Classical Threads

TONIFI is a clinic of ritual arts, where healing is a radical tonification of vitality rather than a sedation of symptoms. A ritual is a sacred offering through ceremonial forms, an invitation to experience through listening, hearing, and seeing.

Ritual experiences are sacramental thresholds, aesthetic opportunities in a floating world, elevated experiences where healing becomes a sacrament of universal sacrifice. When we listen to our own pulse, we hear the sound its emotion and the aromatics of its color.

AURICLE is a revisioning of the community clinic, a place where auricular acupuncture merges with deep listening in an analog atmosphere.

CHA IN THE CLOUDS is a tea and incense ceremony, featuring a selection of oolong and puerh teas, paired with agarwood incense.

Auricle

Tonifi in Hifi

AURICLE is an invitation to tonifi in hifi—listen and hear in an analog/artisanal atmosphere. Our listening events are a creative synthesis of community acupuncture and sound baths––where clients receive an auricular acupuncture treatment amidst the warm tones of vinyl. Complimentary amenities include artisanal espresso and tisanes.

Our analog atmosphere is hifi without wifi. Espresso shots are pulled on a lever machine, and vinyl is played through a fully analog system featuring a vintage Lenco L75 turntable, a class A tube amplifier, and mid-century Klipsch Heresy speakers.

We extend the concept of auricular acupuncture into a therapeutic of deep listening. Auricular acupuncture was founded by the French physician, Paul Nogier, in the 1950s. He observed that the human ear was shaped like an inverted fetus and that entire body could be mapped onto its structure. This structural likeness gives the ear an embryological resonance, signifying its role in healing trauma through a process of deep listening.

In Chinese medicine, the ears are the “fruit” of the Kidneys, the organ that houses the ancestral essence of the body. The ears are the sensory apertures of our ancestral essence, receiving the audible sounds of the world. When we cultivate our essence, we tonify our spirit in an energetic transformation.

When we open our ears, we enter the ambiance that already envelops us. By combining auricular acupuncture with deep listening, we are incarnating a rebirth of the community clinic, not only as a treatment space with others, but an aura that invites connection.

Auricular acupuncture includes the “acu-detox” protocol of NADA but also encompasses a therapeutic modality unto itself. Neeshee’s style of auricular acupuncture is influenced by the French and Chinese traditions of auriculotherapy. Auricular acupuncture has been used in community clinic settings as a supportive treatment for addictions, withdrawals/cravings, smoking cessation, PTSD, and nervous system dysregulation.

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Cha in the Clouds

Tonifi with Tea

CHA IN THE CLOUDS is an invitation to tonifi with tea and incense––to enter the path of tea with the way of incense.

We serve a variety of high mountain oolong teas from Taiwan and vintage puerh teas from China, carefully curated for the moment. Water is boiled in a purple-clay cloud kettle and poured through an antique Yixing teapot, in a gongfu style ceremony. Tea is paired with rare and precious agarwood and kyara incense, hand-rolled in the Japanese tradition.

Each tea carries a unique energetic quality that resonates with the meridians of the body and the constellations of the heavens. Tea drinking is thus an alchemical journey, an opportunity to cultivate the vitality of our body, mind, and spirit.

As tea is poured, we light a stick, and listen to its evocative aroma. Incense is an invitation to meditation, to listen as an act of contemplation. In the Japanese way of incense, the term monko means both “listening to incense” and “smelling”. Incense offerings are a way to purify and settle the spirit, to tonifi the vital center of the body.

A traditional text from the Tensho era describes the following benefits of ceremonial-grade incense: “sharpens the senses; purifies the body and the spirit; eliminates pollutants; awakens the spirit; heals loneliness; calms in turbulent times”.

The ritual of tea and incense is also an opportunity to consult an oracle—to hear our own message and divine a visible direction.