Hannah Zulueta What Four Years of Acupuncture School Taught Me About Time
And what it means for the dog you feed every day
Tomorrow I start my final term of a doctorate in acupuncture, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and herbalism. Here’s what actually changed in me, and why it changes how I treat the dog in front of you.
We’re not just treating a symptom. We’re prescribing time.
Four years ago I didn’t understand that sentence. I do now.
What did four years actually change?
Four years ago, waiting my turn to present in clinic, I heard my teacher tell another student, “You guys think these points are like magic buttons. You press one, and it’s fixed.”
That stuck with me because it wasn’t wrong. That’s exactly what I thought points did.
I started school terrified of needles. It was a month before I received my first treatment as a patient myself. The fear lasted a few seconds, every single time, right up until my body caught up with what was happening. Then something in me settled, and I always left the room a different person than the one who walked in. I’m not afraid of needles anymore. Now I look forward to the change, whatever that ends up being.
Term one, first class, called Fundamentals. Everything I knew coming in fit inside that one class. That’s when I knew I had so much to learn. If one class covered everything I knew going in, what else was going to be revealed? That was the beginning of my new found purpose.
Why isn’t a pattern just a label?
Four years later, I understand why my teacher said that. A point isn’t a button and a pattern isn’t a label. Restoring balance means restoring access to resources the body already has, and removing whatever is standing between the body and those resources. That block is never sitting in just one place. It’s a relationship between places, one system leaning too hard on another, one system too tired to hold up its end.
I’ve watched this in dogs as clearly as I’ve felt it in myself. A dog’s itch that would not calm down no matter what intervention we tried, until the gut settled first, and then the skin followed a few weeks later like it had been waiting for permission. Appetite that came back only once sleep improved, not the other way around. The skin was never really the problem. The gut was never really separate from the skin. They were one relationship, showing up in two places, and treating the visible one alone was never going to hold.
What am I actually feeling for, under my fingers?
When I palpate someone now, I’m looking for where they’re stuck under my fingers. It feels tight, knotted, like there’s an actual substance there that shouldn’t be. Something stopped moving a long time ago and left something behind.
When it releases, the tissue goes smooth, like an obstruction clearing out of a river. And it’s never only the tissue. The pulse evens out. The breath slows. Color shifts in the face. Even the voice sounds different.
One relationship, finding its way back to itself, showing up in five places at once.
Why does the shift feel different every visit?
Some visits, the shift is life changing. Other visits, it’s small. I used to read small as the treatment not working. Now I know that’s simply what was supposed to happen that day. Relationships that took years to strain don’t unwind in an hour. You can’t stand over a plant and demand it grow any more than you can stand over a body and demand it change in an instant. That’s the whole of what it means to prescribe time instead of chasing a fix.
Everyone wants to talk about what to add. What else to feed, what herb to start, what supplement might finally fix things. I’m usually looking somewhere else. I’m looking at whether the body can actually finish what it already started.
The body only knows how to run in cycles. Food comes in and eventually has to leave.
You’d be surprised how many people never actually complete that part. One of my teachers, a colon cancer survivor and a masterful herbalist with his own line of herbs, Classical Pearls, puts it bluntly. If you’re not having a complete bowel movement every day, you’re walking around polluted.
With humans, that’s where we start. Regulate what’s coming in, regulate what’s going out, before anything else gets addressed. We start dogs in that same place, which is exactly what Spleen Qi deficiency in dogs is actually about.
Breath comes in and eventually has to leave too. The same back and forth plays out every day in the sky, the moon rising and setting, then the sun following behind it. Health depends on whether what’s already moving gets to finish, not only on what keeps coming in.
A dog whose acid reflux wouldn’t calm down until the gut settled first was living inside a stuck cycle too. Food was coming in and not fully moving through. The rebellious qi, the stomach’s own qi rising instead of moving down and out, was simply where that unfinished cycle finally showed itself. Once digestion could actually complete its process, the rebellious qi had nothing left to announce.
The real question is whether the cycle already in motion gets to finish.
What does any of this have to do with your dog?
This is true for your dog too.
A recipe built for chronic itch, kidney values that climbed slowly over years, gut inflammation that took months to settle in, none of it is one organ misbehaving on its own. It’s a relationship between organs that took time to strain, and it takes time to ease back. None of it resolves in a week because we want it to. The body, human or dog, moves at its own rate once whatever is blocking it gets out of the way. My job is to find where that relationship is stuck and help it move again, then let the body do what it already knows how to do. The timeline belongs to the dog in front of me, not to a calendar on my wall.
Why do I keep adding new lineages, this far in?
Prescribing time didn’t mean the learning was finished. If anything, it opened more doors, not fewer. I’ve also come to understand this medicine has more than one voice, and I’ve been lucky enough to sit under a few of them. Japanese Meridian Therapy taught me how much a body can shift from a treatment so light I sometimes wonder in the room if anything happened at all, then notice on the drive home that something has. The Fire School approach to herbs works nothing like that. It builds slowly, like warmth added to a fire a little at a time over days rather than delivered all at once. Dr. Tan’s Balance Method taught me something else again, through a protocol called Bagua Global Balance. The Bagua itself is ancient, and receiving that style of treatment doesn’t feel like a shift so much as a reset, like an earlier, younger version of me gets some room to come back. My friend and I joked it’s like defragging a computer, for those old enough to remember what that even was. Different doors into the same house.
And that’s on top of what my doctoral program itself requires: TCM foundations, Zang Fu, herbal medicine, auricular acupuncture, orthopedics, and a full course load of biomedical pathology and pharmacology running alongside all of it. This Saturday I start a two year study of Kampo, a fourth door outside of school entirely, and I like that I’m adding a new lineage to my hands at the exact moment I’m closing out this chapter of school. It feels like proof that this medicine never stops teaching, no matter how many years, or how many lineages, you’ve already given it.
Want to understand this medicine better than a book can teach you?
If you want to understand this medicine more, skip the books for a moment and look at the actual countries it came from. China, Japan, and Korea are each strikingly different, and each one is beautiful in its own way. Once you start looking closely, you start to see exactly why TCM reaches for rivers, mountains, and growing things as its metaphors. The medicine was describing the landscape its founders were standing inside of every day. A documentary is a good place to start. YouTube works fine. I won’t point you toward a particular one, because I trust you to find what pulls you in.
What have patients actually told me it feels like?
I start my final term tomorrow. Four years in, and I’m still learning this from both sides of the table, as a patient and now in my final months as the one treating others. I’ve seen people heal from pain, helped athletes recover so they can compete, treated the elderly, the depressed, and the anxious. I’ve helped dermatology issues, and my favorite last term were the menopause and GLP1 cases. One patient told me:
It felt like a DMT experience without the DMT.
That made me chuckle. I wasn’t expecting that, but she said it reset her soul.
Another time, I watched something happen that didn’t need more words than this:
Grief moved.
While you’re here, where should you go next?
I’ve spent real time redesigning the website, pulling years of scattered posts into actual subject matter pillars so you can find what you need without digging. Start with the Library of Wisdom page if you want the full map of what’s here.
And if anything above about warming and cooling has you curious what that actually means for the food already in your dog’s bowl, I keep a running TCM food energy list that breaks it down food by food.
So here’s my thank you
I want to thank every one of you who has trusted me with your dog’s care while I’ve been in school. I didn’t expect the doctorate to demand what it has, and I’ve learned more than I thought possible in four years. Some of that came fast, in a single class. Most of it came slow, one dog and one lesson at a time. I’ll keep offering my services to the dog community, even part time, because I know this perspective helps. And I’m genuinely excited for what comes next, including building an in-person practice here in San Diego.
You can’t demand a plant grow. Tomorrow I start my final term. Every day brings a new opportunity to be curious, and to grow, even just a little.
Your dog’s timeline is the one that matters
If a kidney diet, a gut protocol, or an itch plan hasn’t shifted on the schedule you hoped for, that’s not failure. Sometimes it just takes another look, a different perspective, at a different time. I build recipes and herbal support to fit the dog in front of me, then give the body room to move at its own pace. That’s what prescribing time actually looks like in practice, a plan built around your dog’s own clock. If you want help reading what your dog’s body is asking for, I’m here.
Hannah Zulueta obtained her Certificate in Canine Nutrition from CASI Institute. She is also studying for her Doctorate in Acupuncture, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and Herbalism from the esteemed Pacific College of Health and Medicine. If you’re as keenly interested in health for yourself, visit her website for human health: Satori Acupuncture and Herbs.
She resides in San Diego with her three dogs, Maggie, Orbit, and Mr. Higgins.
She is available for one on one consultations. She develops evidence-based recipes that meet both NRC and AAFCO nutritional standards while integrating the therapeutic food principles of Traditional Chinese Veterinary Medicine into her formulations.
Additionally, you can find her sharing free content on Instagram.
