Who am I?

Hi, my name is Amy and I, as Walt Whitman said, contain multitudes.

I'm a wood tiger piscean with a cancer moon and taurus rising. Someone told me once my vedic sign is Gemini. Not sure. That said, I believe in the power of metaphor and love a quote by Carolyn Myss who said, "When you lose power the text will speak to you literally." Amen. So, this whole wood-tiger-pisces-cancer-taurus thing means I can be moody, fierce, courageous, loving, sensitive, inquisitive, mothering, hermetic, opinionated and stubborn. But I try not to take myself too seriously or literally. It can be hard. But I try.

I live with two sweet, loving cats and one sweet, loving(and sometimes neurotic) boyfriend named Jason. I've been a student at AIMC for going on 3.5 years and I intend to finish fairly soon. TCM school can be grueling and long so early into the program I decided to pace myself a bit and let the information seep in and marinate. That said, I think almost 4 years in, I'm just starting to "get it." I am a bona fide political junkie with a 24-hour new cycle addiction (ugh!). Someone once said to me, "all that stuff is just somebody's opinion." Ok sure, but that is part of why I love it. My favorite founding father is probably John Adams (such a moody stickler of a man who never gets any credit but had quite a respectable amount of integrity, including having an awesome wife). I also absolutely love science and Larry's last class really sealed this deal for me. I am a rabid reader (yes, even in TCM school) and I have picked up quite a few books on physics and other various topics lately that excite me tremendously- right now I'm reading "The Secret History of Dreams" and a wonderful biography on Einstein.

I love Chinese Medicine. That said, I think there is too much of it in our curriculum. Some people will think perhaps I am nutso for saying this but maybe after a few years you will agree with me (or not). I have much appreciation for other acupuncture systems (French, Japanese, Taiwanese, Korean, Vietnamese, etc....) along with some more western "style" bodywork theories that align well with acupuncture (Travell's Trigger points, Gunn, Chaitow) and will strive in my practice to source from those systems that resonate and make them my own into a hodge-podge of what I deem a new American Acupuncture style (I stole that term from Mark Seem who is a practitioner out of NY and someone I respect for his work and all that I have gleaned from his books).

For more on why I chose tcm, check this out:

http://woodtygerburningbright.blogspot.com/2009/09/week-one.html

Thanks for reading!