Gail Rex is an author, acupuncturist, and earth healer who has been practicing acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine for over 20 years. A graduate and former faculty member of the Tri-State Instititute of Traditional Chinese Acupuncture. She is also the author of Earth Acupuncture: Healing the Living Landscape and of Wood Becomes Water: Chinese Medicine in Everyday Life.

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Since my first day of acupuncture school more than twenty years ago, I have been fascinated by the way that Chinese medicine connects the patterns and cycles of nature to the processes of the human body. Early in my practice I wrote a book about the five-element template that defines precisely how each of us mirrors the world around us. “The planet and its creatures are made of the same stuff,” I wrote in Wood Becomes Water. “We suffer from the same illnesses and will heal from the same cures. We are that closely intertwined.”

At the time, I meant that we can find ways of healing our bodies by learning from natural cycles. Little did I know that just a few years later I’d be turning that model on its head, using acupuncture and the principles of Chinese Medicine to heal a river near my home. This time, instead of looking to nature for insights into healing the human body, I was applying the techniques of human acupuncture to illnesses of the natural world. “Healing from the same cures” indeed.

To this day, I am amazed at the power of Chinese Medicine to effect sophisticated cures that are described in very simple terms. The language of "yin" and "yang," and "heat" and "cold" is powerful because it is not scientific; rather, it is a symbolic language that evokes images more than single events or anatomical parts. It is a language of poetry, and the practice of Chinese Medicine is a poetic art with its own cadence, power, and infinite interpretations.

The genius of Chinese medicine is that it establishes clear and consistent connections between our bodies and our minds, our surroundings, our ailments, and the natural world all around us. It provides theories that clarify our relationships with food, seasons, emotions, etc., and practices that create healing by strengthening those relationships. In defining our health and healing so broadly, Chinese Medicine challenges our notions of what "medicine" can be and allows us to engage with a worldview that is whole.

In my acupuncture practice and in the books I have written, I try to communicate a sense of that wholeness, so that readers and clients will be inspired to participate in their own deep healing. In the process, many discover that personal healing ripples outward---to our loved ones, our communities, and even to the earth itself.