Todd Turetsky, L.Ac.
Starting a practice again at 55 is odd. Odd in many ways.
I have absolutely no desire to sell myself. I’d genuinely rather get a gig at the co-op than go through the process of putting myself out there.
Being new in town though, nobody knows me. And throwing away what I’ve spent my whole adult life building just to avoid the discomfort of setting up shop, that seems like a shame.
So the question I keep coming back to is: how do I get what I do out there, express it authentically, without it feeling like a sales pitch?
Maybe the answer is simply this, express the work itself. How I see it. How I aspire to practice it. And leave it at that.
More than 30 years on the path
My license says acupuncturist, I received my master’s in Traditional Oriental Medicine in 1997. But while that license gives a degree of legitimacy to what I do, my heart ultimately lies in healing, a word that is nuanced and not easily defined. For me it is most intimately reflected in the devotion I have brought over three decades to breath, movement, stillness, and hands-on work. Not as techniques to make a living, but as gateways to meaning, balance, and freedom. This is less a career than a life orientation.
The path that brought me to Olympia began in 2022, when I made a difficult choice: I walked away from a thriving acupuncture practice in Alaska to spend several years in retreat and deep contemplation. My kids were out on their own. I was well into my fifties. Fully aware that life is limited in time and space, and genuinely asking how I wanted to meet that.
In the middle of that contemplative period, in November of 2024, I attended the annual Auschwitz-Birkenau Bearing Witness Retreat. I am a first-generation American on my mother’s side, born of a Holocaust family, and I had long felt drawn to make that pilgrimage. Something essential was clarified there: it was time to come back into the world and make my life meaningful and purpose-driven.
I left the retreat center I had been living at, relocated to Olympia, and began teaching at a behavioral health center, an experience that gave birth to Cultivating Refuge. I am now beginning to offer the full scope of my work here for the first time. If you are curious whether my work might be of service to you, feel free to reach out. I’m happy to connect and talk it through.
“Hari wa hito nari.”
Your needle reflects what you are
Dr. Shudo Denmei, Tokyo, 2010
