Enough Structure to Play
Sometimes the thing that gives us the most freedom is the thing we once thought was confining us.
If we’ve crossed paths at all over the past year, then you probably know about my current passion (obsession?) for baking. I’ve always loved baking, but never quite in the way that I do now. In many ways, baking has become a companion through my grief, a place where I can express, create, and connect with something tangible during a season that often feels impossible to put into words. What I didn’t expect was for this experience with baking to so deeply influence my relationship to practicing medicine, specifically acupuncture. So meta, I know, but stay with me.
I was recently going through the chaos that is my Notes app on my phone, deleting about a billion grocery lists and random, one-sentence thoughts whose importance or meaning was beyond present me. I have a handful of notes devoted to clinic things and a handful devoted to baking. And while the content is completely different, the structure of the notes is surprisingly similar. They’re records of things that worked, variations I want to remember, combinations of ingredients or acupuncture points that created a particularly good outcome, and ideas I hadn’t thought to put together before.
They are, in a way, records of experimentation. And what makes that experimentation possible is the foundation underneath it, the knowledge and pattern recognition that can only come with time, as well as many instances of things not working. This foundational knowledge is something that I am in the early stages of building as a baker, and I have so much to learn. But I’m seeing that foundation become more and more solid in real time, and it is making me curious about the freedom that comes from taking the time to build a solid framework with everything we do. Every hobby, every relationship, every trade or craft, everything.
Which all somehow circles me back to acupuncture.
Over the past few years, I’ve leaned heavily into what I learned through my Somatic Experiencing training. Those skills have become woven into the way I show up in the treatment room, and in the world. I think I needed to immerse myself so fully in the somatic work, to practice these skills until they became something I could feel in my own body, and to develop a deeper understanding of the nervous system and all of its nuance. It’s changed me as a practitioner in ways I feel really proud of.
And I think I needed to explore, too. Thinking back to the early days of my practice, I remember feeling antsy about adding on other skills, techniques, and modalities to my toolkit. There was a bit of a grass-is-greener mentality in me, a feeling that I needed to go see what else was out there before I could really commit to what was already in front of me. The most Sagittarius thing about me, for better or for worse, is that I can’t be tied down to one thing. I remember feeling this sense of not wanting to be limited to only East Asian Medicine (lol to the only in that sentence). Somehow, I felt like the tools I had were not enough, without realizing at the time that actual clinical experience out in the world, on my own as an acupuncturist, was going to be the greatest tool of all.
I needed to follow my curiosity, to learn other things, to find the pieces that would eventually become part of the way I practice. Those things have changed me and have become meaningful parts of my work, and I wouldn’t want to be without them.
But over these past few months, I’ve found myself leaning heavily back into acupuncture. I feel like I’ve been seeing it through fresh eyes, remembering just how much depth and possibility there is in this medicine, and falling in love with its magic all over again. There is a sense of fun and creativity within my practice that I’m getting to experience in a new way, and it feels so cool. It also feels similar to the joy that I’m experiencing with baking, which has made me curious about what might connect those two things, aside from just a deep love and appreciation for both.
And so I wonder if it’s the freedom that I get to experience now that the framework for both has been laid. I am 11 years into my acupuncture practice and I’m still a very amateur baker, so there is much to learn in both arenas. But I think I have enough of a foundation with both that I get to play with more flexibility.
For me, the magic of baking is in discovering just how much flexibility exists within a framework. And you might be saying to yourself, there’s no flexibility in baking. It’s so rigid. That’s what I once thought too. But that was also when I was just following recipes, step by step, detail by detail. I didn’t yet understand the elements of baking, like what the difference is between baking powder and baking soda, and why some cookies spread and some don’t. And don’t get me started on the importance of salt in desserts (!!!).
To build a foundation in anything takes time. It requires working within the somewhat rigid guidelines for long enough to recognize the patterns. To understand what each ingredient is doing in the same way that I’ve spent years learning what each acupuncture point I use is doing. To learn what happens when I change one thing and leave another alone. Eventually, I know the structure well enough that I can start to play.
And I’m finding myself coming to acupuncture and my treatments with a similar sense of freedom. It feels both old and new to me. Like something I know quite well, but also am getting to know in a new and sweet way. Maybe this is what happens when you spend enough time building something that you can begin to see its shape. Thinking back to the early days of my practice and feeling antsy to know more, I think part of that desire to look elsewhere came from the parts of building my foundation that felt slow, or dare I say, boring?
What I think this all has given me is an appreciation for the freedom that can come from structure. For the creativity that becomes possible when you know and trust your foundation well enough to bend it, adapt it, and create within it. I think for a long time I have been living within the confines of the structure, and it’s only recently that I'm really getting to explore all the possibilities that exist both from that place and just outside of it.
Some fun news, speaking of baking ;)
The Good Neighbor Baking Project is my little monthly baking project, born out of a love for baking and a desire to support the community around me. Each month, I bake a new menu of gluten-free and mostly refined sugar-free treats, offered for a suggested donation, with pickup in Highland Park.
70% of all donations received go directly to local Los Angeles organizations in an effort to support the people and communities around us.
For the June and July drops, we raised $815 for Transforming Family, an LA-based organization that supports youth exploring gender identity and their families by connecting them with resources, education, and community.
The August drop will support the Community Self-Defense Coalition (CSDC), a Los Angeles-based coalition organizing to protect immigrant and working-class communities from ICE and other forms of violence. CSDC coordinates community patrols and rapid response, shares Know Your Rights information, provides community defense training, and helps organize and resource neighbors to protect one another. Donations help fund the tangible work of this organization, from printing educational materials and providing meeting spaces to purchasing equipment and supporting community patrols.
Follow @communityselfdefensecoalition on IG to support their work
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