GaChing Kong -

Acupuncture

What happens at an acupuncture appointment? From your first visit, we will work with you to make a plan of treatment that considers what you need emotionally, physically, spiritually and mentally. Over the course of your treatments, we will carefully look at how to transform what you eat, what you move, how you relate, how you breathe and how you care for yourself in order for you to embody your whole self. Modalities include acupuncture and moxibustion, counseling, nutritional planning, breathing, body work, and movement. Who is GaChing Kong, R. Ac., M. Ed. I bring almost 20 years experience in social justice, research and community education to my work in community wellness, specifically with issues of healing from residential schooling, historical trauma, racism and addictions. Yoga, meditation, acupuncture and plant medicine are tools that helped me walk in the world a little more softly and listen to the body a little more closely, as I considered the processes the body, mind and spirit undertakes to move through oppression, sickness and grieving. At the age of 22, I opened a drop-in centre in the Downtown Eastside for at-risk youth of colour to explore community based activism around key issues of poverty, harm reduction and racism. In 2001, I received a Canadian Race Relations research grant to investigate programming for at risk youth of colour to heal from racism. From 2005 to 2007, I worked as a residential school therapist with Liard Aboriginal Women’s Society in the Yukon. In 2008, I was part of initiating and sustaining an affordable clinic at the Victoria Native Friendship Centre so community could receive accessible acupuncture, bodywork and herbal medicine and until 2015, I worked with several Coast Salish communities providing accessible acupuncture. In 2012, I began apprenticing with plant spirit medicine, which took me on a 3 year journey of meditation and fasting, culminating in a year in Peru. On my return from my travels in 2016, I faced a life-threatening illness, which left me with an awareness of the miraculous capacity of the personal and planetary body for regeneration. I draw on my extensive yoga and meditation practice and love of teaching to bring classes on non-dualism and meditation, Chinese medicine, herbal medicine and Self- healing / Self-realization to Duncan, Olympia, WA and other communities. Older traditions within acupuncture and Chinese medicine speak about healing as the spirit’s journey of coming home to themselves, and this is the experience I wish to offer those who come to see me. I believe that the wholeness of our bodies is intimately connected to the wholeness of our families, communities and the land. I do this work to honour my own ancestors and those who have struggled on this land to make a space for me and my work. I am grateful. GaChing Kong