TP365/Year 10:: Connections – Dr. So

Todays connection is someone I have never met but his presence on my life is massive (and so many others).

His name is Dr So.

He was sometimes called the “Father of Acupuncture” for North America and a majority of the acupuncture schools in the US were founded by students of Dr. So.

This legacy of acupuncture in North America is unparalleled and he was the master teacher of my acupuncturist Shelley (who was my connection last week). 

Today, Shelley was telling me about Dr. So and about a concept called “Duende” — she actually gave me homework to look up the word and what it means. So I did:

Duende or tener duende (“having duende”) can be loosely translated as having soul, a heightened state of emotion, expression, and heart. 

This is Shelley’s story of Dr. So and an explanation of Duende.

Shelley first saw a sign in a window in Boston’s Kenmore Square that caught her attention while she was attending Massachusetts College of Pharmacy. It was a poster of all the acupuncture points on the body. It mesmerized her since she had never seen anything like it before.

Then, later that year, a lecture at the Museum of Science featured “acupuncture” as the topic. She attended, still intrigued by this foreign concept.

Still later that year, in her last class of the year, her professor invited guest lecturers to the pharmacy school — one was an acupuncturist.

She graduated as a pharmacist and didn’t think anymore of it. Then as a practicing pharmacist she had a client who was in great pain, so much pain he couldn’t get enough pain medication. He ended up trying acupuncture and was so happy with it that he reported back to his pharmacist (Shelley) that it was working.

Even more intrigued, Shelley then submitted an application to an Acupuncture School. This is where she began her training with Dr. So.

After her training ended, her acupuncture office ended up being located across the street from the pharmacy where she had first worked and that patient who was in pain, and he ended up becoming her very first acupuncture patient.

Many years later Massachusetts College of Pharmacy absorbed the Acupuncture School marrying together the two things that Shelley had studied at what was two different schools.

Finally, thirty years into her career, Shelley was given the biography papers of her teacher, Dr. So (through some school contact), and discovered that his very first office in the U.S.A. was in Kenmore Square. That’s when she realized that it was that very same office where she had first seen the poster in the window that had caught her attention.

That’s Duende.

In this year of connections, I am beginning to see the depths of connecting all the dots. 

Thank you, Dr. So! While I have never met you I feel very connected to and healed by your legacy.
And that is a powerful connection.

More tomorrow,
Jamie