#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."

Health Gossip

Oct 19, 2025

#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.

“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.”

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.

When I met Carlos, I was at a big transition point in my life. I’d been living in a meditation hut for 10 days, walking through the valley before sunrise, meditating, studying the Huangdi Neijing all day, swimming each evening in glacial-melt rivers. At one point I went deep into an ice cave system and had a profound awakening or remembering of sorts. Returning to life in LA was impossible, though I can’t describe why. I was camping alone on the coast, or sleeping on my friend’s couch or outside his apartment in my car, I couldn’t be inside. I asked Instagram if anyone knew anything about the mythology of caves, and through a friend, Carlos responded, which is how we met. He basically said to look up the mythology of Cyclops, the anarchistic giant who lives in a cave with only one eye. One reading is that Cyclops is the archetype of the too-spiritual person, the person with only a third eye who is so in touch he’s out of touch, a fool who can’t see what’s right around him. That really moved me, and I understood more deeply how my childhood had made me want to live alone on my side of the mountain, but that I survived and am alive, having a human experience, and I want it to be so.

What’s your relationship to self-healing?

Self-healing is happening all the time, so I don’t spend too much conscious energy thinking about it. I have my ways — I talk a lot, think a lot, walk a lot, say what’s on my mind, try to maximize the fun at all times, let myself get mad and sad, eat well even when I’m broke, and stay warm. I don’t have a boss and I don’t spend time with people I don’t like or who don’t like me. There’s not a ton of money, but my little world is my healing environment, and I write my own recipe everyday. My privilege and my richness.

“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.”

Healing in duality is wild, there’s a multidimensional swirling of images and data and spirit. I won’t do that with just anyone, I’m selective. LA is full of practitioners I love, but I’m less resourced in Colorado. For a while I was wanting acupuncture and had some recs but didn’t get the right vibe. So I let the need be there, didn’t try to solve it. Then I met this guy Hasan at a training in Boulder, and I liked him and a part of myself that I usually keep guarded and private felt relaxed, so I knew he was my acupuncturist.

In that same logic, I only go to the doctor if I need a diagnostic test or procedure like an ultrasound or bloodwork. I’m not open to being perceived by some rando with a skewed model of life on earth. I’m a gorgeous creature of the wilderness in a t-shirt. They wouldn’t get it. Who knows though, I am willing to be changed by life experience. This is me now. Good food, good friends, good care is the way for me.

Do you work with any practitioners, texts, or modalities on a regular basis?

I’m a student of Dr. Ed Neal, he’s an acupuncturist, physician, translator, and attended the Jung Institute in Zurich. We study the Huangdi Neijing, the oldest known Chinese medicine text. It tells the most gorgeous story of the universe breathing and exhaling space-time, and us on earth in resonance with that motion. I’m skipping over a lot, but the idea that I am a piece of the universe, that the intelligence that moves the seeds and the wind and the migration of birds is the same intelligence moving through me — this is a way I can live.

The practitioner is more important to me than the modality. Acupuncture is so powerful, holding the needle is like holding the tail of a tiger. The person holding the tail must be courageous enough to do so, and soft enough to let something unexpected happen. Otherwise it’s just popping pills, this point for this symptom, this herb for this malady. It works, but it’s not alchemical. I like care that falls at the intersections of acupuncture, craniosacral, massage, and somatic experiencing, those modalities that are technical and listening-based but still leave a lot of space for the unknown to exist.

When do you feel the most nourished?

Dinner with friends! Anywhere, anytime. Last week we were in LA, the same time Fino of Snakeroot Apothecary was in town from New Mexico. They were offering a meal service and dropped off a picadillo pie, miso corn soup, earth crackers, and maca honey almond butter. Their food was so freaking good and exciting to eat, nourishing but fresh with herbs to help digest that ultra nutrition. And I could tell it was made with mirth, food from a magician. A couple nights that week, we’d heat up some of Fino’s food and have our beloveds Sophie and Evan over to laugh and eat (gossip) while Esmeralda slept. Heaven.

How do you reset?

Walking Joey, my husky girl. Living with a husky is its own spiritual experience, it’s so much labor and effort and so worth it. If family life is a long wandering monologue, Joey is the comma. Everything is broken up and tied together with her personality and presence.

I used to camp a lot alone or with a sacred friend, and memory sustains me until I can get back out there. Big Sur at dawn or dusk, watching condors float through the mist. Point Lobos on the windiest day in earth’s history, all the birds in flight but motionless. Rain for days on the Oregon coast. Waking up outside anywhere on earth!

Do you have a favorite meal?

Whatever the current subject of my capricious desire. Pozole. Gen mai cha poured over white rice. Sparkling water, an orange, and an ice cream sandwich. Saltines dipped in butter. Steak. I like food made with care by someone who’s on my side of things.

“I’d rather die than pull out my laptop to cook, so if I make something and like it, I’ll copy it into my greasy little Five Star.”

There used to be this spot called Soy on the Lower East Side, owned by the coolest Japanese lady. She ran the front and back of house herself while her kid sat at the counter, his drawings and toys were everywhere. One afternoon, I was sitting at the counter when the health department walked in. She told the inspector she didn’t have time, told her to sit and wait, which she did. She sat next to me at the counter until lunch was served. It was incredible, I’d never seen or heard of anything like it. That was the best lunch ever.

When I was pregnant I felt like a small drum being forced to eat, which I did — the required 7000g of protein a day or whatever — and hated every second of it. Except for Del Taco. My first studio was in Atwater, so I’d hit the Del Taco drive thru for a Coke, because it’s caloric medicine. Then I discovered I could stomach a single taco. That drive thru became my little safe haven. My new spot’s back in Atwater, and when I’m working, I ask myself, “Is today a Del Taco day?”. Often the answer is a clear no thank you, but I love when it’s a yes. Food is so wild, it can be so utterly disgusting and then nothing less than transcendent. Day to day, I aim for somewhere in between.

I cook simply and add in heavier nourishment as needed. Meat is an herb. I keep a notebook with handwritten recipes from wherever. I’d rather die than pull out my laptop to cook, so if I make something and like it, I’ll copy it into my greasy little Five Star. We make all of Esmeralda’s meals, and now Joey’s, too. There’s always eggs, whole milk, and cheese. Smoked salmon, whole chicken, ground beef. Good bread, sauerkraut, rice, crackers, olives. Mushrooms, carrots, shallots, greens, berries. Apples. (Esmeralda loves apples so much, she face planted in Terminal 1 of LAX while toddler sprinting toward an Authorized Apple Dealer sign. Imagine that level of pure enthusiasm.) Ghee, lots of butter, lots of good olive oil, Celtic sea salt. Homemade broth and meat stock. Coffee and lots of herbal teas. Food is life, but life is chaos and I’m no saint.