deep roots - wide branches

Jonathan Hadas Edwards, MS, LAc. 

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Bio

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Jonathan Hadas Edwards, MS, LAc. is a practitioner and lifelong student of medical and mantic arts. He holds a Masters of Science in East Asian Medicine from National University of Natural Medicine ('14) and degrees in writing from Warren Wilson College's MFA program and in religious studies from Swarthmore College.

     He has trained in a diverse array of healing modalities including Korean Sa'am acupuncture, Japanese moxibustion, Classical Chinese herbalism, and Ayurvedic herbal medicine. This is his 10th year of clinical practice. 

     Along Asian medicine, Jonathan has expertise in the mantic arts--a discipline that went hand in hand with medicine before the two were sundered in the modern era. His experience encompasses a number of divination styles, including the Yijing (I Ching), Jyotisa, sortilege and cartomancy methods, and West African Ifá. 

     Jonathan has pursued studies in China and Southasia, including on a US Fulbright fellowship to Nepal. He has practiced medicine in Brooklyn, NY and the NC Triangle, where he resides currently. He welcomes inquiries at info@jonathanhadasedwards.com. 

    

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Personal Statement

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Always fascinated by the mysteries of the universe, I set out to study astrophysics until life threw me two curveballs. One was that my father, composer George Edwards, began slipping away due to dementia. Modern medicine had little to offer him. At the same time, I began having health struggles of my own, digestive troubles frustratingly linked to mood and energy swings. Modern medicine had little for me, either. I knew there had to be another way of approaching healthcare, and I set out to find one. 

       During a semester in India, I was exposed to ideas from Tibetan and Ayurvedic medicine. Here was a way of viewing the body that made poetic and intuitive sense--and I was excited to discover that these approaches could be extraordinarily effective. 

       After college, I enrolled at the Ayurvedic Institute in New Mexico for a year-long study program, still not suspecting I'd found a career path. When in 2008 I returned to South Asia on a Fulbright fellowship to Nepal--initially to study sustinable agriculture and its connection with religious ritual--I soon switched my research topic to Ayurveda. During that year in Nepal, I met an elderly, last-of-his-lineage Ayurvedic practitioner named Keshab Laal. Keshab-ji welcomed me into his home and his heart; we spent days together talking about all things herbal. The elderly man quizzed me, told stories and case studies, and showed me his impressive collection of handmade medicines from the Sanskrit Śastras. Learning that he had no one to carry on his tradition, I resolved to pursue serious herbal training in order to bring these beautiful, potent healing traditions to others. This determination led me to Chinese Medicine school and to acupuncture, which I came to embrace. 

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      Alongside my calling to practice medicine, I nursed a  fascination with the ways that insight can emerge from seemingly random processes and patterns. By the time I entered Chinese Medicine school, it was becoming clear that divination methods were as deep a study as medicine itself. I learned how acupuncture is informed by the Yijing, and how ancient cosmology weaves together all the traditional arts and sciences into a continuous body.  I have continued to follow my interest in divination as a serious (yet playful) source of guidance, and believe that mantic arts and medicine powerfully inform one another. 

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See blog and writing/resources page for more musings and leads, respectively. 

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