✦  ASA 2026 · Minneapolis  ✦

Watch · ASA 2026 Field Notes

Will Sheppy · Setting the Scene

"Five Shen. Five brainwave frequencies. The Daoists described it through internal cultivation a thousand years before we had EEG. Now we can measure what they were pointing at."

— Brehan Crawford, ASA 2026 Keynote

Q1 · The Talk

What was the through-line you wanted that room of acupuncturists to walk out with?

One sentence: the gut–brain axis is the most important clinical territory in our medicine right now, and we already have the map. We just have to recognize that brainwaves and the five Shen are pointing at the same thing.

I opened by asking the room a question I knew they'd feel personally: how many of you come home after holding space for 15 patients with nothing left for your kids or your partner? Because the people we treat — MCAS, POTS, IBS, long COVID, Lyme, PTSD — and the practitioners treating them, and the nine-figure founders and political class and luxury executives we have measured, all show the same pattern on EEG and HRV. Hungry ghosts at every layer of society.

The lineage everyone in that room shares — classical Chinese medicine — has the keys.

Q2 · Damp Conditions

You called it the "damp cluster." For people who don't know the term, what does damp actually mean clinically?

Damp is what happens when fluids in the body stop moving the way they should. Circulation slows, lymph thickens, gut mucus accumulates, biofilm builds, and the whole system gets sticky and heavy. Modern terms for the same picture: sluggish lymphatic drainage, low motility, increased intestinal mucus, biofilm-protected microbial overgrowth, low-grade systemic inflammation, and a body temperature running cool.

The patient experience is recognizable. Heaviness. Brain fog after meals. Loose or incomplete stools — or stalled motility and pelvic pressure. Coated tongue. Phlegm in the throat. Skin that won't clear. Fatigue that doesn't lift with sleep.

And here's the thing American medicine misses: damp creates the perfect ecological niche for chronic infections to persist and the gut-brain axis to misfire. It's not a metaphor. It's the terrain.

Signs your terrain is running damp

Coated, swollen, or scalloped tongue · heaviness in head or limbs · brain fog worse after eating · sticky or incomplete bowel movements · stalled motility · pelvic pressure or urgency · phlegm in throat · skin that won't clear · puffiness independent of weight · cold hands and feet · low baseline body temperature in the high 96s or low 97s · fatigue that does not lift with sleep · mucus-heavy stools · sensitivities that keep multiplying.

Conventional labs miss this. The terrain shows up on the tongue and in lived experience long before bloodwork goes off.

Q3 · Five Brainwaves, Five Shen

Walk me through the brainwave-to-Shen mapping. This is where the room got really quiet on Saturday.

Five frequencies. Five spirits. Clinicians already know both vocabularies — they just haven't been taught to overlay them. The short version, the way I gave it from the stage:

When you palpate the radial pulse, you are touching autonomic function.

Vasodilation and constriction are autonomic processes — measurable electrically as heart rate variability and layered onto brainwave traces. High HRV with coherent patterns is robust Zheng Qi. The system can mount a healing response, herbs work, acupuncture treatments hold, and patients in this camp can recover from serious illness in two weeks with the right formula.

Low HRV with fragmented rhythms is deficiency. It does not matter what the chief complaint is — IBS, insomnia, anxiety, fatigue. If HRV has collapsed, the nervous system cannot organize recovery. You can tonify the Spleen all day, and if the system is locked in beta dominance, the herbs are fighting a body that cannot receive them.

— Brehan Crawford, MAcOM, LAc

Q4 · The Microbiome Piece

Where does the gut microbiome enter the brainwave story?

The composition of the gut microbiome directly alters brain electrical activity, and vice versa. I cited a double-blind crossover study from the talk: a single strain of Lactobacillus lowered theta power on EEG and improved daytime attention in healthy adults. Cold and sour yogurt helped Metal descend and enter. That is not a metaphor anymore.

The Spleen governs transformation and transportation. Earth is in the center. Disrupt the microbiome — Qi deficiency with accumulated dampness — and the spirits scatter, because microbial metabolites traveling the vagus nerve are literally shaping the electrical environment the five Shen operate inside of. Our herbal medicine is the most sophisticated microbiome intervention on the planet.

Q5 · The Case That Hit Hardest

The case study you closed with — the 43-year-old acupuncturist — got a real reaction. Walk me through it.

Forty-three-year-old male acupuncturist. By every external measure, he had made it. And he came home to his young kids with absolutely nothing left.

What was scaring him was the temper. Short fuse at home. Irritability disproportionate to the trigger. He knew what it was — Liver yin vacuity, Wood with no roots. On the EEG his alpha-theta coherence had collapsed. He was beta-dominant, running clinic, staff, family, and schedule from the analytical mind. The Po doing the work of all five spirits.

HRV was low — fragmented. House of cards. So we told him to daydream. Real assignment. And to get massage one or two times a week. Sounds basic. Worked beautifully.

Daydreaming is theta recovery. The Hun stretching. Toddlers do not stress about balancing books. Massage is one of the fastest ways to shift the nervous system from sympathetic lock into parasympathetic depth. You cannot think your way out of beta dominance. You have to be moved out of it. Carried out of it. Passively. The body has to receive something the mind cannot organize.

The Roundtable

Dr. Joshua Park, DSOM, LAc

Gut-brain axis · digestive disorders · autoimmune disease

Joshua Park earned his doctorate at the National University of Natural Medicine in Portland, where he trained with leading physicians and clinicians from China, Korea, Europe, and the United States. That kind of background matters. It gives him a wider clinical lens than most practitioners, and you can feel that in the way he talks about complex chronic illness.

He spent four years in the Division of Integrative Medicine at Memorial Healthcare System in South Florida, treating cancer patients, veterans, and people with difficult digestive conditions. That is not casual wellness care. That is, acupuncture and herbal medicine are being brought into serious medical settings, with patients who often present with layered, complicated presentations.

Joshua has also taught at Wongu University and Virginia University of Integrative Medicine, helping train the next generation of East Asian medicine practitioners. His clinical work on the gut-brain axis and herbal medicine was published in Convergent Points, a peer-reviewed integrative medicine journal, and he is the co-author of Hidden River: The Lost Science of Gut Ecology.

That book is one of the clearest articulations I have read of what it means to think like a gut-brain expert. Joshua does not treat the gut as a simple digestive tube. He sees it as an ecosystem connected to breath, stress, immunity, inflammation, the nervous system, and the body’s ability to regulate itself.

He now practices as an inpatient acupuncturist at UC Irvine Medical Center and serves as Clinical Director of Empowered You Acupuncture in Orange County, California, where he specializes in complex chronic conditions.

Dr. Yaron Cohen, DAOM, LAc

Chronic constipation · motility · pelvic floor · gut-brain disconnection

Yaron is the Director of Clinical Education at Virginia University of Integrative Medicine. He has spent fifteen-plus years building clinical systems for chronic constipation, slow transit, pelvic floor dysfunction, and what he calls gut-brain disconnection. He runs Wise Wellness, and he is rolling out the Unburden Protocol — a 90-day phased system for patients whose motility has flat-out stopped responding to fiber, water, supplements, and medications.

What I respect about Yaron is how direct he is. He says he does not manage symptoms — he corrects dysfunction. From a TCM lens, his patients are damp and stagnant in the lower burner with collapsed gas pressure. Modern read: enteric nervous system signaling has gone quiet, the pelvic floor locked down, autonomic system stuck in beta dominance. Same picture I was showing on the EEG slides Saturday afternoon.

Yaron is not adding another supplement to an overloaded patient. He is reorganizing the physiology so the body can move on its own again.

Free Community

Q6 · Daoyin, Du Mai, Ren Mai

You showed Ming dynasty Daoyin images on the slides and a photo of one of your teachers, Zhang Laoshi, working with a student in Chengdu. Why bring Daoyin into a gut-brain talk?

Everyone in that room knows the Du Mai and Ren Mai — the extraordinary channels connecting upper and lower, brain and body. In Western terms, that incorporates the spinal cord, the central nervous system, and the fascial network conducting mechanical and electrical signal along the spine.

Daoyin develops that connection through movement and breath — subtle, snake-like undulation through the spine that repatterns autonomic regulation. As the Du Mai and Ren Mai open, coherence develops between the brain and the enteric nervous system, and something else starts to emerge.

The classics call it the transformation of Jing into Qi and then Shen. The microbiome is not background noise. It is infrastructure — trillions of microflora subtly influencing thoughts, feelings, and actions.

The Frame

Q7 · The Closing Line

You closed the talk with something I haven't been able to stop thinking about. Say it again here.

When you help people feel safe, when you help balance their energy, their heart rate variability goes up, their brightness extends to a neighbor, and we measure all of this. That creates healthy communities. It takes us out of the world of hungry ghosts.

Patients in these demographics — the chronic illness cluster, burned-out professionals, elite leaders empty despite the externals — often feel hopeless. That feeling is not a desire to die. It is a refusal to live in a world that feels cold and predatory. They are waiting for you, as acupuncturists, to show them another way.

You are not ultimately fixing the gut or the back pain. You are removing the roadblocks from the mandate of heaven. The work is sacred.

Gut Brain Synchrony — Skool Community

References &Further Reading