Metal Men

Today was about the Lungs in Chinese Medicine and what they are attached to. In Chinese Medicine the Metal element relates to the Lungs and Large Intestine. Although seemingly very different the Lung and Large Intestine are connected through various functions and provide balance to each other.

All my patients today were men. They were dealing with common colds, grief, insomnia, headaches and muscle tension.

Cold Weather Treatments

As the air in the bay area finally starts to cool down, I am yet to see coldness in pulses or yang deficiency. However, the pulses are getting deeper and people who are dealing with blood deficiency have many physical manifestations. Wind invasions are entering their bodies, or muscles ache more, fatigue, headaches after a long work week and even hair loss are starting.

To nourish your blood in Chinese Medicine there is much work to do before being diagnosed as anemic.

Bone broth - partially the warmth of soup and bone broth can be deeply beneficial, but bone broth absorbs many of the nutrients that are carried in the bones and marrow of animals. This is one of the most nourishing foods and can be eaten medicinally as two dosages per day. It can me added to stir fries, soups and roasts.

Dark Green Veggies - dark green veggies carry iron and nutrients that help nourish the blood in Chinese Medicine.

Nettle Tea - nettles are a western herb that are a simple and great blood builder

Goji Berries - Very strengthening for the organs of the Liver and Kidney in Chinese Medicine. They can be great for blurry vision, anemia, dizziness or tinnitus. They can also help early graying of hair, sore back, painful knees. Long term dry cough. They are great to add to oatmeal, or add into tea that you brew for a long time.

Fall crisp

With the sudden change of weather there is a chill in the air to match. As the nights begin earlier our bodies natural rhythm is to be inside and rest more. It's a great time for rejuvenating acupuncture. This does not mean that acupuncture will bring instant energy and immunity. It means it will support your body's natural rhythms of the season to help you sleep when your body wants to sleep to have energy for the shorter days.

Energetically the qi is not as surface as it was even a week ago. I tend to needle deeper and use heat lamps and warming techniques to treat patients. 

Time to eat more cooked food and use delicious warming spices to aid in digestion and seasonal health.

-ginger

-garlic/onion

-cinnamon

-nutmeg

-pepper

Are great additions this time.

Gan Mai Da Zao Tang, Emotional Glue

Herbal formulas have many different purposes. Even within one formula there can be a variety of symptoms that it can treat. Formulas can have the same name and ingredients, but varying dosages of different herbs therefore creating different effects. I love what formulas can do, and how they feel in my body. One of my favorites is a very simple formula with a complex function.

I prescribe this formula and use this formula in times that I feel like I am coming unglued. There are a variety of sensations that go along with that. Sometimes it's uncontrollable tears. Other times it is anxiety, palpitations. It is a restless sensation due to the fact the it feels like some piece of our world is crumbling. This can be due to external events adding up and becoming overwhelming. It can be due to internal strife finally becoming strong enough to slowly unglue any feeling of stability that had come to be normal.

This formulas is called Gan Mai Da Zao Tang. With just three simple ingredients, red date, licorice root and wheat, this formula is extremely calming and grounding. All the ingredients are food herbs, which generally means they are on the gentle end of the spectrum.

Although this formula is not usually a permanent solution and is not the right fit for everyone with those sensations, it can gently, strongly help a person survive a tough patch without depleting them greatly. If you are feeling unglued, get acupuncture, take herbs. They can be greatly supportive in times where all someone needs is a little bit of comfort to keep going.

Don't settle for mediocrity

I went to an event at a wonderful, temporary space in SF called Freespace. At an event/discussion titled "Don't Settle for Mediocrity, A Discussion about career transitions and finding meaningful work"

I was on the fence about attending since I am on the road to meaningful work as a Licensed Acupuncturist. But I am in a career transition in the respect that I have my career chosen, I just don't have my career yet.

Acupuncturists aren't exactly recruited by the top five clinics in the U.S. during their last year in school. We aren't met at the gates with signing bonuses, big salaries and health benefits. However, we have chosen meaningful work which can be fulfilling for a lifetime. I really appreciated this talk, because it acknowledge the scary parts, the challenging parts and the community of people that work to find meaningful work. It may not immediately be financially stable. It may not be a road with a path that is easy to follow. Yet there is meaning in this work and it took work to get here. Here is a list I got from the workshop. As we wound the discussion through different people's experiences we covered these points on how to make the transition. (As life seems to be one everlasting transition, this list seems pretty apt for a lifetime of meaningful work). I thought I would share. Maybe it can inspire you to, #6, take a tiny tiny step, towards whatever meaningful work you can imagine. I hope you can join me and we can share a life of work that is meaningful together.

1. Listen to that VOICE within

2. Lean INTO fear, be vulnerable. Name your fears.

3. Excuses: distinguish your voice vs. other voices

4. Find believers, not haters

5. Take your ideas seriously, SHARE THEM

6. Take a tiny tiny step

7. Embrace the journey

8. Balance $ + meaning (some venn diagram of SKILLS/IMPACT/LIFESTYLE)

9. Don't waste time!

Tea As Medicine

I bought a local food package over the holidays as a gift for my partner and recently found this tea laying around. Made by an Oakland company, Sky Tea, it was Tangerine-Ginger. Recently, after carting it around and never giving it much thought, I took it out and read the ingredients:

• Hibiscus
• Tangerine Rind
• Schizandra berry
• Dried ginger 

Three of the four ingredients are commonly used Chinese Herbs! I love having food as medicine, herbal teas to me now usually mean some odd tasting powdered herbs mixed with hot water or long boiled raw chinese herbs to form a strong tasting tea. But this is a tea that is marketed to taste good, not for medicinal purposes, those are just a bonus.

If you are interested in the herbal details, I break it down after the photo. This is the tea covered in hot water, and secondly backlit by the sun. Look at that amazing magenta color that hibscus gives, beautiful!

 

Ok, so if you are still reading, I want to talk about the medicinal herbs included in this tea and what they do.

Hibiscus - is not in the Materia Medica that we use, but has lots of modern research of health benefits, the most common being that it reduces inflammation

Tangerine Rind aka 'Chen Pi' or Citri reticulatae Pericarpium - This type of tangerine peel is aged and known for "regulating qi". This is a commonly used herb to balance out a formula that can be strengthening but doesn't have enough movement qualities. Tangerine peel also has great effects not just on moving but on drying dampness and phlegm. Aka, this is a great hangover cure! Some symptoms it can help are: 

• feeling of fullness in your upper abdomen and chest
• indigestion
• vomiting
• hiccups
• belching
• flatulence
• poor appetite
• diarrhea
• loose stools
• productive cough

Schizandra Berry aka 'Wu Wei Zi' or Schisandrae Fructus - this is at type of Astringent Herb. These herbs help pull qi and or fluids together when things are dispersing too much. It is also known to be very sour, but the translation is called "five flavors seed". The herb can help:

• chronic cough/wheeze/asthma
• diarrhea, spermatorrhea, nocturnal emission, leukorrhea, frequen urination, enuresis
• spontaneous sweat, night sweat
• thirst
• diabetes
• palpitations
• insomnia
• irritability

Dried Ginger Root aka 'Gan Jiang' or Zingiberis Rhizoma - this is a type of warming herb. It can be great for lots of digestive issues that have a Chinese Medical diagonsis that is 'cold' and other issues as well.

• chronic diarrhea
• vomit
• pain in upper abdomen
• cold feeling in abdomen
• low back pain
• spontaneous sweating
• cold sweat
• cold extremeties
• cough
• dyspnea
• frothy sputum

Making Peace

For some reason I find that my mind easily goes to the 'what if this was better' about various parts of my life. I constantly look for things that could be improved, or with some sort of adjustment, there would be a radical perfection over the way life just...is.

In a personal challenge, hoping for the best outcome, but with very little control over the situation, I was given the advice, "do everything you can, but make peace with what could happen." Now, a year later, those words "make peace, make peace, make peace" ring over and over in my head like a mantra. Isn't that what we are all trying to do? We are all just trying, desperately to make peace with our situations. But, what is it that tears us away from that peace, why is there so much making, and not as much peace?

In our current 2013 world, most of us have smart phones with 3G/4G/LTE speedy connections. Whatever our connections, our brains are quick to jump from one topic to the next, with the hope that we will receive positive feedback, or some sort of feedback. This, "connection" seems to keep us going. This is the 'making' part. We are used to moving, making, working, controlling, acting upon something. We are not so used to what can come with the 'peace' part.

Peace has very different meanings for different people. While it can mean a variety of specific things, it has a general meaning of space, of stopping, of finding the calm within the storm. We try, I try to 'make peace' all the time. But, what if I just stopped and looked for the peace that is inherently there, within every situation, no matter the visible chaos that surrounds it.

The current auto-survive mode of stress, control, technologically-connected-real-time-disconnected feels like the storm, the chaos, the 'making' part. But within that there is a calm, a quiet, a peace that is cored into it, being a part of a bigger balance. When we are able to see that, when we are able to find that piece of ourselves, then we can see it everywhere, finding peace amidst any situation that may arise. Yes, there are tools to develop this, to give your mind space to find those moments of peace. Meditation, yoga, acupuncture but those are simply tools, reminding your body and mind how to do something it already knows.

Connected

Sunday night I was just back from a wonderful weekend of laugh therapy with my dearest girlfriends and as I was unpacking I switched on the TV for company.

It was the top of the hour and a narrator's voice was on, mimicking my thoughts about the rapid development of technology and the effect on our brains. Driving home into a bustling city, from the tranquility of the sierra mountains where there is easy cell phone service and a get-away is pretty connected. As I wondered about the ability to escape our technology,  'Connected', a film by Tiffany Schlain engulfed my attention. She calls it an 'autoblogography', with her personal narrative, she questions and uses research to start a conversation on the evolution of technology and the effect it is having on our brains, society and the world.

Along with becoming very attached to Tiffany and her personal story, I loved the verbalization of how our world is changing so rapidly. Tiffany's father wrote a book called "The Alphabet Versus the Goddess", Leonard Schlain had a theory explaining the evolution of the brain with invention and how the invention of the alphabet was a male type of brain to organize and separate. What he theorized was that the female type of brain would react to this to become stronger once visuals become more present, more easily passed around. Well, now we are moving beyond written word and visual stills. Film and video are making a strong upsurge in their ability to be accessible. Now, we no longer have to go to a rental store to watch something we do not own, we can order it with a click. With internet speeding up, home videos are shareable across oceans and can be on display for the whole world to see. Visuals are now an extremely potent form of communication at the same time that women are the most formally educated they ever have been and they are the majority in upper education. Although my description is incredibly oversimplified, I have been wondering these things. When are women going to be ruling countries? The natural process of motherhood, intuition and tools that women have been more apt to for as long as we can remember are now looking necessary to heal the wounds of a world ruled by science, trade and business. But how can we find balance?

In our world we are tipped towards addiction, drugs, alcohol, sugar, food, internet and technology. How do we find inner balance in a world of all these influences? Maybe there is some form of balance but things feel out of balance to me. In my life, I always strive towards balance, part of that including some imbalance, but quickly finding a way back to a moment of equilibrium. Chinese Medicine has taught me tools to get back to equilibrium and has helped me develop these questions.

I still wonder, is it possible to escape my technology? Should I experiment and leave my cell phone at home one day, treating it as a home phone? What would other people think? Would they be frustrated with me or inspired to do the same? Will society yo-yo back to the way it was? No, that's impossible, we are no addicted to our creations. What about mindfulness, will it upsurge in rebellion to all of our mindlessness? Are people happy with this disconnected technological world?

A conversation needs to happen, maybe all the time and everyday. We are accepting these changes faster than our brains and bodies can adapt. In 40 years, there will be research and knowledge that will probably add the side effects of the world we live in now. Whatever surfaces is invisible now, waiting for it's time in the headlines. Until we get to that point in the future, maybe a little balance is good for now. Finding a moment, an hour, a day to unplug and interface with humans instead of a screen. We humans like each other, and it's important to remember that.

Summer, Season of the Heart

Our hearts and our heads seem to be in constant friendship or battle with each other. So often people feel they must chose with one and not both. Our hearts are a vital and important part of our physiological being, yet they also have a life of their own. The emotions that we feel from the left part of our chest our real and the bounce out of us strongly as if needing room for expansion.

In summer, the season of expansion, these sensations are often stronger and more urgent. In Chinese Medicine the Heart is related to the summer season and pathology sometimes emerges during this season because of this close relationship. The heart is most prone to symptoms of heat, which means sleepless nights, restless sleep, anxiety, palpitations, overexcitement, excessive talking, excessive dreaming and other symptoms. Our choices in our lifestyle and diet can help prevent or curb these symptoms when they arise.

SUMMER FOOD:

-Think cooling foods, yet limit raw fruits and veggies to 1.5 meals a day. Your digestion will thank you for keeping up with cooked food!

SUMMER SLEEP:

-later and less sleep is ok, but your body loves a good 11PM-7AM eight hour night.

SUMMER EXERCISE:

-Now is the season to train for something that takes a lot of energy, take advantage of the light and energy of the season to work for a marathon, bike race etc.

SUMMER CREATIVITY:

-the seasonal flow is expansive, use this time to get outside for inspiration and put that inspiration to action with the extra hours of daylight

SUMMER EMOTIONAL:

-feel the easy joy and enjoy the available lightness of being that matches the season. If depression and anxiety come to you easily they may knock on your door this season as well. If you need help with balance, come get a treatment or some herbs to keep on hand.

Happy Summer Everyone!

Hello Wellness Junkies!

It has come to my attention that a majority of people in the United States have no clue what Chinese Medicine is or how it could possibly help them. My goal is to use tips I have found and have chosen to live by to help introduce people to basic suggestions to improve health.

Firstly, Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine school is a complete journey and rite of passage. After 3.3 years of full time school, months of studying, and passing a (very big) licensing exam later you earn your L.Ac. (Licensed Acupuncturist).

This is the beginning of my professional journey and I invite you to share it with me!