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Blood Nourishing Food for Emotional Wellbeing

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.

Happy 2023

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.

Full Moon – Illuminating the Darkness

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!

The miraculous power of gratitude

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.

Why I’ve chosen to not renew my AHPRA registration

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.  
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Inner Alchemy – A feminine + masculine approach to healing

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.

How trauma affects the Heart & Shen (spirit)

From this perspective, the current culture of segregation may be perceived as trauma to the Shen. To be faced with discrimination, division and other control measures goes against the Heart and the core of our humanity. The flame the resides at the centre of your Heart seeks connection, much like the way people come together around a campfire. The Heart is strengthened through connections to others, strengthening the field of love which is the glue that holds it all together. Without love, the Shen fly home to the stars and eventually the flame of the will to live dies out.

What does it mean to ‘follow the yin’?

It doesn't matter whether its the small things at the individual level, such as filling your body with junk food or neglecting your body's need for rest or exercise OR if it's on a global scale such as modifying crops or altering genetics or even changing the weather patterns. There's ALWAYS a price to pay. This is simply Natural Law. Nature will always seek to restore balance because it's the perfection of Nature's Design that holds the whole thing together. Yes, humanity has free will but just because we can doesn't mean we should. The capacity to know the difference is called WISDOM.

Why anger is your pathway to passion & creativity

Anger is then used to 'blow off steam' and to attack which may provide a false sense of feeling powerful (and temporarily relieve the frustration), but actually stems from underlying feelings of vulnerability and powerless-ness. If any of this sounds familiar, the thing to understand about your Liver Qi is that this energy is meant to provide you with the MOTIVE FORCE to create the change you want to see in the world. So it's learning how to harness this motive force and use it to affect positive change.

What’s the panicdemic got to do with birth?

There are so many parallels that can be drawn between our birthing culture and the spiralling cascade of interventions that we've all experienced as part of the panicdemic these past 18+ months. It's time to question our mainstream medical culture that OBJECTIFIES the body and focuses on 'saving lives' without recognition for the WHOLE of what it means to be human. Its time mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing be given equal consideration, if not priority.