 Spring is finally here!
Do you know how I know? The symptoms that you all are coming in with! Spring is the season associated with the Liver, in Chinese Medicine. The Liver, when it's out of balance, shows particular symptoms. Have you been experiencing any of these?
The Liver is associated with the element of Wood. Just like the trees budding, bulbs popping up out of the ground, and grass growing crazy fast, our energy is ready to emerge for the season! Winter time is a time to rest and repair and rebuild. Spring is a time to emerge, grow and expand. Many of us are experiencing worsened symptoms because the weather hasn't been cooperating with our energetic and mental desires to start moving, growing and changing! In order to help ease your Livery symptoms, consider trying some of these tactics!
Until Next Time! <3 Becca
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Your digestion (and the ability to absorb nutrients efficiently) play a role in all of them! You have over 8 feet of intestines, divided into the large and small intestines. Your intestines are responsible to absorbing much of the nutrients from the foods you eat. I like to think of your intestines being like your skin. If you think about it, we are one big tube with our mouths being one end and our anuses being the other. Technically, the inside surface of our intestines is like our skin - the barrier between us and the outside world! Take a moment to think about that - it's wild, huh? :) So what happens if your skin or intestines aren't healthy and can't provide an effect barrier? On our skin, bacteria can cause an infection. In our intestines, we can either absorb things that aren't supposed to make it through, or be unable to absorb nutrients that we should be able to. This can lead to increased allergies, in the case of absorbing things we shouldn't; or nutritional deficiencies in the case of being unable to absorb vitamins and minerals properly. Improper diets, antibiotic use, and stress can all lead to an unhealthy digestive system. Poor digestion can also be complicated by Celiac Disease (gluten intolerance), Irritable Bowel Disorder and Chron's Disease which all damage the absorptive lining of the intestines. So what can you do to help keep your intestines happy and healthy on your own?
Keeping your intestines healthy is absolutely necessary for maintaining your health. Without an effective barrier against the outside, your immune system will have to work overtime to protect your body. Without a proper absorptive surface, your body won't get the building blocks for maintaining your body!  Image courtesy of gubgib / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Tomorrow is Valentine's Day and in western ideology, the heart is king of love. But in Chinese medicine, the Kidney plays a huge role in addition to the heart! I've seen a LOT of great articles around the last few days on just this topic, here are a few :
Regardless of whether you have a valentine in your life, it's important to keep your Kidney Qi strong and healthy! Happy Valentine's Day!  Welcome to the last post of Resolutions Week. You made it! Hopefully your first week with your new goals in 2011 went well! If it was a rough one, keep going, it WILL get easier as these new habits become old ones.
Today I'm going to talk about willpower and tips and tricks for keeping the motivation until your new-found habits become integrated in your daily life. First off, what is willpower? Dictionary.com defines it as: the ability to control oneself and determine one's actions As I was looking through the definitions to find the one I wanted to use in this article, I found that they have a section of quotes that contain the word you've just looked up. Pretty cool! And funny enough, there's a quote that I think will fit well in this situation: Writing a book is like rearing children—willpower has very little to do with it. If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, the baby will starve. You do it out of love. Willpower is a weak idea; love is strong. You don't have to scourge yourself with a cat-o'-nine tails to go to the baby. You go to the baby out of love for that particular baby. That's the same way you go to your desk. - Annie Dillard Let's just substitute the parts about writing a book with the idea of living healthfully and loving your body. Nice, huh? So let's talk about willpower from a Chinese medical perspective. Our willpower is associated with our Kidneys. When the Kidneys are weak, not only can we experience a decrease in willpower, but fatigue, early aging, pain or weakness in our low back or knees and much more. Kidney deficiency is really common in college students, parents of young children, and anyone else burning the candle at both ends. Have you noticed that the more tired or stressed out you are, the harder it is to follow through with things that aren't vital? So what can we do to strengthen our Kidneys so we'll be more likely to follow through long-term with our goals?
Resolutions Week - Intro Resolutions Week - Part I - Exercise Resolutions Week - Part II - Healthy Eating Resolutions Week - Part III - Quitting Smoking  Welcome back to Resolutions Week! If you're just now finding this series, you'll find links to the other posts at the end.
Today we're going to talk about smoking and how it affects our bodies from a Chinese medical standpoint. In Chinese medicine, any time we're exposed to smoke it has a drying effect. This could be cigarette smoke, marijuana smoke, or even smoke from the wood-burning stove you use to heat your house during the winter. As with many things, a few exposures here and there aren't going to drastically change your health. It's the chronic, long-term exposures that will have an impact. What does it mean for something to be drying? Just like a campfire can dry your shoes after you played in the river earlier in the day, smoking will dry up your body fluids. Some people will notice this drying effect as:
Again, in small doses, the drying won't have a lasting effect. We'll drink more water because we're thirsty, which will replenish our body fluids. Long term, however, while we could theoretically drink enough water to compensate for the loss of body fluids, our body's mechanisms for moving that fluid to different our different parts are damaged. We can drink a ton of water, but we're still going to have the dry skin, hair and nails (and other symptoms) because our body isn't taking in and utilizing fluids properly anymore. In Chinese medical terms, smoking damages our Yin. When we don't have enough Yin energy to cool, moisten and calm, we end up with uncomfortable symptoms such as those mentioned above. To reverse this drying effect, acupuncture and herbs can be prescribed, but of course, the best course of action is to limit your exposure. Tomorrow will be our last piece of this series on Resolutions. We'll be talking about will-power and tips and tricks to keep going with those healthful resolutions! As mentioned above, here are links to the rest of the articles from Resolutions Week Resolutions Week - Intro Resolutions Week - Part I - Exercise Resolutions Week - Part II - Healthy Eating Resolutions Week - Part IV - Willpower  Welcome to Resolutions Week! Yesterday we talked about how Chinese medicine looks at exercise. Today we're going to take a look at how Chinese medicine views healthy eating - another common New Year's Resolution.
In Chinese medical theory, your Stomach is viewed as an oven, in which the foods you eat are cooked using the energy of the Spleen. This isn't too far off from what we know biologically happens. Biologically speaking, our foods are chemically "cooked" using acids and enzymes rather than heat cooked, but those ancient Chinese had a great analogy going, so let's stick with it! So you put food into your Stomach and then your Spleen turns the oven on to digest that food. There are a couple of ways that we can make our oven inefficient at cooking our foods. Let's take a look at them:
The above things that we can do to make our oven inefficient are often used in "dieting" to burn more calories (except for the part about eating too many sweets, of course). For someone who is extremely robust and in tip-top shape, doing those things won't likely make a large impact on their digestion. Their oven is already super efficient and not bogged-down! But in someone who has weaker digestion, who is cold all the time or has fatigue, doing these things can mean you're spending too much energy on digesting the food without gaining enough from it. So here's what I recommend most people do to eat healthier:
Come back tomorrow for a look at Quitting Smoking as a New Year's Resolution! In case you missed the rest of this series: Resolutions Week - Intro Resolutions Week - Part I - Exercise Resolutions Week - Part III - Quitting Smoking Resolutions Week - Part IV - Willpower  Welcome to Resolutions Week! Today we'll be discussing exercise and its importance as viewed from the Chinese medical perspective.
Many many MANY people make exercise a part of their New Year's Resolutions. (It's definitely made my list!) We all know that to be truly healthy, exercise is an important building block. So why do so many of us struggle with the motivation to get up and move our bodies regularly? We are a society of stress. Our jobs are stressful. Our families are stressful. Traffic is stressful. We're expected to do so much in so few hours! In Chinese medical theory, stress is associated with the Liver and the Wood element. Stress prevents the Liver from doing its job of keeping our Qi moving in a smooth fashion. If our Qi isn't moving properly, we start to get symptoms of unhealth. When we exercise regularly, we are mechanically making our Qi flow. Think of all those muscles moving. That blood pumping. The sweat pouring. Your Qi follows each of them. So even though the stress may be making it difficult for your Qi to move smoothly, when you exercise, it is being forced to do so, which will help ease your levels of stress. See how that works? It's a great feedback loop! One of the reasons we may find it difficult to get motivated to get moving is because of our Qi not moving properly. Think of it like a car with a dead battery. If the battery isn't sending power to the engine to start it, you're going to have to push-start it. It's hard to be motivated to push that car, especially if it means having to get up earlier in the morning! However, if you know that if you push that car and get the battery fixed so it'll start easily when you tell it to, it's much easier to get out there and start pushing! So get out there and fulfill your New Year's Resolutions, and know that you're doing your body good to get that Qi moving! Remember, it'll get easier to continue with your new habit once all those little bits of Qi get unstuck! Resolutions Week - Intro Resolutions Week - Part II - Healthy Eating Resolutions Week - Part III - Quitting Smoking Resolutions Week - Part IV - Willpower I liked this article from Natural News (copied below) and wanted to share it with you all. Apparently I am in the mood for some autumnal foods. Bonus recipe at the end!
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, autumn is represented by the metal element, which corresponds to the Lungs and Large Intestine. Weakness in this element shows up as ailments in the Lung and Intestines: allergies, asthma and constipation. The remedy can be found in this season's most notable food: the pumpkin or squash. The pumpkin is round, orange and sweet. It corresponds to the earth element in the five element cycle. Earth is the mother of metal. In Chinese medicine there is a saying: when there is weakness in the child (in this case metal: lungs and large intestine), nourish the mother (in this case earth.) Weakness in the lungs will show up as:
In Chinese medicine, the pumpkin is known to relieve damp conditions such as dysentery and eczema. It promotes discharge of mucus from the lungs, bronchi and throat, easing bronchialasthma. (1) Not only does the flesh of the pumpkin benefit the Lungs and Large Intestine, the seeds are especially good for the intestines, easing constipation and acting as a parasite cleanse. Known as nan gua zi, pumpkin seeds are especially known to alleviate tapeworm and roundworm. For this purpose pumpkin seeds are taken by boiling into a strong tea known as a decoction or grinding into a powder to be taken with water. Nutritionally, pumpkins are high in beta carotene which is converted by the body to vitamin A. Beta carotene protects the mucous membranes of the body and has been shown to protect both the lungs and large intestine against cancer. (2) Soup is an excellent way to nourish the body this time of year. The following soup can be made with pumpkin or any kind of yellow winter squash. Make sure to save and wash the seeds, which can then be salted and baked at 350 degrees until dry. Nourishing Pumpkin Soup
References Pitchford, Paul. Healing with Whole Foods. North Atlantic Books. Berkeley, CA. Bensky, Dan and Gamble, Andrew. Chinese Herbal Medicine, Materia Medica.Eastland Press, Seattle. Shanghai College of Traditional Medicine. Acupuncture, A Comprehensive Text. Eastland Press. Seattle. A recent study on acupuncture as a treatment for depression during pregnancy finds that acupuncture shows some real promise for being a safe and effective treatment during a time when most treatments are not considered safe.
Depression, according to Chinese medicine, is due to Qi and/or blood deficiency, usually associated with the Heart (the organ associated with the emotion of joy) and Spleen (the organ associated with being grounded and content in life). When our Qi levels are not strong enough to support these emotions, then we fall to the other, unhealthy, side of the spectrum. We experience the common symptoms of depression. To further compound the problem of depression, when our Spleen is weak, our Liver (the organ associate with stress!) is allowed to rule the roost! So not only are we feeling bad, but we experience more stress which can force us into a cycle of feeling hopeless. So how can we treat depression using Chinese medicine? First off, I'd like to mention that anytime you're dealing with a major deficit of Qi or blood, it takes time to correct. There is no quick fix. Expect at least 1-3 months, depending on how deficient you are, to see results. Expect to be treated longer than that for lasting results. So back to the question - how can we treat depression using Chinese medicine? Acupuncture and herbs will help get your Qi back to healthy levels relatively quickly. Things that you can do at home include:
So I've done a lot of talking about the Spleen, in particular its sibling-like relationship with the Liver. Today I want to give you a few ideas of things you can do at home that will strengthen your Spleen which will in turn give you:
The emotions of the Spleen are worry and over-analyzing on the negative end and feeling at peace on the positive side of the spectrum. If you're feeling stressed out by something, try not to over-analyze it. It is what it is. This isn't to say that you shouldn't work to change things, but don't get bogged down by negative details. Earth is the element of the Spleen. Connect with the earth element! Go for a hike in a wooded area - just make sure that the path you're taking is dirt, not concrete! Below are some stretches that you can do in order to stimulate the Spleen (and its spouse channel, the Stomach). Sit in a kneeling position with your buttocks on your feet. Place your hands on the floor next to your feet. As you slowly inhale, lean back towards the floor as far as you can comfortably go, letting your head drop back. Upon exhale, lift yourself back to the starting position. Repeat 5 times.   Consider omitting excess sugars from your life. They damage your Spleen by bogging it down.
And finally, love your Spleen! It does some hard work digesting foods for you! |
