Tag Archives: Mindfulness

Late-Summer Moon

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IMG_4376I’m at the footsteps of graduation. A couple more tests and a few more clinic shifts and I will receive my Masters of Traditional Oriental Medicine (MSTOM). Four years rigorous years of study later I prepare to step out into the world to practice medicine on my own. There’s a lot to reflect on and process; so much has happened over the past weeks and months. And it’s the perfect time to be engaged in this process of integration and contemplation.

You see, we just began the lunar month of the late summer. In Chinese Medicine the late summer is the season of the Earth element, which in the body corresponds with our digestive faculties. Our garden is exploding with tomatoes, cucumbers, and kale; we’ve harvested carrots and beets and beans too – so much to eat and digest and absorb. The process of digestion involves taking things from the outside world (food) and breaking it down and then integrating what we need from it into our body.

So too, we digest our experiences. We reflect on different things that happen in our lives and how we respond and interact with them and then we figure out what we need to integrate into ourselves. Of course there is a broad spectrum of thought between healthy contemplation and over-thinking and over-analyzing. In Chinese Medicine, we see over-thinking thing as pathological and as harmful to our health and digestive ability (that said, there’s a “chicken and egg” question: is said overthinking causing problems, or are we overthinking things because we’re already out-of-balance – ever noticed how sometimes after eating certain foods your head gets fuzzy and you have trouble thinking clearly?).

It also happens to be the tradition of my ancestors to integrate and contemplate life and how we’re living during this part of the earth’s cycle around the sun. In Jewish mythology we are in the last month of the year, a time to integrate the experiences of the year, a time when we can go out into the fields to be with the Earth and meditate on why we’re here and what we’re doing right and what we could be doing better. This late-summer month is only just beginning, and as we watch the moon wax and then wane we can take a moment to contemplate where we are in our lives, and where we’re going, and how well we’ve been digesting along the way.

How Acupuncture is Like Gardening

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I was out watering the garden this morning noticing how slowly things actually move in nature. We direct seeded a bunch of root crops and greens a few weeks ago and at first I felt a bit silly watering raised beds with only dirt in them. After a week, then 10 days, I started to wonder if the seeds we used were bad, or if something was wrong with the soil. Then I looked closer, and the tiniest little sprouts were starting to come up.

Now, I water these baby sproutlings with joy, and I know in my mind that in about a month we’ll start eating our own abundant homegrown greens. But in the present a month feels like a long time (though in retrospect I’ll wonder how a whole month managed to pass by). Or, I could go to the grocery store and get a bunch of chard right now.

As I was thinking about how slowly things move in nature, it popped into my head that acupuncture is a natural process that utilizes the body’s own healing ability to get back to a place of health. Yes, often people get immediate relief from pain, and some people even see other immediate results – they might sleep better, or feel less bloated after a meal, or have more energy – but often the relief isn’t permanent, until they’ve had enough acupuncture sessions to really lock the shifts towards health into place.

I think one of the challenges we have being patient to see results, is that often, by the time we’ve seek out intervention, we’ve already been patiently waiting for an issue to resolve itself on its own. We’ve used up our reserves of patience and perseverance and are ready for a quick fix. Ironically, the longer we wait, the deeper most issues have managed to get and the longer they take to fix naturally. It’s like weeding a garden, you want to pull the weeds out as soon as they sprout, the longer you wait, the harder they are to get out and keep out.

Next time your feeling impatient with yourself or with your body – whether it’s how long it’s taking you to lose some weight, or how difficult it’s been to get rid of sinusitis, or how long it’s taking to recover from an injury – go for a walk in a garden, or in the woods, or on a farm. Say hello the fallen tree trunk that is slowly being recycled back into the soil. Say hello to the big tree that’s decades older than you are. Say hello to the flower that took weeks, if not months, to germinate, and sprout, and grow, and bud, and blossom. You can even say hello to the rocks, that over the course of millions of years will be etched down to sand. And smile, and be grateful for the beautiful world around us, for all the reminders we’re given about how to live well, and for the resilience there is in our bodies and spirits.

The Hara

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It’s always interesting when a few different classes all line up and teach and talk about the same thing from different angles. I’d say the theme of the past few weeks has been “the belly” or “Hara” in Japanese. In our culture, we have an interesting relationship with our bellies. There are plenty of media outlets showing us what a “pretty/sexy belly” looks like and if our belly doesn’t look like that we may have trouble liking our belly. So, we either try to change it, or ignore it, or oscillate between the two – either way, we don’t love our bellies as they are. We also generally spend more time trying to tell it how we think it should be rather than listening to what it needs and wants.

Perhaps not surprisingly, we store a lot of our stress and tension in our bellies. Sometimes it shows up in symptoms (acid reflux, belly aches, loose stools, indigestion, gas, bloating), but sometime it doesn’t, and most of our stress alleviating practices don’t really focus on on stressed out bellies. When was the last time you had your belly massaged? As strange as it may sound, that’s an integral part of many Chinese and Japanese health treatments, and while it’s not always entirely pleasant while it’s happening, it usually feels great afterward and makes a big difference, and it happens to be the first thing we’re learning how to do in my Shiatsu class. There are plenty of other things we can do to make our bellies (and thus our whole bodies) happier that don’t involve direct contact for those of us who aren’t comfortable with that, or who are at a loss about where they can find a belly massage.

There’s the obvious thing of choosing what how and when to eat. There’s so much out there about what and how to eat, that I hesitate to add the echoes of the often contradictory advice. A couple perhaps indisputable suggestions I can make are to try not to eat while stressed out or in a hurry, try not to eat late at night. I’d also recommend eating warm foods more often than cold foods (warm foods are easier to digest, cold foods constrict the stomach and require extra energy to bring them up to body temperature) – especially as we move into the colder months.

In my differentiation of disease class we’ve been talking about how much of our immune system is in our gut. While we tend to thing of our digestive track as inside of us, however the whole length of our alimentary canal from our mouths to our anus is technically outside of us, and we have to keep things in our guts in check. There happen to be billions of microorganisms living in our gut, and when things are in balance, we’re living symbiotically. They break down some of the fiber we eat into short chain fatty acids (SCFA), which are an essential nutrient for the cells lining our intestines. When things are out of balance, bacteria and yeasts can live like parasites inside of us, sapping some of our energy and nutrients and weakening us and our immune systems and thus making us vulnerable to other diseases. A few simple things we can do to help our guts out are eating probiotic foods (like yogurt or sauerkraut) or taking a probiotic (such as acidophilus), and making sure we get enough fiber (preferably from a natural source like fruit and vegetables).

Hopefully, we can all bring a little more attention to our bellies, and send them some love, regardless of how they look or feel, and maybe start listening a little more to what they need and want.

I know things!

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I just made it through mid-terms and I had a surprisingly awesome experience studying for them. While studying for my Acu-points mid-term, I sat down, and as a review, started writing out everything I know. After a few minutes I looked down at a page, full points and categories on 7 channels and I realized that a year ago, I knew none of this. It was one of those important moments where I became aware of my progress.

Whenever I work on a long-term project, I often get caught up in the future, but am getting better at being content in the present. Another important part of any journey is to take intermittent brakes to look back and acknowledge the progress you’ve made. It’s encouraging and empowering to see what you’ve accomplished and how your hard work has come to fruition.

I spent the summer after graduating from college working on a farm, and at the end of every week we would take some time to walk the fields with the specific intention of bringing our awareness to the changes that had happened over the past week. I was always blown away by how much taller the tomato plants were, and how many new baby plants had been planted. More importantly the feelings of fulfillment, satisfaction, and gratitude that filled me, helped me take a day off (which I always needed to replenish myself) and fueled me in the following week.

Whether we’re growing food, teaching children, running a business, or learning acupuncture points, it’s vital to step back occasionally and bring awareness to what we’ve achieved thus far. We may have a ways to go before we reach our ultimate destination, but that may be all the more reason to be proud of how far we’ve come.

We have to remind ourselves…

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We have to remind ourselves. Constantly remind ourselves.

It’s not that we as individuals are forgetful, it’s not that we’re careless, it’s just part of the way the human mind works, and especially in this modern world of ours, there are so many distractions.

We need to remind ourselves what our goals are and how we intend to accomplish them.

We need to remind ourselves to take care of ourselves – and we need to remember how to take care of ourselves.

We need to remind ourselves to be forgiving (we are all human).

We need to remind ourselves to be compassionate.

We need to remind ourselves of the Power of Love.

One of my roommates reminded me this past week that we need to remind ourselves about things. She was telling me about a magazine she reads that has lots of ideas and tends to remind her of things she’s forgotten.

Recently, I’ve resumed my morning meditation and prayer practice. This is one of my ways of reminding myself of some of the more important things to me in life. I also rely on friends and family, and on my calendar and to-do list. Sunsets help a lot too.

Oh, in case you’ve forgotten, Happy Father’s Day! 🙂

How do you remind yourself about what’s important?

Pure Contentment

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Yesterday in my Acu-Points class I had a moment of pure contentment.

As much as I love learning overall, especially Chinese medicine, there are classes and days when it feels like I’m just doing what I have to to get by. Dragging through, studying for the quiz and not to master the material. I’d say it’s a pretty normal phenomenon, and to be expected. I also often think of school as a means to end, it’s about getting through the program so that I can treat people.

That’s why this moment was noteworthy. I was lying on the table while my friend placed sticky dots on my Urinary Bladder channel on my leg. Gazing around at my classmates, it just struck me how wonderful everything was, in the present moment. All of us just hanging out learning where points are and what they do. Ironically, I thought of the moment in terms of my future memory of it. A few years down the road, after I graduate, I could be thinking back to this moment with nostalgia, I best cherish it while it’s here.

I’ve written about some practices to stay present, but it’s nice when things just happen on their own. What was important about this moment was that it gave me a glimpse of what it feels like to treat everything as the ends, rather than the means. In that moment (and hopefully from now on in many more moments to come) I was no longer in school to graduate, I was able to be purely in the experience of being in school, just to be in school. Our actions always have results, but like they say in the Bhagavad-Gita, we need to focus on doing the actions and let go of the outcome of the result in order to achieve at the highest level.

Self-Cultivation as a Pracitioner

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“You won’t be able to tell a client to ____ (eat healthy, exercise, meditate, get enough sleep) if you’re not doing so yourself.”

These words have been ringing in my ears since my last Fundamentals of Chinese Medicine lecture last semester. So simple, yet so true, and something all of the Chinese medicine students (and practitioners) need to be thinking about. If I’m not able to set aside time to meditate and exercise, and if I don’t invest time and energy in making and eating delicious and healthy food, I won’t be able to encourage my patients to do that with integrity.
And they’ll know. Because of how you say it and because of how you hold yourself, they’ll know whether you’re hypocritically dishing out advice.

There’s a positive side to this as well though.

You can be honest about your own personal challenges and recognize that it’s not an all-or-nothing-game. You can share your own personal ways of fitting in a short meditation session or a quick exercise jaunt. And you can share how you let your slide sometimes and go for the occasional doughnut when you really want it.
Balance is important.
Honesty is important.
Integrity is important,
in life in general, but especially when communicating with patients.

So, how do you manage to juggle your multitude of obligations?