DAMP- The Destroyer of Motivation

I’m a very energetically Damp person. What do I mean by this? Fundamentally, my body contains a sticky waste substance which is a byproduct of not digesting my food well (or eating too much Damp-producing food). The implications for having too much Damp are broad and varied. It can make a person feel heavy, exhausted, sluggish, lethargic, achy and have difficulty coalescing thoughts. This is because Damp impairs Spleen functioning which is responsible for bringing clarity (clear Qi) to the head. In fact, it damages all the Spleen’s functions including holding Blood (so you may bruise easily or suffer varicosities). Dampness is an insidious thing- it’s turbid and can penetrate everywhere. Personally, it lodges in my joints causing osteo-arthritic pain, know as Wind-Damp Bi syndrome. This means that I feel sore on waking up in the morning, the Damp has had overnight to settle and I require some movement to “get me going”.

When there is excess Heat added into the mix, then Damp transforms to Phlegm leading to other problems like coughing up catarrh, pus-filled acne or forming cyst like nodules under the skin.

Damp people tend to look a bit like me too. Barrel-shaped with puffy skin and a swollen tongue. This waste interferes with the production of Blood so my skin and hair can look dry and pale.

That’s not even the worst thing about Damp. This blog entry is about it’s ability to de-motivate us. It can give us a sense of hopelessness, making us think “what’s the point?”. Then we comfort eat more Damp-producing foods like chocolate or crisps which makes the endless cycle start all over again!

How can we rid ourselves of Damp? It’s really difficult to treat it in such a wet and cold country. A Spleen-friendly diet is essential in order to prevent the production of any additional Damp. Cutting out dairy, refined wheat, sugar, alcohol and limiting raw foods also helps. Not eating late at night or worrying excessively should be a focus too.

However, the most important way of eliminating Damp is EXERCISE. Anything that moves Qi to the point of sweating. Because we are moving into the Yin season of winter, I will start to reduce my clinic in order to care for myself. I will be going to the sauna and doing lots of spin classes to keep my Qi moving, Damp in check and produce more Blood so I can feel well and be of better service to you, my dear patients.

Fertility Expectations in a TCM Clinic

There was a time at the beginning of the noughties when acupuncture was headlined as the go-to treatment to assist in fertility. This meant that I saw a great many women who had experienced hardship on their journey to building a family. There were the unexplained infertility cases; the recurrent miscarriages; the IVFs; the ICSI’s; the ectopics and those women who fell pregnant easily the first time, only to find that conceiving a second time was near impossible.

Despite each case being treated individually and holistically, the over-riding message that I gave to each patient was the importance to improve the internal conditions for a healthy pregnancy to take place. It’s natural to latch onto the idea that your acupuncturist can miraculously help get you pregnant based on how the media’s portrayal.

Before booking in with any TCM practitioner, a woman must first ask themselves if their physical and personal situation are optimal (within reason) for bringing a child into the world. Is she willing to commit to treatment? Follow the lifestyle advice? Take the herbal formulas prescribed? Make and drink the bone broth? Do the cardio exercise for one half of the month followed by more meditative practices later on? Accept the financial implications without any “guarantees” of success? Send the spouse for treatment too even if their sperm has been reported as “healthy”? Does her job allow space for bringing a new life into the world? Is there harmony in the relationship between her and her partner?

It should also not be underestimated how huge the emotional component involved is. Feeling mentally well and being relaxed leads to an easier pregnancy, childbirth and a constitutionally healthier child. This is related to the pre-heaven essence (Jing) that is given to our offspring. The quality and quantity of Jing is finite and it’ll impact on the health of the individual overall so the conditions of conception are paramount in both mother and father.

(Although, we all know that “accidental” pregnancies can occur and there are also those born out of nonconsensual intercourse. In these situations, the vitality of both people (as well as timing) would have been enough to lead to conception.)

The final message of this blog is to reiterate the magic of creating life. If it were the simple chemistry of sperm meeting egg, wouldn’t we all be conceiving? Why are our best chances approximately 33% at best? The answer is in TCM.

Qi, Blood, Yin and Yang must all be in harmony for a successful pregnancy that goes to full term producing a robust child.

Do the research, track your cycle and take a quizzical look at your lifestyle. Without defensiveness or shame, explore ways that can optimise your health to lay the groundwork for what lies ahead.

Confinement and Convalescence: Postpartum Tradition

You may know that I have 2 teenage sons whom I love fiercely. When I fell pregnant with my eldest, I was consumed by the tsunami of childbirth and child rearing material thrown at me. Not once did I consider the days following the birth - after all, the prize was the baby who would effortless slip into my life. Furthermore, my body would instantly return to it’s pre-pregnancy splendour- Boy, was I wrong!

I remember my mum swooping down to our new house in the Scottish Borders to take charge once I was finally discharged from hospital. She filled the freezer with homemade Chinese food. There was a pot of chicken feet soup on the hob which contained shiitake, red dates, goji berries, jujube, dried cuttlefish and other Chinese herbs. Each ring on the range cooker had a pan with something wholesome and balanced on it. Dark leafy choi cooked with spring onions, ginger and rice wine; steamed sea bream in soy sauce; pork belly and potatoes marinated in fermented red bean curd and braised stuffed chicken wings. Of course, the rice cooker was standing sentry next to the hob, filled with hot, fragrant steamed rice. This is where I truly acknowledged the potency of food therapy. She also told me which foods to avoid- smoothies, yoghurt, cold and raw things. Basically nothing that could injure the Spleen and Stomach Qi.

There were many rules to confinement. I literally had no idea until this time.

For example I was not “allowed” to climb the stairs as my mother explained, in our Chinese tradition, that it could lead to prolapse. Arguably the “4th trimester” was the most crucial time for the new mother as it dictated the state of overall health for the rest of our lives. In fact, how we looked after ourselves during that time, could influence our ease of falling pregnant in the future.

It didn’t stop there! I was not permitted to wash my hair or even take a shower for 1 month so I used a basin of warm soapy water and a flannel each day. In my culture, I was also forbidden to go outdoors and as a TCM practitioner, I could understand why. I was vulnerable to the attack by Wind (an external pathogenic factor). Our postpartum bodies are more susceptible to invasion as our channels are still open following the birth of the child.

When the blessed day came where I was finally allowed to wash that mop on my head, my mother dumped a whole soup pot of water infused with ginger peel all over my scalp. I’ve never felt burning like it! Not due to the temperature of the water, but due to the searing spicy heat from the ginger peel. Mum looked on smugly, satisfied that the feng wouldn’t harm me.

Similarly, another rule was that guests were not recommended during this time as they could carry their own miscellaneous pathogenic factors in the form of bacteria and viruses.

One aspect that I couldn’t stomach was the daily consumption of spiced pigs trotters and boiled eggs in vinegar. I balked when my mother presented me with a giant jar of this concoction whilst she strictly instructed me to finish the whole thing in order to build up my Qi and Blood. I was astounded that we were speaking the same language. For decades, she never explained the TCM concepts of the soups and teas she gave me and simply forced me to eat them. Occasionally she would say that I had “yeit hei”- translated as “hot air/energy”. Despite this sweet moment of bonding, I hid the jar away until I could launch it into the garbage wheelie bin, never to be seen again.

It interests me now that “confinement hotels” are gaining popularity in the East. It’s probably a result of the growing disconnectedness that we have with our community and lack of space for support within our housing. At the very least, these tried and tested traditions are staying alive and the new mother is viewed as the priority rather than the emphasis being purely on baby’s health.

If you are looking into how to support yourself in the post-natal days, get in touch to book in for a Mother Warming session where I will come to your house and deliver a nourishing and loving treatment. There will be moxa, massage and needles, and I promise, no pigs trotters!

Ruminations of a TCM Practitioner- Part 1

“Being at ease with not knowing is crucial for the answers to come to you.” Eckhart Tolle

The other day, a friend said to me “Gosh Lena, you are so smart. When you taught us that lesson, I was blown away”. Despite coming from a good place, this praise sent me into waves of distress as my inner critic came to the fore. Being an acupuncturist is not an easy profession. You are the scorn of the medical community and the joke of the skeptical general public. You constantly sit with a feeling that you are being evaluated and have to justify the reasons why this long established and evidence based medicine is the real deal.

It’s been almost 20 years since I graduated from acupuncture school and I was grateful that it opened the door into a calling that transcended profession. I really love Chinese Medicine. Heck, I grew up with it. It’s in my cell tissue. Even a characters in my Chinese name are translated as “assist” and “needle”. However, I’ve never felt that I am a “good” acupuncturist. Yes, I get results but my point prescriptions are simple, I don’t read Chinese and only speak a smattering of colloquial Cantonese. Patients would come to me saying that they wanted to receive acupuncture “straight from the source”. I could weep.

A part of me wants to blame my training at the Northern College of Acupuncture in York, as the course was rudimentary at best. Yes, there was Zang-Fu theory, point exams on real people, a teaching clinic where members of the public would receive treatment from students. All basic and useful stuff but there was no discussion of the classics, no analysis of Chinese characters in relation to point action and a brief skimming over the very important 6 conformations. I also felt the teachers (except Chen who travelled from China to teach us in clinic) had inflated egos without the knowhow to support it. I hope that 2 decades on, things have improved.

Another part of me realises that that experience was necessary to put me on a certain path of my own self study. It’s not uncommon to discover the wealth of material that you don’t know until you start to gain some clinical experience. I dip in and out of textbooks, listen to podcasts, trawl the internet, read any articles that jump at me. None of it is enough. I would be of great disservice to my patients if I didn’t dedicate more of my time returning to the foundations of Chinese Medicine as taught by our ancestors. So, I have slowly started to learn Mandarin and I am enjoying learning Asian Herbal Medicine from Dr Cannon. I’ll be picking up a copy of the Huang Di Wei Jing Su Wen and will probably never finish it in my lifetime. All of these areas require me to start from scratch and pushes the boundaries of the comfort zone.

A former patient said to me recently that on a daily basis, he asks himself “how can I be a better man tomorrow?”. I liked this. It probably rubs people up the wrong way as nowadays, folk cite in a mantra-style fashion that “you are enough”.

My personal conclusion is that even in times of inner turmoil when that imposter syndrome is screaming loudly, try to do your best with what you have. Accept that you do not hold all the answers but endeavour to seek them out. And if that doesn’t work, change lanes. After all, stagnation is the source of most diseases, walk a few different paths until you find the one that resonates with you. Be a better version of yourself tomorrow.

Falling in Love with Fungi

I grew up in a pretty traditional British/Hong Kong Chinese household. We had the takeaway downstairs and our home upstairs. When it came to dinner time (this happened when fewer orders came through), my parents would snatch a mouthful of rice and rush off. The meals were pretty balanced in terms of the 5 flavours. We’d have a meat dish like beef/pork/chicken; a whole fish served with ginger and spring onions or pickled turnip and sour cabbage; steamed salt preserved duck eggs; salted fish with black beans; stir fried choi and usually a bowl of tong (soup). Following this would be tong shui (sweet dessert soup), orange segments, Chinese apple-pears and fresh lychees or longan/dragon eyes (if we were lucky!). However, by far my favourite dish would contain dong gu / shittake. Sometimes served with pork, fermented red bean curd and Chinese yams or with chicken thighs in a gorgeous smooth sauce, I would dive in! My mother would lament that I would suffer horrendous constipation but I didn’t care, they were my favourite.

As success of our takeaway grew, my parents sold it and opened a Chinese restaurant in the next town and we bought a newly built red brick house on a site of old woodland. Every autumn, a whole array of weird looking, brightly coloured mushrooms would festoon the garden floor. I owned a tiny Collins Gem book on fungi which contained no photos, only illustrations and was frustratingly inadequate for safe identification. Whilst my curiosity and affinity to fungi never left me, I parked it on the back burner while I focused on school, university and then TCM training.

Shortly after graduating from Acupuncture school, the mushroom bug bit me again and I trawled the internet for fungi foraging courses. My first was with the esteemed mycologist, Patrick Harding, up in a beautiful Scottish town called Crieff. I remember being 7 weeks pregnant with my eldest son at the time and was constantly vomiting every time I even smelt a mushroom!

I followed up by reading books by Paul Stamets, Roger Phillips and attending other courses run by wild food enthusiasts. However, the real learning is only gained by quietly foraging yourself and identifying your finds through spore prints and a host of other means.

While picking chicken-of-the-woods, chanterelles, ceps and hedgehog mushrooms were fun for the pot, I still wanted to find out more about the healing properties of fungi. They have been used for centuries in Traditional Chinese Herbal Medicine andI am currently growing some Ling Zhi at home (Reishi/Ganoderma lucidum) and I’ve foraged some Ganoderma applanatum this week. I’m especially interested in looking into aqueous and ethanol-based extraction techniques and am keen to try it on the aforementioned artist conk. I’ve encapsulated some home grown Lion’s Mane mushroom (Hericium erinaceus) because I’m curious about it’s reputation in improving cognitive memory. I really must credit the book by Martin Powell “Medicinal Mushrooms: A Clinical Guide” which sets out all the essential must-know aspects of some common medicinal fungi. It’s an easy read and especially accessible as Martin is also a TCM practitioner.

Finally, I am studying East Asian Herbal Medicine with the esteemed Dr Christine Cannon of the AHMRC and am enjoying delving deeper into these fascinating fruiting bodies that have the power to heal us so much.

But what’s your “take away” from this blog entry? Well if you too are interested in wild crafting, you may wish to follow a similar trajectory to mine. There are so many more resources out there compared to my formative days. The main area of study I think everyone should start with is to LEARN YOUR TREES as this is a very important means of identifying woodland mushrooms. Also get fully versed in the foraging rules in the areas that you wish to explore, e.g. seek landowner’s permission. Lastly and most vitally- NEVER EAT ANYTHING THAT YOU ARE NOT 100% SURE OF ITS IDENTITY. For example, many young amanitas look like the prized cep . Fortunately, you can only meet you maker by EATING a poisonous mushroom- smelling, touching and even licking them won’t harm you.