Life - It Just Keeps on Going
Join in a spiritual adventure to examine what will happen when each of us dies. We will meet with people who have gone to the other side and come back (Near Death Experience - NDE), people who can speak with spirits on the other side (Mediums), people who help others go back to earlier lives to solve current problems (Past Life Regression Therapy) and much more.
We will also enjoy experiencing energy healing such as acupuncture, master energy healers, reiki, medical qigong, and more.
Life - It Just Keeps on Going
Finding Balance: Acupuncture's Role in Emotional and Physical Healing - with Jessica Resch
In this episode we engage with Jessica Resch, an experienced acupuncturist with 15 years of practice. Jessica discussed the nature of her work, the principles of acupuncture, and its emotional and physical healing capacities.
She emphasizes treating emotional aspects like anxiety, depression, and trauma. We delve into the traditional Chinese Medicine concept of energy (Chi), the relevance of pulses in diagnosis, and the therapeutic impact of acupuncture.
I'm very happy to be here with Jessica Resch She is someone that I met fairly recently And the moment I met her she just had such energy and such she's just such an interesting person I just said I gotta get you on my podcast And thank you for coming on
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:excited. Really grateful to be here, Jen.
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:When I met you we talked a little bit about what you do for a living and that's what kind of led to us Doing this interview and you work in Acupuncture.
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:I'm an acupuncturist. I've been an acupuncturist now for 14, going on 15 years.
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:Oh, wow. And what's the name of your business?
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:I had gone by the word spirit healing acupuncture. And that's sort of what I've been the umbrella that I'm working under, but really it's just more Jessica Rush acupuncture,
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:okay. Okay. And now can acupuncture be done remotely or does it have to be done with you and the person in the same room?
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:Honestly, if you're going to be using the, you know, the modality of the needles should be in person, but I believe everything's intention. So. I do believe I could sit with you and we could create a space where I could intentionally maybe send energy to an acupuncture point. I mean, why not? Right. I do believe that's possible.
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:Why not? I do, I do believe it as well. And it, it years ago when I had a friend who was in Reiki and she said, Oh, I have a friend in Australia and I'm going to send him some, some energy for his sore shoulder. And I just looked at her and I'm like, Oh, you are, you are a wacky. But since that time I have really come to believe that it's real and it's there and you can do that. So that isn't that neat now All right. Do you do most of your people come in or do you do a lot on
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:No, my entire practice is in person.
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:Okay, and what community are you
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:I treat in a town, an area called Eldersberg near Sykesville, Maryland. It's in Carroll County, Maryland. I've been out there for the entire time, pretty much.
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:Oh, wow. Oh, that's great. That's great. I, I think it's, it's so nice for you as a practitioner to have your space that you are used to and that you feel good in and, and it's just a matter of just you have the, the person come in and you treat them and, and nothing else changes. It's just a new person. And everything else is the same. So I think that that's great. Now, do you have any particular areas of focus of things that you treat? I mean, do you treat the sore shoulders and psychological things? What kind of things do you
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:a great question. I think when I started out, I was just open to treating most everything and anything, most people sort of come in with physical pain, but I would say as my career has progressed, I do tend to like to support more of the emotional aspects that show up for people. Whether that's, anxiety, depression worry I have trained also with a woman called Elaine Duncan and something called the Dow trauma. So I've learned quite a bit about the nervous system in that way and how dysregulation can happen for people that have experienced all sorts of trauma. So that really informs my practice as well.
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:Well, you just covered a lot of territory there, Jessica, so psychological things like depression and anxiety, right? Is one area, and then trauma, which I don't know if it's always involved with anxiety and depression or not, but that's a big area trauma. We you know, most people have had some trauma
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:would say everybody. And that's, that's what I've learned. You know, we think of extreme traumas, whether it's a car accident or some sort of emotional, physical abuse, but honestly, you could have childhood things, the, the household you grew up in, maybe there was alcoholism or addiction or things like that. And that can, Certainly create patterns of trauma. And when I use the word dysregulation, it's more that the nervous system isn't able to really relax and be in what we call parasympathetic, which is rest and digest. It's like you can get stuck in that sort of fight or flight,
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:yeah, let's let's talk a little bit about that Dysregulation that in other words you someone comes in to you you take a history from them right and then you kind of check out their energy flow And when you do that, do you put your hands above their body or on their body or how do you do
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:question. I for the acupuncture parts of it, I would listen to their pulses. Okay. And so how we do that is you listen on both wrists. I say, listen, you know, I'm going to use terms that might not sound physical.
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:No, no. I, I understand. I understand.
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:I would listen to someone's pulses just to learn what's going on with them from Meridian standpoint and how their energy is flowing from the lens of acupuncture. But really I'm, I would probably venture to say I'm pretty empathic. So when someone's just sitting across from me, it's a sense, a lot of times I might even feel anxiety myself or, feel myself start to mimic what I'm picking up on. If that makes sense.
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:I understand. I understand. Right. You take it on yourself a little bit so that you can feel what it is they're
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:And you can, and you can pick up on whether someone feels comfortable or not, like, I'm nervous a little bit. This is my first podcast ever. So a little fidgety and. you can sort of pick up on somebody's energy in terms of whether they're grounded or there's a stillness or
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:Definitely. Definitely. And that would be called their chi, right? You evaluate their
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:energy. Yeah. Yeah.
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:And the dysregulation, does that mean that things aren't flowing the way they're supposed to? What does that
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:It kind of means like being stuck in fight or flight. So we have
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:Oh,
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:of the nervous system, the sympathetic part of our nervous system, which we need, right? If you and I were standing on a corner road corner right now, and some truck was barreling towards us, we would need to move, Right. So that's always accessible to us, that ability to just flee or fight to protect ourselves is like a primal aspect, I guess, but certain ways of being in life, being on constant stress or constant deadlines, you can kind of get stuck in that fight or flight and not be able to. Let it go and rest. So dysregulation is part of that not being able to come out of that cycle.
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:I know someone who basically most of their day to day life is spent thinking about things that have gone wrong or things that have frustrated them or problems that they have. To me I think that that person would be dysregulated. Is that accurate or not?
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:from an emotional standpoint, I think that is accurate, they're stuck in one type of way of being, that dysregulation because they're not able to move out of that emotional state of worry or fear,
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:Right, right. It's so interesting to me that you do this evaluation by the pulses. Now, do you do check the pulses with a stethoscope? Is that what it's called?
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:I don't,
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:Or would you with your fingers or how do you
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:Just with my fingertip. just hold your hand and there's several positions on each wrist that I would connect with, that tell me something about the different energies involved in through that lens of acupuncture, which connect in a lot with the seasons. That's a whole like,
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:I want to get into that, talking about that in a little while. Yeah. You can, by feeling the pulse, is it the strength of the pulse or the, the frequency or what, what, what is it about the pulse that's
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:Jim. You're good at this. There is the pace. It is that it's like the quality of it, the speed of it. Yeah. Is it empty? Does it feel thin? Like for me, sometimes I have my own language. It isn't necessarily how I learned it in school, but is it feel feathery? Like I can just press through it and there's nothing there or does it feel wiry? It's tight,
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:oh, that is neat. I have friend who is probably still suffering from a condition where she was exposed to a very toxic chemical. It was in the wall in the creosote or whatever and it got wet and so she's there working in this office and all day long This creosote is filling up her room and she became very, very sensitive to all different types of smells and things like that. she was trying everything to get, a break from it. Someone suggested that she may get relief from acupuncture. And so, and this is a person that is like Miss Science, and I would never think that she would even be open to trying it. But that's how bad she felt. So she went to the acupuncturist and this is a story that she told is the woman said, Let me talk to your hand. Let me talk to your hand. So she grabbed the pulse. That's must be what she was doing. She's like, I'll talk to the head. And then she goes, Oh, you must have a stoppage or something. and sure enough, wasn't she able to cure that? And my friend said, she felt the energy break through the clog or, or whatever. So, when this super skeptic was talking about that, I'm like, wow, well that's, can't get more believable than that, because that's, person would never have said that. And so, let's say that you do feel like with my friend, you feel the pulse and you're like, oh, I think there's a, I think there, your energy is really not flowing
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:So when I, I would feel that and it would like for your friend, I would wonder about her lungs. Right. So in,
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:oh,
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:on the left hand, it tells me something about the heart, small intestine, the liver, the gallbladder.
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:okay.
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:right hand, it's different organs. So you press a certain area and you're going to feel, Oh, like with your friend, I would think her lung would be in distress,
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:okay.
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:how that might show up is it might feel deficient or like, low energy, or it might feel sometimes, you want the pulse to feel round and paced. Sometimes it might feel a little edgy, like something's not quite right there,
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:you know what this reminds me of is I, tried to do recording of music and I did a lot of listening to people talk about how does it work and all that sort of stuff. they would play something and then I'd say, okay, I'm going to do something different. And then they would say, how about this? And it sounds so much better and I couldn't tell the difference at all, you know, so, but the thing is, is they develop that ability to listen to it in such a way that they could really tell the difference. And that's you, you know, I could feel that same pulse with a person. I wouldn't have any clue about it, but you can really tell the difference from feeling it.
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:It is really neat. And to think back as a baby acupuncturist, how I have, gotten better, if you will, or I built that, that muscle and, and yet I probably will be building that muscle the rest of my life, as long as I practice
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:Yes.
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:for sure, cause there are masters out there and, just never quite feel that way.
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:Well, I'm sure that you've got tremendous abilities. You went to high school and then you went to college and then you worked in the corporate world for some
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:I did. And I I grew up out in Carroll County, and I went to, a county school out there, South Carroll, and went to
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:That's Maryland.
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:Yep. In Maryland. And I went on to get my bachelor's in communication arts. And what does that mean? That was like PR communication, news, marketing, that kind of
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:A lot of things. A lot of
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:And I wound up getting my first real job was with a government contractor, a federal consultant. And I wound up having this 16 year career. Working with federal clients and helping them with their, like a lot of environmental programs with the army that needed to tell the public about what they were doing, their mediation efforts or what have you. And so I was part of that team that would like do their public meetings and write their newsletters and develop their videos and do all that.
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:So you developed a lot of communication skills.
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:I would say that I did.
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:Verbal communication. And written.
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:written team leadership skills, people, leadership skills, all that good stuff.
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:Right.
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:It was a great opportunity. I traveled a lot, sort of all over, which I loved, but I
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:Mm hmm.
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:and I don't know if this is the time to say this, but I always sort of knew this is not it. This is not, I just had this deep yearning for a calling, I guess, or a vocation. And I did really well at it, but I didn't feel like I just always like from the very beginning felt like this is not it. This is not it. You know?
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:what I wanted to talk about. It's just that thing, is that you, as a very accomplished professional person, could have very easily said, I'm making good money. I got a good job. They like me, I'm doing okay. You could just have sat with that forever until retirement. But something, yeah, like you said, it just wasn't it. It wasn't right. so what, came along to nudge you into looking into something else?
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:Well, I think I was always seeking, I would do classes or read books, and just like trying to figure out, well, where, where do I sort of light up, And it was gosh, how many years into my career I was having regular reflexology. Which is like, I don't know if you're familiar with reflex, reflexology. It's
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:I'm
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:kind of like massage for the feet, but imagine the feet
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:Okay.
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:the body, if you will. So it's a form of healing energy healing, but it's through your feet. And I did deal with some depression after many years of working. And that manifested for me and like work, work, work, but then I didn't have energy for anything else in my life, And it was hard to sort of rise up, other than work. And I went to, her name was Maureen Champion and she changed my life. I don't know if it was her particular, when we're in school, they say, you'll, you'll develop Jessica puncture or, Maureen puncture, you develop your own way of being.
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:Oh, that's great. That's great.
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:this acupuncturist that I went to, I started in May and by September, I knew I wanted to study it. That's how profound of an experience I had. I. it was almost like, Jim, it was like the blinds that had been just shut over my soul, my heart, my eyes for so long, starting to just do this a little bit. And I was like, Oh, I'm noticing that tree again. I'm seeing the sky. I was like, felt a little freer in myself where I had been feeling pretty hopeless.
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:That, that must have been amazing to, Have that daylight kind of creep in to your life and then be like, oh that feels good Let's have more of that,
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:so profound. Now I went to her. Now that's the only thing you got to mention too with acupuncture. Sometimes it takes a lot of it. When you first start, it's almost like repatterning the flow of your energy. So with PT, when you're building a new muscle, you go twice a week, it's similar, you're building something new. And so to have that start to anchor in you, sometimes you have to do a lot of it. And I did, I went weekly for two months, at least two and a half. And luckily I was able to do that, and it was profound. And she, Maureen, this acupuncture, she's no longer practicing now, but Maureen champion, she. She would impart the spirit of the medicine to me. She would tell me like the acupuncture name point, say, for example, was greater mountain stream. And what does that evoke in you and what's that about? She taught me so much about the five elements, which I'm sure we'll get into. And the spirit of the medicine, which to me was poetic and profound and. Beautiful. And it just lit, lit up my spirit. It
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:Well, I think the fact that she was combining that teaching of you with the fact that you were feeling profound effects from it that combination must have just been gangbusters, because it's one thing if you're reading it in a book, but it's another thing if she's saying, you know, that great feeling that you're having, that's this, I can see where you would have like, wow, I'd like to do that for other
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:for sure. And she, as a person, I think what I've learned about myself is that I am always wanting to dig deeper and, wanting to find meaning in life and in things. And so she was that for me too, and her way of practicing, she was very deep, very spiritual, very present. And, and that inspired me. Tremendously.
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:I think it's so wonderful that you've expressed how the acupuncturists individual abilities and spiritual, abilities really has a lot to do with what the experience of the, of the patient or client is. And but let, let's go back a little bit to. What the heck is acupuncture? Not everybody knows about it. everybody kind of knows there's something about needles and blah, blah, blah. But they don't really know much about it. And it, it, my understanding is that Chinese medicine or what do you call it?
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:Chinese medicine, and you're right, it's ancient, it's thousands of years old. It's, it's hard because at the beginning it really, there weren't books available till, till really recently. So a lot of what was taught was through the oral tradition and through observation. So. There are some ancient texts that guide this medicine, but honestly, we weren't taught a lot of that,
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:that's pretty wild that this, very fulfilling and wonderful medical treatment has been going from before there were books, right? No one had a printing press yet, so it was really passed on verbally, but that's, it, ancient really means ancient. here, you
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:That's why sometimes I will like, you know, people say, Oh, alternative. I'm like, no, it's not. It's been around, it's been around a long time,
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:it's not new wave anything, it's old wave, and now it has to do with the flow of energy, we talked a little bit about
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:what does that mean really? Right.
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:Yeah, what does the flow of energy mean? What's that all
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:we, if you think about us as humans, we have our physical form and we have our spirit, when we pass the body is lifeless, and there's this idea that there is energy. We call it Chi through the lens of Chinese medicine. Right. That animates life, right? But you can't see that. You can feel that, Just like we feel heat or we might feel the wind, these things that you can't really see but you can feel That's part of this thing called energy and if you, you study metaphysical stuff, everything is energy, the leaf of the tree, what have you, and I'm sure you've done a lot of stuff on that. So it's this idea that we have energy within us that animates our life, right? And so in Chinese medicine, it's this idea that there are 12 main pathways, if you will. So you can imagine
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:Okay.
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:many rivers or, you know, roadways or something like that. There's really, there are two more, so there's 12 main ones. I won't get into the other two, but by listening, when we were talking about the pulses I'm able to tell which of those 12 have enough or aren't maybe flowing or maybe feel a little stuck, there's all these different ways I can sort of interpret some of the flow of someone's energy
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:Okay.
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:it's also rooted in the seasons. Okay. What does that mean? So right now you and I are in this mid winter 20 degrees whatever it is out there. very different than say June 21st If we were to sit here and think about the summer, the daylight, the warmth, the activity, the energy, the action, the growth on the trees and the ground, that has a different feeling to it than where we sit today. And so, In Chinese medicine, it's really about, can we live, we have those energies in us. We have, the gifts of winter within us. And I can go into that a little more. The gifts of spring, the gifts of summer, late summer and fall
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:Yeah you go into that a little bit more because I have heard this
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:yeah, sure.
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:I couldn't I couldn't bite on to it I couldn't grab on to it. How do I as LaPan just going down the street I've got winter and energies in me, right?
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:So I would say, so winter, it has a lot to do with our in each of these seasons, there are five of them in Chinese medicine. There are an emotion, a taste, a color organs that relate to that. There's all these, what we call correspondences. So in winter, it has a lot to do with the kidneys and the bladder has a lot to do with fear, but the opposite of fear is courage. So you might be somebody that is like fearless. And I would say anyone who takes on a podcast has a tremendous amount of courage to figure this out. Right. To be, to have the will to be like, I'm curious about this. I'm going to figure this out. That to me is like a wintry energetic thing through my list.
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:Okay. Okay.
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:Right.
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:Yeah, I'm gonna make it happen somehow.
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:It's like staying power. It's like you think of so winter energy is the element of water and you think of the power of water, the sea, even if the snow that right now is like coding where I am in Maryland, all over the ground, like it's immense, it's created such stillness around,
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:Right.
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:are like winter slash water element attributes, if you will.
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:Okay. I, I'm, I'm getting it. I'm getting it.
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:Jim has that, you know?
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:Yeah,
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:And if I were treating you, you could be someone that this isn't you, but someone that's frozen with fear. Can't be. Make a move can't make a decision is too afraid to live life to embrace,
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:Afraid to be wrong, afraid to be criticized, afraid
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:Right, so I would see that as a maybe perhaps there's other probably factors at play Elementally, but could their water be frozen? Do they need a little bit of the summer, the fire to warm that water up?
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:And how would you apply that
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:really the, the pulses would tell me, I could listen to the pulse and I would follow that as my leading first, and to see when we, we were taught, when we listened to the pulses too, there's a different, there's a, there's an order, there's a flow of things. And so when you listen to the pulse, you can find out if there's a block in between say one meridian and another. And then there's a protocol of points that you would do to, to free that energy to flow again.
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:Okay. And, the meridians, those are those 12 or 14
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:yes.
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:going through our body.
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:So that's an example of winter, you know, and then there are four others that have similar characteristics. So spring. is happening actually in early February. Groundhog Day around that time, that's the beginning, the awakening of spring really, from the winter solstice, December 21st, sun starts coming back.
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:Right.
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:that's like a rising energy. And Jim, I have a poster here. I don't know if it will help to show you this or not,
james_1_01-10-2025_130101:well I'll tell you what, let's finish up today's episode and let's start off with that next time.'cause this is a perfect spot to, I want to continue to move on with this. This is wonderful. And thank you so much. let's finish up and go get back to work again.
jessica--she-her-_1_01-10-2025_130102:you, Jim.