Meet Kelly Ilseman

 

We recently connected with Kelly Ilseman and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Kelly, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

I believe I get my resilience from both “nature and nurture” (the two epigenetic pressures). I feel I was truly “born with it” and that my life growing up in a small, rural Maine mill town in a unique setting on a Christmas tree farm and shrub nursery gave me more resilience than I’ll ever be able to quantify.

I grew up low-middle income poor and we worked hard. My grandparents instilled Depression-era values of saving, using what we had, re-using what we had, not wasting anything, growing our own food, using natural resources to make money. and encouraging us to be happy with what we had. Growing up one hour from the closest “city” gave me the ambition to get out of my town and see the world. I also innately had curiosity and desire to travel. I was blessed by coming into this world with an innate drive to never give up and trusting that things usually work out when I work hard and follow the path intended for me. I was born with a keen, curious intellect and loved academic work. Luckily, this fit into the traditional academic model, and though it was soul-crushing at times to continue working myself within these traditional guidelines of success, I thrived nonetheless. I was lucky to have supportive grandparents, a mom, and great teachers and coaches who taught me discipline, educated me, gave me untold opportunities, and encouraged me to discover who I am and my truest path in life.

Several majorly impactful events truly shaped my life. My relationship with my mom is the first and most foundational. It was characterized by tension, fighting, and an inability to get along from the earliest age. That was always a source of pain and also made me stronger ~ a fuller expression of myself. I had a desire to understand and demonstrate who I was and how I saw the world, to try to show her my perspective so that she might understand and perhaps accept me. I also have had several major physical accidents throughout my life: a head-on car collision in 1988 at a combined speed of 90 mph when i was 12. I was thrown into the windshield and have physical repercussions from that event to this day. Another was being born with a misaligned skeleton, largely due to a L-side transitional segment from L4/L5 to my sacrum, which created hyper-stability on the left and hyper-mobility on the R, as well as a skeletal misalignment in a zig-zag pattern from top to bottom (mainly resulting in terrible neck pain for most of my life). Most recently, I fell badly in 2020, breaking two ribs and tearing my L kidney ureter from my bladder. The ability to work through health issues, and along with them some of the deeper spiritual work related to these health issues as well as psychological patterning/conditioning and unhealthful relationships have taught me a fair share of resilience and patience and deepened my connection with and understanding of myself.

The next part of the interview is where we’d love to learn more about you, your story and what you are focused on professionally – whether it’s a business, nonprofit, artistic career etc.
Please tell our readers about what you do, what you feel is most exciting or special about it, as well as anything else you’d like folks to know about your brand/art/etc. If relevant, please also tell our readers about anything new (events, product/service launches, expansion, etc)

I attended the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine (OCOM) from 2017-2020, where I studied acupuncture, herbal medicine, and shiatsu under the instruction and leadership of some incredible practitioners and mentors. I am a licensed acupuncturist and NCCAOM diplomate and hold active licenses in Oregon and Maine. I am a 500-hour certified yoga and meditation instructor with eight+ years of teaching experience. I practice acupuncture, cupping, gua sha, moxa, herbal medicine, shiatsu and reflexology, as well as mindful movement, breath work, meditation, and nutrition in the Central Eastside neighborhood of Portland, at Advanced Acupuncture in Lake Oswego, Oregon, and at Quest Center for Integrative Health in Portland. Mindful movement, breathing, meditation, and sound vibration are part of my personal practices of energy cultivation.

I treat a variety of medical conditions, including chronic and acute pain, internal medicine, complex biomedical conditions, mental-emotional health (depression, anxiety, insomnia, stress, trauma), and substance use recovery. I provide treatments that help people to cultivate an internal space for stillness and regeneration, allowing the body to move deeply into the parasympathetic rest, renew, and restore response for transformative healing and nervous system regulation. I envision a world where acupuncture, bodywork, herbs, and mindful movement are integrated into the mainstream medical system.

I serve as Research Committee Chair for the Oregon Association of Acupuncturists (OAA) and have compiled several large-scale written documents on acupuncture for pain management. I have been a Teaching Assistant for graduate-level research and writing courses at the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine (OCOM). I am always available for writing consultation, whether technical or creative.

You can find me giving and receiving acupuncture, doing yoga, hiking, biking, running, cooking, gardening, watching movies, adoring my cat, and listening to music.

My diagnostic and treatment style is influenced by Chinese tongue and pulse as well as Japanese point, channel, and abdominal palpation, gathering in-the-moment information to facilitate the direction of treatments. My needling style is influenced by Chinese and Japanese acupuncture. I infuse bodywork in the form of shiatsu into my treatments, and rely on the methods of listening, curiosity, and compassion to guide diagnosis and treatment. Patients might get a lot of needles, they might get 10, or they might get one ~ it just depends on their presentation and what they need!

I share these practices because they have helped ease my journey and create more meaning and connection in my life. I understand from personal experience what it feels like to live with chronic musculoskeletal pain due to skeletal misalignment, sports injuries, and motor vehicle collision injury. As a former college athlete and lifelong yogi, I am fluent in working with athletes, movers, and bodies of all kinds. I am committed to helping people feel better. I have successfully used whole foods, herbs, and acupuncture to heal my gut, thankfully, and you can do the same! Acupuncture, herbs, and bodywork have softened the edges of my mind-body experience. I invite you to give yourself the opportunity to experience the physical and emotional softness and flow that comes with stress reduction, in turn allowing you to be more productive in your relationships, creative projects, and work. Chinese medicine has offered me ease in my cycles of life. It is possible for you to find physical and mental balance at every stage of life. Acupuncture and herbal medicine are some of the most under-utilized, highly effective, evidence-based forms of medicine that exist, period. And of course, I always note that they work best in conjunction with a healthful lifestyle that includes yoga and nutritious foods.

What led me to acupuncture? My path to acupuncture and Chinese Medicine was resonant with a sense of time and place in my life in 2004. It was women’s health that led me to acupuncture. I received my first treatment at Boston’s Fenway Medical Center, in the rush and hum of the city close to research institutions and hospitals, and the gritty energy of the gap between wealth and poverty. I consider Pathways to Wellness, the New England School of Acupuncture’s (NESA’s) former intern clinic, my first acupuncture home. Under the care of NESA interns, my curiosity grew regarding the benefits I received from treatments. Pathways’ location above South Boston Medical Center modeled integrative care and the opportunity for social impact; I could see huge possibilities for the growth and reach of this medicine. I had just graduated from the University of Maine with my Master’s degree in Science and Environmental Education, and worked late nights at Allston and Porter Square coffee shops preparing teaching lessons for my high school biology and chemistry classes. Facebook was being developed at Harvard a couple miles from where I lived in Brighton. Life felt rich with possibility, positive impact to be made, and social problems to be solved. I kept a brochure from Pathways on my bulletin board at Upward Bound where I worked over the next 14 years, keeping the dream alive that acupuncture could be part of the solution to many of the social issues facing the world. I envision someday combining acupuncture with social/educational programs for youth and am grateful for the opportunities to give back to the communities around me.

I am inspired to create pathways for greater access to this medicine. I provide heart- and science-based patient care that aspires to be truly integrative. My heart is aligned with helping people heal and I am truly grateful for the opportunity to practice this medicine.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

In my experience, the three most important qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge for becoming an acupuncturist are: a) academic discipline (memorization, whole-systems interconnected thinking, and an ability to write and understand research; b) spiritual connection: why are we here?, what are the deeper meanings of people’s life experiences?, and what is the greater meaning in it all?; c) energy cultivation: breathing with movement, yoga, qigong, mindfulness, nature.

You can improve on these by informal and formal learning (and seeking advice from teachers about learning strategies as well as seeking counsel from academic experts within the area you’d like to improve), finding spiritual mentors, reading books related to these topics, and deepening your connection to yourself through mind-body practices.

Are you looking for folks to partner or collaborate with? If so, describe the sorts of folks you are looking to collaborate with and how they can connect with you if they are reading this and want to collaborate.

I’m looking for people to collaborate to form a national network of providers who offer free/reduced acupuncture care and after-school or summer programs to youth as part of Ripple Acupuncture Project. And I’m looking for people who want to start talking about the intersection of science, education, and acupuncture. Anyone in any area of the US who is interested can join these diverse yet connected projects. We are grassroots and just getting started. The aspiration to take part, the desire to share the experience of acupuncture with others, and a vision for how to creatively advance the profession of acupuncture is all you need! Questions? Please email me at [email protected].

Live in the Portland, Oregon, area and want to become a patient? Want technical or creative writing assistance? Want to take part in the Bold Journey project? Email me at [email protected].

 

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Image Credits

photo taken by Shan Gray at Bridal Veil Falls, Columbia River Gorge, Oregon, December 2018

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