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I don’t think I’m becoming a worse herbalist—I think that there are more and more truly complex and challenging cases out there. I think that everyday life has become not just more difficult, but in many cases more paradoxical and internally contradictory, than ever before in my lifetime as a healer. I noticed the first…
A Happy New Year’s Resolution For a few years now, I’ve had an Economic Redress policy at Perennial Medicine. I do this in part because it feels good to stand behind what I believe in, but also because I want to introduce the Economic Redress concept to my community—especially to other anti-racist white people who often…
It’s so dark, it’s dark, it’s dark, it’s really dark, it’s so bad. There’s a giant octopus of darkness and it’s got all of its tentacles wrapped around me. I’m doomed! Can you hear me? I’m doomed. I’ve got to stay where it’s really bad, because if I don’t stay here, where I go from here could be worse.
What is healthy anger? That’s an easily politicized question—and I‘d like to disrupt the binary of healthy/unhealthy anger by instead suggesting that we consider anger along the polarity of healthier anger and less healthy anger. This is important for many reasons, chief among which is that anger is a dynamic process, and health is a…
What is healthy trauma? Healthy trauma is a state of complete or incomplete dissociation from an injury that we do not have the resources to heal. This is why injuries that took place years ago—or centuries ago—can still remain unhealed. That is the nature of trauma—to remain unhealed, until we have the resources to heal.
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…
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…
