To be completely honest, I never intended for my passionate-heart-centered service to become a full-blown organization that is now becoming the Inner Ocean Empowerment Project! This whole journey began so simply and yet now here we are featured in such a large publication as, Dr. Oz: The Good Life Magazine (750,000 person readership!)! I feel so blessed and honored to be recognized in this way (heart opening, big sigh).
The journey of Inner Ocean’s arrival in the magazine has been a fun and interesting one, however not so easy!
When I was first contacted by them hearing that they wanted to run a feature on medical practitioners who give back, I was completely shocked that they were specifically looking for an acupuncturist! (They had heard about me through Acupuncturists Without Borders who I have done some work with in the past). How cool that acupuncture is making mainstream media, I thought!
After a couple of phone interviews with the journalist and hours spent shuffling through hundreds of photos from each one of my service projects with the Dr. Oz photo editor, they finally landed on the juice of the story and some photos that they really liked and that also happened to be the correct size. Problem was, one of the photos I needed special permission for since it was of young girls who had been rescued from sex-
trafficking!
Unsure if we would get it before the looming deadline, we were coming up with all sorts of alternative plans, including them having to rearrange the entire article! Emails shooting back and forth, phone calls from New York to Portland; it was high intensity for a while! Two days later, and only hours before their deadline, we did finally receive permission.
Ahh, sweet relief! Or so I thought…
Then came the fact-checking which happens in lieu of reading the article before it gets published (which is considered unethical, news to me!) This is where they send me lots of questions to verify the statements made in the article without giving away the contents of the article. I must say, it is a very unique process and gave way to much stress about trying to make sure everything is spoken and written correctly! With so many people that this article has to filter through (ever played the Telephone Game?), I knew it would be amazing if all the pieces made it through intact!
Well, the June Issue just arrived at Barnes and Noble yesterday and while it looks BEAUTIFUL, they listed the wrong website with my article! Darn. Humanity exists everywhere. And yet I am still sitting here with a smile on my face.
Amazing: they interviewed 6 people for the feature and everyone is a doctor except for me! Not to mention, I took the lead in the article with the large picture on the front of me sitting with some very special young women in India who I treated for several weeks. I am also the youngest person in the feature.
So website mistake aside: it’s very, very, cool. Thank you, Dr. Oz!
