Dr. Anne Shelton Crute & Dr. Adam Okerblom
Licensed Acupuncturists (LAc), Doctors of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (DAOM)
Acupuncture | Classical Chinese Medicine | Tibetan Medicine
Herbal Therapy | Seasonal Care | Chinese Polestar Astrology
Our work is to help you navigate health challenges and feel like yourself again.
Care is informed by millennia of medical knowledge from the Chinese, Tibetan, and Ayurvedic traditions,
and tailored to your individual path.
New patients welcome at our Berkeley and Albany acupuncture offices. Care begins with conversation.
Practitioners
Anne and Adam are Licensed Acupuncurists (LAc) and Doctors of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (DAOM) with decades of training and experience. They offer classical Chinese Medicine, Tibetan Medicine, Ayurvedic herbalism, and Chinese Polestar astrology.
Anne and Adam are educators offering various courses, workshops, and teachings to communities and universities
both locally and worldwide.
Services
Ritual Health offers acupuncture and individualized herbal formula prescriptions based on traditional diagnostic methods like pulse and tongue examination. Chinese Polestar Astrological analysis is offered as a stand-alone service as well as a diagnostic tool for treatment. We utilize various hands-on therapeutics such as moxibustion and cupping.
Yangsheng
Art of Living in Season
A monthly online course with Anne Shelton Crute & Tara Bianca Rado within a supportive community, with recipes, qigong, and teachings—live or recorded.
What does it mean to live in rhythm with the world? Do you tend to ask your acupuncturist, “What can I do between sessions?” or “What should I eat for my condition?” or “How long should I sleep?”
Classical Chinese medicine understands the year as a living sequence of qi transformations. The 24 solar nodes mark subtle microseasons: shifts in climate, light, physiology, emotion, and the spirit that shape human life throughout the seasons.
Yangsheng, or “nourishing life,” is the art of aligning daily life with these movements through food, rest, ritual, seasonal awareness, and embodied practice.
Rooted in classical Chinese medicine, acupuncture, and East Asian cosmology, this ongoing monthly assembly meets 10 months a year and offers practical ways to work with seasonal change through teachings on these microseasons with food practices, tea, qi gong, astrology, and daily cultivation.
Live monthly on Zoom, with recordings available. Open to all—patient, practitioners, students, and beginners alike. Next class October 4, 2026.
Article: Please Feel Your Feelings
“Quiet peacefulness, absolute emptiness — the true qi follows.” Suwen 1
We need our emotions.
This may sound obvious, but in practice it is increasingly countercultural.
Much of contemporary wellness and pop psychology frames emotional health as the achievement of calm: regulation as smoothing, neutralizing, or quieting experience. The implicit goal is an unruffled state. This approach dulls us, delays us, prevents us from using our bodies as tools to help us meet reality as it is.
From the perspective of classical Chinese medicine, this goal is not only unrealistic: it is physiologically misguided.
What to do instead? It has to do with the nature of the current time we are in, and the handoff from the gallbladder channel to the liver channel.
Year of the Yang Fire Horse:
Recording Available
Understanding the nature of the Yang Fire Horse Year is not limited to the lunar new year festival moment—it’s something we work with all year. This talk offers a clear orientation to the qi dynamics shaping 2026, and how to move in relationship to them.
This lecture covers the broader atmosphere of the year, along with practical ways to recognize and respond to its movement in daily life.
Originally recorded live at Blue Willow Teaspot in Berkeley, CA, with proceeds benefiting the Oakland-based nonprofit Family Violence Law Center.
Access the recording and work with this material throughout the year.
Alchemical Acupuncture:
How Often Should I Get Care?
How often should you get acupuncture? The answer depends on what you are asking care to do.
This article looks at everything from seasonal maintenance and support for chronic conditions to acupuncture as a deeper practice of self-cultivation.
We explore why the body can benefit from regular care even before symptoms become urgent, how treatment can help us move with the seasons instead of constantly fighting ourselves, and what it means to use acupuncture not only to treat disease, but to work backward toward health.
At its deepest, acupuncture can become a way of understanding our own patterns, freeing up energy that has been tied up in compensation, and making more of our life force available to us.
clinic
We offer acupuncture at three clinic locations in the San Francisco East Bay Area. Our North Berkeley office is located off of Shattuck Avenue, in the heart of Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto neighborhood. Our Albany office is located off Solano Avenue, close to Flowerland garden shop, restaurants, and boutiques. Our El Cerrito Plaza office is adjacent to the bustling shops and services of El Cerrito Plaza, close to the BART station, and right off of San Pablo Avenue.
We Won!
We have received many accolades over the last few years here in the San Francisco East Bay Area. Ritual Health Acupuncture Clinic’s awards include… Finalist in three categories in SFGate’s Best of the Bay 2025 and 2026 competitions: Healing/Wellness Center, Holistic Health, and Pain Management. Winner of “Best Acupuncture Clinic” by Google Reviews Business Rate 2025 and 2026. Winner of East Bay Times “Best in the East Bay: Acupuncture Clinic” in 2024 and 2026!
Listen to the PODCAST
Dr. Anne Shelton Crute joins Michael Max on the Qiological podcast, alongside Thomas Sørensen and Z’ev Rosenberg, for a wide-ranging conversation about Mingmen, Ministerial Fire, and the movement of warmth and vitality through the body.
The discussion moves between the classical texts, clinical practice, palpation, alchemical physiology, and Chinese medicine’s larger ecological understanding of fire. Anne explores Ministerial Fire as an “activation power”—not simply heat, but the movement that allows life, presence, and function to reach throughout the whole person
Study Chinese Astrology
Interested in studying Chinese Polestar Astrology aka Zi Wei Dou Shu?
Two live, online, mixed-level study groups are working through foundation theory and the practical application of Chinese Polestar Astrology with Dr. Anne Shelton Crute. Classes are recorded for those who cannot attend live each time.
Class Dates: October 5 & 19 | November 16 & 30 | future dates TBA | ongoing enrollment
Snake Assembly: Beginner/Intermediate levels welcome! Mondays, 2x/month, 10-11:30am Pacific, $150/month; inquire directly to join.
Dragon Assembly: Mondays, 2x/month, 12:30-2:00pm Pacific, $150/month; This cohort is closed unless you have special permission.
Horse Assembly? Unlikely, but possible. Keep reaching out if you want it. I may start late this year or early next.
Curriculum: Classes include lecture material, Q&A sessions, case studies, and supportive practices and techniques. This material is designed to support the development of the Chinese philosophical view necessary for global interpretation as well as technique, including stems & branches, houses, star power, star placement, and global interpretation. Learn more about Anne’s training here and her practice here.
Book, Teachings & Seminar Tour
This is an exciting phase for sharing our classics-based approach to Chinese medicine!
Book Release News: A Ring Without End: Reflections on Classical Chinese Medicine Mind/Body Mapping, the book for which Anne authored a chapter officially launched at Kamwo, a 4th generation Chinese medicine herb company in Chinatown in June. It was a fun party: Watch a clip of Dr. Anne at Kamwo. Anne’s chapter titled, “The Celestial Dance: Integrating Time & Astronomy in Chinese Medicine,” discusses the uses of timing in clinical practices and its foundation in the classical literature of the tradition.
Teaching News:
Dr. Adam Okerblom taught Tibetan Medicine in LA at Yo San University earlier this year to the doctoral students.
Dr. Anne taught alongside Z’ev Rosenberg on the topic of the classical understandings of Ministerial Fire—an often forgotten, but very helpful diagnostic piece for clinical practice at the Academy of Chinese Culture & Health Sciences’s Oakland-based doctoral program. This work echoed the research that Z’ev offered in his book Afterglow: Ministerial Fire and Chinese Ecological Medicine
With Z’ev Rosenberg, Anne presented her research for A Ring Without End for a CEU course in NYC alongside authors Z’ev Rosenberg, Stephen Cowan, and Daniel Schrier, and again with Z’ev at the doctoral programs in LA at Yo San University and again for San Jose-based Five Branches University in 2025.
Get a copy of A Ring Without End at clinic or by email.
The Jade Circle
Join our social and educational offering, called The Jade Circle. This is part of our community-building and support branch of our clinic. Here, patients and community can share, ask questions, and get notifications of new articles to support your healing process on our WhatsApp group. We also have regular social meetings both in-person and online. If you are interested in educational events like this and fun art and culture events like this, check it out.
It’s hard to heal alone. We need community.
Join the WhatsApp group, where we post our clinic’s initiatives to support you in integrating natural wisdom and traditional medicine into your life. Articles, tips, and local events.
📅 Future events TBA.
Join Our Email List!
We send occasional announcements, seasonal teachings, and thoughtful articles—nothing spammy.
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