Night Sky Acupuncture + Ideaphoria

Liz Asch Greenhill, LAc.

811 East Burnside Street Suite 216 Portland, OR, 97214 United States

NIGHT SKY ACUPUNCTURE WILL CLOSE ON MARCH 31, 2025. THANK YOU FOR ALL THE YEARS OF COLLABORATION, COMMUNITY, GROWTH, AND CARE.

PLEASE SEE THE COMMUNITY RESOURCES PAGE FOR SUGGESTIONS FOR SUCCESSIVE PRACTITIONERS.

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We offer transformative acupuncture to reduce pain (physical and emotional) and support the nervous system and whole being. We do not offer managed care or primary care. If we are a good fit, we can serve as an auxiliary person in your network. We are both certified herbalists and can bring herbal medicine into your treatment plan, along with bodywork and other Eastern Medicine modalities. Liz is also an educator on creative embodiment and offers virtual sessions to individuals and groups of artists and thinkers. 

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Liz is the creator and host of Body Land Metaphor Medicine, a free guided visualization resource on the podcast platform. Listen and get a sense of what it’s like to work with me. These are deep listening experiences that require time set aside in a still, quiet place. They can be listened to in bed for insomnia, via headphones on public transportation for self-regulation, in groups as a guided meditation with an integration discussion afterwards, and so on. They are not to be listened to while driving or multi-tasking. Listen on Spotify, Apple podcasts, Amazon Music, or download directly here on my website. Please share widely. These are a public offering. Seasons 1-4 are in English, and season 5 is en Español.

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If you’d like to subscribe to Liz’s very occasional newsletter which includes guided visualization and tidbits on Eastern Medicine, here’s the LINK.

Healing is Rethinking Old Narratives; and a form of Activism

June 24, 2016  /  Liz Greenhill

Read along for an experiment with me. 

Let's use the imagination to see your body in a creative way. You know what you look like from the outside. Now imagine that you can see inside your body and let's pretend that inside is all darkness and space, that you can see your body as hollow. What if the hollow of your body was a cave? A long meandering cavern, with all the crooks and crevices of your fingers, your ankles, the arcs of your hips. What if it was peaty, and you could taste the minerals in your mouth and feel the dark cool cave air on your arms and feel the dirt under your feet, the quiet stillness all around you? Imagine a small thumb-sized hologram of yourself, lantern in hand, meandering through your caves. Hear water trickling, feel the heat of the lantern as the tiny-you travels through your body. Imagine the hands of the hologram brushing against the caves walls, bringing warmth and light to the inside of the shell of you, like matchstrike, your fingers leaving traces of orange glow along the walls. 

Can you feel it? Does your body feel somehow different? 

What got me interested in Chinese Medicine was anxiety, and specifically, anxiety as physiological and psychological pain brought about by the imagination. In my twenties, I was working in the arts in New York as a studio assistant to various artists including a man I adored who was living with advanced AIDS. I could all too easily imagine his sudden death, or a sudden illness or a devastating accident happening to anyone I loved—and instantly, the dread took over my entire body like a quick infection. Worries sped through my mind, a bristling tension fevered into my muscles, and panic sharpened against my heart. I’d felt this feeling my entire life, and I was creating it with my thoughts.

 

My therapist at the time reminded me patiently that worry is the misuse of the imagination. What, I wondered, is a better use of the imagination for the body? The artist I worked for at the time, Frank Moore, gave me many ideas through his body of work. 

 

In my thirties, I’ve come to understand that my mental state greatly affects my physiological one. Get on a downward spiral of thinking, sinking into negativity and doom, and I can bet that my neck will tighten, my blood pressure rise, my heart feel leaded and my hip go out. Certainly, anxiety isn’t the only reason for these issues, but I’ve known it to be both a contributing factor and a causative spark. 

 

If our imaginations can make us feel so sick and negative, then what if we repurposed them, used them to serve us: to help us feel safe and calm and embodied? 

 

I’m passionate about helping people revise their imaginations to be of salutary use. When you come in for a session, I offer you a creative visualization, tailor-made to fit your health and our work together.  Whether or not I speak the words aloud, creative imagery informs the way I work with your body. I believe in engaging the imagination as a form of radical creative activism. This is a profound revision of self, a shucking of the old narratives that hold us stuck in discomfort. Re-thinking and re-imagining is way to create a place in your own body that is immediately safe. A design that gifts you in the moment your body as your refuge.