A Clarification from my Heart about Facial Acupuncture
Dr. Noah K. Goldstein, DACM L.Ac.
I believe I owe a clarification. It was pointed out to me that the last blog didn’t accurately reflect who I am and the work I do as an acupuncturist in Boulder.
Let me explain. When I was 15, I had Bell’s Palsy - half of my face was paralyzed for several weeks, recovering slowly over months. I had to tape my eye shut at night to sleep, food would dribble out of my mouth when I ate, but worse of all was feeling distorted. I saw how people flinched or recoiled when they first saw my half-smiling half-frozen face. My friends were loving and supportive, but I still felt uncomfortable in my own skin.
It was Bell’s Palsy that led to me to get acupuncture. Seven or eight years later I still couldn’t raise my left eyebrow, my smile was still crooked, and my squinty eye still teared whenever I ate. My experiences with acupuncture didn’t “fix” my eyebrow or my smile, but they did open me up to a relationship with myself.
What occured in those months while I was receiving acupuncture in my early twenties was a flowering of my heart. It was the beginning of walking my soul path in the world as a young adult.
Ever since, I’ve been fascinated with the way our encounters with the physical self can serve as a doorway to the soul. I see this time and again in my practice. A person with shoulder pain discovers unresolved grief and heals both or someone struggling with lower back pain accesses the pain of their unbearable stress and then finds relief. I recognize that not all physical symptoms are rooted in the psychospiritual. Sometimes pain is the result of a car accident, digestive difficulties can be from a parasite or an inflammatory process, and aches, fatigue, and a foggy mind can be caused by diseases like Lyme.
So, I've starting offering Facial Acupuncture. Because of my journey with Bell’s Palsy, I understand the experience of feeling dissatisfied when looking in the mirror. I have a lot of compassion and understanding for anyone and everyone who’s in that place. My hope is to let that open a doorway to the inner terrain. My intention is to help unbind the physical and emotional patterns that are holding people back in life. The reality is that physical and emotional patterns show up in the expressions on our faces, and that as we heal, things can change there too.
I felt a lot of confusion and resistance around offering Facial Acupuncture. And while I was aware of it, initially I neglected to fully understand what that resistance was trying to communicate to me. But I understand that I need to be explicit and clear about where I’m coming from and why I choose to offer what I do.
