and my husband's personal acupuncturist. He is just a wealth of wisdom and knowledge.
Everytime I go to a session with him I not only feel amazing physically, but we have such great conversations as well. I feel so uplifted hearing about his perspectives on everything with mind, body, health. I am so excited to have him on the show today to share more about what acupuncture is and how it can really help you.
You guys know how much I share and recommend acupuncture to so many of my clients and there’s a little bit of a hesitation. Justin is going to be sharing with us all the ways that it can benefit you. So, welcome Justin to the show!
So, I just want to give everyone a little bit of a background of you and your story. Can you tell us a little bit about you and how you got into acupuncture?
Justin Penoyer: So there’s a short and long answer to that. The short answer is I got injured on a work site in my early 20’s. This would have been in the early 2000’s. I went through a process that might sound familiar to a lot of folks trying to find someone that could not only give me an answer and a pathway to recovery, but also help me in the short term.
After bouncing around to many doctors it was mentioned to me that I might try this crazy thing called acupuncture. So I jumped online and found the closest place to try it and that was in Chicago. There was a school there that had just opened. I made the drive into Chicago and went through a series of treatments there. A number of things happened after that that would eventually lead me to becoming an acupuncturist.
That was the initial introduction and experience with acupuncture. It helped me a great deal to the point that it influenced me enough that at that point in my life it felt like this was something I was supposed to do myself.
Alisha Leytem: So you had a personal injury, it helped you immensely to recover, and you realize this could help a lot of other people. I liked that you said “this crazy thing called acupuncture.” Why do you think so many people are hesitant or unsure of what it is? Then can you also share with us what it is?
Justin Penoyer: I would sort of frame that in two different vectors. One being that they are somewhat familiar with the thought model that is the backdrop for acupuncture. In chinese medicine what we would say is “be all heard” (Bèi suǒyǒu rén tīng dào). Ying Yong thinking is a paradigm model. We just come from a different mental model, so it looks different for us for that reason.
Then secondly it’s because it doesn't seem logical that getting stuck with needles. Especially these needles since they lack mass. They are very tiny needles. So how could that provoke physiological response at all? How could that control a beneficial healing response?
That's why I understand those who have not experienced chinese medicine and acupuncture before are skeptical. At the same time I say people can’t really talk about the experience of acupuncture unless they had it.
You yourself having acupuncture, you understand. A chi response is really something you have to experience for use to be able to discuss it rationally. So it’s really those two different sets of the thought models being different. At the same time the practical side may seem as a break when we think of medical practices/
Alisha Leytem: Can you walk me through how it actually helps you? For example, I come in and sit down for a session. Walk me through that whole process if this is someone's first appointment. What would they go through and what’s actually happening?
Justin Penoyer: The initial portion of it would be familiar to a lot of folks. This is a general framework where you’re going to come in and you fill out medical paperwork, do a medical intake. What might be different there as far as a medical intake is that there is a lot of questioning that goes on that’s rather extensive.
Next we go onto the treatment portion. Typically what happens is you’re going to go to different variances of this, but in my practice we typically are going to start a patient on their back, and insert the needles. They lay there for a time and then we come back and flip over and we will needle the other side.
The needles themselves during the needling process sounds like it would be uncomfortable, but as a lot of acupuncture patients find out, it’s not nearly what we would conceive it to be when going through the process. The needles are small. Most of the needles I use are 1.6 to 1.8 millimeters in diameter.
Typically what we do is we will insert points on the head, on the body, and limbs on various locations. The needling can be fairly light or a little bit stronger depending on what we are doing. That’s pretty much the basic process of it and of course we will find variations of it depending on who I am treating or what I am treating.
What acupuncture is going to be doing is we could describe in various different languages of course. We could use the model of chinese medicine and then also western physiology and chemistry. In Chinese medicine, what we are doing is promoting the proper circulation of physiology in the body.
I would say these are two broad and basic categories defined as chi (blood). It’s this idea that all physiology is undergoing a constant process. They define the body in terms of processes over constituents. The goal is to have correct circulation in the body, which is what we call a 50 fold cycle.
This idea that the body is going through physiological processes throughout the day that we might label as circadian rhythms. Those have to be not only properly timed, but properly located within the body.
Chi flow and blood flow within the body needs to be timely and harmonious for one to be healthy, for one to be happy, and for one to be content. Acupuncture in a nutshell is designed to restore the proper timing and placement of those physiological processes.
Now in terms of western physiology we could point to quite a few things that are going on. As I say to my patients, acupuncture induces a meditative like state when we are doing it properly. They are well aware that when they lay on the table and we start needling it does induce the parasympathetic nervous system. That is a very important mechanism of Chinese medicine.
Whether we are treating pain and prepping the body to go into a healing response or we are breaking inflammatory responses or we are breaking neurological feedback. At the fundamental level we are acting on the parasympathetic nervous system in addition to the stress access as well. The gut, the brain, and the skin are included.
The brain lights up of course, your endocrine system is going to respond, your immune system is most definitely going to respond. It takes getting stuck with needles in the skin quite seriously of course. We trigger all sorts of mast cells especially histamine and heparin that are hanging out in the skin. This is why one of the signs that a patient is responding on the table in addition to dropping into a parasympathetic state is the stomach starts to rumble.
In Chinese medicine, acupuncture is known to unblock the stomach chi, which is one of its primary functions. That’s easily observable in a clinical setting when things are going correctly. That sort of releases gunk and it opens the blood flow in the body.
In addition to a list of other processes we could go into, all that fall into this general idea of working on the central nervous systems. We are working on the immune system, and how those are not only coordinated with the body of course, but within our own internal circulating rhythms. Making sure that our internal physiology is appropriate to the time of year and to the seasonal dynamic.
This is an important component to Chinese medicine as well. We would not only work on circulation within our own body of course, but that circulation between you and your environment. It’s important that you are in sync.
Alisha Leytem: I am glad that you are speaking about how it activates the parasympathetic nervous system. I talk about how important it is to do so, especially in this modern day and age where we are always running from fighter flight. People are very stressed and I find most people don’t ever really activate their parasympathetic. They don’t really know how to relax on their own.
That’s a big reason why I recommend going to acupuncture because there may be nothing “wrong” necessarily, but that can help you to relax and manage your stress. Can you tell me more about who would benefit from going to acupuncture and why might you go? And is there a benefit to going even if there is nothing “wrong” and you just want to keep up with maintenance of that homeostasis between yourself and your body?
Justin Penoyer: There’s sort of 3 points here. One would be, who can benefit from acupuncture? The answer to that is acupuncture is a primary care of medicine. Not to overstate it, for our primary care complaints. Roughly 80% of conditions in Chinese medicine are treated with Chinese herbal medicine.
If we put these two together with acupuncture of Chinese and herbal medicine and then we throw in case management, it has a population wide service ability. Within that, what we are trying to do at the same time is we differentiate appropriate care of interventions. When would we go to acupuncture chinese medicine versus going elsewhere first.
What are we good at treating? Traditionally these are going to be things like unblocking the stomach chi. If you have gastrail stomach complaints, acupuncture should be at the top of your list. Sleep disorders for a lot of the same reasons. Sleep disorders are not a widget in Chinese medicine of course, it's a process of timely and harmonious circulation of what we call the 50 fold cycle. Your body is making these 25 circular orbits of the body before noon and afternoon.
Gastrointestinal issues, sleep issues, pain issues all 3 of those are lack of flow in Chinese medicine and we are good at addressing. Specifically with pain management, patients will find with acupuncture and cupping that you simply can’t get the treatment elsewhere. You can’t get it with a massage or at a chiropractor, and you won’t get it at physical therapy. That can be highly effective for both acute and chronic pain.
We could easily expand this into women's health, which was my specialty in school. I didn’t really put thought into traditional Chinese medicine 25 years ago. But it is such a wide range of women's health conditions both from dysmenorrhea all the way through obstetrics and post obstetric care and pediatrics.
Pediatrics is another field that we excel in. Children need prompting with acupuncture and nerves and it is highly effective. That will go all the way through the teen years is what I found. They take to the treatment well and they enjoy the benefits of it.
Then we could jump even further into endocrine disorders of course. Autoimmune disorders, cognitive disorders for acupuncture's ability to work on the vagus nerve, brain waves, neurotransmitters, reducing inflammation, and reducing oxidation.
Then we would follow it into a category of meta inflammation or chronic inflammation is a huge issue. It is the core to a lot of what's ailing our current population. Meta-inflammation has especially been on the radar since COVID. Inflammation also lies within the beginning of cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, heart disease, and kidney disease. The population is struggling mildly.
We know for certain that acupuncture reduces the inflammation of interleukins. Principally interleukin 6. Which is impactful within the body, in connection with that huge range of conditions I just listed. Anything that is going to deal with chronic inflammatory load, acupuncture should be on the menu for addressing that.
For runaway fighter flight responses. Acupuncture does what we don’t see anything else do. Hence me working in hospitals using auricular acupuncture helping to break fighter flight responses. Patients come out from cardiac surgery and go to the ICU because they can’t get their heart rate down. That’s the number one thing keeping ICU patients in the ICU.
What you said is correct. Most of the population is walking around in a state of depression or anxiety right now. Stress is off the charts, anger is off the charts, and even circadian rhythms. These are all issues that I deal with in treatment with my patients.
They are applicable in a wide range of conditions mentioned. That’s why I think it should be on the radar for your listeners in general. Hopefully that’s not too broad because I think everyone can benefit from acupuncture, but we will find very specific use cases.
Let’s say you don’t have an active disease. Let’s say hypothetically, that you are sleeping perfectly, your digestion is working perfectly, your bowels are perfect, your stress management is perfect, and you're exercising for 30 minutes 3x a week. I would still come and get acupuncture because we are flooded by vectors of circadian dysrhythmia in our environment. Incorrect lighting, incorrect timing, incorrect eating schedules, incorrect sleeping schedules, being surrounded by people who are stressed, airborne vectors of inflammation, food borne vectors of inflammation.
The odds are quite high that you’re not perfectly well. Even if you are quite well, I do advise you to keep up with efforts to stay that way. One of the things that acupuncture does that I know nothing else can, is a tuning of each of our immune systems. To the specific needs of the current environment. It’s important to remember that your immune system can’t remember all the formations that it could or should remember in order to fight infections.
It actually has to balance its caloric output and its thermodynamic output at both preserving memory and being adaptive. When you get acupuncture even on a monthly basis it is helping to keep your immue proteins specific to the micro dynamics of your environment. Which shifts on a daily, monthly, seasonal, and yearly basis.
Not doing that is not going to show up like a baseball bat smacking you in the back of the leg and telling you that it’s a problem. What will happen is if you are constantly out of sync with your environment, it requires more energy for you literally to live rather than maintain your immune system. That’s going to lead to illness and a shorter life.
That’s why I value it greatly because you can take on acute issues such as bringing my son in to deal with carpal tunnel, we treat that, and we graduate to case management. Teaching how to do some of these basic functions, such as I said. How do I maintain an efficient life is really a big therapeutic goal and the model we have talked about. How do I flow downhill effortlessly through life? How I move through life is the backdrop that we engage in as well.
Alisha Leytem: That’s really helpful and I feel like you touched on a lot of important parts of how it really is beneficial for everyone. Whether you have something going on acutely or not. I think that you gave a really great description of how it is really beneficial and helpful for you.
I think what’s really interesting that I haven’t heard about that I want to highlight is talking about how acupuncture really helps to live in tune more with our environment. Our environment is so out of tune with nature that acupuncture helps us to become more in tune with the correct flow of nature.
Justin Penoyer: There’s a lot unseen that isn't on our active radar. I would point out in our environment that microorganisms are moving around in our air, changing on a minute by minute and hour by hour basis. These are responding to the photo wavelength of the sun and the temperature of the air.
We have seasonal wind cycles on a local and global level. The environment is constantly shifting and circulating, but it’s not shifting and circulating all over the board. It’s not complete chaos or randomness. There is order in summer, fall, and winter.
Case in point is that it’s exactly what you said. Our environment is constantly shifting. There’s too many combinations out there for our bodies to possibly remember. It has these feedback mechanisms including absorption through the gut, for example. This is one of my favorite topics to study, which is the fact that we have viruses raining down from the sky on our heads, our houses, and our food. Our bodies suck them up like a dipstick. Trying to measure what’s out there, so it can stay ahead.
To answer your point, circadian dysrhythmia has been put into the spotlight due to covid and its relationship to inflammation. They are saying now that for circadian dysrhythmia the principal driver is connected to the inflammation in our population.
Everything that we do here, not with just the acupuncture, but with the way that we move through our day and we move through our environment. How do we do so to make sure that we are in tune with these multi vector processes that are shifting in the environment.
If you listen to my colleagues on the other aisle, medical doctors, the ones from the known are going to tell you the same thing. You need to have sunlight in the morning to hit your eyeballs. You need the sun to hit your eyeballs at night when the sun is going down. The wavelengths that you’re exposed to do matter and you have photoreceptors all throughout your body.
When you eat is a huge driver for your rhythm and also when you sleep is another principal driver. These principles are that your body is changing with these immune proteins on the hour, the environment outside is changing constantly, and the two of you need to have a reciprocal dynamic where you are in communication. That really is a fundamental therapeutic goal.
Alisha Leytem: When someone comes into a session with you, how do you know which pressure points that you know you are going to put the needle in? How do you determine that for them?
Justin Penoyer: Part of the process is conducting that medical intake I mentioned earlier. That part largely looks the same, if not more expanded than what we are used to. When it comes to interpreting the data points is where we start to diverge.
We go into what we call categorical thinking “Ying yong” thinking. We are less focused on widgets and more focused on processes. What we are looking for when we gather our data points is pattern identification. We are looking for a pattern to emerge.
From that pattern differential, let’s take an example of a heart chi deficiency. So in conducting the intake I find that they have issues with working memory, issues with being easily startled, issues with anxiety, or perhaps falling asleep at night, overthinking, even sweating at night.
Alisha Leytem: I don’t want to cut you off, but I want to say this before I forget. When you are talking about the intake form, we actually sit down and have a long conversation about how I’ve been doing. My mindset, my physical body, my sleep, my digestion, and all those things.
If you haven’t been to an appointment before, the conversations that your acupuncturists ask is much more in depth than any other medical professional. They are looking at you for the whole self, the whole body, and your lifestyle. They are taking that all into account, so when they are doing that analysis like he's explaining right now, then he knows when to go in with the needles to readjust the imbalance of the chi.
Justin Penoyer: It’s the same if you look at the data, data says I have a headache, and the action that follows is taking anti-headache medicine. It’s the same thing. You come in and we do a pattern differential, we do a diagnostic and the treatment principle must match the diagnostic.
So if you think someone does have heart chi deficiency, then you need to be needling points that restore that heart chi dynamic and how that dynamic is off is multi variant. To go back to what you said is that the questioning is far more extensive. In my line of questioning we focus on the 3 pillars of health: eating, sleeping, and pooping.
If those are all going perfectly then the changes are that your health is quite good. Then I related that to blood sugar regulation, which is one of these key pivots or key principles in the body. We do go through an extensive line of questioning, but I also think it is built on an important part of Chinese medicine.
One is if you are going to go into a situation and try to change it, the first thing that you need to do is inquire what is going on there at that location, i.e. you need to find local customs. If I am going to work with a patient, I need to locate that patient's mentality and their preferences. That’s an alien model in western medicine.
Alisha Leytem: So you are saying you want to look at the root causes and why you’ve gotten to this point instead of saying “oh I’ve got a headache, let me take something for that headache,” you would say let’s find the point and use acupuncture to help address the root causes to prevent them from coming back.
Justin Penoyer: Yes, and root branch structuralism is one of the defining thought models of the hindi lyng de chu. What has become associated through holistic thinking was located by our medical techs there. It was revolutionary for their time. It has been influential to society ever since.
It comes from the idea that we think of holism in Chinese medicine. Two is that it’s a little bit different than how we conceive in a greek western model. It is important to understand that ying and yong converge together to drive material realization. They combine to make the process matter at the same time. Wholism in our model here that again goes back to what you said, there are two things that I am looking at. I am looking at you in totality. You as a total thing.
An easy visualization is to think of a blank piece of paper. Then we have these constituent parts within our body that are not happening all at once in all ways that they could. It’s like thinking things that grow in my garden are going to grow right now and forever be there. That’s not necessarily how it works.
For them, holism is this idea and quite specifically in the heart, creates that blank sheet of paper in a whole. Let’s say you drop grains of sand on that paper, those elements are constantly cycling. Think of it this way. There is a year that we all know, but we never actually experience the year. We only experience the cycling of the seasons. Each of which takes their own stage in certain locations. Of course not every region in the world experiences the same seasons, right?
You have a universal field and particulars of your body and that’s why Chinese medicine is so geared toward circulation. The health of the system is understood by the proper cycling of those foci on that universal field.
So that coordination and arrangement of your physiology is where health potency lies. These things that we associate with feeling good and feeling healthy is where they come from, proper arrangement of those elements within the total.
So it might sound like a trite distinction, but it really leads to some critical reasons in a paradigm view. Also in a therapeutic view. This goes back to why would I get treatment on a regular basis if I am 100% healthy.
This even relates to leadership. This is something you never arrive at, these are only things that we achieve in the process. It’s never done, you’re not imperfect, perfection is proper arrangement of the circumstance.
This might hit home to some of your listeners that the western model of being this perfect “apple.” You always strive to be the perfect, golden apple. This is the idea that I can be a failure, and I can be imperfect.
This is what’s key for me that this view of what is sacred in our experience are not objects, but they are processes. That is where meaningfulness comes from. I would assert that there is no health without meaningfulness. That’s why you’ve heard me say we are nothing but walking books with legs.
The narrative is key. I do enjoy the fact that if we are talking on a spiritual level or on a level of metaphysics. Whether we are talking about very simple things like a broken leg or my eternal soul, the system of Chinese thinking kind of comps for those.
Whereas if you go to your western doctor and you ask him or her to define health they can’t give it. To define happiness they can’t give it. That proper arrangement of your widgets or chi creates what I call a clean watershed. It is accurate that they portrayed the body as a watershed. This combination of earth and water.
When your water is circulating clearly, and gently then you have clear water. Clear water is exactly all those things that we would imagine it to be in our body. It’s reflective consciousness, it’s clarity, it’s gentleness, it’s movement, it’s energy.
Energy comes from the movement of water. That’s really where I find the great value of Chinese medicine. Making a few people feel better in the long term is important of course. Most of my patients really resonate with these thought models that lie behind it. This deep truth that I don’t need to look toward an abstract God, I need to look out my window.
I don’t care what your political views or you religious views are because there is meaningfulness outside that we forget when we get trapped too deep into these views.
Alisha Leytem: That’s one thing that I love about acupuncture is that you really bring that spiritual component back into it. Remembering your wholeness, remembering we are nature itself. You said that once in my sessions and it really stuck with me that we are literally nature.
That’s one of my keys in The Six G.O.L.D Keys to Well-Being. Having that connection and relationship with nature is really a component to access your soul, contentment, and that happiness because it’s a part of you.
I feel like our modern lives disconnects us from it so much that we are not looking at the sun in the morning or at night. We’re not really connected to the seasons, we don’t like the seasons. We think Winter is here and now we have to be sad for the next few months. So we have just lost this connection to that. I think acupuncture is one tool that helps to reconnect to that truth.
Justin Penoyer: We are the processes of nature that are eternal. Just to echo everything you’ve said and sit with this. We take a lot of these abstract ideas and we screw it up with spirituality. It makes it concrete like you said. Metaphors and similes connect to things within Chinese thought.
We need to distinguish between a metaphor and a matter of cosmology. We aren’t metaphorically like water, we are parallel to water. They weren’t worshiping the sun, they were worshiping the circulation of the sun across the sky. They viewed this as sacred, and I would have to agree.
There’s something that seems sacredly true about the idea that heat always rises and water descends. I don’t need a priest to teach me that. I can observe it. The key to health is to suffer with grace. To answer this is where people have questioned where their eternal soul goes after they die.
So I point to my patients two different things. This is what nature does, spring, summer, fall, winter. Each one is unique, and each one is not unique. Each season has a femoral quality to it. Each season has an eternal quality to it. Our soul is the same way.
We are eternal and femoral at the same time and I am 100% certain of that. In my life that I am going to die one day, I am 100% certain that I am going to be happy and it’s going to lead me to have a meaningful life. And not everyone has to answer that.
I don’t need to wonder if it’s possible because I see it everyday. That is why the dollists are why there is a tradition of waking up and giving gratitude to the sun. They aren’t worshiping the sun at all, in fact it’s not about the sun. It’s about you and what you’re reflecting on.
It’s not about the ritual, but what it means. This brings us back to meaningfulness because they understand the meaning and process of nature are one in the same. That is what I mean when I discuss this thought model and looking towards nature. There is something implicitly true that you and I, and possibly a lot of your listeners feel. It’s just never been explained this way. Then once it is, everyone kind of goes “ahhh it makes sense.”
I can observe fire, I can observe water, I can observe wind, and I can observe heat and cold. Just a little bit of education unlocks an entirely different way of perceiving the world and in ways we do think of systems thinking, system biology, and process thinking. All which are top trends in our academic field right now.
Systems thinking is huge. Going into these ying yong thought models, which I view as beneficial, but also I would view them as critical. To address some real serious medical and social issues in our country today. You cannot move through life like a ping pong ball.
There is a pattern and there is an order to it. We can extrapolate that simply by looking out our window and if we receive a little bit of information to interpret that.
Alisha Leytem: I love that we keep coming back to the idea of meaningfulness. I think that is what so many people are searching for outside of themselves. Like you have been saying, if we can really just tune back into nature, you’ll see that it’s all right there. It’s the way you view life and all of those things within you.
The things outside of you don’t give you meaningfulness from within that you then bring with you out into the world. At the end of the day all these things that we are talking about are helping you to access that. It’s already there within.
What I think is encouraging is that more and more practitioners like yourself are popping up. Not even 10 years ago had I heard of many acupuncturists. I think you told me in one of our sessions recently that there's' more now and the field is starting to grow.
Justin Penoyer: It is growing, but the number of acupuncturists in the United States is roughly around 15,000. We can’t go off of diplomas because not everyone that has a degree in Chinese medicine practices Chinese medicine.
Alisha Leytem: Why not?
Justin Penoyer: A significant portion cannot maintain their practice.
Alisha Leytem: Is it that they aren’t getting enough clients or they just can’t financially sustain it?
Justin Penoyer: Both. This is where I get into a broader debate on Chinese medical trends. How there's a revival that I partake in with some of my colleagues. Where we classify traditional Chinese medicine versus classical Chinese medicine. And why those may or may not be different.
It matters because some of what you hear me talking about leads to principles of therapeutic intervention that matter. If you try to take this approach of defining Chinese medicine from what I call “the outside in '' and redefining it basically from where we are.
Alisha Leytem: Can you talk more about that? Are you saying if someone practices acupuncture on the side for example, if you’re at the chiropractor and they say they can put a few needles in, is that what you’re talking about?
Justin Penoyer: Yes. First of all, don’t get acupuncture from someone who doesn’t have at least a 4 year medical license. Don’t get acupuncture from chiropractors, they have no business doing acupuncture. Same with a physical therapist. Dry needling should be avoided and condemned. Your patients should know the difference between those things.
Even if you do go to someone who does have a 4 year license or other, when it comes time to implement strategy I am still doing it in terms of western physiology. I’m not thinking of chi flow and I don’t really know what that means. I’m not thinking in terms of arrangement. I’m not thinking in terms of acupuncture really.
Someone who has diabetes, I have a diabetes protocol and I give someone diabetes herbs. That’s not how it goes. The problem is due to the education models that are failing in our profession and in this country. They are not teaching in terms of ying yong thinking. It leads to a biomedicalized model of the body. Which leads to poor performance, case in point.
As I tell my students, if you’re not practicing herbs, your ability for private practice is probably not going to happen. You’re not dynamic enough and you’re not able to treat enough things. They don’t push herbs there either.
Again, if we are just sticking needles in and we don’t evoke a chi response, which took me 8 years of practice to begin to develop, your therapeutic efficacy is going to be very low. It’s not even diagnosing correctly or constituting the right treatment principle. If your technique isn’t provoking the chi then patients are going to get the response.
Going back to your question, it comes down to the fact that if your patients feel better, they are going to tell people, and your practice will grow. My practice is proof of that. I have never had to market my work, which should be the way it works. Your work will be spread throughout clients and the word will get out there.
If you’re doing well and 8-10 patients get better, they keep coming back, then things will go well. It has to do with two principles, both with the way medicine is taught and how that ties into the way students are taught. Having studied with teachers who don’t know what a chi response is.
It's hard to under emphasize how important that is. You must evoke chi responses from your muling and your practitioner. You must know how to do that, how to achieve it, and when you accomplish it the patient is paying you to do it.
They don’t teach you to do that. Hence we are leading into a situation where patients simply aren't getting better and they aren’t going back.
Alisha Leytem: So if someone wants to seek out a good acupuncturist who’s going to get them that chi response, what should they be looking for?
Justin Penoyer: It would be a similar process I would suggest for looking for a doctor in the western side of medicine. We would look for pedigree. Where did they go to school? What is their experience? What is their background?
Then from there you simply have to make contact with that professional and try it. You’ve got to meet them, you’ve got to get a treatment to understand their system, and understand their practicality of being skilled, i.e. getting a chi response.
It’s the same way I hire workers in my house. I will investigate them, figure out which one seems to have the best portfolio, and then I am going to analyze examples of their work so I can see myself if they are technically experienced.
It’s going to be the same thing in helping patients try and find practitioners. Then they might go out and it might take them one or two or even three different practitioners before they find someone who clicks.
You listeners might have guessed so far that there is a higher level of intimacy. It’s what I call a cinderella effect, I am not going to treat everyone and that has to do with the differences between me and that person.
That’s where beyond a certain point you have to go out and experience. It’s hard to do that without a good experience to compare against. That’s a big part of the trouble, we don’t know what acupuncture within ying yong thinking is. So how do we go about evaluating the quality of that service when we are receiving it?
Alisha Leytem: I have heard of people saying they have tried it when I recommend it. They also say it doesn’t really do anything. Then I will ask “well where did you go?” They say something along the lines of they went to a holistic center and that place had someone who could do it. Or it was on their chiropractic table.
That’s when I say they need to seek out a legit, Chinese medicine acupuncturist. They will ask “how do I find that?” I think that you just helped with that. First of all we know there aren’t a ton. Like you said, there’s only 15,000 practicing in the U.S. It lies within really looking for that Chinese medicine title.
Justin Penoyer: I think it’s important for practicing in this country that your practitioner that’s bilingual in western medicine and in chinese medicine. Those are two pillars and there is nothing wrong with either necessarily. They address different things. In my questioning and my thought processes, you hear me refer to both of those.
Would you like me to explain it in terms of biochemistry or in terms of chi dynamics? I can do both. The difference is, when it comes time to treat the patient, am I needling you to work on antihistamines or am I needling you to correct your chi dynamic and histamine is a part of that process?
A lot of practitioners think from start to finish in terms of the way that you and I and our listeners have been taught to think of the human body. Going from grade school, to middle school, to college.
If you can’t break out of that thought model within my profession, it will trap you and you will suffer as a result. There’s no question about it.
When your patients come in, they should really look and kind of see is that practitioner constructing my practice in terms of chinese medicine? Are they talking to me about chi dynamics? DO they know what it is? Are they talking about any of these things that have been brought up in this podcast? Are they not talking to me at all?
American health specialty is paying practitioners $41 or $42 a treatment now, which is less than a haircut. If we were to go over to tai wan you would only get about a 15 minute treatment there as well.
It’s not as if there is a utopia of Chinese medicine being practiced. It’s unfortunate that there is a great deal of variation of professions right now, that is a disadvantage of that practitioner in that community of course. It’s also a disadvantage for the population because they don;t know how to shop around for it. Nothing against my chiropractor colleagues, but they should not be doing acupuncture. They should be bone setting. I could go down the line for physical therapists as well.
If you’re not invoking a chi response with needling, and you don’t know how to do that, then that will be a problem. Your treatment results are going to suffer. That’s really common here as well in Hanover as it was in San Diego. People will tell me that a previous experience with acupuncture didn’t do anything for them. Then they will experience their first chi response with me and freak out.
Alisha Leytem: You should be walking out of there like you just had the greatest meditation or massage of your spirit and soul, ever. I feel like I should be really careful driving home because it just feels so strong in the meditative state. It feels amazing.
Justin Penoyer: That’s where I teach my patients too. Trust me, we will observe you responding to treatment. As soon as you are on the table, then you drop into a parasympathetic state. The tone of the voice changes, the eyes change, body movements change. It’s clear as day.
Then when I send someone home after a treatment, we are taught to look at the eyes. There's a reason for that. We are taught that the chi flows everywhere, but it meets in the eyes. Because their bodies' chi dynamic is properly arranged.
A cup that is full of incorrectly ranged water functions as if it has none. When we correctly arrange the chi dynamic in the body, you literally become more. A proper treatment is observable during the process and after the process. I tell my patients, I don’t care what they think of acupuncture.
This idea that you need to believe in acupuncture to work is an alternative myth. If I am doing my job correctly, what you think about the situation doesn’t impact it in the slightest. 2+2 doesn’t require you to believe in it to equal 4. It’s the same for acupuncture.
When someone leaves, they know if they’ve had a successful treatment. Is it going to be a “hard point” with data? Versus a soft data point which is a sense of well-being and the after effects of meditation. Which are well cataloged at this point.
That’s what I would point out to your listeners, is that there are things that you can absolutely look at ahead of time. There are things that you look for before the treatment process, and then there are things that you look for after the treatment process. All of which will indicate that you are moving in the direction that you want to go.
Alisha Leytem: This has been so enlightening and so awesome. I am sure people will be excited to tune it and take in some really amazing nuggets from this. If you guys live in the midwest we will have all information about Justin and his practice in the show notes. You are writing a book as well now, correct?
Justin Penoyer: I am, yes.
Alisha Leytem: Tell us about the book. When is it coming out?
Justin Penoyer: Hopefully we will get it published next year. The topic of the book is everything we really have been talking about today. What is the thought model of early Chinese Medicine? So as a student or a consumer of chinese medicine, this is something we can pick up and sort of understand a lot of these topics we’ve brought up.
How does Chinese medicine conceive of the body? It conceives it as a political state and it conceives of it as a watcher shed. Mirroring the arrangement of the universe. So those are two principal body models. Structuralism, what does that mean exactly? What is chi and what is chi flow?
Really it is a book of philosophy on Chinese medicine. It is to help take the western mind and open it up to the thought models that are contained on the other end.
Alisha Leytem: Congratulations on writing it. I clearly know that it takes some time to write, edit, and publish it all. It’s going to be great when it comes out. We will also have your information for San Diego.
Justin Penoyer: Yes, I do have patients over in San Diego. So if you are in the SoCa area, you are more than welcome to come in when I am available. I see a lot of patients remotely from that area as well. I can do telemedicine from almost anywhere within the country. Then I am here in Hanover, IL. I have a wide circle to make a day trip, to see what I could do to take care of you. Then if not, I do have colleges all across the country and I would be happy to point someone in the right direction.
Alisha Leytem: When you say you do the telehealth appointments, is that for herbs?
Justin Penoyer: Usually if I am actively intervening with someone that telemedicine will be used for herbs. I do quite a bit of case management as well remotely. We can pretty much do everything except acupuncture over the phone. It is a disadvantage to not be able to physically sit down with someone face to face and have that analysis going on. I do encourage working with someone locally if possible. If it’s not possible, move to telemedicine after that.
Alisha Leytem: One last question that I want to ask you before we wrap up here is the question I ask every guest who comes onto the show. How do you unlock your own well-being?
Justin Penoyer: I want to say I try to observe and reflect upon nature, but I am not sure if that will convey what I am trying to say here. I think the big thing is to follow your heart. To demand a meaningful existence. To lead a patterned day-to-day life. I do take the idea very seriously of modeling life after nature.
I try to be 80% regular with what I do and 20% adaptable with what I do. Looking with a different eye towards that as well. I would say it’s having adopted a process thinking mentality, a ying yong mentality. The process of looking at eternal nature and I do believe that they are sacred. How these ideas of meaningfulness convey directly over in the Chinese medical model.
They are indivisible. It’s not as if you can live a meaningful life and not be well to a certain extent. We are all going to get sick and die someday. It won’t mean I won’t have a meaningful existence. Hopefully that’s an answer to your question , which is having an eye for that and process thinking. Seeing the differences between people and things is easy. Seeing how things are similar is very difficult. I think that in answering those questions, that they not only unlock our health, but also our heart and spirit.
Alisha Leytem: Thank you so much for coming on. I would love to have you on again to speak more specifically on women's wellness and womens acupuncture. That is your speciality and I have learned a lot about it from you. I think we could help a lot of people. If you guys have questions for him in the future please be sure to let me know. So we are able to have you come on maybe after your book comes out. Thank you so much again. We will have all that information in the show notes for our listeners.
Justin Penoyer: Thank you for the conversation. I enjoyed it.
Alisha Leytem: Thanks everyone!
