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Adele on GOOP – Year of the Tiger


My contribution to Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP Newsletter for Living by the Seasons – Winter

Chinese New Year, Year of the Tiger


February 14th marks the beginning of the New Year in the Chinese lunar calendar. This is the year of the Tiger. The Chinese ancient pictograph for the tiger is of a crouching tiger, which is a fitting emblem for the New Year. The pictograph depicts a tiger crouching down with his head turned to the side, he is quiet, waiting in peaceful repose. We don’t often think of tigers in their resting state, but all cats know when to pounce and when to be still, and winter is a time to be still.

Living According To The Seasons

In winter the days are shorter with less natural light, which also brings less natural warmth. It is a time to slow down and let our bodies restore and rejuvenate. Going to bed earlier, resting and giving ourselves a chance to catch our breath are all a part of the natural cycle of winter.

All year long we are busy, too busy really. We’re running helter-skelter from this meeting to that meeting, worried about money, too busy to cook dinner, too busy to sleep, too busy to be the tiger in peaceful repose.

So where does all this really get us? Being overworked and chronically stressed tax the adrenals, the gland associated with the fight or flight response. When the adrenals are constantly employed for energy it can lead to morning anxiety, insomnia, blood sugar problems, and a disruption in the endocrine system. This only necessitates working more to make the money needed to support all of the doctor’s bills, acupuncture appointments, and yoga classes required to feel better. So what can we do when we find ourselves in a hyper-adrenalized state?

Adrenaline

First, let’s try to understand what is happening in the body when it is overworked and chronically stressed. When we are working too hard, our body begins to produce adrenaline. Adrenaline is a hormone produced by the adrenal glands located on the kidneys. It is a stress hormone involved in the fight or flight response. It keeps us going when we are taxed and need to tap into our reserves to make it through a stressful time. The adrenals are akin to our emergency battery – they keep the lights on when the power is out. If we live under constant stress (like many of us do) the system begins to break down and our bodies become depleted. We can’t live on adrenaline, on the emergency batteries, forever.

Recharge Your Batteries and Start Living Healthy

One thing I have come to appreciate in all my years of studying Chinese Medicine, and working with so many patients, as well as being a lover of the outdoors, is that our individual bodies are a reflection of the environment. The same things that are healthy and good for our bodies are equally good for the environment.

I’m going to ask you to please slow down a little. Use this season to begin to understand in a new way the natural rhythms of the earth.

Winter is the season for quiet repose, a natural time to unwind, slow down and let the adrenal glands replenish. Just think of the bears in hibernation and the trees losing their leaves and returning nutrients to their roots. Winter is the season of conservation and storage, a natural time to restore and recuperate.

Change One Habit

How can you begin to let your activities, and your time for rest, mirror the quietness and coldness of the winter months? Of course it would be extreme to forgo all of your work and priorities to simply lock yourself in and hibernate for the winter, but can you take at least one step? Can you make one small change at the beginning of this New Year to form one new habit, which will bring you warmth and a little peace through this cold winter?

Start by modifying your eating habits by adding a few new good foods to your list. During this time of year, winter squashes and root vegetables are very good to cook. Dried mushrooms are a potent tonic for the lungs and seasonably available. Parsley is a savory winter green full of Vitamin C. Dried goji berries and walnuts are also good; try adding them to hot cereal. Definitely avoid cold and raw foods, as they are particularly hard to digest right now. The following recipes and home remedies will recharge the kidneys and adrenals during the winter months. Add these food to your winter repertoire and you’ll be sure to feel a positive difference.

The key to Chinese Medicine, and to these home remedies, is consistency. The potency of the effects builds slowly in your system over time, and it is the slow steady changes that are the longest lasting and most healing.

In peaceful tranquility quiet your mind, then empty and erase your mind of thoughts.

Written by the grand master and doctor Mu Wee Dang at the age of 91.

For Winter Home Remedies and Self Care, check out:

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Shai Taiyang: Basking in the Sun

During one of my sojourns through Mainland China I came upon a village North of Beijing in an arid, mountainous region. This village was distinguished because it still retained the flavor of an 18th century village – centuries had passed but the architecture was unchanged, and people still lived in their family homes of 300 years, or more. There was no refrigeration so food customs had also remained in tact – if you wanted a chicken for dinner someone from the village would go out, slaughter it, and feed you the whole animal. Although modern conveniences have done so much to change the way that we can live our lives, and what is readily available to us, time spent in an old village such as this one is a reminder of our humanness, and the customs can teach us a lot about what we need to feel healthy, vital, and happy.

One afternoon, as I made my way up one of the clay pathways I came upon a group of elderly Chinese folks sitting against a wall that was illuminated by winter sunlight. It was a cold day, but snug there at the wall, protected from wind, it was a good place to bask in the sunlight. This basking has a term in Chinese, Shai Taiyang, and it implies that it is good for your body to soak in the sunshine. I sat with the villagers and indeed it felt very good. We all smiled at one-another and had a congenial time, although I did not think much beyond, oh it’s nice to sit in the sun. I did not think about any of the implications to health – not until recently that is.

There is a hormone, which we call Vitamin D, that is produced when the sun soaks into the skin and converts cholesterol stored in the oils of our skin into Vitamin D3. The inert Vitamin D3 travels to the liver where it is converted into another inactive form (called 25-hydroxy Vitamin D), which can circulate through the whole body. Although Vitamin D has been known for some time to be crucial for bone health, studies are now showing that every cell in the body has receptors for Vitamin D. This perhaps explains why deficiencies in Vitamin D have been linked to a wide range of diseases and disorders including chronic muscle and joint pain, chronic fatigue, muscle weakness and poor muscle tone, seasonal affective disorder, infertility, high blood pressure, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, autoimmune diseases, and some forms of cancer especially breast cancer and colon cancer – just to name a few.

Although the recommendation is controversial I do believe that spending fifteen minutes, when the sun is at its peak, basking with bare arms and legs and without wearing any sun block can have advantages to our overall health. (sun screen inhibits our bodies ability to make vitamin D). Of course, it isn’t always possible to follow these recommendations, and we still need to consider the negative effects of the sun damaging the skin. For this reason it is recommended to take Vitamin D supplements. (2000 IU per day is considered safe.) Multivitamins usually contain a low dose of Vitamin D, so it may be necessary to take additional supplements.

Since taking steps to correct my own Vitamin D deficiency, I have noticed a distinct increase in my tolerance to cold, and I have been able to maintain my body temperature much more easily. I find this effect fascinating considering Vitamin D is made by our bodies with the help of adequate daily sunlight. Sunlight is yang in nature, and in fact the Chinese character for yang is a pictograph of the sunny side of a hill. Yang energy is indeed what maintains our body temperature and warmth, and people who are always cold are said to be yang deficient. In addition to feeling warmer, I have also noticed an overall elevation in my mood – I feel more vigorous and optimistic about life in general.

It would be ideal to take time to sit and bask quietly in the sunlight everyday, like I did in China so many years ago, but it is also nice to understand, at least in part, what scientifically is happening inside the body when enjoying such a custom, and how the vitamins that our body makes and needs can help us to live longer, healthier lives. I encourage you to have your Vitamin D levels checked the next time you’re at the doctor to see if you too may benefit your overall health by adding a little sunlight (or a little supplement) to your daily routine. And please don’t forget about your children – they need Vitamin D too to have a healthy immune system.

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Adele on GOOP – Healing Modalities

I am a practitioner of Chinese medicine, which includes acupuncture, herbal medicine and Chinese medical massage, among other types of treatment. I have my own private practice in New York City.

Here, I hope to give you a taste of the vast wisdom on health and well-being embodied in this ancient medical practice, as well as a few practical and easy applications that you can start to incorporate into your life today. If you are already familiar with Chinese medicine, I think there will be something here for you as well.

When in college at Indiana University in 1987, I met a Chinese medical doctor. This was my first exposure to Chinese medicine and I was intrigued by a medical practice with a two-thousand year history, built on a complete medical system virtually ignored by Western studies. When I began my studies with her, I began a journey that would not only take me to China, but would forever change my life.

I went on to earn a Master’s degree in Chinese medicine from the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine (where I ultimately taught from 1999 to 2006 and served as department chair of herbal medicine for four years). For two-and-a-half years I studied in Beijing, which included two hospital residencies. I am fluent in Chinese and read classical Chinese, the language the medical texts use. I continue my studies to this day with a Korean master, Won Duk-Huang, and the Taoist master Jeffery Yuen.

Chinese medicine is based on the ancient Chinese philosophical principle of the holistic nature of the universe, where humans are essentially a representation of the universe. For example, the heart is like the sun in the sky, the lungs the atmosphere or the sky itself, the digestion is the soil of the earth and the kidneys are the salty oceans. Chinese medicine studies the natural order of the universe in order to understand the inner workings of the human body.

Acupuncture works on a system of meridians that flows through the body, much like the nervous system or circulatory system. Qi (pronounced “chee”), our life force, moves through the meridians and is thought to flow like rivers on the earth into the sea. Certain points along the meridians will clog up or get weak; the body can’t do what it knows to do to stay healthy and illness ensues. The insertion of very fine, painless needles into these points mobilizes the flow of Qi through these meridians in therapeutic ways.

Many people think that acupuncture works on the nervous system and is used solely to treat pain. However, just as we go to our doctors for all types of ailments, Chinese medicine too, treats everything, because it is a complete medical system. While I can and do often treat pain, I also treat allergies, asthma, auto-immune disorders, gynecological disorders, infertility, migraines, irritable bowel, acid reflux, gastro-intestinal disorders, skin rashes, acne, nicotine and other drug addictions, even Asperger’s syndrome.

Chinese medicine excels at treating diseases that are chronic in nature and that Western medicine has limited treatment for, such as irritable bowel or acid reflux. Doctors manage the symptoms, but a Chinese doctor can actually cure the condition. Allergies and asthma fall into this category as well. I have cured many patients of allergies and asthma, especially children. While treating a disease such as asthma with acupuncture, the patient may continue to use inhalers to manage symptoms. My goal as an acupuncturist is to improve the situation so that inhalers are no longer necessary.

Here are a few home remedies that I often recommend to my patients and use myself. Chinese herbal remedies, like needles, help stimulate the Qi and encourage healing. I do suggest, though, that you see an acupuncturist for a full diagnosis and follow-up care.