acupuncture, yoga, breathing: part 1, hemma

Two weekends ago I got to visit hemma, Michael Lium-Hall's lovely, lovely community acupuncture clinic in Victoria, BC. The first thing I thought when I saw hemma was that it illustrated how much the Internet can understate reality; I remember Michael's September post "Field of Dreams" (http://www.communityacupuncturenetwork.org/forum/read.php?35,5705) where he wrote that he was just writing his first blog post because, well, he'd been a little busy over the summer, stripping floors and whatnot. Yeah.

Yeah, wow! Hemma is gorgeous, and not just the floors. It is indeed in an old grocery store, a charming space with big windows and high ceilings and some crazily bold -- but perfect -- colors like bright orange on some of the walls. The overall effect is warmth and light. Michael and his wife are yoga teachers, and part of hemma is devoted to yoga and part to community acupuncture, which got me to thinking again about acupuncture, yoga, and breathing.

You could say that part of what the community acupuncture movement is doing is trying to shift the way that people perceive acupuncture, so that they think of it less like a surgical procedure and more like a yoga class. Including, of course, that the price of acupuncture should be comparable to the price of a yoga class as opposed to the price of a surgical procedure. The way that the yoga space and the community acupuncture space fit together inside hemma so naturally is a beautiful illustration of this analogy.

Yoga, like acupuncture, is a powerful and ancient technology that is potentially available to all classes of people. Its effectiveness relies on the innate healing potential of the human body rather than on any nifty external gadgets. And while yoga can be practiced individually or one-on-one with a teacher, most serious yogis will acknowledge that something special and irreplaceable happens when they do yoga in a room with other people. One of the really cool things about hemma was that you could feel that something in the air in two different rooms, side by side, the yoga room and the acupuncture room.

So before I keep rambling about yoga, acupuncture and breathing -- Michael, can you post some pictures of hemma?