Needling your way to nightly Nirvana: how acupuncture can work sleep wonders for the sunrise community

For example, let’s see this: after a very long day, you finally collapse onto your bed in fierce anticipation of drifting into sweet slumber; instead, your eyes are as wide open as a deer in headlights. It’s a story all too familiar in the Sunrise Community. But from a sea of abundant solutions, acupuncture sunrise has been a beacon of hope for many restless souls here.

Acupuncture intrigues me because, different from a prickly cactus, it is all about poking with strategic direction. Of course, our ancestors had long found out that this ancient art is not a question of setting right the aches and ailments but rather treads a wider avenue-one which is intriguing, especially when counting sheep no longer made the cut.

Long-time resident Joanne remembers those sleepless nights quite well. “I guess my pillow was an interrogation chair,” she says, laughing at the memory of the toss-and-turn tango. Then came Joanna, an acupuncturist with deft fingers and soothing talk. Five sessions later, she was sleeping-in fact, she bathed in sleep like it was some spa thing. And such stories here are not some unicorn; they’re real from the neighbors.

Acupuncture speaks the language of our internal energies. By calling on those energies to flow without obstacle, it may well sing us to sleep, so to say, like a lullaby sung by Momma. Think of the body being like a city at rush hour; acupuncture creates the passageways for easy traffic flow, avoiding those traffic jams disturbing your sleep at nighttime.

The talks over the fence, the community potlucks that keep Sunrise Community abuzz, are about how much easier it is, this magic touch of thin, sterile needles. “I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t tried it myself,” says Dave, who for years had avoided acupuncture, thinking it to be no more than pin-cushion paranoia. “But it’s as though my nights have been tucked under a cozy weighted blanket.