#71: Emi Arimura, L.Ac

"If there is something of the divine in all things, then tending to the mundane aspects and objects of life is a spiritual act."

#71: Emi Arimura, L.Ac

Emi (@emi_on_earth) is a writer and acupuncturist. Those in Los Angeles can book a session with her here.

Health Gossip with Emi
Capricorn/Aries/Aries
Colorado, USA

What does health, or being healthy, mean to you?

Being in right relationship to my environment, the reality of my community and my circumstances. Free enough of obstruction that life can flow through me. Free enough.

How would you describe your current lifestyle?

All over the place. We left LA after the fires for the sake of our baby’s health, she wasn’t yet a year old. We’re in Colorado now, sorting through the details and the emotions. There’s a lot of sadness and adjustment and vulnerability and anger as the idea we had for our life is breaking down around us, as is the case for so many people right now. But there’s a new sense of wisdom and clarity, too. I feel porous, sharp, and strong despite my obvious precariousness. We’re not exactly in the “rebuild” portion of our experience, but I’ve been alive long enough to understand that’s what comes next.

While I wait to get licensed in Colorado, I travel back to LA every few weeks to see my clients, I’m an acupuncturist. Carlos, my baby daddy, travels for work too, he’s a tattooer. We’re all together for a week or so, then one of us leaves while the other stays home with baby girl, Esmeralda. It’s a constant shifting of tasks and priorities, desires and plans, but the value at the center is always our love for our gal. The details can be overwhelming, but it just must be so. I still feel lucky and alive.

How do you start and end your days?

I was going to say it starts and ends Esmeralda, but really it starts and ends Joey, our husky, rescued from the desert. She insists on sleeping outside in a little hole she dug. I let her in and runs around giving everyone a kiss. Lately everyone’s been sleeping in and taking it easy, wanting to lounge around before moving through the task of it all. Young kids are so magical, it’s really clear when you get to live with one that they come from another realm. And when they’ve just woken up they’re re-dusted with other realm dust, it’s awesome. So I want to defend that time, want the present to expand, making space for her to do things in her special fairy way. Is there anytime more precious than childhood?

The pull of sleep has its own momentum that draws babies in. All day we go with the flow, but I’m never not watching. You have to steer the ship around the bend toward bedtime, or else it ends in a big rush, and who wants that? Or it does indeed go to hell and that works too. The sense of completion and rightness regarding how things go has really loosened up for me in a way I like and am surprised by. My heart is growing bigger. After she’s asleep, I stay awake for as long as possible, cramming all of my outside life stuff into that time. I eat, clean up, send emails, study, walk the husky, grocery shop, text, do anything and everything else after 7pm. Often I don’t go to sleep until well after midnight, which is so dumb. Oh well.

Can you recall a moment when you became more aware of your health, or your relationship to it changed?

I was 24 when I got this job at UCSF and suddenly was in close relationship with a lot of people who were terminally ill. I was a very lucky bright person, but my life had been quite hard. I was alone and really felt the weight of needing to care for myself and find my way in the world. Being close with so many people at the end of their lives during that tender time of my own made it impossible to hide from the immediate realness of our situation, the inevitability of illness and death. It intensified what was already inside of me, this feeling that I really wanted to experience life and get after it. Gratitude isn’t quite the word, more like I developed this sense that when things were going okay, I wanted to enjoy them. And when they weren’t, I wanted to accept them.

A few years after that, I got sick, started getting severe migraines. I underwent a full medical work-up, many meds, little relief. The drugs left me feeling on edge and hopeless. But nothing else helped. Days at a time of piercing pain and vomiting down to the bottom of my soul. When I felt good, I tried to work hard, control what I could control. Then I’d get a migraine and drop entirely out of life. I was in so much pain and life was hell. I was ready to do anything and change everything to regain my lost life, but my good health acts just weren’t making a difference.

So I kind of gave up. I quit jobs without notice. I broke up with people, didn’t commit, partied. I did what I wanted and started to feel better. My new therapist referred me to her acupuncturist. Though it was still a long messy road, I instantly felt different after that first session, more cleared and unclogged. Until I left New York, I saw her every 3 weeks, paying for it with a credit card. Now, like 15 years later, I’m an acupuncturist myself and chronic migraine disease isn’t really a factor in my life.

Then I had a kid. One day I was a human individual and the next I hurtled into the void and came back with a baby who is my baby. Nothing made sense. I’d sit on the porch, looking at this amazing pink peppercorn with infinite little yellow flowers, and for each flower, a bee. Bees buzzing everywhere all the time, the whole tree fuzzy with life. Then it ended. All the flowers fell away in the wind and in the rain. No berries, no bees. The tree dried up, seemed not to move at all in the breeze. She looked like she was waiting and in that waiting, she might die. No one came to her, no one exclaimed at her glow, and everything was quiet.

Do you have a spiritual practice?

I take the world in. Rain at night, birds flying overhead, the way the light falls on the plates. It feels like communion. I like the model of the farmer — you get up in the morning and do good work in right relationship to what’s around you, and the world rights itself. If there is something of the divine in all things, then tending to the mundane aspects and objects of life is a spiritual act.