Spring Re-Release: Awaken Your Healing Abilities with Acupuncture

Our Season 1 Spring Re-Release continues, and for the month of May, we're revisiting conversations all about finding peace in your Present. We're kicking things off with Hero Jacques in this Acupuncture 101 masterclass!

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Physical and emotional memories from past experiences often manifest as tension, pain, or other symptoms. Achieving peace with the ancient healing practice of acupuncture can help release these suppressed memories and restore balance within the body.

In this episode, Hero Jacques Depardieu talks about the difference between spirituality and religion, how faith can change you, and the role spirituality can play in the darkest times. Jacques is nationally board-certified in acupuncture and traditional Chinese pharmacology and has been practicing for over 25 years.

What You Will Learn:

• [00:01] Intro and a bit about our guest today, Jacques Depardieu 
• [05:10] What is acupuncture, and why people reach out to Jacques
• [07:24] What happens in a typical acupuncture session
• [12:37] How needles in acupuncture facilitate and support healing 
• [16:27] How Jacques has seen people heal from acupuncture 
• [19:49] The moment Jacques realized he wanted to pursue acupuncture  
• [24:11] The biggest challenge Jacques faced going all into acupuncture 
• [26:35] How acupuncture helps women heal and reconnect with themselves 
• [29:53] Ways you can get into your body and start healing 
• [31:41] Wrap up and end of the show

Let’s Connect!

Jacques Depardieu

Website

Chandler Stroud

Website | LinkedIn | Instagram

Download a complimentary Healing Roadmap to discover our Past, Present, and Possible framework.

Want personalized guidance for your healing journey? Book a call with Chandler!

Mixing and editing provided by Next Day Podcast.

Transcript

Hey guys, it's Chandler, and welcome to The Healing Heroes. 

I promise you (music)

I'm Chandler Stroud, an executive wife and busy mom of two who after years of living with anxiety health struggles and an unshakable feeling like I should be happier, made a profound discovery that changed everything. Join me on a journey where unexpected paths lead to healing and more happiness. On this show, we'll explore unconventional ways to unlock more joy in your own life. With the help of my very own healers and trusted advisors, the healing heroes. 

Hey guys, this is Chandler and I'm really excited for our conversation today. To kick us off, I want to start with a simple question for you all. Have any of you listening ever had an injury or a physical pain that you've tried to treat, but it just won't go away for me? There's a lot I can draw on from this question, but specifically, and most recently, about six months ago, I woke up one morning with a great deal of pain in my right knee. Now I'm an active person. I like to do yoga. I walk, I spin, love biking outside, but there was nothing in particular that would've caused this injury. I just woke up with pain in my right knee and it was shooting pain right below my kneecap. Anytime I bent my knee in a very specific position, didn't matter if I had weight on it. 

Sometimes it would happen if I was lying in bed and just straightening my leg, my knee would shoot pain up my leg into my body, and you'd think it was the kind of thing I would probably address sooner. It took me a few weeks to actually recognize that it was a real injury. I went to an orthopedic. I had X-rays done. He gave me some physical therapy to do and I did it all, but nothing came from the X-ray. It looked like I was totally healthy. They couldn't find anything. And yet three, four months later, I still had this pain. I was using creams and I would say I was already working with my acupuncturist at the time, Jacques, who's here with us today, and I'm so excited for you to meet him. And for some reason we were working on other things I had sought his guidance for. 

But one morning I mentioned that my leg was really bothering me, that I had this knee ailment. And then I looked, I had talked to doctors, I had gotten the X-ray done, and he looked at me and he said, you want me to fix your knee? I can help with that. And I skeptically was like, sure, I'd love to have you help me with my knee. And he sat me down and remember the pain is in my right knee. And he looked at me and put, I don't remember if it was two or three needles max in my left elbow and told me to stand up out of the chair and I did. And for the first time in I don't know how many months, there was no pain. He said, is that better? And I was like, oh my gosh. Yeah, yeah, it's better. 

I mean, I was up and down out of that chair six or seven times fast, putting full weight on my feet. And it was in that moment that I decided, I truly believed, I believed before, but that moment really made me believe in the work he was doing. And I just have been so grateful for that and so much more that we've worked through together ever since. But I share that story because I think it's an important place to start. And he's here today, and I'm so excited to introduce you to Jacques Dip. But first let me tell you a little bit more about him. Jacques is nationally board certified in acupuncture and traditional Chinese pharmacology and has been practicing for over 25 years. He has a master's in Oriental medicine and has been a Qigong practitioner and teacher for over 30 years. He's a self-described advocate of the human spirit, having treated thousands of individuals for a wide array of conditions. 

He understands the role that spirit creativity and spontaneity play in creating health and recovery. We also both happened to have graduated from Colgate University Go Gate totally though didn't figure that out until a few months into our sessions together. So that's been kind of a fun surprise as well. So Jacques, welcome. I'm so glad you're here. Thank you for being with us. I'm thrilled to introduce you to listeners and share more over time about the great work you do within East Asian Medicine. For our time today, I'd love to start with the basics of acupuncture since that's how we've worked together and is a key focus in your practice. 

Thank you so much for inviting me, and thanks for sharing that fun story. 

Can you take a moment to speak to the holistic approach to traditional East Asian medicine? What is it and what are the various reasons why somebody would reach out to you for help? 

Yeah, so basically your story is a perfect example of what I've encountered over the last three decades really. Acupuncture was a modality that was generally used by people as a last resort. So it was one of those things where it was really fringy. People were like, oh, well, there's no hope, so why don't you try acupuncture? Kind of thing. Tried everything else. And then over time people started to realize, well, that's really crazy, but it's really great for knee pain, back pain, shoulder pain, that kind of thing. So then probably about 20 years ago, about 15, 20 years ago, it became very supported with both chemotherapy for side effects of chemo and for fertility, which I treat fertility patients, which really when you treat patients for that or for something similar, you create an effect where patients get pregnant where they were told they either couldn't or they had failed IVFs and word goes around quickly. And at this point now, I think a lot of the fertility clinics have acupuncturists in house. I know at least five or six that do, and they probably started doing that maybe 10 or 15 years ago. We're at a point now where acupuncture, I believe when I started, there were three schools in the United States and now I think there's like 50 or 60, something like that. Wow. Yeah. So it's something which went from fringe to now is incorporated. What is 

Acupuncture? If I'm going in for a session, I mean, I think a lot of people probably hear or assume it's just a bunch of needles, really painful and scary, but if you really break it down, can you help listeners understand what's happening when you get acupuncture? 

I don't know what acupuncture is, right? That really builds a lot of confidence. That's my joking way of saying, of answering your question and saying at this point, acupuncture is very similar to if somebody said, I've heard music, I've read a book, and that sounds really odd for me to say perhaps, but really there is cosmetic acupuncture, there's acupuncture that you can do for anesthesia. There is acupuncture for fertility, there is acupuncture just for sports medicine pain. There's acupuncture for drug addiction. There is, I could just keep going, right? There's acupuncture for mood disorders, digestive disorders, so not to continue. So what's going on here? So then as more than a few patients over the years of saying, okay, so is there anything you don't treat? And the answer, which is funny, I say no. If I'm treating human being and that human being is alive, then there's nothing that I can't treat. 

Okay, that's pretty loaded, right? I'll explain that. If you cut your leg, you don't have to tell your body to send white blood cells and platelets there. You don't wake up in the middle of the night to make sure that your heart's pumping and that your kidneys are functioning. What acupuncture does, it facilitates and supports what our body's naturally trying to do. A good practitioner targets the systems that the physical body is working towards in order to enhance what the body naturally wants to do. It's made its way into the mainstream. But what's not really discussed is that the practitioner's questions should really be about what's going on in your life. What are you eating? How is your sleeping? What's your digestion? Because basically if you come in and you're like, Hey, my knees bothering me, okay, so it's like, okay, so how's it going? 

You're like, oh, good. I have 10 red bowls a day and then I drink five cups of coffee. I sleep two hours a night and I smoke like 10 cigarettes a day, whatever. So your body has to really manage all of that. That's a lot of your energy. So it's difficult for people who live that kind of lifestyle to heal. The reciprocal is true as well, which is like I eat well, I get adequate rest, but I have a gastrointestinal disorder. I had my thyroid removed. I have asthma. So that person is going to have generally a little more difficulty in the healing process. And so often a good practitioner treats all of the underlying issues so that person's healing can happen more quickly. That's what it's all about. So the person's like, my digestion's better. I'm sleeping better. That person's going to already start healing. 

And often in our lives, we think of our bodies mechanically, but not energetically. We are a living entity, not our whole being, but what makes our whole being up all of our cells or organs and they need support and they need health just as much as what we consider ourselves are, which is our mind. So acupuncture is something which each person who goes and seeks out treatment needs to make a connection with that practitioner, and they should be able to have clinical results with the practitioner supporting their overall health and wellbeing mentally, physically, and emotionally. 

I so believe in that, and I definitely think based on my experience with you, that is definitely at the core of how you think about your work. I've felt that deeply. I have to ask, given that answer, and you've said this to me before too, after some of our best sessions, you're like, I hear all the time patients ask me, are there drugs on these needles? I mean, how do needles do everything you're saying? 

I would say that what's fascinating about acupuncture is it's experiential. It's just to music similar to a sunset on the beach. The way that I practice is to support the body to communicate within itself within that particular individual. So what's happening there is if you can assist the person to experience a state, it's kind of like if you meditate, if anybody meditates, it's very similar to someone who's meditated for let's say six months, an hour or two a day, you can start to experience that acupuncture is a shortcut to that, at least the way that I practice. And in that state, generally, the person is more consciously aware of being in their body than in their mind. We're constantly directing our thoughts and feelings, whether we're aware of it or not, to being in a state of either thinking about the past or projecting into the future, our schedules, our agendas, what we have to do, and the acupuncture can help the person experience being in their body without those thoughts and feelings happening and directing them. 

And that sounds so simple and so obvious, but when you experience it, you can completely change the way your body reacts to food. You can change the way your body's experiencing pain. You can change the way your body is experiencing a headache because the tension in your body leaves, and for lack of a better way of communicating it, the body has a memory and just like our mind, and when that is disengaged, the way we're experiencing tension, whether it's in our jaw, whether it's in our chest, whatever that weight, whether it's physical, mental or emotional, kind of breaks the chain of memory. Chandler with you with those pins, that's quite an undertaking to describe the meridians and their relationships. But simply put, there is an energetic relationship between your left arm and your right knee. And if you know from experience where that relationship is, you can affect change in one part of the body by needling another. And kind of like if you want to turn the lights on in the family room, but you know that in your entrance you have the big master switches, so you just go to the master switch. You don't have to walk all the way down to the family room to turn the lights on, you just do it on from the master switch. It's kind of like that. That's a simplification. 

I loved what you said about breaking the cycle of past memory so that you can just be in the present. And I think beyond the knee and the digestive issues and anxiety that I'm being treated for with you, I think it really helped me emotionally as well with some of those thoughts that I had been carrying in my physical self. And I just felt like there have been some very powerful moments where just dropping into my body and being present has disrupted that cycle of carrying those feelings, those emotions day to day without even realizing it. And I think that's really important, right? It broke it so I could feel different for a minute, and I knew that there was another way to feel, and that's what got me more curious and wanting to do more. 

Basically, what's beautiful about this conversation is it's personal and it's unique, and that's what acupuncture is. Acupuncture is personal and unique, but so is any modality that assists us to become experientially self-realized in whatever way we want to interpret that. And I believe all healing occurs within us, and it can be activated by a thought or a feeling or a desire, but it happens within, and acupuncture is fascinating because it can facilitate that without us having to use our thoughts, our feelings, or our intentions. I'd 

Be really interested to hear some of the ways that you've seen patients heal from acupuncture, whether it be emotional distress, physical ailments, depression, or more. I mean, I would turn it to you if there are any specific examples that you would want to give of how you've seen people heal. 

I would say the stories I would share are patients who have experienced remarkable changes. Most of my patients that I've treated don't believe in acupuncture at all. I have other patients who are more interested when they come in and I share with them what we just talked about, digestion, where they're like, I've had this since I was a kid. I always had stomach problems. I had problems eating. But now it's getting the point where I will explain to them that we somaticize our emotions. We not only digest the food, we have to digest our life. So all of our thoughts and feelings are a process of digestion. 

I love that analogy. 

For me, it's very accurate and children especially, you see that in, but I would say most people will to see that we're always trying to digest our thoughts and feelings, and when we can't, if somebody's always irritable, they'll generally have more acid reflux in TMJ. And if somebody just ruminates and it never is expressed, they usually have bloating and distended abdomen. And if somebody's that way, but they're fearful and worrying all the time, they usually have bowel issues. And then what we work on then is their awareness of that relationship, which they knew anyway, but a practitioner for the first time is telling them, yeah, there's a relationship between your emotional experience and your digestion. And then lastly, patients who are really aware of and experiencing deep states of stress in their lives where they're just going to need support to get through somebody who with a deep personal loss in their life, and just assisting the person for short periods of time, experience some peace to experience an hour or two where they don't feel like just that it's hard to get through the next 10 minutes and many patients over the years. I'm not here to tell you what to do. I'm here to listen and support each person in their healing. And obviously you and I have that relationship as well, right? 

Yes. Yes, we do. And I'm so grateful for you every day. Thank you. What was the moment that you realized you wanted to learn more about traditional Asian medicine and specifically acupuncture, if you can, that first intrigued you? 

Sure. I'll give you the abridged version of that. So yes, Colgate. When I was at Colgate, I was interested in being neuroscience, which led me to actually studying philosophy and psychology because at the time when I started to get into that, I felt personally, and this is my own personal experience, that so much of what I perceived as medicine was missing the human part. So I sought it out through philosophy, through psychology, and when I graduated, I was going to continue into a PhD program focusing on medicine and possibly continuing that. But after about a year or two, I said it was a year and a half actually, and it was crazy. Professor was going to be my PhD mentor. I met with him and he looks at me, he goes, what the hell are you doing here? You know all this stuff. Why don't you just go out and live? 

And it was like he hit me on the head with a cane. I had taught sailing all through high school and college. So I wound up leaving the program and I got my a hundred ton merchant mariners license from sailing on schooner and mostly sail training with young adults. And I did that, which led me to running, getting my captain's license, running charter boats. I injured my back in my early twenties, and one of the sailors that I knew, he was a tanker captain for Exxon. He's like, Hey, go see my wife. She does acupuncture. I had been told that I needed surgery and I'd probably never lift more than five pounds and that they were needed to fuse my discs. Long story short, I got acupuncture and that was it. I was like, there's no way. How could this affect a change in my body? 

And not only that, but it changed me mentally and emotionally because I was in my twenties and somebody tells you that, and I literally was crippled. I could not walk, and I'm pretty crazy as in like I broke my leg. When I broke my leg, which I broke my leg at Colgate. I walked into the hospital with a broken leg. I've walked in, okay, when I broke my finger, I've broken my finger, my toes, I tape it up, finished the day. So I broke my leg. I walked into the hospital, I'm like, Hey, my leg iss broken. The guy's like sit there. I waited an hour and a half. The guy said, your leg iss broken. I said, I told you my leg is broken. So I was so crippled from my back that I used to literally have to crawl, fall to the floor off my bed and crawl on my hands and knees to go to the bathroom. So the acupuncture, that was it. I pursued it. I wanted to learn it. So what did I do? Of course, I went to Shanghai to study what you do. I'm like, I'm going to learn this. So my back fully recuperated never needed surgery. I started doing yoga. I started doing Qigong and went to study in Shanghai in I think it was 94. 

And that is my personal, that's just a little snippet of my personal experience with acupuncture. 

Thanks for sharing that. That's an incredible story and makes sense that you had your own personal journey to wanting to dive in the deep end with everything you practice today. So appreciate you sharing. I'm curious, and maybe you answered this question just now, but what was the biggest challenge you faced when deciding to go all in and start your own practice and do this kind of healing full time? Yeah, 

It's very interesting. I've changed a lot because I'm married and I have children. I am an all in type person, so I didn't throw in all the parts about when I left that PhD program. I lived in my truck with my dog at the time when I injured my back. And then I was like, okay, I'm going to go to China. And my parents were like, no, you're going to go to see a psychiatrist. They were not supportive. And I wound up visiting my girlfriend. We were out on the west coast. I literally was walking around going into these Chinese stores in Chinatown talking to these people like, Hey, who does acupuncture? Who does Qigong in the nineties? And they were like, oh, Qigong master. She lives over here. I literally got her a dress and drove to her house and knocked on the door, and she's like, I'm going there in two months. I'm going to China in months with you, came back to New York, worked enough to have enough money. 

I know you've been practicing for over 20 years and you've seen all sorts of things. You understand your patients on an incredibly deep level. I'm curious what sorts of ways you've seen women in particular reconnect with themselves as a result of your work? And I think specifically, how do you think busy moms and women most need to heal based on your experiences with patients? 

That is the most important question for me to be clear about. Women are really the foundation and the creators of community and women and children, I personally believe from my experience, are what creates community, that women have this natural intuitive state within them, and there's this knowing, and children have it too. And so what I find often is that regardless of what women are coming in for, often, and you've just said it, busy moms, often people in our society think of like, oh, wow, she's got such a nice house and they have lots of money, and she just gets all the help she wants, or whatever. They make this assumption like, oh, life is so easy, but actually, it doesn't necessarily mean that life is easy. But what I want to point out is that when women connect to that inner knowing within themselves, when they look for what they really, truly value, and that's an individual experience, but there is a general seeking of community, of kinship, of supporting themselves if they're so inclined to have a family and they have the ability to do that, supporting their children in that way. So it's often for women trying to connect to that inner knowing because so many women experience trying to be 2, 3, 4 different personalities at the same time and all at the same time. I really do believe many, many women now are struggling and suffering. 

I believe it. 

I try and assist each patient, each mother, each sister, each daughter, grandmother, whatever, to assist them in connecting to that aspect of themselves. One of the most important things is to assist women to find their way to their own self-worth, because when that happens, it's going to change them. It's going to change their family, it's going to change the community, and then they'll connect together. 

You just dropped some major knowledge, and I love it. I love how you summarized that at the end. It's so true, and I am so excited to continue this journey with you to explore that last piece even more. Before we go though, I do want to ask you, what would you say to the listener who is now thinking about giving acupuncture a try? And if they're apprehensive about seeing a professional, are there ways they can try to drop into their body and interrupt that cycle at home? 

Sure. So acupuncture, finding a practitioner, I'm going to be very broad and try and answer that for the broadest audience, depending on what your condition or issue or inclination is. And hopefully, if you've listened to this, you want to first have somebody who's nationally board certified because that is the yardstick, really. And then just like anything, just like going to a physician or to having a coach, you want to make a connection. And if you don't like the person and they're not listening to you, you need to find somebody else. So in a sense, I believe I'm a strong believer in interviewing the people you want to work with. And then if you try a couple treatments, you need to get clinical results. Now, in some cases, you might not experience that right away depending on the condition, but you should feel something and you should hopefully be guided in a way to self-care. And lastly, there are many different ways that you can self-care. And if you're motivated, you have incredible resources online to try and find things for acupressure, for changing your eating habits and whatever you're inclined to. But there's visualization, there's meditation, there's Qigong, and it's all out there, and it's all free, but it does require your attention, your intention, and your commitment. 

Very helpful. And we can put some of those resources in the show notes for folks to check out after. Well, this was great, Jacques. Thank you so much again for being here. It was a great time, as we always do have. And if you guys liked what you heard today, please share it with friends and subscribe. You can also visit healing Heroes podcast.com to get resources, meet the heroes, Jacque included, and share your ideas for future episodes. Thanks for listening everyone, and until next time, remember, be curious, be courageous, and be kind to yourself. You've got this. Thanks for listening.