Well, I’ve just seen a rare sight. Was it a glimpse of a UFO? Our president-elect saying something presidential? (I said rare, not nonexistent.) Me in running shorts? No, I just saw a Yelp review for a business that was 99.9-percent all positive comments. In this day and age of snarky remarks, that’s quite a feat.
As we celebrate the New You in the New Year, I decided to shed a little light on a local LGBT business. Open City Healing Arts is a wellness practice that embraces body and mind to help clients achieve maximum potential. Founded by Laura Hawley, the practice combines acupuncture and psychotherapy to help patients integrate the mental and the physical. And it seems to work; the testimonials on her page made me feel all warm and fuzzy.
PGN: Tell me about your practice.
LH: It’s a unique practice. I work as an acupuncturist and also a psychotherapist. I work with physical and emotional pain and constriction and expansion. Basically, we tackle mind/body issues.
PGN: Which came first? What did you study?
LH: Well, I first went to Oberlin College and majored in English. After that, I went to Seattle and got a master’s in social work from the University of Washington and worked as an LICSW [Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker] in the Boston area. While I was doing social work in the mental-health field, I put myself through acupuncture school and have been practicing it ever since.
PGN: And graduated with distinction, from what I read. You were awarded with the Tsay Fellowship, given to the student most likely to make a significant contribution to the profession.
LH: Yes! I love what I do.
PGN: Let’s go back. Where did you yourself start out?
LH: I was born in Guatemala City. My parents were in the Foreign Service and about a month after they got there, I arrived. My dad was in the economic section of the Foreign Service so we traveled all over, mostly in Asia. I grew up in Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. I went to high school in India, part of the time at least.
PGN: Tell me a story about it.
LH: Well, I’ll tell you something that’s recent. A friend of mine found me on Facebook and then we connected with another friend. The three of us used to have this club in Sri Lanka; we called ourselves The Terrible Three. We were supposed to investigate mysteries but the main thing we did was that we made our own rubber stamp and stamped all our papers with it. It was a wonderful school. We spent a lot of time playing marbles and talking and making up stories. It was wonderful.
PGN: In the U.S., we tend to think of everything as being substandard to us, especially schools, but what was your experience?
LH: We had wonderful teachers and they taught us all kinds of things. They were very sophisticated; most of them were Sinhalese so they taught us Sinhalese history but they also taught us Shakespeare and other worldly things. It was different in that the school had more independence than the teach-to-the-test style here. All three of us remembered sitting under a tree outside and our teacher, Mr. Ederi Singha, asking us if we thought God existed and all of us having this whole beautiful conversation about it. It’s been over 40 years but we all still remember that conversation and talk about it. It was a very nurturing school.
PGN: That’s definitely something that wouldn’t take place in most schools here!
LH: No! And I remember this great science teacher, Mrs. Desova. She’d wear a lab coat over her sari and she was such a smart, interesting woman.
PGN: How many schools did you go to?
LH: Oh, I can’t even remember, lots of them. In Afghanistan we traveled on a school trip to Bamiyan to see the carved Buddhas. I remember seeing the game of Buzkashi played. It’s a national game that they play on horseback.
PGN: Kind of like polo right?
LH: Yes, except it’s very elaborate, very fierce. It’s played using a carcass that they have to get into the opponent’s goal. Buzkashi literally means “goat grabbing” and traditionally it can go on for days, but now it’s more tournament-oriented with regulated time periods. Another memory in Afghanistan is going to the corner to buy naan — you know, the flat bread. They would dig into the ground and put coal on the bottom and baked it right there. You’d pull it out and have this delicious warm bread. [Laughs] We’d take it home and put Jif peanut butter on it. It was a multicultural experience!
PGN: I love it!
LH: Yes, it was a cool way to grow up and I was lucky because I have two sisters that are close to me in age, so no matter where we went I always had them with me.
PGN: When did you move to the states, and was it a culture shock?
LH: We came back to the states from Australia when I was 5 and I remember my sister was shocked because there were no school uniforms and she wanted to wear one. Then we came back again when I was in high school. We’d been in India and it was a weird transition. It was a much bigger school and the kids seemed older. I was 13 and going around in these dykey little clothes — my grandfather’s hunting shirt and an Afghan hat — and I did not fit in at all. I felt very … I didn’t know what queer was, but I was it.
PGN: It must have been hard being the one who was probably the most worldly and then being considered uncool because you wore clothes that didn’t fit it.
LH: Yeah, and no one was interested in my story of where I’d come from or what I’d done. As is the nature of 13-year-olds, they were preoccupied with being teenagers. The good thing about it was that now I know what it feels like to be the outsider. Growing up overseas, we were always kind of special in our environments. I don’t think I would have learned to be as kind if I hadn’t had the chance to experience the bullying and isolation here. It made me more empathetic.
PGN: What led you into the work you do?
LH: When I was a social worker, I took care of other people, but neglected to take care of myself, so I got sick, physically sick. I was in my late 20s and was achy and tired all the time. I distinctly remember being at a gay Pride parade and just being exhausted. So I went to the doctor. They basically told me that I was achy and sick. They didn’t ask about stress or anything else. So I went to an acupuncturist and they immediately understood the connection between the mind and body and the pressures at work. I’d been sick for a year and within five sessions I felt better. I decided I was still young enough to switch professions and went to school to study acupuncture. I’ve been doing it for 20 years but the past five I’ve been really interested in integrating the mind-body practice, which is why I’ve been combining psychotherapy — which is a listening therapy — with the acupuncture.
PGN: Give me an example.
LH: When I first started working I had a patient who came to me with a pinched nerve, severe pain in her shoulder and numbness in her hand. I began to treat her for the physical problem and there was significant release for a while and then it would reoccur and she’d come back. One day I asked her to tell me about her work and specifically about her boss. I don’t know why I asked that but I did and she responded, “She’s a pain in the neck. She’s younger than me and it’s humiliating.” I realized that it was clear that there was a correlation between what was happening to her mentally that was having a physical effect. That kind of tension affects the breathing. It causes the body to constrict and causes imbalances. That’s where the listening can help because I can use needles to alleviate the immediate pain, but you also need help to acknowledge and solve the mental state as well. The body can tell you about your emotional and spiritual situations.
PGN: What were the difficulties in starting your own business?
LH: I was used to being a social worker so I was used to having administration be at fault for things that weren’t working, but now I don’t have anyone to blame for any deficiencies!
PGN: In the beginning I understand you worked with a lot of HIV/AIDS patients.
LH: Yes, that was really beautiful work. I learned so much from those folks and I still see one or two of them on occasion. It was profound because at that time people were dying from it and I learned a lot about human nature: How people can know they’re dying and be very alive at the same time? People at that stage tell the truth, they don’t want to waste time.
PGN: Was there a particular person who stood out?
LH: I worked with a man who had Kaposi Sarcoma, which are lesions that form on the skin. It’s making me tearful now just thinking of the people who are gone, right? It’s still overwhelming. Anyway, he wasn’t participating in life; he walked around in long-sleeve shirts to hide the lesions and really kept to himself. He came to see me and brought a photograph of himself before he got ill so I could see how beautiful he used to be. He took his shirt off and I said, “I think you’re still beautiful.” I couldn’t do anything physical about the blotches, what they looked like, but I could profoundly change the way he felt about them. Soon he started working with people with HIV/AIDS at a clinic. It was really something. And I learned that it was OK to love people, that you could express love for them and still be appropriately professional. I remember I got off the phone with a client one day and a friend who’d been listening said, “You just called your patient ‘honey!’” And I said, “Well, he wasn’t feeling well and he needed that.”
PGN: Does acupuncture hurt?
LH: No, most people don’t even know that I’ve inserted a needle because they’re hair-thin. For reasons I don’t really understand, those little needles provide a deep relaxation, almost a euphoria. I can’t make it happen and it doesn’t always happen, though more often than not it does. It’s an invasive procedure but it’s so small that you get the healing properties but not the pain. It reminds the body to heal and balance itself.
PGN: Biggest misconception?
LH: That we treat the sensitive area where the pain is at that moment. So if you have a sore knee, the fear is that we’re going to stick something into the center of where the pain is, but we almost never do that. We might use the thigh or calf to treat the knee, because of the way that the body is connected.
PGN: Good to know.
LH: A metaphor I use is to imagine there’s a problem in Kensington. People may gather to protest downtown at City Hall in a large crowd that begins to clog up the area. Well, you wouldn’t help anything if you just clear the crowd at City Hall; you have to go to Kensington where it all started, fix the original imbalance or problem and then the crowd will disperse. You have to deal with the root of the problem, not the symptoms. It’s the body politics: The body is protesting that something is out of harmony.
PGN: You’ve also studied herbal medicine. What’s the one thing everyone should have in their cabinet?
LH: Ginger, everyone should have it. It aids in digestion and inflammation, and raw turmeric is useful for lifting the mood and lowering inflammation. And it’s delicious!
PGN: Turmeric? I use it in smoothies and it’s awful!
LH: [Laughs] You need to use raw turmeric, the powdered stuff is bitter.
PGN: What are some of your extracurricular activities?
LH: I have a book club for girls that I run through Mighty Writers. It’s a monthly club and we’re in our fourth year. We read everything from “Hunger Games” to Octavia Butler. They were 12 when we started and now they’re 16 and I think we’re really coming into our own intellectually. I look forward to it every month. I used to do Urban Exploring with an LGBT group in town. We’d climb around in abandoned buildings, including the top of the Divine Lorraine Hotel when it was empty.
PGN: Single or partnered?
LH: Married. By coincidence, we got married the week after the Supreme Court made it legal. It was really fun. My wife is an artist so we had the ceremony at Fleisher Art Memorial in South Philadelphia. They have a chapel there and my wife Chris wanted to eat in the same place that we had the ceremony because it made sense logistically, plus it was cheaper, but we had to figure out what to do with everyone while they were setting up. So we made piñatas filled with noisemakers like kazoos and whistles and had people bust them open. Then we had the whole party march around the block in our own little gay Pride parade! It was a great celebration.
PGN: A treasured possession?
LH: My wife carved a heart out of stone, which I’ve been carrying around recently.
PGN: If you could disappear for a weekend, where would you go?
LH: I’ve always wanted to go to the city of Lisbon in Portugal.
PGN: What is your background?
LH: Scotch, Irish and English.
PGN: [Laughs] But you want to go to Portugal?
LH: Hey, I’m curious about everyone.
PGN: Motto?
LH: Integrate and simplify.
For more information about Open City Healing Arts, visit www.acuphilly.com.
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