Diego Garcia, L.Ac.
Medicine that treats the whole person with both rigor and reverence.
Dis-ease so often begins as a fight against what is true. We lose our ease long before we lose our health, and I learned that in my own life before I ever learned it in a clinic. Being gay meant growing up under pressure to conform; being an immigrant from Venezuela meant a steeper climb. For years I resisted both, which was really a war with myself. When I stopped resisting, the climb remained, but the war ended, and the steadiness it left behind is what I carry into every treatment. That steadiness is also the root of my work in acupuncture and Daoist alchemy for gay men. I came to medicine from nutrition science and nearly a decade as a strength and conditioning coach, and I still look at the body the way an engineer does, for the order beneath the symptom. My acupuncture training was in Traditional Chinese Medicine, and five years past my license it still had not taken hold. I was seeing a couple of patients a month, still coaching to get by, spiritually blocked, and certain I was not yet living the life I was meant to. Looking for the spark I expected and could not find, I enrolled in a class on the 13 Ghost Points.
It released a pattern of spiritual friction that had kept me from fully stepping into my calling as a healer. I stopped fearing failure. I signed a lease, opened my practice, and immersed myself in Daoist Alchemy. That path led me to Classical Acupuncture, which runs through the same lineage as the alchemy I had been studying. In it I found the magic I thought acupuncture had lost, and I have been studying it ever since.
Classical Chinese Medicine sees the body not as broken and in need of correction, but as perfect. Daoist Alchemy goes further, into that mystery, tending the spiritual patterns that live in the body and shape a life.
Together, they are the medicine I had been searching for: rigorous, reverent, and whole.