2017 is the twentieth anniversary of the founding of our company in Seattle, WA. Our first classes that launched Acutonics were taught in early 1998 and Paul and Jude Ponton were with us then and continue to be major contributors to the Acutonics community. This month they share their journey with Acutonics. The Wood Issue of Oriental Medicine Journal (OMJ) that will be published in March will focus on the 20th anniversary of Acutonics. If you have a story about you and Acutonics that you’d like to contribute to a future newsletter or OMJ please email Ellen.
Jude and Paul’s Excellent Acutonics® Adventure
by Jude and Paul Ponton, Certified Acutonics® Practitioners. Senior Faculty, Authors
In 1996 we had been working as clinical faculty at Northwest Institute of Acupuncture and East Asian Medicine (NIAOM) in Seattle for several years. We thought of ourselves as fairly mainstream practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). It was about that time that the school hired Donna Carey to be the new Clinical Director. To welcome her and find out more about our new boss, we took her to lunch. In sharing our backgrounds with each other, we learned that Donna had been employing the use of sound, in her prior practice in Wisconsin. Our interest was stimulated by her description of the use of tuning forks to stimulate acupuncture points. We asked her about receiving treatment with sound so we could have a first hand experience of the sound work. So began our excellent Acutonics adventure.
Donna’s treatment room was in the basement of her classic, early 1900’s home in the Capitol Hill area of Seattle. This is how we first experienced, not only the incredible sensations of the tuning forks, but the powerful resonance of her many Planetary Gongs. Our sessions amplified our interest in learning this extraordinary work. “When”, we asked, “will you be teaching us how to use these tools?” This question was repeated in various forms over the next few weeks until at one point Donna told us that she and another NIAOM instructor, Marjorie de Muynck, had started thinking about how they might teach this material. Marjorie taught Shiatsu and was also a jazz musician and shamanic student.
In June of 1998 we attended the first Acutonics Level I workshop. At that time, Level I was a two-day class, jam-packed with, what for us was, a wealth of new material. This was the beginning of our understanding of the vibrational and frequency-based nature of the universe. We were eager to incorporate the tuning forks into our acupuncture and chiropractic practices. At that point, we thought of Acutonics as an incredible support to the work we had been doing.
As subsequent Acutonics courses were developed, we were among the first to take each new class. As more acupuncture students studied Acutonics, they requested that they be able to bring the work into their clinical learning experience. We served as clinical supervisors, mentoring students in the combination of Acutonics with acupuncture treatments. As Donna developed more community based clinics that provided learning experiences, we began to see the value of the use of Acutonics in a variety of clinical settings, such as drug treatment, senior living situations, HIV/AIDS patients, chronic fatigue and other populations. We found that many patients who were unable to tolerate acupuncture needling responded well to tuning fork stimulation.
As the number of people interested in taking the Acutonics courses increased, we were able to gain more experience by serving as teaching assistants for Level I and Level II courses. In 2001 we were among the first to be trained as teachers of Acutonics Levels I & II. This led to taking over the teaching of Acutonics at NIAOM when Donna and Marjorie each moved from Seattle. We continued to teach at NIAOM until its closure in 2002 and then taught smaller classes in our office. We also contributed case studies to the first Acutonics textbook, There’s No Place Like Ohm, which was published in 2002.
We took Acutonics practice and training to Sedona Arizona where we moved in 2003. While there, we hosted classes taught by Donna and other guest instructors at our facility.
We competed requirements and were among the first group of students to receive official Acutonics Practitioner Certification in 2004. (We always joke that it took six years to become certified because we had to wait for classes to be developed). It was also during this time that we joined Donna, Ellen Franklin and MichelAngelo in collaborating on the writing of Acutonics: From Galaxies to Cells Planetary Science, Harmony and Medicine (brilliantly illustrated by Gail Geltner). We decided to return to the Pacific Northwest in 2006 and spent part of our traveling time receiving and editing case studies for this book, which ended up being published as a separate volume. Acutonics from Galaxies to Cells was published in 2010 and turned out to be more beautiful than we could have imagined.
We returned to the Seattle area (after a short stay in Portland) in 2007, opening up the Seattle location of Whispering Dragon Center, where we remain as of this writing. During all this time we have developed new classes, both for the core and elective curriculum. One of those classes, Small Animal Acutonics, inspired us to write Acutonics for Dogs & Cats Sound Healing for Animal Health which was published in 2011.
We have trained hundreds of students in Acutonics and have witnessed the expansion of this work throughout the world. As more practitioners become trained to teach, the morphic field of Acutonics broadens and deepens. Practitioners enhance their existing energy work and meld sound into their practices. The community shares, so that we can incorporate new ideas and strategies into our practices. We have become a community unified in our trajectory toward vibrational alignment.
As we move forward in 2017, our practice is far different than we might have imagined years ago when we began our journey in sound. The transformation that Acutonics has brought about both in our practice and in our personal lives is profound. We have opened to and incorporated technologies of consciousness expansion into our work and practice that resonate in frequencies we couldn’t have predicted. Where we once utilized sound as a supportive element in our work, it now forms the foundation around which we design treatment sessions. We now experience ourselves living in a vibrational universe with resonance as our primary intention. We always begin our Level I classes by telling our students to be ready to be transformed by this work as much as those they are treating.
We look forward to our continued becoming and the continuing expansion of Acutonics as it opens more portals of possibility for the highest and greatest good.