Macalester Today

founder, SweatShop Health Club on Snelling Avenue in St. Paul, a few blocks from Macalester. Celebrating its 25th year in 2006, the SweatShop has some 1,500 clients and nearly a million dollars in annual revenues.

I thought I would be the next generation of Margaret Mead, working for Planned Parenthood in South America. The passion I had for anthropology and travel circuitously took me into fitness. [Professor David] McCurdy gave me credit--I lived on a sailboat studying boat culture, if you will, from Los Angeles to the Panama Canal and out the other side. It was a great, great adventure. You're really limited in terms of exercise [on a sailboat] so I would bring my Jane Fonda tape--God bless Jane Fonda--out on the deck and do aerobics. I had all these guys doing Jane Fonda with me. I thought, "This is easy, I can do this."

The dang challenge about the fitness world is that you still have to live in the business world. Our strength [at the SweatShop] is in being right ahead of the crest of the wave, sometimes a little too far ahead of the wave. The first time we offered yoga 25 years ago, it was not well attended, I can tell you. We've cycled through on yoga three times. We started Pilates 12 years ago before people could even say it, let alone spell it.

Here you can have six women in menopause within eyeshot, within earshot [working out]. The conversations that happen every morning concern everything from what the solutions are, to all the symptoms, to childcare, to politics. I really think of the SweatShop as community. First and foremost, it's based on the values of health and wellness and it encompasses so much more than traditional physical health. There's emotional health; there's a sense of well-being. It's also about empowerment. If you were to nail me down to two words, the SweatShop is about community and empowerment.

We're focused on taking boomers through the aging process, and at the same time, I'm so concerned with kid fitness. Our job is to work with both of those groups. The challenge is to do it and still maintain a small business...it's an interesting balancing act. In the past four years, health insurance premiums for staff have increased annually up to 20 percent, while deductibles have quadrupled and services and coverage have become more limited.

One of the things that Macalester fostered was really creative thinking and problem-solving and testing the envelope a little bit. If there's a seed that got planted, it was you have to go change the world in some significant way. What I've come to be at peace with at this stage of life, is I'm doing that in one little significant way, five blocks from Macalester. It's not South America!

co-founder, Del Mar Integrative Health Center, Del Mar, Calif. He has a master of science degree in traditional Oriental medicine and is also an acupuncturist.

As a biology major, I developed a firm foundation in scientific reasoning and the Darwinian theory of adaptation. This grasp of Western medicine combined with training in traditional Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Oriental Medicine has allowed me to find connections across these seemingly conflicting approaches to the human system. My most influential experience at Macalester was the year I spent studying abroad in the jungles of Ecuador with a Qichua shaman. It was with Bartolo Chimbo and his family in Ecuador that I learned the magic of medicine and a spirit of health unknown and undernourished in this country. Bartolo taught me that the human body is an antenna for a subtle but powerful healing energy. That impression has helped dictate my course ever since.

I practice acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine integratively. That means that I use both Chinese and conventional medicine paradigms to diagnose and treat my patients. I still emphasize the powerful Chinese medicine tradition I come from, but I want to use all that is available to me to treat my patients. If needed, I order labs or x-rays, administer orthopedic tests and individually check muscle strength.

Many times the patient's presenting symptoms are simply the branches of disease. Through proper diagnosis, it is possible to dig down and find the root of disease that is constantly feeding these branches. This includes the physical, emotional and spiritual symptoms which have never been separated in Chinese medicine but are linked to the same dis-ease which shows up as "patterns" of symptoms like constellations in the sky. Once we find the root and treat accordingly, the symptoms disappear and the patient feels whole again. When the patient finds balance, i.e., their deep sense of homeostasis--which I first learned about in physiology class at Macalester--it creates a powerful healing experience for both the patient and the practitioner.

I have taken Qigong [the Chinese term for energy skills] to be my daily dose of exercise, mental clarity and spiritual connection. Maintaining health on a daily basis is vital to longevity and opens us up to love and life's richness like nothing else can. I tell my patients that I may see them for one hour or two hours per week and can help them generate a certain amount of balance. But they are with themselves all day and all night and can do so much more. Balancing food, rest, passions, alcohol and exercise is the key to health based on any medical model. If we can pursue this course of medicine, we will not need expensive prescriptions or their side effects, risky surgeries, or even expensive acupuncturists, chiropractors, homeopaths, naturopaths, etc.

sollom 'Did you know that more people visit alternative health practitioners each year than medical doctors? I'm beginning to wonder which is more alternative.'

LEE PELLEGRINI

health and human rights advocate; acupuncturist; graduate student at Harvard School of Public Health

I majored in international studies, political science and French. My experience at Mac directly influenced my current career (albeit circuitously): [Professor] Hélène Peters was instrumental in my application for a Fulbright teaching fellowship in France after graduation. I then joined the Peace Corps where I taught English in Hungary. I wanted to work for the United Nations, so I went to the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy to study international public law. As a U.N. civil servant, I interviewed hundreds of refugees, many of whom were survivors of torture and often suffering from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

During my final year of Chinese medical studies, I was awarded an Albert Schweitzer Fellowship to open an alternative health clinic for refugees in the Boston area who suffer from PTSD.

I seem to be an oddity to my acupuncturist colleagues and a curiosity at Harvard School of Public Health, but it's beginning to make sense to me! As these two medical paradigms become more integrated in American health care settings, there is a growing need for health professionals to straddle both worlds, speak each other's language and knowledgeably advise patients on treatment alternatives. [Professor] Jack Weatherford's course on political anthropology was the best training I had to live in both these worlds. While I pursue my master's degree in public health, I work as an acupuncturist at a large Boston hospital, an AIDS care project and a detox program at a community health center. My long-term career goal is to bring alternative health to refugee camps, war zones and humanitarian emergencies.

Did you know that more people visit alternative health practitioners each year than medical doctors? Or that more money is spent out-of-pocket on these services than on out-of-pocket expenditures for hospitalization? I'm beginning to wonder which is more alternative....My own experience has shown me that patients value time spent with a health practitioner--be it a Western doctor or Chinese acupuncturist: they want their health care providers to listen to them. I think Asian medicine resonates with people in our culture, as it does throughout the world, because of the mind-body connection. Most of my patients complain of somatic stress--in other words, they exhibit physical symptoms and illness as a result of mental stress. Because of this mind-body connection, acupuncture quite effectively treats modern-day illnesses and chronic conditions that Western medicine finds baffling.

I practice ashtanga yoga twice a week and lift weights five times a week. I climb and am beginning to do triathlons. What's most important, from a Chinese medical perspective, though, is to move your Qi [the Chinese word for energy] and the best way to do that is to physically move your body.

founder, Great River T'ai Chi Ch'uan in Minneapolis, which celebrated its 25th anniversary this year. Great River serves more than 80 people a year at its studio as well as at Minneapolis Community and Technical College and at Tasks Unlimited, a program for people with mental illness. Davis, who also teaches workshops at a number of national tai chi events, has a master's degree in East Asian Studies from the University of Minnesota.

I was an art major with an interest in physical movement. In high school, I had played sports and had taken some modern dance classes. In college, I studied art, music and biology. I remember being challenged by some of my teachers to focus more. I felt I was focused, but by the standards of Western discipline, I wasn't committed enough.

Through the language of tai chi and Chinese thought, I've found a way to merge things. Since I had always gravitated toward things that took concentration and focus, tai chi was a natural fit. Because I had been interested in sculpture, I felt, in essence, that when I began teaching tai chi it was like doing moving sculpture on students.

Tai chi study has led me in all kinds of unexpected, interesting directions, like teaching, going to graduate school, spending time in Taiwan, research, writing, publishing and now, writing a biography of Cheng Man-ch'ing, a Chinese man who was a master of poetry, painting, calligraphy, tai chi and medicine. I'm working now as a free-lance editor, and tai chi has even influenced that--an article of mine, "Finding the Flow," was just published in A View From the Loft. It's about the "go with the flow" concept of Daoism as applied to writing and editing.

After graduate school, I began to teach classes on Chinese philosophy and tai chi for the University of Minnesota's Compleat Scholar program. I'll be teaching another class next winter for the program on the I Ching, the Book of Changes, which is one of the world's oldest and most enigmatic books. The magazine I edit about tai chi, Taijiquan Journal, was nominated for an Utne Reader award. We take an eclectic approach and include how-to, philosophy, history and humor. We've even had an original cartoon called "The Yang and the Restless."

Exercise in the West is about aerobics, heart rate and perspiration. In traditional Chinese society, everything--including exercise, tai chi and even fierce martial arts--has balance as the focus. Balance of mind and body, of movement and stillness, and balance within the physical self. With Chinese medicine and exercise, you feel good afterwards, you feel relaxed, you feel whole.

Kate Havelin '83 balanced two of her passions--writing and running--in her new book, Minnesota Running Trails: Dirt, Gravel, Rocks and Roots (see books). She lives in St. Paul with her husband and two sons.