Blood Nourishing recipes are generally warming, nourishing, comforting and delicious. When you need it – especially during postpartum or menstruation – it feels like every cell dances with joy to receive the blood nourishment. This is also perfect winter food! I’m sharing the Red Lentil Dahl recipe to show how easy it is boost the Blood Nourishing properties of your cooking by adding Chinese Herbs.
One thing you might be finding jarring about New Year celebrations is that in Western culture the new year is celebrated based on a man-made calendar. This is known as the Gregorian calendar, that divides the year into 12 months of varying lengths.
As you know I’m all about lining up with natural rhythms and cycles, or Universal Qi. From this perspective the new year doesn’t start for another couple of weeks. According to this cosmic perspective, the wheel of the year is measured by the LUNAR CALENDAR, which is 13 months of approximately 28.5 days each.
A key principle of Chinese Medicine is you don’t exist in isolation – you’re completely connected to your environment. This means you’re always being influenced by Universal energies: the changing seasons, time of day, the movement of planetary bodies…such as the moon.
One way of looking at the energetic influence of a full moon is that it brings to surface whatever you’ve been holding in your Emotional Body ready to be released. In the same way the moon influences the ebb and flow of the Earth’s tides, the moon affects the waters in your body and these watery energies correspond to your emotional reality.
So when the moon is full its high tide!
As you know, your gut needs to be working properly to physically digest the food you eat, which essentially means extracting the nutrients needed to keep your body healthy and eliminating any waste products.
But what you might not know is that, due of the Mind-Body connection, your digestion is also responsible for how you mentally digest and process ideas, thoughts and new information.
Humming is an excellent practice to still a busy mind so you can respond to life’s challenges from a place of calm and connection rather then stress-mode. The beauty of humming is that it silences the excess mental noise long enough for you to hear yourself think. In other words, the INNER LISTENING that allows you to discern the whisper of your Heart for guidance.
The thing to understand about maximising the creative potential of Spring’s abundant energies is this: You need to be able to hold or contain this potent energy for new life and channel this creative power selectively. Think about the way a tree grows in Spring. Its energy branches up and out in all directions. In the same way, under the influence of the Wood Element you may find that you are multi-passionate, wanting to shoot branches in all directions, filled with creative enthusiasm for all you want to do.
One of the most common words I’ve heard women use to describe their first experience of Empress Yoga is ‘confronting’.
This isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it’s kind of the point. The purpose of this style of yoga is to invite you to explore aspects of being a woman you may not have explored before. These practices confront because they ask you to connect to what it means to be a woman, in order to heal, love and celebrate your body and feminine nature. It can be like shining a light on places you may not have even realised were there.
I’ve always thought of gratitude as a practice of counting your blessings in order to receive more blessings. You know, the whole Law of Attraction thing.
And yes, this is part of it.
But I’m going to admit to being a little superficial and entitled here, because now I’m starting to see gratitude in a whole new light.
The power of gratitude isn’t limited to appreciating how good you’ve got it when life is going well. There’s also something here in the practice of gratitude that offers a light or a torch to navigate those darkest of times when you’d think gratitude would be the last thing you’d turn to.
From this perspective, the moment you try and fit Chinese Medicine into the parameters of evidence-based medicine, you’re no longer practicing Chinese Medicine. This is such an important distinction and I hope more Australian Chinese Medicine practitioners recognise that the push to ‘legitimise’ Chinese Medicine using scientific standards of evidence-based medicine actually threatens the holistic integrity of Chinese Medicine and all it stands for.
This is different to staying stuck in your feelings and going in a downward spiral of negative emotion and getting lost there. This is a process of building emotional and mental resilience through times of crisis by consciously working with what you hold in your energetic bodies that you experience as ‘pain’ or ‘suffering’ in order to transform this to ‘power’ or ‘love’ or ‘wisdom’. This is the healing path known as Inner Alchemy.
