Acupuncture Girl: Archive

Second treatment with Charlotte

I had been running low on sleep when I came back to see my acupuncturist. Charlotte did tell me to ‘have fun’ over the weekend, but she probably didn’t mean to have four hours of sleep on Friday, Sunday, and Monday nights!. Consequently everything felt ‘off’. I need more sleep than that! I also had done a lot of driving back and forth to Richmond, and I had spent time with my friends, and the missing of them was fierce at the beginning of the week.

Last week Charlotte treated me with what she called her “Chesapeake Bay” treatment, to make the energy clean and sparkling. The points she treated were on the back, probably AE although there is really no way for me to know. This time, Charlotte treated me with one point, probably LI-3, “Supreme Rushing”, on both feet. She said it would help me sleep. Oh my gosh, did I sleep! I couldn’t stay awake that evening (Tuesday) and then Wednesday it was very hard to get up for Officials (the last day of our fascinating three-day intensive). I feel much better now, and of course I’ve been sleeping more, but I imagine that isn’t all of it.

She was concerned about my resting pulse rate (over 80 when I had been resting 20 minutes; I think this was due to lack of sleep). She advised me to avoid alcohol and caffeine for now (and I had overdone the caffeine when I was home on Sat & Sun). I’ve managed this easily so far.

Charlotte wants me to ‘just be a patient’ for her treatments, instead of being analytical and an acupuncture student. I could not resist checking with some of the senior students (Greg, who is a year ahead of me, and Niall, who is two years ahead). Charlotte would prefer I not worry about these details just now, and that I focus on being a patient. However, I am in the middle of learning this stuff and it is fascinating! I’m impatient to know more, and more.

The question I have is whether my CF is wood. I love the concept of Constitutional Type, and when I read about ‘wood’, I didn’t think it sounded at all like me. Sure, I tend to get indecisive under stress (I avoid an issue, like a ostrich putting his head in the sand). Sometimes I’m bossy, although since I grew up doing that to my sister, I have been very cognizant of this tendency and practiced being consultative. And look at my impatience to know more, and more. That’s probably wood. I can wait until I really learn about CF but I’m paying attention to wood as I learn, just in case. (I really thought after Officials that I was ‘earth’ instead of wood.)

I feel really great after all this and am looking forward to the next treatment. I’d love to have my upper back and shoulders ‘open up’ again, since my neck muscles are very tight. Hmm. Next time, perhaps?

Mar 21, 20081 note

New treatment series - notes on the first session with Charlotte

I’m seeing a practitioner with more than three decades of experience. It is incredible to be in the presence of so many talented practitioners, and to be able to choose one who has so much to offer.

She keeps saying, “Thirty years ago I would have known all the answers…”

She needled points in my back, and to my surprise afterward I felt really shaky. I thought after I had some food (light chicken salad and some Kombucha tea) I would feel better, but I still felt shaky so I had more Kombucha and some high-test chocolate (well, ya gotta try whatever works!).

I feel better now. Sherrie, an experienced acupuncturist who is also on the faculty at Tai Sophia, told me that I should call Charlotte if I don’t feel better tomorrow. I actually feel better now (6 hours after treatment). Sherrie also advised that a bath with Epsom Salts might be good, but it is nearly 11 pm so I think sleep is the first order of business for me.

After treatment, on the table, resting, I felt occasional muscular twitches. My theory is that these are some kind of release. They aren’t bothering me; they are just a curious and unusual symptom. I forgot to tell Charlotte about them - later I was at a lecture by Barbara Dossey and felt a twitch and thought, “Oh yeah, I meant to say something.”

Today was also my first day going to our Community Health Initiative site in Baltimore. It was scary navigating the neighborhood around the CHI site, but the space inside the clinic was positive and I felt good about the work being done there. I also felt safe in there. I don’t actually have to work there until next year, if I’m not assigned to a different center, but I wanted to go experience the site and maybe get some pulses.

Mar 12, 2008

Mar 6, 2008

#photo

“

What goes on in the treatment room is a tapping of life as an empowering event. Traditional acupuncture is a system of healing that looks to all of a person and sees the entirety of the individual as an expression of Ch’i, the life force, the essence of life manifesting. Nothing of a person’s life is judged bad or good, it simply is. Everything is seen and held simply as an expression of the person en route to knowing who she is, self reaching for self. Everything in each human’s life is seen as an integrated picture consistent with her journey. Health is a dynamic experience of this integrity, no matter what the circumstances of the daily life, the tasks at hand at the moment—diapering the baby, putting in the needle, delivering a lecture, making love, washing dishes, praying. As she taps the power of being in her own life, it is as though she has swallowed a hand grenade with the pin pulled out, and in slow motion begins to realize what she has done: an internal explosion occurs, and though she may look like her old self in appearance, a transformation happens from which she will not recover, nor will she want to. In the awesome recognition of her homecoming, in the irrevocable acknowledgment of her Nature, she is no longer estranged from herself. Every estrangement henceforth will point her homeward.

It is through our nature that we master our symptoms, that we break through habits and patterns that no longer serve us, that we change the ways that we have ceased to be useful in our lives. We shift from being possessed by our history and all its content to being in command of our own homecoming. “I am more at home in myself. I have a grasp on my struggles—I can use them. If a headache starts, I don’t automatically dread it. I’m calmer now.” These are words of a person beginning to recognize her power to be healthy. This is a shift from a position of being the victim of a symptom, to being in balance and harmony in relation to the symptom. From here, the patient begins to gain her whole life, seeing herself in the world, both her internal and external world, as a creative force. She grows to trust her own life, to observe the varied expressions of herself—gestures, thoughts, interactions, reactions, patterns of eating, sleeping, emotions, upsets, symptoms; to see the relationships and watch the tapestry she weaves in a day’s time, not as a voyeur, but as a voyager in the kingdom of self. She opens to all of life, and gives thanks. She realizes that her task is the same as the task of every human being—to be home in her life, to live her life fully and authentically, knowing she is not here alone nor only for herself. She is here for life, shepherdess for the homecoming of human life.

” —The quote is a wonderful description of the experience of five element acupuncture from the patient’s point of view. The author of this passage is Dianne Connelly, a leading practitioner and one of the founders of the Traditional Acupuncture Institute [now called the Tai Sophia Institute, in Laurel Maryland].
—Dianne Connelly, All Sickness is Home Sickness as posted on
http://www.fivelement.com/interest.htm

Mar 6, 20081 note

Acupuncture Today
March, 2008, Vol. 09, Issue 03

By Kaleb Montgomery, DTCM

Excerpt:

Most of the women I see are busy career women in their early 30s and 40s. They have spent most of their adult lives pouring their heart and soul into their work. Most of them work a minimum of 50-hour weeks, do a fair amount of business travel and play fairly hard too. They have spent the last 10-20 years in a “go-go, make-things-happen-now” world.

Most successful business people inhabit a world-based goal by setting and achieving a single goal – more profit. This successful business woman almost exclusively inhabits the world of manifesting things, and consequently the male aspect of their energetic selves. The irony of this is that after they have spent all their time cultivating their yang aspects, they now need to use their receptive yin aspects so they can have a baby. They are now trying to create a “womb space” so they can conceive and carry a healthy baby to term. I do not think that it is a coincidence that these busy, smart, driven and successful career women are having a hard time trying to conceive, considering that it is their yang aspects that are more developed than their yin. It is their yin aspect that they now need more for pregnancy.

…

What smacked me in the face was that here were a bunch of women with very strong male sides who (when you scratch the surface a little more) have largely lost touch with their feminine yin sides. Their nurturing and receptive sides have largely been placed on the back burner. It’s not that these women do not have a yin side; it’s that to succeed in today’s business climate and become the high-powered business executives, they have had to almost exclusively cultivate their male sides.

Now that they were trying to get pregnant using the same formula that provided their success in the business world, using their yang “go-go, make-things happen” strategy and energy, they are finding that it is not working. They are running headlong into some very real frustration. Their usual formula for success is not working. They are confronted with the reality of relearning and slowly, steadily cultivating their yin sides. This is a difficult and frustrating process, compounded by their perceived “failure” of not conceiving. These are not people who are used to failing or not getting what they set their minds on. For many of them, this may be the first time in their lives that they have ever run into any real difficulty getting what they want. Because they are smart, generally these women can solve any problem they encounter, given hard work. Hard work does not scare them; not being able to control the outcome scares them. The thought that even though they could do everything right and still not become pregnant that month drives most of them crazy. Unfortunately, you cannot force Mother Nature to do anything.

Mar 1, 2008

#photo

Upset is optional (and other suggestions)

I’m enrolled at the Tai Sophia Institute, and they are offering a class called “Upset is Optional” (http://www.tai.edu/Events.aspx?eventid=100 - this link should work through April 8 2008).

For information on all events, and articles of interest, go to their website:

http://www.tai.edu/NewsEvents.aspx

I took their “Redefining Health” course in October 2007. Here is a partial list of the practices they suggested for improved health. I think it is very useful to practice these, although I find it challenging to practice more than just one or two at a time:

Bow to life exactly as it is.
Practice non-judgment.
Practice not being in opposition.
Open your five senses: Using your capacities to listen, see, tast, touch, and smell, open newly to everything.
Create your inner observer of your senses and of your speaking
Give up ‘trying’; practice doing.
Every interaction is an opportunity for kindness.
Every word can create either an opening or a closing. Choose words that create openings.
Life is movement.
Upset is optional.
I am a beginner.
In a crisis, ask “What is the opportunity?”
Ask if the story you are telling is big enough for you or others to be at peace. If not, create a bigger story.
Take effective action - request, decline, counteroffer.
Be in the unknowing.
Be conscious of the mood you create.
Life becomes wonderful when you declare it wonderful.
If you are not happy with what you have, how could you be happy with more?
Expectations can cause suffering.
Symptoms are teachers - what do you learn from them?
Everyone is perfect exactly as s/he is - there is nothing to fix.
Use “AND” instead of “BUT” and observe how the sentence shifts.
Does my action/speech honor the ancestors and serve the children?

Mar 1, 2008

Acupuncture Girl

March 2008

9 posts