Brodie Welch, Licensed Acupuncturist

Recently one of my patients -a beautiful, strong, and conscious, woman- told me that her qi gong practice has taught her to examine the difference between health and fitness in her life. She went on to explain how some of the things she had been doing to “stay fit” were actually compromising her health. Too much running and biking were causing back pain, knee pain, and fatigue. But in moderation, these same exercises helped her feel great. Listening to her body’s wisdom, she was able to keep herself feeling pain-free and energetic through doing less of what her mind was telling her she needed in order to be fit. Some days that meant a gentle walk rather than a vigorous run.

I could relate. My own internal “should” voice can be very strong. And loud. At times shrill. And I have definite ideas about what I need to be doing in order to be healthy, which don’t always line up with what my body needs. Is it better to force myself to get up and meditate, or get an extra hour of sleep? Green smoothies can be wonderfully healthy, but is my digestive qi up to the challenge of digesting them in the cold, damp, winter? Maybe oatmeal would be a better choice. My intellectual mind doesn’t always know the answers, but my bodymind does. That information is always there when I bother to tune in and ask, rather than let my mind run the show.

Qigong is a practice of turning into the bodymind. But the benefits of the practice are not confined to the half hour of going through the qigong routine: there’s a spillover effect. Tuning into what’s going on inside moment by moment, day by day, we allow the what the Taoists call “right action” to arise by itself, which is the secret to living in harmony with nature, and with one’s own heart. And that’s where the joy lives. Interestingly enough, the 2011 study by Massachusetts General Hospital showed increased grey matter density in brain in areas associated with self-awareness, introspection, compassion, empathy, memory and learning, decision-making (plus decreased size of the region associated with stress) when participants practiced meditation for 30-minutes a day for 8 weeks.

Could you benefit from a practice of tuning in? A new qigong session begins January 4, and another on Feb. 1. I invite you to sign up.

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My practice.  The love in my life.  Eating ripe cherries off a tree. The internet.  Being able to walk without pain.  Air travel. The roof over my head.  My amazing patients.  Tea. Music.  Sight.  Hot, running water inside my house. That the Earth continues to orbit around the sun without my help. These are just a few things I’m feeling grateful for right now.

In Chinese Medicine, our qi is said to follow our intention or mental energy.  And different mental and emotional patterns do different things to our energy: over-thinking  and worry knot the qi; anger makes it rise up , fear sinks it, sadness dissolves it, and so on. In addition to having directionality, mental/emotional activity also affects the internal organs.  For example, habitual worry tends to affect the Spleen, like a knot in the gut, resulting in digestive problems. Habitual anger tends to affect the Liver, resulting in high blood pressure, tight neck and shoulder muscles in its partner channel, the Gall Bladder.

I have not come across references in the Chinese Medical classics as to what gratitude does to the qi, but in the laboratory of my body, it provides a kind of gentle buoyancy and softening. I have used it to shift out of many less desirable mental/ emotional states. Of course, the so-called “negative emotions”  are part of life, and they are to be fully felt, digested, and integrated. But when any mental or emotional state becomes habitual or excessive, or when it limits our ability to experience anything else, it’s time for an intervention. And gratitude is great one.

• Gratitude turns scarcity into wealth, whether the scarce resource is time, money, or energy. I remember my father in horrible physical condition after a particularly brutal week of chemo and radiation, tuning into the feeling of the sun on his face and saying “I’m a happy man.” It has turned me from completely broke to among the wealthiest people on the planet without altering my bank account one penny.
• Gratitude can stuff a sock into the mouth of the shrill inner “to-do” list reciter.  When I tune into what I’m grateful for in my life, I realize that not accomplishing all the stuff on the list usually does not jeopardize any of it. When there is a potential consequence, that becomes the priority, and the rest can be let go.  Clarifying.
• Gratitude can silence the inner critic.  Is it possible to be critical and grateful at the same time?  I don’t think so.
• Gratitude makes loss bearable. In coping with loss of loved ones from my life due to deaths or break-ups, I have found that gratitude doesn’t wipe out grief or loss, but coexists with it, walking with it arm-in-arm in a way that allows moving forward.  Celebrating the life of the loved one who has died or the relationship that has ended helps the sadness to recede.
• Gratitude ends worry. Worry is too much thinking about things that may or may not happen in the future or things beyond our control.  Gratitude reflects the present moment, which is the only moment that counts, or even exists. If I can find something  happening right here, right now that I can truly appreciate, that trumps any hypothetical future that may or may not ever transpire.

I love gratitude and have a few practices that I employ daily.  Before I eat a meal, I take a short moment to tune into gratitude for the plants, sunshine, earth, water, farmers, and cooks that went into creating the food, as well as the people with whom I might be sharing it. I try to thank each patient and student for coming in to see me, thus allowing me to do work I love, and to learn and to grow.  When I stretch out after a workout, I send mental thank-yous to the parts of my body that I am feeling:  the muscles, bones,  my heart pumping my blood, my lungs giving me oxygen.  I do these things because living in gratitude feels great, and that’s how I want to feel.

A Note on the Misuse of Gratitude:  I sometimes hear from patients  “I should just be grateful, because so-and-so has it worse than me” or because “people are starving in other parts of the world.”  These people are often extremely burned-out caregivers, castigating themselves for not being able to feel gratitude, but more significantly, for having any needs at all when they perceive that someone they love has it worse.  Note the use of the word “should” and the implied “I should just shut up.” This person is denying her own needs. What is called for here is acknowledgment  and honoring of the unmet needs, followed by self-compassion. (and perhaps strategizing as to how those needs could be met). Then gratitude can follow.

How does gratitude feel in your body? What does it do for you? I’d appreciate your thoughts.

*A photo I took at Cafe Gratitude in Berkeley, CA. That day, I was grateful for being with my sisters, and for  delicious raw vegan strawberry cheesecake.

It’s getting to be that time of year where a remarkable number of people here in the Willamette Valley start sneezing, dripping, and itching with seasonal allergies.  Fortunately, there are a number of natural steps you one can take to mitigate or even eliminate allergy symptoms without suffering the drowsiness and other side effects that often come with taking pharmaceuticals.

In Chinese Medicine, we distinguish between two main types of allergies: those where heat or cold predominates.  Wind, joining forces with either heat or cold, invades the body from the outside, causing an acute attack of those symptoms we all know and don’t love: sneezing, nasal congestion or runny nose, itchy eyes, tiredness, and even diffiuculty breathing.

Symptoms of wind-cold type of allergies include very drippy runny nose with clear mucus and fatigue, while the wind-heat type is characterized by itchy eyes, itchy throat and thick yellow or green mucus. Both conditions are made worse by the presence of phlegm.  Phlegm is which is basically accumulated turbid water that the body is trying to throw at what it perceives as a dangerous pathogen: the evil, invading pollen.

So what can you do besides hide indoors?

1. Use a neti pot to rinse your sinuses to get the pollen out of your respiratory tract. Combine warm water and enough salt so that the water tastes like a teardrop, and rinse your nasal passages twice daily.  Flushing the allergens out of your body gives the body a break from having to perpetually react to them.  Plus, freeing the flow of qi in your sinuses makes it less likely for stuff to percolate there and become infected.
2. Eat strategically: Making sure that you’re digesting well and therefore not creating more residual crud to hang out in your system as dampness or phlegm is very important.  Keep damp-producing foods like dairy products, refined sugar, bananas, alcohol, and refined flour products to a minimum (Though yogurt and kefir with active probiotic cultures can help the immune system, you may be better off with fermented foods like miso and kimchi — or taking probiotic supplements– which are less mucogenic than dairy.) The taste of bitter helps to transform phlegm, so including lots of leafy greens in your diet can be helpful.  If you have wind-heat type allergies, cooking with spices such as rosemary, oregano, turmeric, and mint can be helpful. For wind-cold type allergies, cook with onions and fresh ginger.
3. Drink tea:  Both green and black tea are especially rich in quercetin, a component of plant-based foods that has anit-inflammatory properties. Other foods rich in quercetin include red onions, lovage, capers, red grapes, and green leafy vegetables.Tea made from nettles can be highly anti-inflammatory: steep the leaves for 10 minutes in hot water (and handle with care!) Chrysanthemum blossoms (steeped covered for at least 5 minutes) is especially good to relieve itchy eyes.
4. Take Herbs: Herbs are simply stronger foods. Ready-made Chinese herb formulas like Pe Min Kan Wan, Bi Yan Pian, or Xanthium Pills are all aimed at treating the wind-heat or wind-cold to decrease symptoms of allergies, and many people find to be effective symptom relievers without the side-effects of pharmaceutical drugs. (available at Life in Balance Acupuncture.)
5. Get acupuncture.  A study published in the Australian Journal of Medicine suggests that acupuncture provides safe, effective treatment for persistent seasonal allergies, even 12 weeks after the course of treatment. But you may already know that!

I said this to a patient today, and her mouth literally dropped open: so radical, apparently, was the concept that we slow down BEFORE our bodies force us to, out of sheer exhaustion.

This is winter — nature is hibernating, and so too should we be. I find that the same schedule that felt fine to me a few months ago now feels draining. I need more sleep, I’m craving time alone. I want to curl up and read with my cat. And I have been hearing a similar refrain from almost every person who has passed through my office in the past few weeks. Hence this blog post: you are not alone if you feel exhausted. Especially if instead of doing less, you are packing more into your schedule to prepare for the holidays.

So here’s my radical proposition: what would it be like to feel rested and peaceful for the next two weeks? Conjure that up internally. Now, what could you do to get there? Is it going to bed an hour earlier? Lowering your expectations of how your house has to look? Taking a half an hour to walk outside to give yourself a break from the houseful of people you love? How could you stop the yang (activity) madness and be truly rejuvenated by yin (rest)?

I’d love to hear your intentions.

I’d edit this post, but it’s past my bedtime.

Wishing you and your loved ones the happiest and most peaceful of holidays.
Brodie

Chinese Medicine is based on the notion that humans are connected to the cycles of nature,and that everything that happens in nature also happens with us. Each of our internal organ systems resonates with a particular season of the year (and an element of nature, a color, an emotion, a taste, etc.) In the season of autumn, the days grow shorter, the weather gets cooler and the leaves begin to fall off the trees: nature moves from the fullness expression of yang to yin. In our bodies, the season of autumn, the Metal Phase, resonates with the Lungs and Large Intestine, those organs in the body responsible for letting go of what we no longer need. The Lungs breathe out carbon dioxide which allows us to take in fresh oxygen, the Large Intestine eliminates the waste products from digestion. To do this requires discernment: knowing what is valuable and what is not, which is another virtue attributed to and empowered by the Lungs.

So right now, nature presents to us the opportunity to discern what is the essential sap we’d like to bring down into our trunks to nourish us through the winter, and what aspect of our lives, belief systems, and behavioral repertoire can we drop like the autumn leaves? This process can be helped along by being a little less busy, as we begin to gather our energy inward for the winter as nature herself is doing.

Autumn is nature in decline, slowing down, letting go, dying. The emotion associated with the phase is sadness, loss, loneliness – -what we often feel when we have to let go of an experience or a person we have cherished. (And, incidentally, what many people are currently experiencing without knowing why, simply because it’s part of the qi of the season.) As emotions are all simply qi, feeling whatever comes up, experiencing it, crying it out or otherwise expressing it, and letting it go allows the sadness to move through and not weigh down the Lungs.

But there may not be sadness; there may be gratitude and joy. There’s a lot to appreciate about the Metal Phase, the season of decline and death: I’m grateful for the death happening within my body: right now, cells that have mutated or dysfunctional are dying off. (Cells that do not die are cancer — hooray for cell death!) My immune system (aided greatly by my Lung qi) is killing off viruses and bacteria to keep me healthy. I appreciate that I as pay attention to what thoughts cause me stress — usually old beliefs that I no longer need, I am able to weed them and let them go with mindful exhalation. And I’m grateful for the finiteness of life that gives meaning to how I spend my limited time on the planet.

May you receive the gift this season has for you.