26 - Classical Chinese Medicine | Longevity with Josephine Spilka

Season 2, Episode 26: Classical Chinese Medicine | Longevity with Josephine Spilka

Introduction to Josephine Spilka and Classical Chinese Medicine

In this episode of the Be Well Asheville Podcast, host Travis Richardson sits down with Josephine Spilka — a classical Chinese medicine practitioner with more than 30 years of experience in Asheville, NC. Josephine shares how she works at the deepest level of the body — jing, or essence — to support people navigating cancer diagnoses, autoimmune conditions, and their own personal evolution.

Together, they explore the profound differences between classical and traditional Chinese medicine, how yin and yang govern the aging process, and why the body's deepest intelligence — when properly engaged — holds the key to longevity. This conversation will shift the way you think about health, healing, and what it truly means to feel at home in yourself.

Key Takeaways:

• Classical Chinese medicine draws on texts over 4,000 years old and works with five distinct channel systems — making it far more precise and personalized than TCM.
• Jing (essence) is the body's deepest layer — present in every cell — and working with it opens better choices, greater clarity, and a stronger sense of self.
• Yin declines naturally throughout life. Cultivating stillness, not just activity, is one of the most overlooked strategies for protecting longevity.
• Cancer is understood as a process at the level of the essence. Epigenetic research confirms that returning cells to a healthy environment can restore healthy functioning.
• Essential oils carry the jing of plants and immediately open the senses — making them powerful tools for self-cultivation and essence-level healing.
• Josephine's retreat model (1–18 days) creates the environmental shift that allows real, lasting change — something the habitual home environment rarely permits.

Timestamps:

• 00:00 | Intro and Josephine's 30-year practice overview
• 01:30 | What is essence (jing) in Chinese medicine
• 03:00 | Classical vs. traditional Chinese medicine explained
• 07:00 | Precision of classical diagnosis and treatment
• 11:00 | Jing as blueprint: feeling at home in yourself
• 14:00 | Yin, yang, and how aging depletes essence
• 17:00 | Cancer as a process at the essence level
• 21:00 | Epigenetics: restoring cells through environment
• 22:00 | Meditation and Guan Yin compassion practices
• 27:00 | What modern research could learn from Chinese medicine
• 31:00 | Essential oils: concentrated jing of the plants
• 35:00 | Retreat model and Blueprint for Change consult
• 39:00 | Conditions treated: cancer, autoimmune, and more
• 42:00 | Design and Destiny class and the future
• 45:00 | Midlife energy tip and how to connect

Episode Links:

• Be Well Asheville
• Be Well Asheville Podcast Archive
• Josephine Spilka — Classical Chinese Medicine
• Instagram: @retreatswithjosephine | @thenectarofplants
• YouTube: @essencepresence

Special Offer:

• Season 1 Wellness Discounts (Asheville Salt Cave, Stillpoint Wellness & many more)

The Wellness in Asheville podcast is produced by Be Well Asheville, your local news source covering health + wellness news + events in Asheville. Get the latest at bewellasheville.com or follow @bewellasheville.

Transcript

Travis Richardson (00:04.057)
plan my meetings out right I usually make sure something must be wrong because I usually have a 15 minute gap in between my okay

And then just so I have your Spilka. OK, all right. OK, so we'll start right now. OK, so welcome to the. Sorry, sir. I got it. Got it myself. All right, we are. Wait, hold on a second. I am like literally like all discombobulated. I forgot how I normally do my intro. One second.

Josephine Spilka (00:19.511)
Yep.

Josephine Spilka (00:43.032)
Okay, you can stop and start again. It's okay with me. You're gonna edit it anyway, right?

Travis Richardson (00:49.111)
Yes, usually like like mentally. Yeah, this is all gets edited.

Travis Richardson (00:56.281)
Okay, so today we have Josephine Spilka on the show today here to talk to us about all things essence, classical Chinese medicine, longevity, much, much more. Welcome to the show, Josephine.

Josephine Spilka (01:13.516)
Thank you, so happy to be here.

Travis Richardson (01:16.365)
Yeah, so for somebody who's never heard of you, how about you just start with giving us the one minute version of who you are, what you practice, and sort of the thread that runs through all of it for you.

Josephine Spilka (01:29.502)
yeah, that's lovely. I have been practicing classical Chinese medicine for 30 years. My focus at this time is on process at the level of the essence, which includes a cancer diagnosis, autoimmune disease, and creativity and evolution, individual self-cultivation, things that are great interest to me, for myself, and for anyone interested.

Travis Richardson (01:58.905)
So you just said the word essence. Can you talk more right off the bat about like, what does that even mean at the level of essence?

Josephine Spilka (02:07.316)
Yeah, so essence, also you could think of it like DNA. So it's the basic material that we have when we're born, like when we're conceived. Essence is the stuff that holds our whole structure together in the marrow of the bones, in the pulp of your teeth. It's the deepest, you could say the deepest layer of the body.

Travis Richardson (02:36.921)
Okay, and I know we'll talk a lot more about that too. We'll get into some terms that describe that from the Chinese medical perspective. And so let's start with understanding the difference between, I guess, classical Chinese medicine versus even traditional Chinese medicine and what you practice.

Josephine Spilka (02:54.466)
Yeah.

Josephine Spilka (02:58.744)
Great. Yeah, good, good, good question. So classical Chinese medicine by definition is a version of Chinese medicine that relies on the classics and by definition those are probably books that are more than 500 years old. In my case, most of those books are thousands of years old, like the Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine or

the Nanjing, the classic of difficulties, and those two are related and that they're commentaries on some of those things. In traditional Chinese medicine, which was created by the communists in China, they wanted to simplify and streamline the medicine so that it could be more available to more people.

And so that effort was made in the middle of the 20th century. And what they did was they took kind of pieces of all the textbooks that had accumulated and sort of mishmashed it together into some kind of recipes for various...

types of problems. And that is what is mostly taught here in the US. So when, when China's medicine started to come to this country, it came with the people who had been educated in the last half of the 20th century. So they weren't familiar with these classics because at that time that wasn't even being taught there. Now there's been a resurgence in the last 20 years, there's been a big resurgence of people interested in that.

know, the older styles of medicine, but it still isn't taught much anywhere. It's taught very, very rarely. Here in Asheville, one of the only schools that has taught it.

Travis Richardson (04:47.201)
What?

Travis Richardson (04:54.039)
Yeah, why is that? What is it about classical Chinese medicine versus the traditional form? does it have different outcomes or is it?

Josephine Spilka (05:01.207)
Well...

I think the outcomes are way better, but I'm biased. But it is a more complex system in some ways, because in traditional Chinese medicine, we only ever talk about the primary channels most of the time. And in the classical styles, there are five different channel systems one can work with.

So they cover the different layers of the body. It in some ways requires a deeper understanding that in the education that came initiated in this country was never that deep. So, you know, it wasn't.

Well, it was competing with Western medicine styles. So they tried to parallel that, especially in the last half of the 20th century, it was important to the Chinese to kind of come up to par. so, there's nothing wrong with the primary channels, they're great, but they're really only one aspect of the larger body of wisdom that's there in the classical styles.

And probably because the people who came from China to this country were not educated in those styles. So that meant when they started schools in this country, they started them in the TCM styles and the traditional Chinese medicine styles, because that's how they were educated. So it wasn't until people began to teach from those classics that people began to understand there was more to the medicine.

Travis Richardson (06:16.673)
Yes.

Travis Richardson (06:40.953)
As I understand it too, classical Chinese medicine is a little more esoteric and there's things in it that the Western mind, even the Western practitioner wouldn't quite, wouldn't make sense. that right? Is there an example of that that you could share with the listeners? Because I think that's a pretty curious observation, if I'm right.

Josephine Spilka (07:08.553)
Yeah, I think that's one way you could talk about it. There's a lot of nuance to the classical styles and part of that, I don't know how to describe it, part of that is that in the traditional Chinese medicine most of it is recipe style.

As in, know, if you have a headache, do this. If you have a backache, do this. In the classical styles, we don't make any of that assumption. Every treatment is tailored to the person in that moment, in their current condition. So it's a much more precise way of diagnosis in a way. It's tailored to that person in that moment. So what was good for somebody else wouldn't be good for that person in that moment.

Well, like if you open the book and it says headache and you take the recipe and then you try it and it doesn't work, you wouldn't know if you did it that way. You wouldn't understand what the problem was if it didn't work. If you do it the classical way, then you can find where the problem is in your thinking.

Travis Richardson (08:21.645)
Yeah, I have an example of that kind of, well, a little, at least for me in my layman's brain is that, you know, I had acupuncture done on my son when he was younger and the Western trained clinician or acupuncturist, he was a medical doctor who went to get a, I think, I don't know, a hundred hour certificate or something to do acupuncture.

so my son had like digestive issues and so every treatment he just would put a bunch of needles in his stomach. And maybe that was the right thing. I don't know, but it seemed very like a protocol and he never had much benefit at all from that. He did feel a sense of energy and movement in his, his, his belly. did feel he, that there was something going on there. but

You know, we went to another guy who was classically Chinese, medically trained, and he was doing stuff that had made no sense to me at all as to how that would help, what he was doing would help his digestive system. Meaning he was doing things on other parts of the body, organs and things that were not at all associated in my Western brain.

Josephine Spilka (09:45.29)
Yeah, exactly. because in our way of thinking, you're of a piece. You can't separate your hands and feet from your head. They're connected. So it's possible to use hands, feet, head to treat your stomach. But that's true in both styles. I think the difference is the way they're applied. So in the TCM...

field, the way those people are trained, it's applied very much like western medicine, like a a pharmaceutical prescription. Here you have this, where in the classical styles it's applied much more like, I don't know, maybe more like psychotherapy. Like there's much more discussion about what is what is true for that person, and so it becomes a more precise form of treatment, which

Travis Richardson (10:37.657)
Mm.

Josephine Spilka (10:38.093)
many people is much more effective, which isn't to say that some of those recipes don't work. Sometimes they do in TCM.

Travis Richardson (10:48.675)
Let's talk more about this idea of essence or jing as it's called in Chinese medicine. You've said, I don't know if it was on your website that I saw this or in talking to you, but you liken it to kind of a genetic blueprint as what I had in my notes. so not like identical to DNA, but

that's something of a map of a person, of their, know, blueprint of their beingness, I guess you would call it. How do you explain that parallel? And how do you explain it to, again, that Western mind that doesn't understand things they can't see?

Josephine Spilka (11:23.191)
Yes.

Josephine Spilka (11:33.326)
Well, they do actually understand, see? They just don't know how to explain it. And that's different, right? So everybody knows what it feels like to feel at home or comfortable in your body, right? You know when you're not at home. Maybe that's the easiest way to say it. You know when you're not at home. And when you are at home, it means that you and your essence are in communication.

So your essence is like holding the space for you to be you in this life. Right? So what happens when you work with that level is that you open up more and more of your own being to you. So this enables you to make better choices. It enables you to feel stronger, more clear, more confident, and more at home.

Travis Richardson (12:12.781)
Mm.

Josephine Spilka (12:32.425)
in yourself. And that to me is invaluable. Really, almost, I don't know of anything else that can do that for you. Right? Because, you know, talk therapy doesn't, talk therapy can approach that. Sometimes we say to reach the essence, need vibration, resonance.

So that's like music, dancing, when you move your limbs, you create a wave of resonance, or talking will create a wave, a sound wave. So any of those things can penetrate the essence and actually move you, right? Literally move you, like a ripple through the water. so acupuncture is one way, but it's not the only way.

But it's important understanding that you have such a thing. When you were conceived, it came into your body as the, as the stuff from which you grew. You grew from that stuff. So therefore it's in every cell, everywhere in a way. The, the, the echo of that essence, that is you. It's like the essence of you. And so that's pretty precious.

Travis Richardson (13:47.767)
Hmm

Travis Richardson (13:52.442)
Yeah, that's a thing. And so some other things too. So around this idea of expansion and contraction and with the Chinese medical model and a lot of how energy is understood, we obviously know everything is essentially a wave. There's a peak, a trough, a peak and a bottom, right?

And so with ging, I suppose that it's similar. And as we age, we have this different way of being, right? We have this energy distribution and it changes as we age. Can you talk about how the aging process changes our ging, our energy and what that looks like?

Josephine Spilka (14:41.783)
Well, so to do that, I think it's good to sort of remind people they probably already know about yin and yang, right? So yin is the force that is moving inward, right? That consolidates. And yang is the force that moves outward. It's hot and light, and yin is cold and dark and still. So yang is the activity, yin is the stillness.

So what happens over the course of our lives, we are obviously doing more and more activity. So we have less and less yin sometimes, especially if we spend a lot of time looking at the computer, which is the little yin eater. And what that means is that if you run out of yin resource, yin, that stillness, that quiet, that water.

is the source of everything. It's like saying the ocean is where all life came from. It's the same in your body. The ocean of yin is where you came from. So as you spin that, as you get down to the bottom, you could say you gain wisdom, you gain enlightenment, we hope, you know more, but your physical form is less.

So over the course of your lifetime, the, when you die, your essence is at its lowest point. When you're born, it's at its highest point. And as you go through life doing the things you do, you spend, you could say, your essence, your yin over time to gain wisdom, to gain proficiency and clarity and wakefulness in your life.

So by the time you die, in theory, you die peacefully because you've become pure wisdom. Right? Yeah. Right? So you're not hanging on to anything at that point. Ideally speaking. Ideally speaking. And all those challenges through your life that come from the level of the essence, meaning...

Travis Richardson (16:35.289)
I like that. That's an optimistic, yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

Josephine Spilka (16:51.147)
We have structural challenges, right? Our teeth get worse, our eyes get worse, our backbones get worse, our joints degrade. Over time, all of those indications that your essence is declining are opportunities to mine, as in go in and reckon with your own essence as to what you need. If you want to stay alive longer, you might like to do that. If you don't mind,

If you don't care, you keep spending what you've got in the bank. That's no problem. Like there's no value judgment about it. It's up to you. It's your choice, right? So, but you can't make that choice unless you have sort of met your own essence fair and square, you know? If you don't know what you've got, then you spend crazily, maybe.

Travis Richardson (17:26.169)
This is

Travis Richardson (17:31.308)
or right.

Josephine Spilka (17:42.15)
or you spend or you don't spend at all. Some people don't spend at all. They're busy conserving all the time and then they never have any fun and they never understand what happened. So the whole idea is that you get to choose which is beautiful too.

Travis Richardson (17:59.885)
Yeah, yeah, and I know that you work a lot with, I think you even just mentioned right before this call, working with, you've got various cancer patients that you've worked with in the past. And I guess, how do you understand that disease in terms of

this idea of essence or gene, like what does that look like?

Josephine Spilka (18:29.453)
So the cancer process, which I like to call it a process, and I like to say I work with people who have a cancer diagnosis because I don't like to label them always as being patients. This is an effort of mine. Undeniably, the cancer process takes place at the level of the essence in the cell. There's no two ways about that.

Travis Richardson (18:42.009)
Mm.

Josephine Spilka (18:55.679)
Everybody agrees. It's a replication of cells. Therefore, it takes place at the level of the essence. So the question always is, how are you allocating your resources? If you are involved with the cancer diagnosis, it's always a question of resource. And it goes back to what we were just talking about, that if you spend those resources, you aren't aware that you're spending them, then...

The cells that have become injured through time because they are innocent, they become injured innocently. It's not like they're malevolent. They just get injured and then they replicate and because they are injured, they make what we call a malignancy. But essentially they're operating out of the range of your awareness. So they're over here doing their thing. And part of the way I work with people who've received that diagnosis is to help them

become aware of the things that they might be doing that are contributing to accelerating the process and how one might slow it down or even stop it or even reverse it. Because it's been shown, and I know this was on your list of topics, there's been a ton of epigenetic research that says you can take a cancer cell and put it back.

into a healthy environment and it will return to healthy functioning. So that's an amazing thing that I love to remind people about. And that is true of so much. The community of the body is designed to create health. Your body moves towards health naturally. So what we really have to do is remove the things that obstruct us from being healthy, as opposed to change ourselves.

Travis Richardson (20:35.732)
Hmm.

Travis Richardson (20:47.512)
Wow, that is crazy to think. It's not crazy. That's the wrong word. It's powerful to think about the fact that we can change our environment. And if we can change our environment, then the cells operating in such set environment can also change. so, oh, it's very empowering. mean, like if we just talked about that alone, it would be all we would need to say. It says everything, doesn't it?

Josephine Spilka (21:03.754)
Isn't it?

Josephine Spilka (21:15.593)
It does. And we are, we are an emanation of our environment. We are heaven and earth. This is another, this is just one of the basics of Chinese medical thinking. You, your body is this ongoing flow between heaven and earth. So therefore.

the conditions in the heavens and the conditions in the earth affect you. I was just speaking with a colleague the other day who wrote a book about climate change and Chinese medicine. It's fascinating. And again, he's talking about this very same idea that your body, it's a little cosmos and the conditions in it reflect the conditions in the environment around you. So, so tending to that,

actually changing those conditions can be extraordinarily powerful and so far-reaching, vast. If each of us

Travis Richardson (22:05.558)
Mm.

Travis Richardson (22:12.024)
So I know, yeah, yeah. And I was just also, I was looking at your website again prior to the call and I was gonna ask this earlier but I wanna make sure I ask it now because I think it's important before we move on. was gonna ask, we'll talk a little bit more about epigenetics because I think that's a really interesting topic and it definitely maps to the longevity part. But in terms of,

meditation. How does that fit in with what you do? And is there do you have? Do you kind of have a clinical use for meditation for the people that you see? Or is it just something that you practice yourself?

Josephine Spilka (22:42.476)
Mmm.

Josephine Spilka (22:58.059)
it myself and have for 40 years, but there is a lot of evidence that it's clinically useful. In fact, was just listening to, recently I was listening to Huberman, Huberman Lab and a conversation with Richie Davison who helped write, I think it's called emotional, what is it called? It's the book about emotions and the brain and meditation. Anyway, there's a lot of evidence that

even five minutes a day of meditation practice, resting the mind, basically resting the mind, can improve your health dramatically and improve your longevity, specifically improve your longevity. And they've done massive amounts of studies now due to the Dalai Lama and his efforts and the, not the Institute for Noetic Sciences, the other one.

That's not popping into my brain right now, but there have been many conferences between the Buddha Dharma people and the scientists about how these types of practices work. In my own work with people, I specifically introduce two types of practice usually. One is the practice of resting the mind.

which though it sounds restful, usually isn't in the beginning because both minds are pretty crazy, my own included. So it's not a failing to have an active mind. It's a question of how you work with it. And the way I work with it is to...

Travis Richardson (24:26.081)
Hahaha.

Josephine Spilka (24:42.039)
help people understand the value of finding the choice points. Because to go back to what I was saying earlier, it's that that makes the difference between a method that works for you and one that doesn't. If you know you are choosing it, your awareness, your ability to know that, it makes all the difference in the outcome. And there's many, many scientific studies to support that. And I don't...

force the practice on anyone, but I offer it to everyone. And the other style of practice that I offer most often these days is the compassion practices and the practices related to Guan Yin, the goddess of compassion from the Chinese culture. She's also known as Tara in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition or Avalokiteshvara.

Bodhisattva of compassion. So those practices are really about allying yourself with who you actually are, which is not who you think you are, which is, you know, that's a tough one to explain to people. But once you experience it, it's very liberating to realize that you have a whole life of experience that is there for you.

that you don't have to rely on concept to find that.

Travis Richardson (26:17.464)
Right, What do you wish that modern, like, researchers knew about Chinese medicine? especially, like, you know, we talk about epigenetics and the expression of, you know, that we can change our expression of ourselves through the inputs that go in, the change in the environment. We just kind of talked about that a second ago.

I guess what do you wish that researchers knew about what Chinese medicine is known for thousands of years? Is there anything that stands out to you there?

Josephine Spilka (26:55.981)
Well, what they've known for thousands of years and practiced is what we call the practice of tonification. So cultivating health through doing the things on a daily basis that support health as opposed to clearing pathology. in the West,

Everything is about getting rid of things or clearing pathologies. So there's very little research and very little attention paid to the things that one might do more and more these days, though I have to say, know, walk for 15 minutes, meditate for five minutes, like, you know, these kinds of things that actually will promote health.

the probably the biggest thing and I again, it's hard to do this research because they would have to do it over a long period of time is that the stillness or the quiet that we don't get in our modern culture is really vital to nourishing longevity.

you know, time off the screen, time in the natural world, time with yourself without necessarily being in conversation or doing an activity, but actually just being. This is vital, but it's hard to research that and it's also hard to get people to do it.

take away their phones and then they feel scared.

Travis Richardson (28:20.532)
Yeah, oh no. Yeah, not my phones, not my phones. All right, well, hey, actually just, I'm gonna do an edit here, but I have to take, I drank a whole one of these, and so I have to take another body break. I can't believe it, but I'm like, I better stop right now and go do this thing, because otherwise I'm gonna be urgent about it. I didn't.

Josephine Spilka (28:26.893)
Yeah.

Josephine Spilka (28:43.533)
Well, it's your editing. It's your editing. It's up to you.

Travis Richardson (28:48.512)
Yeah, yeah, so I'll be right back. I, what happened was I drank some coffee and then I, of course, I like to drink more after that. But I have had back to back meetings and so I'm chugging all this water and I'm like, shoot, now it's all hitting me. So I'll be right back. I'll be right back.

Travis Richardson (31:12.918)
Right now we can continue and I don't have to feel...

Josephine Spilka (31:14.573)
I'm glad you take care of yourself. That's very important for my...

Travis Richardson (31:22.784)
I normally don't have to do that on a call like this, but I'm good at editing and so I don't have too much of a problem with it.

Josephine Spilka (31:32.372)
Yeah. All right.

Travis Richardson (31:34.392)
All right, so we were at, I think cell phones and such. Okay, all right, well let's turn our attention a little here now to essential oils. You do work with essential oils. How does that tie back into, how does that work with all the other things that you're doing? You're obviously doing acupuncture, you do meditation, you're instructing with that. Where do oils come in?

Josephine Spilka (32:01.377)
Yeah, so essential oils are the essence of a plant. they contain jing, they contain essence. So I was immediately drawn to them as substances that I would like to use. They're kind of condensed yin. They're made from a steam, most often a steam distillation. They can be made in other ways. But what they do is condense the most powerful part of the plant into this

precious little bit of substance that only requires one drop or less to do amazing things. And their aroma activates our senses. So what's beautiful about that is that when you activate the senses, your capacity to change your perception is immediately present.

So that is a very, very handy thing, right? So when I want somebody to meet themselves, meet their own essence, when I use an essential oil, immediately their essence is resonating with that oil and their senses are open. That's the perfect conditions under which you can learn about yourself and learn about your world. So it's perfect.

Travis Richardson (33:22.496)
I'm curious what kinds of oils do you use? they traditional ones that we might have heard of, lavender and the like, or are they other kinds?

Josephine Spilka (33:31.413)
Yes, so until recently there weren't essential oils made from Chinese herbal medicinal herbs. So when I began to study with the essential oils, which was 25 years ago, all that was available was the ones that you're familiar with, the eucalyptus, lavender, tea tree, clary sage, myrtle. So

Most of the time and most of the teaching that I've done, I'm using those very familiar plants in the essential oil form, but I'm talking about them in Chinese medicine terms. So that means I can talk about eucalyptus entering the lungs and...

Though people think of that because they know that smelling eucalyptus makes them feel they can take a deep breath. But what they don't know is that it might also clear a cough or phlegm or that it might help with grief and letting go, which are all things that come through the Chinese medical model. So it's very different from what you usually find about essential oils in that way.

Travis Richardson (34:39.813)
Hmm. Well, it seems you'll.

Travis Richardson (34:46.381)
Well, yeah, it sounds very complimentary. And actually somebody who understands that Oregon systems as they relate to the Chinese medical model in this way could use essential oils from a very different perspective, I think, than somebody who is just trained on Western modalities, because you wouldn't think to target maybe an Oregon that was weak in Jing or Qi or something like that or too much. You would know which oils to...

Josephine Spilka (35:14.678)
Yeah, so for example we use seed oils. Seeds are the essence of a plant, right? So it's seed that will give birth to another plant just like the one it came from. So the seed oils again gonna nourish the essence very strongly and of course different seeds resonate with different organ systems, grow it, you know, depends how they grow the plant. So anyway.

Travis Richardson (35:15.597)
balance those things.

Travis Richardson (35:21.836)
Mm-hmm

Josephine Spilka (35:41.206)
It's great because it's just, again, more precise, which I would say is true about the classical thinking always.

Travis Richardson (35:44.973)
Yeah.

Travis Richardson (35:49.411)
Gotcha. Well, what is it? So with all that we've discussed, what does it look like for somebody to come see you for the first time? What's your process?

Josephine Spilka (35:59.835)
Well, I offer what I call a blueprint for change, which is a two, usually two to two and a half hour conversation where I'm taking everything that's on their mind and, you know, depends if they come in person, I can take their pulses and look at their tongue. But even if they don't, particularly if they have

diagnoses from a Western doctor that they are finding difficult to work with. I will write up a report from that conversation, usually 10 to 15 pages, mapping out possible treatments, my thinking, my logic for why I think certain things might be good and other things might not. I will cover...

both acupuncture treatment, lifestyle, diet, exercise, meditation, all of that, and I will make recommendations. So at present, I don't do what most acupuncturists do, which is that they, most acupuncturists see people on an hourly basis, which is wonderful. Glad they're there. But for me right now, I see people only on a retreat setting. So they come for

one day up to 18 days depending on what they need and they get all their meals and they get workshops and they get treatments and all of that.

Travis Richardson (37:22.966)
Travis Richardson (37:32.641)
That's amazing. That's a totally different model, but I really like that because it feels to me like that you do so much, there's so much healing that can happen just by being there, you know, with you.

Josephine Spilka (37:47.001)
Welcome home, being in a different environment, just like we were saying earlier. It's so hard to make change when you're in your habitual environment. So by putting somebody in a new environment and letting them relax, they actually have the opportunity to make change they never could make at home. So.

Travis Richardson (37:50.712)
Yeah.

Travis Richardson (38:05.559)
Yeah, right. And as part of that, who's your typical person coming to see you? What presentations or conditions do people come in with that you work with?

Josephine Spilka (38:20.75)
Yeah, most of them have a cancer diagnosis or an autoimmune diagnosis. I've had a lot of breast cancer, prostate cancer, lymphoma, thyroid cancer, skin cancer, and ovarian cancer.

Travis Richardson (38:25.88)
Okay.

Josephine Spilka (38:38.83)
colon cancer, anyway, lots of different kinds of cancer and also autoimmune diagnosis like rheumatoid arthritis or lupus or multiple sclerosis. I have treated that condition. So all of those are responsive to treatment at the level of the essence, which is what I prioritize.

Travis Richardson (39:01.849)
Yeah, so to use the body's natural systems to kind of work with the person as opposed to against them. What's the most, if you were to choose the most important thing for somebody to let go of in lieu of working with you or reconsider, I guess the reason I'm asking that is if you're used to like a Western medical system, it's very different to come

got treatment like what's what does somebody got have to do to kind of let go of thoughts that that there are you know what i'm saying like to come get this kind of treatment from you what is it what do they got to let go of

Josephine Spilka (39:45.663)
work with anyone who's willing to to investigate. So there's no precondition. However, I would say that the main thing is to be willing to work with your own body directly. Like if if all you want is somebody to take things away from you, then this is not the best place. Because what what's required to do Chinese medicine properly is for somebody to be engaged, to participate.

Travis Richardson (40:14.467)
Mm-hmm.

Josephine Spilka (40:14.594)
That might mean you change your diet. It might mean you change your sleep hours. It might mean you change your exercise. It could mean any of those things in order to support the treatment. But if you're not willing to do that, it's probably not going to be a good fit.

Travis Richardson (40:32.831)
Right, right.

Josephine Spilka (40:33.782)
Yeah, and but I will work with people. I have had people on retreat who've just received radiation, people who received chemotherapy, people who are taking medications. I am not afraid to work with people who have chosen to do that. unless they don't want to, obviously then they're not going to come and see me. So I mostly feel like. Unfortunately, and this is, this is an aside in a way for, for.

Processes at the level of the essence, think teaching people how to meet themselves is the best prevention there is. for the diseases or the processes that happen on the surface like COVID, for example, Chinese medicine has a lot to offer, but the cosmology, the way we think about it is so different that it's hard for people to

Travis Richardson (41:13.334)
Mmm.

Josephine Spilka (41:34.847)
know, shift into that gear. But I've worked with so many people teaching them how to take care of themselves in a different way and keep themselves well. So, you know, the upside of it, it's a lot of work up front. This was my colleague and I had the same, the one who wrote the climate change book. We had the same conversation because he's also involved in a study with Chinese medicine and long COVID, which in his opinion is related to the climate. And

Travis Richardson (41:44.344)
Mm.

Josephine Spilka (42:03.338)
He was saying that,

the conditions inside someone's body and the conditions outside the body and you know, that basically we can teach people how to be well under a lot of duress. Like COVID was a huge, huge stress across the globe for everyone. And there's so much to offer there, not only for longevity, but for like staying healthy.

Travis Richardson (42:19.097)
Mm.

Josephine Spilka (42:35.27)
in engraved conditions which are going to contribute to your longevity. Right? that's very important also.

Travis Richardson (42:35.715)
Right.

Travis Richardson (42:41.314)
Right.

Travis Richardson (42:45.249)
Yeah, super important. then you have a, you have a class coming up, right? June, June 20th. Tell me, tell us about that.

Josephine Spilka (42:54.326)
Yeah, so that course is called Design and Destiny and it's about self-cultivation, creativity, and evolution using the essential oils. I'm going to introduce some of the Chinese herbal medicinal oils. I'm going to talk about everything from a classical Chinese medicine point of view. So it's best suited for people who already understand Chinese medicine or to some degree can absorb that.

that framework, but I will teach whatever part of it I need to to help people understand the topic. But it's basically what we were talking about, using the essential oils to treat to work with the essence.

And again, promote your own creativity and your own evolution, which in order to evolve, we say in Daoist thinking that you have a body because you have lessons to learn in this life. And if you don't learn them, you'll probably be back.

which everyone may not believe, but it doesn't matter. You can still use the essential oils to sort of extract the essence, extract the lessons that you need to learn to stay alive as long as you like. Yes.

Travis Richardson (44:10.937)
I love that. Yeah, that's a positive, very positive message. Cool. Well, yeah, I invite the listeners to check that out. I think they can find that probably more on your website. Almost done here. I got a couple more questions here for you though. Where do you see classical Chinese medicine given that, like in the future, given that...

Josephine Spilka (44:16.247)
Yeah.

Travis Richardson (44:36.153)
traditional Chinese medicine is sort of the mainstream is the classical form growing in popularity. Is it moving a little more towards common practice or like, how does that, how do you see that in 10 years, 10 years from now?

Josephine Spilka (44:49.9)
Well

I think it's growing. It's growing because slowly but surely there is a small handful of us trying very hard to help people understand the value in taking the deep and longer view which

which is only possible if you have the classics. As I said, TCM was created to address the sort of emergency of the moment in the last half of the 20th century, the epidemics that occurred and the changes in the population. But the classical thinking has been around for 4,000, 5,000 years, and it is really focused on how we can be well, stay well, and honor our very essence.

Travis Richardson (45:41.338)
Yeah. Okay. Last question and then we'll give people a chance to find out how they can reach you after this episode here is that, well, here's the question. One piece of advice for somebody in midlife who senses they're kind of running on empty, they've got low energy, maybe they're not sleeping well and they don't have any idea why.

Like what would they, what can they do? Aside from coming to see you of course, which we recommend. What can they do?

Josephine Spilka (46:12.066)
Yes.

say there's two things. One is get your bare feet on the ground at least once a day for at least five minutes and turn off your screens when it gets dark. Don't be looking at the computer, talk to a person, listen to music, get your eyes off that screen. Those are the things I think would just improve your health dramatically.

Travis Richardson (46:32.697)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Travis Richardson (46:40.961)
Right, if nothing else, you would maybe sleep better, which would give you the energy to do everything else that matters. Like make smart choices when you eat, maybe have an ability to have energy to work out. Just like one thing like that could make all the difference.

Josephine Spilka (46:57.132)
Yep, get up in the morning, step outside, take in the sun, turn off the screens when the sun goes down. I think you'll be way better.

Travis Richardson (47:07.405)
Totally. And for the listeners out there, know, we can reach Josephine, her website is Josephinespilka.com. That'll be in the show notes, of course, that she's also on social media, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube. We'll put all those links on there for everyone. And at this time, I just want to say thank you so much, Josephine, for the great conversation. There's lots, lots more that we all can learn from you. You're a real asset to.

everyone in Asheville and I do know that there's only, there's not a lot of people practicing like you do. You may be the only one actually that's doing classical Chinese medical retreats for treatment.

Josephine Spilka (47:48.494)
Thank so much for the opportunity. been delightful. It's one of my favorite things to talk about in the world.

Travis Richardson (47:55.52)
Yeah, well until yeah, well until until next time All right, well