Love is Necessary for Healing Have you ever said or done something that, in hindsight, might have been significantly hurtful to someone? Maybe you realized it yourself, or maybe someone pointed it out to you. That’s a difficult moment. How did you feel, and how did you support yourself through those feelings? There are many…
Springtime! There are a number of different serious blog pieces still in the works, but right now, I really just want to have some community fun. I’ve put together a list of some of my favorite Wood-element art and music. I’d love to hear from you: Are you listening to, looking at, or reading anything…
The Power of Stopping We have a choice about how we use this time of immobilization and quarantine, which is in many ways like a winter right in the middle of springtime. In Chinese medicine, Winter is about the evocation and transformation of fear, but it is also about deep revitalization. Over the winter, a…
How to Become a Reassurance Expert, on a Me-First Basis Whew! When those around us are in fear, how can we be most in service to them? Heroic emotional rescue is exhausting—we may not have it in us to support others when we ourselves are tired, and possibly just as afraid. We need a me-first…
Water Transformation of Virtue: Fear (Kong) to Wisdom (Zhi) In Chinese medicine, there are Five Elements, each with a particular capacity for emotional disturbance. The Water element’s emotional disturbance is fear. Each element also has a virtue that is developed when we bring that emotion back in service to the Heart. Water’s returning to the…
I am preparing to teach a class called Needling From the Heart, and of course, I have my Whole Heart Acupuncture series coming up (with extra clinical mentorship on the Mondays), so the nature of acupuncture points is very much on my mind. Acupuncturists treat points with needles, but we all have acupuncture points, so…
I’m white. Racism doesn’t affect me, does it? I’m going to take a moment to write about a fairly new venture of mine, which I’ve been calling Whole Heart Whiteness. It has arisen in the context of the work I’ve been doing in Baltimore (and soon also in NYC) around healing interracial injury and pain….
Middle-Aged White Woman Teaching Asian Medicine Is it cultural appropriation for Westerners to practice Chinese medicine? How about Westerners teaching Chinese medicine? How about innovating new practices, new perspectives, new Western adaptations or sub-modalities that owe their origins to Chinese medicine? These are important questions, and they must be ongoing questions. It seems likely that…
The Me-First School of Global Healing Many of my students are familiar with what I call the “Me-First School of Global Healing.” For those of you who have never heard this phrase before, what does it mean? The Me-First School of Global Healing is two things. First, it is an embodied set of principles which…
