11/08/2026
Well, this was a lovely surprise!
I was very honoured to learn today that I had won the Best Speaker Award for “Transformation into Modern Practice” at AACMAC for my Neoclassical Acupuncture (NCA) workshop.
For me, this was particularly meaningful. It’s been around four years since I first started advocating for greater recognition of NCA at AACMAC. Slate Burris presented NCA remotely from Mexico last year, which was an important step, and this year I had the opportunity to demonstrate the method clinically and show practitioners how we actually use it in everyday practice.
NCA asks us to revisit some much older ideas within Chinese medicine and Chinese cosmology — particularly the six-element model — and bring them into a modern clinical system based on diagnosis through palpation, the one-needle method, and immediate feedback from the body. It represents quite a paradigm shift from the way many of us were originally taught acupuncture,
What I enjoyed most at AACMAC was the response from the practitioners in the room. There was genuine curiosity, lots of questions and some great discussion about how NCA can be incorporated into everyday clinical practice.
And yes, I did talk a little too fast at times — I knew I was doing it!
I had originally intended to keep the workshop fairly focused: demonstrating how the Water and Metal points can open four meridians with one needle, exploring the clinical significance of the Back-Shu and Front-Mu points, treating those findings through the Yuan-Source points, and showing how we locate the six elements on the torso through palpation.
Once I started palpating, however, I ended up demonstrating many more of the obstacles and findings through the torso than I had originally planned. There was simply so much clinical information I wanted practitioners to actually see and get a taste of within the hour available — without turning an AACMAC workshop into a full NCA course!
That interaction with the practitioners in the room was probably the most rewarding part of the whole experience.
Receiving the award afterwards was completely unexpected. For me, it feels like recognition not just of the workshop, but of the value of keeping our profession curious, evolving and open to revisiting older ideas and finding clinically useful ways of applying them in modern practice.
A very big thank you to Slate Burris for his friendship and for guiding my understanding of NCA over the past five years, and to Bryony O’Callaghan, Bethrene Laurenson, Peter Gospos and the AACMAC crew for their support.
Thank you also to San Acupuncture for sponsoring me with their fabulous Japanese steel Acupro needles,
And finally, thank you to everyone who came to the workshop, volunteered to be palpated, asked questions and contributed to such an engaged session.
For TCM practitioners interested in exploring NCA clinically, our next 2 Day NCA Foundation Training is in Brisbane: 26 -27th September
COURSE INTRODUCTION The classical texts describe a principle that: Cannot be seen Cannot be heard Cannot be grasped Yet: Gives rise to form Encompasses all things This is referred to as Heaven, and more fundamentally as the Tao. The Tao is not a thing.It is not an object of perception. It is: The so...
