Capitalism, community acupuncture, and the radical nature of trust.

Everything about this clinic is based on trust. I trust my 2 sister acupunks. We are close friends as well as colleagues, privy to each others’ heartaches, insecurities and recurring health issues. We trust each other to take good care of our patients – folks we care deeply for. I can do this job because I can say with perfect confidence “I’d like you to come in three times in the next week. We’re open every day, and the other two practitioners are great. I get treatments from them all the time.” 

We trust a small army of volunteer receptionists to greet patients, explain our systems, and to count cash at the end of the night.

No, we’ve never worried about being ripped off.

We trust our patients to pencil themselves into the appointment book, decide where on the sliding scale they want to pay, drop payment into the mild little box on the wall. Our patients, in turn, trust us to put sharp bits of metal into their bodies. Then they trust each other enough to go to sleep. Let us notice that, specifically: strangers sleep next to each other in a storefront in an elderly building on one of the busier intersections in this city. I can do this job because I can set needles for someone in acute crisis and then roll away on the my wee red chair, trusting the other sleepers to hold them as softly as they need.These 8 recliners catch us, give us safe space to pause, speed us along to the next unraveling. This happens because we trust the process and each other.

Capitalism functions through division, suspicion, fear. We’re supposed to hoard, not share. Not discover that together we are so much more than the sum of our parts, that by each giving some, we receive a lot. Of course Poke is still a business; if we weren’t making money we wouldn’t stay open.

(Although, in all seriousness, if I were independently wealthy I’d work my community acupuncture gigs for free and I strongly suspect the other two would too.)

But it challenges a powerful narrative in the dominant culture about humans: that we are by nature competitive, aggressive, that we need policing and laws and threat of punishment in order to be safe, that without being coerced, we will not behave “well.”Fuck that! I see people every day in pain, depressed, stressed out. We treat mental illness and intense physical pain alongside mundane strains and headcolds. When people arrive here they are often far from their “best,” but almost without exception they respect us, each other, and the space, and not because they have to. It’s because they want to, because it comes naturally, because they crave the gentleness and ease of letting down their guard, because they are touched by the trust extended to them, no questions asked, as soon as they walk in the door.

I know what kind of world I want to live in. It includes ex-cops, prisons razed to the ground or converted to museums, less isolation, and trust becoming normalised. It includes us going to sleep together, waking up together, remembering that we need each other.

Author: Lisa Baird

Lisa prefers fireflies to fireworks, reverts to bluntness in stressful moments, would happily wear legwarmers year-round, and probably wants to be your friend.