What Is Community Acupuncture, and How Can It Help Anxiety?

For years, acupuncture had been on my bucket list of healing modalities I’d wanted to experience, especially as I developed more of a connection with my body’s qi through yoga, meditation, and reiki. However, each time I’d had the opportunity to try the Traditional Chinese Medicine intervention, I’d let the steep price tag talk my curiosity down. $140 seemed like a lot of money to pay someone to stick needles in my body.

When I learned that a community acupuncture practice opened in my neighborhood—where multiple clients share the same treatment space, making it possible for the business to dramatically reduce session costs—I knew it was finally time to try acupuncture firsthand.

Why Community Acupuncture?

It turns out that the very things that had kept me from receiving acupuncture in the past—like cost and a quiet apprehension—were hardly unique. When Lauren Burke and Jacob Laurent opened Saratoga Springs Community Acupuncture early in the summer of 2024, breaking down the barriers to accessibility was at the forefront of their minds.

“It would have never been available to me to receive private acupuncture being a broke person in their early 20s,” says Burke. Fortunately for Burke, the communities she lived in all had community acupuncture clinics, enabling her to make acupuncture an intrinsic part of her personal health care, eventually inspiring her to provide the same experience for others.

She gives credence to the acupuncturists of Portland, Oregon, who spearheaded the community acupuncture movement in the early 2000s, which gave birth to the People’s Organization of Community Acupuncture.

“The fundamentals of the movement are based on accessibility and making acupuncture available to everybody in the community that you live in,” she says.

The movement accomplishes this and more. It opens up space for people to share in each other’s healing and be in community, even if all they’re doing is receiving their treatment side by side. Burke notes that, traditionally, acupuncture is community-based when it’s practiced in China. The one-on-one sessions that we think of as “traditional” in the West are exactly that: a product of the West.

“What’s happening is we’re breaking through this kind of one-to-one isolation treatment model where it’s just you and the practitioner,” says Burke. “All of us are together, and we’re all dealing with separate things, but we’re all working on it.” There’s a power in that shared experience that is almost hard to describe. “Something happens that way,” she says. “I’m not sure what, but it’s a beautiful thing.”

When Burke searched for the words to capture that ethereal aspect of the healing, I recognized what she was talking about from my own sessions at her table. The feeling of sharing the space with others during acupuncture treatment was not unlike a feeling I’d had before in a yoga nidra class: reverence and gratitude for all of us gathering to rest, heal, and press pause on the stressors of everyday life. In a society that constantly pressures us to add more to our plates and get as much “done” as we can, it feels radical to be in a room with strangers doing absolutely nothing.

Addressing Anxiety with Community Acupuncture

The community acupuncture model also helps soothe anxiety around the treatment.

“People aren’t a fan of needles,” Burke says. “So there’s something to be said about walking into a room and seeing a bunch of people with needles in their body, totally fine—in fact, completely relaxed. It’s a very different story if you’re someone who’s nervous to receive treatment, and someone puts a bunch of needles in your body and then walks away and leaves you alone in a room.”

For many clients, anxiety around treatment is just one piece in a larger puzzle—deeper feelings of anxiety are what brought them to seek out treatment in the first place. Burke emphasizes that when people come to her practice to treat their anxiety, she’s always looking at the holistic picture. Because acupuncturists operate from the framework of Traditional Chinese Medicine, they don’t get stuck on Western diagnoses and labels.

“What matters to us is how [their diagnosis] affects them personally,” explains Burke. “So, if someone’s coming to me with anxiety, I’m like, what does that mean? Where are you feeling that in your body? How is that affecting your bowel movements? What are your periods like?”

All of these questions help Burke understand what’s out of balance. “That’s what we treat,” she says. “The imbalance.”

For anyone who wants to address their anxiety with acupuncture, Burke recommends checking out the People’s Organization of Community Acupuncture website, which features a directory to help locate community clinics in your area.

Burke also urges folks to remember that being out of balance isn’t something to feel ashamed of or guilty about. “It’s part of our human nature.”

While we can’t remove pain, imbalance, or suffering from the human condition, we can set our intentions to reduce it for ourselves and others.

As Burke says, “The most exciting thing for me is watching the ease of suffering.”

Release stagnant emotional energy with self-administered acupressure.