Acupuncture and Neuroscience In Recovering from My Motorcycle Crash

This summer, I hit a deer while riding my motorcycle. It jumped out in front of me with no time to react or register much of anything before being thrown from the bike. Hitting a deer on a motorcycle is a more... visceral experience than hitting one in a car. I slid forearm, shoulder, face before coming to a stop. I looked behind me for the deer, which had taken off into the woods.

I dusted myself off, checked for obvious injuries, did a PERLA on myself with my phone flashlight, and eventually realized that I was okay. The bike on the other hand, was un-driveable. I got a tow, went to the nearest shop, and long story short, picked it up a month later.

Here is what I did during that time to recover:

Actually, I lie. Before I talk specifics, I have to make abundantly clear that the reason I walked away from this crash with only two quarter-sized scrapes was because I was wearing CE rated protective gear and a full-face DOT rated helmet. Those who know me know that I’m a “gear freak,” and that I get noticeably upset when I see motorcyclists — of all ages and styles — wearing what equates to pajamas, sunglasses, and dinky salad bowls for helmets. Have respect for the machine, what it’s capable of doing, what nature and random luck are capable of throwing at you, and wear some damn riding gear. I hear the soapbox creaking underneath my feet, so I’ll step down for now, but the point remains — GEAR WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE. I would not have a lower jaw if I had taken this slide on an open-faced helmet.

Back to the recovery process. Since I was fortunate enough to walk away with minor physical injuries, the focus of my work was psychological. After the accident, my brain immediately started making connections between all kinds of sensory stimuli and the crash. Things as benign as morning sunlight through the trees made me retract and tense up. It makes sense from a survival standpoint - the animal brain wants to protect you from future trauma — but I wasn’t about to let so much of what I’ve come to love about riding get pulled into unconscious association. So I started intentionally engaging with the process.

The #1 thing I DIDN’T do, which most people don’t intuitively realize, is replay the accident over and over in my head in an attempt to desensitize myself. This is never helpful in trauma, as the painful loop and triggers are rooted further into the brain through rehearsal. There’s also no solution there because there is no present moment in that scenario - nowhere you can act, no way to deal with what is actually showing up in the current experience.

Instead, I would imagine myself riding. Start with scenarios far away from the accident. Other places, other times. As I would find something that would trigger a fear response — perhaps the image of my hands on the handlebars, the feeling of reaching for the brakes, etc. — I would feel the response directly for a few moments, stop, and put some needles in a few points across my body.

Why use acupuncture at that time? Acupuncture works as a phenomenal pattern interrupt. Typically, when the brain feels a trigger, it starts a cascade of habitual thoughts/feelings and begins to run a learned response to the trigger. The stimulus created by the needles breaks that cycle because a new, previously un-associated experience is now part of the picture. “Something different is happening here,” the brain registers as the needles go in... and then there’s an opportunity to create something new.

After using acupuncture, I would begin, as vividly as possible, to remember and feel my way into everything I loved about riding. The sense of freedom, the smoothness of carving a good corner, the camaraderie with the bike as you learn to work with the machine in increasingly subtle ways... I would feel, as precisely as possible, how those experiences lived inside me. How was my system signalling to me the experience was positive?

Maybe it was a calm opening across the chest, maybe an expanding and deepening while breathing, maybe a waterfall of focused relaxation running down the front of my body. However it showed up, I would take the images and sensations, stimulate one needle at a time, and see if I could bring that specific feeling to each specific part of my body. Repeat for all the points, then let the positive images spread throughout the whole body. Live inside that for a while.

Now look at the handlebars again. Did you react? Less? Good. Keep going.

I would systematically do this until I found all of the triggers for fear and apprehension associated with riding and unpacked them. You absolutely don’t need acupuncture to break the cycle, it’s just one example of a pattern interrupt. You can interrupt reactive patterns in a number of ways — by consciously focusing on your breath for a few moments, stand up and move your body in an atypical way, look at an inspiring picture of a loved one, just do anything that stops the normal cycle of trigger and fear response.

When I finally got the bike back, I had to see if all of this really worked. The moment I picked the bike up, I drove to the park where the accident happened and just watched myself. Having done some work, I felt surprisingly good. Happy to have the bike back, happy to be riding, but this one moment jumped out at me one turn before the site of the accident; and honestly, even after all this prep, caught me by surprise.

I had this sudden moment of tension in my solar plexus and a rising sensation up my midline to my face, then a brief squeezing sensation like I was about to vomit and/or cry. It lasted less than a second, and that was the last “poof” of traumatic material that surfaced. I stopped the bike and sat on the shoulder.

It was over. I looked around at the rocks and trees sloping along the contour of Harriman Park and just felt so grateful to be all right and in such a beautiful place. Grateful to live at such a time in human history when I can do something as ridiculous as ride two motorized wheels like a horse through the mountains. Life is short and fragile, and there’s nothing more valuable than staying focused on what makes you feel alive while you are here.

Even writing this is part of the process — part of closing the loop. Don’t let that difficult story spin in your head without conclusion. You can’t change the past, but you can notice how it continues to show up in your present, and you can act in your present. You’re not done. You are so much more in control of your experience than you think. Not in control like an authoritarian dictator, but in control in the way that comes from letting go enough to tolerate what you feel and accept what you think — even the gut wrenching sensations that register fear and threat.