Dovetail Healing Arts
Elemental Acupuncture & Alchemical Arts
Karla Vandenbergh, LAc
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Karla Vandenbergh, LAc 〰️
Karla Joy Vandenbergh
I am an acupuncturist and alchemical healer with two decades of experience as a taoist medicine practitioner, transformational healer and teacher. Offering partnership in the unfolding of your personal health journey, my wish is to empower you with resilience and resource, tools to thrive in all the shades of life - chaos, uncertainty, celebration, grief, love, despair, joy, and beauty. This work creates a sacred container, allowing room for the golden threads to emerge from trauma and suffering.
The alchemical approach
Alchemical healing offers a method that allows us to work with and transform psycho-emotional distress and chronic disease patterns by cultivating agency and resilience - learning to thrive even in discomfort, chaos, or difficulty. I utilize and transmit the tools of taoist medicine - acupuncture, qigong, and alchemical neidan. Coming into embodiment, we can heal no matter our age, condition or history. I offer Elemental Acupuncture, Flower Essences, Herbs, Astrology, Qigong, and Esoteric Meditation, all from an alchemical lens and framework.
“Listen with your ears, your eyes, your throat, your abdomen, your toes…we can listen with everything. Imagine listening with your belly to the cricket on the stairs, the raven at the door.” - Joy Harjo, Poet Warrior
patient testimonials
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patient testimonials 〰️
“There is a poetic nature about the way Karla practices acupuncture. I was impressed by her level of expertise. I think the the treatment was effective because she was selfless in the way she practiced, allowing for my healing. I also feel energized and inspired after my treatments. After only two sessions the pain I experienced in my knees had reduced about 90%. I'm newly thinking; acupuncture is a smart choice for healing and maintaining health as a lifestyle.”
- Jarin, Massage Therapist
Blog Posts
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Blog Posts 〰️
Neuroatypical Intelligence
Radical Acceptance
Saffron Lotus Healing Meditation
What do I need to be nourished?
The Elementals, a sacred weaving of relationality
The elements are alive in us, in our minds, our energetic highways and living network of our soma. They are alive, in relationship with us, each other and the tendrilic root system of all beings, human and other than human. When we feel into our wood, our metal, our thunder, we can ask, how are these alive in me, and how are they in relationship with each other? Is my water nourishing my wood? Is my earth giving water its needed legacy to flow in integrity and power? Is my fire alive enough to support my earth? And what do I need? What support do I need and also what support can I offer to these elemental spirits?
Alignment with the energetic of the season is important and it is important to evaluate what is needed to support that alignment. In summer, I may need more cooling water to temper my heat such as shade, raw fruits and veg, slower movements, and calming practices. Or perhaps I need more wood to stoke my dwindling warmth and aliveness, like sour foods, movement, stretching, activity, goals and strategies. Maybe I need to tune into and feed my metal in order to support my heart and upper jiao with meditative practice, being with nature beings, taking in beauty through the senses, qigong, breath work, skin brushing, and immune system enhancement. I am alive, they are alive, and together we are a sacred interweaving of interbeing. A dynamic, multidimensional relationship with all aspects of Self in community with other.
The Elementals: Water, the luminosity of the underworld
Winter invites me to coil into myself. It is the deepest of the depths, the caverns of the dark underbelly of the universe. The dark caves with etches of ancient markings. The bones of my soul, the essences of my ancestors, the transmission of lineage beyond space and time, the threads that embed and inform my very cells. Winter beckons us to go deeper and calls us to rest. What is the invitation of the dark? What am I afraid of? How can I lean back into the support of my truth, what I view as sacred, into my own inner knowing? How can I tap into the deep intuition of my very cells?
I had a dream once, or maybe it was a vision. I was standing on the back of an alligator moving down the river of fear in the underworld. It was so dark and I was so afraid. I can’t see! I can’t see! I was gripping with terror. Then the alligator spoke to me. She said, you are looking in the wrong place for the light. It is here, reflected on the surface of the water. It is illumination, lunar, a different quality than the radiance of solar light. Look at the water, let your subtle eyes shift. This is the vision of the dark. You only need the smallest light to see. This Inanna-esque vision helped me to learn how to see in the dark. The light is different down there. If I can take a breath and lean back into my cells, into a different kind of knowing, I can see. It is a seeing that happens from my bones and my guts, perhaps it is more a felt sense of sight, body vision, rather than from my eyes. It’s as if I have eyes all over my body. Have you ever seen those images of buddhas with eyes everywhere? I wonder if they were born of the dark.
Winter invites us to learn to see in the dark.
Then Solstice comes. A sliver of light, a flicker. A tiny flame that I can hold up. It’s as if the stars themselves hand me a lantern. With this small light, I can hold it up and start to read the inscriptions on the cavern walls. There are no shortcuts. I have to already be down there, surrendered to the restful, quiet, powerful darkness for this to work. The wise, crone-mother of winter is the dark goddess of immortality. She is ancient, fierce, yet nutritive, protective and gestational. She holds us in her steady gaze. She asks us to surrender to generative rest. To cocoon in a hibernatory pod, even if we can’t stop our work in the world due to social norms and constraints, she demands of us to find a way, small ways, perhaps simple small ways to gestate. How can I slow down while moving at the same speed? How can I pause? Where is my breath? How can I lean back no matter what position I'm in? How can I live in active stillness?
Water is the winter elemental. The dual nature of water rules our kidneys, bladder, sexual energy, adrenals, reproductive system, bones, our ears, our balance, and is the furnace that ignites metabolic life. The very essences of our being, our water element is equivalent to our vitality and longevity. The zhi is the lunar soul of water, it is the application of our will of life itself. In health, it is in alignment with the inspiration of the solar radiance of our shen. When we cozy up and befriend rest, when we get to know it, befriend it and let it in, our essences can gestate and generate; a negentropic state that counters the normative entropic values of aging and decline. A question is bubbling to the surface now. What does rest mean to me? And how can I implement and honor that in simple, sustainable ways?
I thought the earthremembered me, shetook me back so tenderly, arrangingher dark skirts, her pocketsfull of lichens and seeds. I sleptas never before, a stoneon the riverbed, nothingbetween me and the white fire of the starsbut my thoughts, and they floatedlight as moths among the branchesof the perfect trees. All nightI heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All nightI rose and fell, as if in water, grapplingwith a luminous doom. By morningI had vanished at least a dozen timesInto something better. -Mary Oliver, Sleeping in the Forest
The Elementals; an ode to wood
The wood elemental qualities embody a sense of the upsurging, birthing strength of spring. Think of the force of labor and delivery. Anyone who has experienced this birthing tumult of power, strength, fragility and ultimate courage knows how intense an experience it is. It requires that we summon all of our courage, and the strength we didn’t know we had, at a moment when we feel our most raw and vulnerable, at our most exhausted. After 9 or 10 months of growing a human inside our bodies, providing every nutrient and speck of sustenance needed to shape bone, form muscle, knit skin. After giving ourselves in this profound and utterly devastating way, we hand our immune system and our very blood to our child as it passes from the womb world into the bright light of the living earth realm. The womb has its own consciousness, the realm of the archaic, primordial essence of life. The ooze of our cells. Here we are protected, we are nourished, we rest and garner our strength and energy needed to emerge from the gestational period to the living world.
Wood is alive, a living elemental being that runs through and around us; both part of us and outside of us. It embodies living energy. It is birth, the pushing forth into life. Think of a seedling in the hard, cold ground of winter. As the light returns and the yang qi rises, that tiny seedling must summon all of its strength to sprout. The roots and tendrils must, despite all of the obstacles they face, summon their courage to continue to grow. They must believe, they must hold a vision of their becoming. That eventually they will push up through the soil, continuing their pathway to the light. They know inside them that the light is there, even if they can’t see it. They trust in their becoming. They stick in a direction and don’t give up. This is the energetic resonance of spring.
It is the living beings, the green woman who is alive in the trees. The nature spirits that dance among the rocks, grasses, and dirt. The spirits of the mountain. The hun is the spirit of wood. They rocket to the stars when we sleep to carry our dreams down in a sacred pathway. The star light enters our crown and we are gifted with the visions we need to incarnate. A dream is a gift, even if we don’t understand its meaning. Having the dream, telling the dream, writing the dream, doing dreamwork, are all ways to honor it and receive its gifts. The hun gives us our vision, the grand plan of our life, our creativity and our ability to vision a future that our most authentic nature can walk toward.
We may feel an overwhelming amount of frustration or a desire to move, to go, to act in Spring. Where I live in Western New York State, we have such a long winter. It snows in spring. The weather oscillates, up and down, hot, cold and damp. People complain, they are so angry in the spring. YES! This is the wood begging to be expressed. All of the gestation in winter, all of the rest is demanding that we express it, in a particular direction. As an elemental, wood is directional. In health it is the free and easy wanderer, but in the moment it has a direction, even if that direction changes in a short time. It is giving ourselves over to our creative energy, the force of birth. When we create, even in very small ways, it opens us, our energy awakens. Even if we never show our painting, our song in the shower, our dance, our poem, the doodle on our page, or our bread to anyone, even if it is the smallest act, it matters. It unlocks us. It doesn’t matter how long you do it, it matters that you do it. It isn't about an audience or having a published master work, it is the spiritual allyship of the creative act, of honoring that flow that is alive in each of us.
The wood element lives in our liver and gallbladder, our eyes, our tendons, ligaments and connective tissue that long to be stretched, to move and be warmed. It is the bow and arrow pointed to the target, and released with perfect ease toward our goal. It is also our ability to be flexible in the face of difficulty. To be willing to re-strategize, to bend to the winds so that we don’t break. Think of the strength of a sequoia. The depth of its roots, the integrity and uprightness of the trunk, the strength it embodies. The boughs, branches and leaves all expand up and out, dancing toward the light, shifting, moving, turning in multidirectional ways according to the light, temperature, time of day and nutrients it has or hasn’t received. We are like this tree in Spring. This wood is alive in you, in me, in them. As are all of the other elementals, including Metal, Water, Thunder, Fire, Mountain, Wind, Space and Earth, to name a few.
The Elementals: a love letter to fire
Fire, an invitation to blossom, open, and unfurl. To come into full maturation of my Self. To know, in presence, myself, where I end and another begins. To know my boundaries, To hold them in place, and also to open when it is right for me to share with an open, vulnerable heart.
Fire is the element of relationality, who I am and how I am in relationship with other. Fire is changeable, it can be calm, warm and comforting. Its warmth can allow us to survive, to cook, nourish and feed the ones we love. It can be romantic to sit by a fireplace with a lover, or exhilaratingly telling ghost stories around a campfire. Fire can also rage. It spreads quickly, just like the laughter and joy it correlates to within us. As Michael Ondaatje puts it so succinctly, “the heart is an organ of fire.”
As we move from spring into summer, things begin to open, growth expands and begins to unfold into its fullest potential. Birdsong is heard in the early morning. In health, the Shen takes its rest in the nest, the empty center of the heart. It is a time of opportunity for us to unfold, to be social, to expand ourselves and alight our communication. Not too hot though! Watch the animals and the way they take cover, find shade and moisture to balance the heat. All of the elements are always present within and around each of us in every time and season. It is helpful to recognize that they are always in relationship to us and each other. How are they in balance? How are in need of assistance? Do I need more water to balance my fire, or perhaps cultivate more earth as to not pull from the mother so strongly. Metal forges water, water creates wood, wood alights fire, fire nourishes earth, earth creates metal. This is the creation or Zheng cycle of the Five Elements. Of course there are many other elementals and spirits we honor here. These are the main five we work with in acupuncture and taoist medicine.
The blossom is the expression of fire in it’s fullest, most mature state. In its complete, full and originality, it opens to reveal its most beautiful sumptuous center. The heart opens to give and receive fragrance, joy and love. A rose is a rose, a peony, a peony. They are not trying to be any other flower, yet there is a dramatic intermingling of fragrance and being in the garden. The multiple fragrances, nectars, leaves and stems all dance together in an exquisite display of interbeing. There is communication and community among them. This is the communion of fire. A ritual of ease, connectivity, and expression. Just as it’s important to find ways to keep the fire alive in the depths of the restful winter, to keep moving in stillness, it is just as vital to find the shade and places of rest in the yang height of summer. It is a time of communion, of beings together and celebrating. And to keep our fires lit, we need relaxation, ease and quietude. Fire expresses as Shen, or spirit, that can be seen in our eyes, the radiance of our complexion, our tongue and speech, our blood and circulatory system. It lives in our heart, small intestine, heart protector and triple energizer. The Mandate of Heaven, our personal tao, our original nature, comes down into our crown and into the empty center of our hearts. As our hearts beat, they stamp our blood with the authentic nature of who we are, which is then expressed through the mai and limbs. the way we move and express in the world and with each other. The vast network of intrabeing.
The Elementals, a sumptuous song to the Earth
My hands reach for her. To place my palms on her dark, textured skin is to know my own body. The earth elemental is the archetypal mother. She is soft and sumptuous. There is comfort in her many fleshy folds. There is a way we become heavier and more rooted to what is beneath our feet when we are in her embrace. Earth belongs to late summer, to the bountiful harvest, the birthing of fruit, the cloying humidity and the frothy soil. As she takes her graceful space, the branches and stems bend with the weight of her gravity. It is the digestive juices that break down and process all experience, everything we take in through our senses, and everything we taste on our lips. It is earth that allows us to chew, to masticate experience, to swallow it down, digest and absorb it. It is the birdsong and the true song of our hearts.
I feel the shift in the atmosphere, the very air moleculizes differently, with a moist heaviness that is present on even the lightest days. There is a slowness in my steps, my muscles feel thicker and there is more density in my movements. The garden weighs, everything is bent with fertility. Seed spores pour forth like so many miniature creatures, the song of the insects changes, and the night air takes on a sweeter scent. The cradle of our embodied existence, she is protective, sustaining, and holds the strength of mountains. She sings to me the true song of my heart. If only I’ll listen.
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The Elementals: a roar of thunder
Thunder is the rumbling force of the sky. It is heaven and wind incarnate, an explosion of heat dancing and crashing in the cloud sky. Thunder is the toaist element of immortality. It is through thunder that we create our most vital, incarnation. Thunder lights us, it awakens our own celestial natures and our ability to soar through the realm of cloud and mist. Thunderstorms usually initiate fear, calm or a sense of energizing our system. Some people come alive during a thunderstorm, others make a fort and hide. Either way, thunder initiates, it causes a response. Thunder is powerful, like so many dragons tumultuously cascading through the sky.
When I was little I made a fort during thunderstorms. A safe place to hide and feel protected from its might. I brought a flashlight, books and toys with me. I created my own thunder world. When I got older, I realized the power of thunder. I was sitting by the window at my mom’s old apartment, staring at the darkening sky, and the trees swaying with the beating of the winds. I felt the energy, the electricity of the thunder moving through me. It filled me with excitement and a great sense of peace. I realized then that if I let it in, I could harness its power to enliven me from my perpetually oscillating depressive-anxious state.
The I Ching trigram for Thunder is the powerful voice of heaven. It arouses and unsettles, thus initiating change through destruction or creation. The Chinese character for thunder translates as to quake, tremor, shake and excite.
