Acupuncture gets more than just my qi flowing.

I wasn’t expecting acupuncture to put me into the introspective mindset that it did today. When I did it a few years ago, my acupuncturist would regularly set me up in a dimly lit room, lodge into me almost unfelt needles, and then leave me for an hour to float in what seemed like a fully conscious form of bodily sleep. I rarely thought about anything specific; instead I lay in what felt physically like a comatose state and let my mind rest; just listened to noises in my surroundings; just processed the sensation of being utterly still and yet feeling energy throughout my limbs. When she roused me, it felt like being ripped out of deepest slumber, which I ached to get back to; I generally felt miserable for the rest of the evening. But the next day I would awaken like a newborn; I would awaken more energized than I could remember feeling.

Today’s session was entirely different. Before lying on the acupuncturist’s table, I was seated in a jointed chair-bed and asked to lie back. Before I knew it, he had whipped spring-bound stirrups out of the wall and was slipping them over my socked feet, letting them tug my legs gently upward. “This is lazy yoga,” he told me, arranging one of my legs in a pose in mid-air and then beginning to gently pat and shake it. “Gravity is one form of god,” he also told me, nodding toward the unattended leg, which was bending deep at the knee and sinking groundward. He explained that before he started acupuncture, he wanted my body to release the fatigue that has been giving me headaches. “Breathe deeply, yawn very big,” he instructed many times; “let the exhaustion out of you.” My previous acupuncturist had said something similar; had explained that my migraines might get worse before they got better because balancing my qi was a bit like an exorcism. I would have to expel my migraines before I would move past them. To expel them, I would have to have them.

That first time, I had gone in with a completely open mind. I knew nothing of how acupuncture is thought to work biologically, and, as someone raised by scientists, I would normally have wanted to know that. But I needed to go in without expectations; I needed to just try it and see if it worked for me. I have had severe headaches and migraines for most of my lifetime; I have tried prescription drugs for treatment and prophylaxis; I have tried everything doctors have thought to tell me to try. Little has ever changed. I still have headache season every so often, and during such times, I get severe headaches every day for weeks and weeks. Last time, three months of acupuncture seemed to cure me; I had very few headaches for more than a year afterward. I hope the current sessions will go as well. But as I wait to see that, I am already marveling at what they have done to me.

Today, after more than 30 minutes of lazy yoga and heavy yawning, I finally lay in the dark on a padded table, settled into stillness under layers of blankets, let the spring-loaded stirrups hold my feet in place, and felt the tingle and subtle electrification of such skinny needles you can hardly see them dipping their sharp tips into my bloodstream. The acupuncturist stood over me and explained that the breathing exercises I had just done were qi gong; “gong,” he told me, “is artfulness.” He was teaching me the art of breathing. And I was floored by how overpowering so much yawning could be. As I turned each breath into a yawn, opening my mouth wide, what had started as inhalation seemed to change—it felt like a wave of oxygen flooded some part of my body not normally filled with air, and, repeating this action so long, I had become light-headed and my eyes dripped with tears. “Now you are ready for acupuncture,” he told me as he turned out the lights.

In this state—body gently paddled and stretched, limbs light, joints airy, head sinking like lead into the pillow—he left me. Only the sound of trickling water kept my attention. But as I shut my eyes, my mind immediately flickered through a curious pattern of thoughts.

Image: the face of someone I wonder if I will eventually fall for. Then a scene of us together, my envisioning of what it is like if that happens. I watch this on my mind’s movie screen for what seems like many minutes. That my mind landed here seems very reasonable; I am feeling, in the scene, those same sensations as my body is feeling now—floating yet stimulated. But eventually, my mind moves on.

Image: the view of a long bridge from the passenger seat of a car; sunshine and water in the background. This is a static image, but momentarily my mind fills in the other details. The song playing is Enigma's “Return to Innocence,” which is eerily fitting; the driver is my mother. We are leaving the town of Wiscasset, Maine. I have just lived for four months in an arctic daydream, working on a farm, trudging through snow to study forest ecology, learning to spin wool and knit and even to practice meditation. I am in high school. I have just spent four months away from the school I’ve attended since kindergarten, four months away from my parents’ divorce. I have just lived in a frozen climate, which once was unimaginable, and I have loved it. My cheeks are soggy; I am not ready to go home. As my body floats, as my qi begins to circulate, my mind has gone from something very present to something long past, and now the stimulus is sad, which surprises me. And yet I am just viewing it. No emotions arise.

Image: a windowsill, pane pushed upward, warm air flowing in. Branches block my view of the sky, but it is up there; it provides a dark backdrop, and when oak leaves rustle, one or two stars glint through. This is my windowsill. This is my bed. I have slept beneath this skyscape every night since I was seven. This is the image that, for all my childhood, I have seen just before going to sleep. This is my metaphorical treetop hiding place; my sanctuary. Sometimes I get in bed ridiculously early because this is where I do my thinking-things-through.

Image: I am in a hammock. Indoors, by a bay window. The air streaming through the glass panes is frigid, but I have what might be the worst of all migraines, so I am too numb to move. I watch snowflakes patterning the blue sky outside and picture a spider, thick like a tarantula, wrapping its legs around my skull and digging the tips of its feet into my skin. This image will inspire poetry when I feel better, but for now the only poetics in my presence are the sudden strumming of guitar strings behind me and the quiet—quietest ever—singing voice the body attached to the fingers emits. He is seated where I cannot see him, but I know that he has never sung in front of anyone. I take this fulfillment of a promise to let me hear one song, and one song only, some day, some time—I take this fulfillment of his promise right now as a sign that he loves me. In a year or two, I will find out that he does but not in the way I thought. In this moment, however, I am frozen, aching, and feeling like I might puke; this gesture of his is such that later I will allow myself to hold onto just this one memory even after I let him go from my heart. This migraine is hell; but he has allowed me to have it in his room, and he will sit with me through all of it.

The acupuncturist picked that moment to whisk the blanket off me and loosen my feet. I didn’t think it was time, but the clock showed that half an hour had passed. “How are you feeling?” he asked me, a hint of curiosity mixed with bashfulness in his voice. “Other-worldly,” I whispered, rubbing my eyes. Physically I was feeling elated; I would have liked to stir up my qi a little longer. But my mind had to wonder: where else would this exorcism have taken me before it was done?