Hello, Autumn

You can feel it in the air, even in Southern California:  a cool breeze that deepens in the late afternoon…cooler mornings, highlighted by a new brightness to the sunshine…dusk falling abruptly, earlier, surprising the evening commuters…the maple trees turning colors…the angle of the sun has changed, and autumn is here.

Autumn brings with it so many other changes that we can feel if we pay attention.  And if we follow the seasons, with our minds and our bodies, we can stay healthy.

The ancient sages who shaped Chinese Medicine knew a lot about autumn.  Autumn is the season belonging to the metal element.  Metal is all about the Lung and the Large Intestine, and as such, embodies the consciousness of inspiration, letting go, surrender, and acceptance.

In Autumn, we feel the transition from warm to cool, as reflected in the weather.  So the best thing to do is to pause, take stock, figure out what we need to keep and what we should let go of.  This goes for possessions, emotions, memories, and habits.  Holding on to too much will overburden our systems in the winter. 

A friend of mine told me a story a few years ago:  he spent the autumn months going through his storage after feeling an inner pull to get rid of old stuff that he didn’t need anymore.  That winter, he said, he was the healthiest he’d ever been, and many new opportunities presented themselves to him.  Since he wasn’t weighed down with a lot of unnecessary possessions, he could accept the opportunities he was offered.

It’s a good contemplation:  what can I let go of?  What feeling does the idea of “letting go” bring up for me?  Is it enthusiasm or fear and resistance?  The answer is critical, because if we resist letting go, we get stuck.  And this stuckness is where we get sick.  On the physical level, resistance can create constipation and lower digestive problems and sore throats.  When we resist, we tend to breathe shallowly, restricting movement in our diaphragm, which shuts down the whole digestive process and creates stagnation in the liver.  Yuck.

On the other hand, if we can let go of things we do not need, especially in this shift between warm and cool, if we can transition gracefully, we will continue to find inspiration in our lives.  And this inspiration is critical to staying connected with ourselves, our work, and the people we love.

It’s also a good time to let go of some dietary habits you may have picked up in the summer.  Like ice cream, which creates phlegm (which will be stored in the lungs), or too much cheese, or too many salads.  Instead, you may want to begin incorporating more warming foods:  soups, steamed vegetables, roasted vegetables, stews.  These will speed digestion time because your body doesn’t have to warm them up first before digesting them.

The emotion associated with Metal is grief. 

Have you let go of grief?  Or is there some grief you are holding on to?  Stuck grief, quite obviously, creates stagnation and disease in the lungs.  As Americans, we often don’t give ourselves the time and space to grieve completely, if at all.  Instead, we wad it up into a little ball and shove it in our lungs, where it festers, creating stagnation and disease. 

Here’s an exercise to do in Autumn to release emotions and memories that are stuck in the body:

On a cool crisp windy Autumn day, climb to the top of a hill.  Take a deep breath, and close your eyes.  Bring a memory to mind that you might not have processed completely, especially one that has a deep emotional component of grief, loss, disappointment, sadness, or sorrow.  Take a deep breath, and focus on the feeling of the wind blowing against your body.  Imagine the wind actually blowing THROUGH you, picking up this memory and emotions and pulling them out of your body, especially out of your lungs and large intestine.  Instead of resisting, relax every muscle in your body.  Think of the word “surrender.”  Take another deep breath, and consciously let go.  You can think about each individual thing and say to yourself, “I surrender this memory.  I surrender my grief.  I surrender my sadness/rage/resentment/sorrow.  I surrender my pain…”

Letting go is huge.  When we do it consciously, we allow our whole body to move on.  Getting stuck in the past is a death sentence; it’s what ages us.  Our past stressful traumatic memories act as filters that color our perception of reality, taking us out of the present moment and limiting our choices.  That’s why we need to let go.  Letting go of the past and accepting “what is” will allow us to enter the present moment.  Then we can take a deep breath, feel inspired in our life, and connect with ourselves and our world.

Mental and Emotional Blockages to Healing

Just about everyone is aware that emotions play a part in the disease process. I bet if you thought about it, you could think of a time when you got really angry, upset, or stressed out about something, and then the next day you came down with a cold or the flu. A good friend of mine once told me that she can always tell when her husband is about to get sick, because he will inevitably get completely bent out of shape—yelling and screaming about something that at any other time might only elicit a grumpy response—about something, only to become completely bedridden with some respiratory or digestive “bug” the next day!

In Chinese Medicine, each emotion—anger, sadness, depression, grief, and fear—is associated with a particular organ of the body. This becomes interesting when you think about what organ might be out of balance enough to bring about illness.

The most obvious example is anger, and its associated emotions of rage, frustration, and feeling “stressed out.” All these emotions correspond to the Liver, a “Yin” organ, and its corresponding “Yang” organ, the Gall Bladder. The Liver is associated with the “smooth flow of Qi,” or energy, through the body. When the Liver gets out of whack, energy gets stagnated, stuck, or deficient.

One thing I’ve noticed about people in general is that when it comes to health and wellness, sometimes our health patterns reflect emotional issues. It’s almost like we take a certain issue we’re grappling with—like problems with a co-worker, feeling disconnected from our spouse or lover, or dissatisfaction with our career—and we wrap it in a little ball and stick it somewhere in our body! There it creates “illness.”

In BodyTalk, we talk about emotions being stored in the Diaphragm. As the Diaphragm gets “full,” it sends these unprocessed emotions to the Liver. The Liver, in turn, sends the emotions to an organ, endocrine, or body part, where they manifest as disease.

I recently read a newsletter from Marga Laube, a Vedic Astrologer, who wrote an article called “The Power to Heal.” In this article, she talks about the upcoming full moon on September 4, 2009, which she describes as a particularly good time to reflect on our own disease process and release emotional and mental blockages to healing. She writes: “The full moon in this lunar sign is asking us to let go of the mental and emotional blockages that can be a breeding ground for disease.” She then gives some examples of how to do this. (Click here to read the full article)

This is a great contemplation for all of us who know in our hearts that we have the answers to our health issues inside, if we’re willing to ask the question and listen to our inner voice as it answers us.

www.quantumlinkwellness.com

Staying Young

I never imagined that I would ever get old. It never occurred to me. I watched my parents age, I watched my friends get old and fat, but never thought it would ever happen to me.

Upon entering the fifth decade myself, I began to notice alarming signs that I was no longer as young as I used to be. It began with my eyesight—which was fine one day, but then suddenly my arms just weren't long enough—and ended with my waistline suddenly swelling like the top of a banana walnut muffin.

To understand how to stay young, you must first know what makes you old. Signs of agedness—grey hair, creaky swollen joints, loss of waistline (when the six pack degenerates into a keg), farsightedness, dry skin and bat wings—have a lot to do with what Chinese Medicine calls Jing Cycles, which are sets of years in which we grow, mature, age, and die. Here's a quote from the Su Wen (Simple Questions), written sometime around the Second Century BCE:

In a man, at the age of 8 the boy's kidney energy is abundant, his hair and teeth grow. At the age of 16 his kidney energy is even more abundant...and he can produce a child. At the age of 24, the kidney energy peaks, ...the wisdom teeth appear, and growth is at its peak. At the age of 32, tendons and bones are at their strongest, and the muscles are full and strong. At the age of 40, the kidney is weakened, the hair begins to fall out and the teeth become loose. At the age of 48, Yang Qi is exhausted, the face becomes darker, and the hair turns grey. At the age of 56, the liver energy is weakened, the tendons cannot move...and the body begins to grow old. At the age of 64, hair and teeth are gone.

In Chinese Medicine, we talk a lot about the Kidneys. The Kidneys store your Essence, also known as Jing. Jing controls your growth and development, as well as your sexual energy and fertility. As such, it is seen as a very important and precious substance.

Basically, in a nutshell, longevity is based on two main things: your pre-natal Jing (which you inherited from your parents) and your post-natal Jing (which is entirely up to you). There are two things that determine the state of your Jing:

1. The food you eat
2. The balance in your life

This is why we talk so much about balance in Chinese Medicine. Aging really can be controlled, but it takes a considerable amount of discipline. The more stressed out you become, the more you work overtime, the more alcohol you drink, the less you exercise, and the more double-ended burning you do on your candle, the faster you will age.

Luckily, the aging process is reversible, and it's relatively easy to do. Besides exercising regularly and eating healthily (which only you can do), regular acupuncture or BodyTalk treatments will bring your body back into balance. And you can eliminate your food, hormone, and enzyme sensitivities, which will repair broken energetic pathways and allow your body to function optimally, like it did when you were twenty. Honestly, it's the best preventive medicine available anywhere.

http://www.quantumlinkwellness.com/

Cold and Ancient China

For thousands of years, Chinese Medicine has said that cold enters the body via the acupuncture points on the back of the head and upper back when the protective energy surrounding the body is weakened. An entire system of acupuncture, known as the Shang Han Lun, was developed some 1700-1800 years ago, that traced the invasion of “cold” into the body. As cold penetrated deeper and deeper, an individual got sicker and sicker until they eventually died. Herbal formulas and acupuncture point prescriptions were developed for each stage of illness, beginning with the simple cold, continuing to high fevers, to abdominal pains and exhaustion, to urinary tract infections, and to complete depletion and death. This is how doctors in ancient China kept people alive. Oh, and by the way, the doctors of ancient China only got paid when people were well. So there was a great incentive to keeping people from being sick.
If we were to engage our universal translator, we'd look at the last paragraph and say, “Oh, back then they had viruses, just like we do, except they didn't have antibiotics. And this is what it looks like when you have a virus that you don't treat—it weakens the immune system until the white blood cells can't fight anymore, and then you die.”
Of course, back then they didn't have antibiotics. People tended to stay home and rest when they got sick, rather than going to work because they didn't have sick days or because they had to finish a project. When a major contagious disease swept through a village, people were quarantined, and they complied voluntarily to try to contain the disease as much as possible. Their very existence—and the existence of their towns and villages—depended on it.
Life in ancient China was different in other ways, too. People had a pretty ascetic diet. There was no fast food, hardly any sugar, and not a lot of alcohol. Life was hard, and people didn't party like we do.
What in the world does this have to do with you or me in 2009?
I would argue that it has a LOT to do with us!
If we focused on preventive health, instead of palliative or curative medicine, health care in the US would look completely different than it does today. But even if the rest of the world doesn't change, we can focus on preventive health for ourselves and the people we care about. Here's a brief list of things we can do, taken from simple wisdom of Ancient China:
1. Pay attention to how you feel. Notice when you start to feel tired or run down. Respond by RESTING, not pushing through it.
2. Cut down or eliminate sugar, fast foods, and too much partying.
3. When you get sick, take a day off. Chances are you will nip it in the bud rather than spreading it around your whole office.
Best wishes to all of you for a prosperous and healthy 2009!

www.quantumlinkwellness.com

Winter: The Season of the Dreaded Cough

I'll never forget the feeling...being awakened at 11:30 pm, soon after falling asleep, by the sound of my son's cough in his room next to ours...that feeling of dread and fear because my son can't breathe.
Every mother of an asthmatic child knows exactly what I'm talking about. There's a certain sound that every child makes when they cough, when you know they're in trouble. For my son, it was when the cough (which had begun 36 hours previously) had pretty much exhausted his lungs. His voice shrank to a whisper. He began to wheeze. And the cough shook his small frame, sending spasms throughout his entire body, sometimes causing him to gag at the end. I knew there was no medicine that would get us through the night, no matter what the doctor said, and that it would be a long, scary night indeed.
Fortunately for us, I learned from our nutritionist that my son had food allergies that were creating copious amounts of phlegm in his small system. When we eat food that is undigestible—either because we're allergic to that food and it creates inflammation in our gut or because we're sensitive to that food and can't absorb it—the residue of the undigested food produces excess mucus. When we reach a certain critical mass, so to speak, of mucus that our body can't store any longer, the mucus is released as phlegm, usually through the nose, in a form that looks, for all intents and purposes, like a cold. This is what our nutritionist explained to us. Hmm, I thought, that sounds suspiciously like Chinese Medicine, which I myself had studied before having children. And, come to think of it, my son seemed like he was getting an awful lot of colds—sometimes he got a cold every two or three weeks! But, I realized, no one else in the family was getting these “colds,” which made me wonder. Maybe the nutritionist was right.
So we followed the nutritionist's advice: No eggs. No wheat. No cow's milk dairy of any sort, including butter. No soy. And much less sugar. It was a miracle—my son got dramatically better in a very short period of time. I was amazed.
Now, for those of you who have never attempted an egg-free, wheat-free, dairy-free, soy-free diet, let me share with you how incredibly difficult this is to do, especially with children, and especially with someone who is a very picky eater to begin with, like my son is. Basically, you can't go out to eat. Every kid's meal known to mankind is replete with wheat and dairy, not to mention things no parent really wants to know about. Basically, on an egg-free, wheat-free, dairy-free diet, you eat meat, chicken, or fish, and vegetables, which if you're interested in losing weight is a really great diet to follow but unfortunately my son, aged 5 at the time, was already too skinny. And basically, we spent a lot of time at the kitchen table amidst plates of (you guessed it) protein and vegetables, while my son cried and said, “Mom, when can I get off this boring diet?” Breaks a mom's heart.
What kind of a life is this, I ask you? Doomed, at age 5, to eat only meat and vegetables! Ask any parent whose child has had to follow this diet, and they will tell you it is very difficult, but better than pulmicort and albuterol, the asthma medicine du jour. And I seconded that every time we fell off the wagon after a bithday-party soaked weekend, or a visit to the grandparents, or when I gave in because I just couldn't listen to the whining anymore, and the dreaded cough came back. Yes, I sighed, life is a sick joke.
But then we discovered NAET, the greatest allergy elimination therapy known to man, the holy grail of alternative medicine. NAET is a combination of Chinese medicine, applied kinesiology (muscle testing), and chiropractic spinal massage. It actually change your relationship with any substance you might be reacting to. I treated my son for eggs, and the cough went away. Really—I'm not kidding. It resurfaced twice in two years—once after he ate salmon, and once after he ate rice pasta—but after treating him for those two things, he basically doesn't cough anymore. The dreaded cough is gone!!

www.quantumlinkwellness.com

The 25-Hour Avoidance in NAET

After each NAET treatment, you must avoid the allergen treated for the following 25 hours.
Why is this necessary? Why 25 hours? After all, didn't the practitioner just test and determine that I passed the treatment?
To answer to these questions, I must first explain about the Chinese Circadian Clock.
In Chinese Medicine, each internal organ, and its corresponding meridian system, is most active at a particular 2-hour period of time each day. This means that the organ's energy is at its highest during this time period. For instance, the time period of 3-5 am is devoted to the Lungs. 5-7 pm is Kidney time. 1-3 am is Liver time.
Here's a list of each internal organ and its corresponding 2-hour time:
Lung: 3-5am
Large Intestine: 5-7am
Stomach: 7-9am
Spleen: 9-11am
Heart: 11am-1pm
Small Intestine: 1-3pm
Urinary Bladder: 3-5pm
Kidney: 5-7pm
Pericardium: 7-9pm
Triple Burner: 9-11pm
Gall Bladder: 11pm-1am
Liver: 1-3am
The Circadian Clock has many applications in Chinese Medicine, which we won't go into right now. But in NAET, the Clock explains why we need to avoid allergens for 25 hours.
Imagine, for a moment, that you have just had an NAET treatment, and let's say we just treated you for pickles because although you love them, they give you terrible gas. And let's say that your appointment was at 3pm, which means that we actually treated you at about 3:10pm. You walked out of the office at 3:50pm.
3-5pm is Urinary Bladder time, and as such, your bladder was wide awake at the time of the treatment. It's as if your bladder said, “Hey, I got it. I now have a new relationship with pickles.”
However, your Kidneys were not experiencing maximum Qi and blood flow at the time of the treatment, and as such, were they to come into contact with pickles during their 2-hour time period, they may not be able to “hold” the treatment. On the other hand, if you were to completely avoid pickles from 5-7pm when your kidneys were experiencing maximum Qi and blood flow, your kidneys would be able to maintain their new relationship with pickles.
Of course, if you were to repeat your treatment every two hours, you could eat all the pickles you wanted. But then NAET would be very expensive, and nobody would do it...so it's better to just avoid the allergen for 25 hours. Because anybody can do anything for just one day, right?

http://www.quantumlinkwellness.com