Mental Health
The 5 Elements of Chinese Medicine for Knicks-Mania
For the first time in 53 years and the first time in my life it looks like the Knicks can do it. I never thought this would happen. Even in the past few years, as they improved and made progress in the playoffs, my non-expert understanding was that we were a second-tier team. We’d make some runs, it’d be exciting and interesting for the first time in a quarter century, and that was enough to stoke the passion of hometown fans. But we’d always fall short of the top tier.
Now here we are, atop the mountain, two games to win to be considered the best, and I’ve already lost sleep over it. Like a kid on Christmas, but instead of sugar plums, visions of dancing in the streets with strangers, causing a ruckus, crying tears of joy in embrace with old friends who I watched the Knicks of the 90’s with as a kid.
It only happened once, but last week I tossed and turned for hours, intermittently frustrated but also laughing at how ridiculous I was, a victim of my own “heart fire,” an over-stimulated central nervous system, hyper-secretion of serotonin, and/or cortisol. So how do we treat this?
“Excessive joy,” as it is referred to in the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic, which sounds almost paradoxical. Why should any amount of joy be labeled “excessive?” What it means is over-excitement. Excessive indulgence, as in intoxicants or sexual pleasures, manic behaviors, and/or over-celebration, as in if your team should win a title for the first time in half a century. Of course, keep in mind for purposes of practicality, that none of these overt examples are requisite to induce heart fire. Some of us are just more so inclined—more prone to anxiety, insomnia, ruminating thoughts, or panic. For heart fire patterns, the following is advisable:
Avoid spicy foods, which induce upward surging of chemicals, the last thing they need. Prioritize bitters: green tea, coffee, and cooked leafy greens. Herbal formulas must be customized by a licensed clinician, but will revolve around medicines such as coptis root, gardenia fruit, scutellaria root, and/or rhubarb root. Keeping in mind that excessive consumption of bitter foods and medicines can weaken metabolism. It can be mitigated by exercise and foods that are mildly bland or sweet, such as yams, rice, and steamed vegetables.
Conversely, what if the Knicks lose? Then the stages of grief, beginning with anger, or “liver fire.”
Liver fire—that is uncontrollable fury—can be calmed by consuming sweets. Not sweet by modern American standards, although plenty of us have reached for junk food in moments of stress and can attest to having felt temporary relief. Instead, foods like rice or yams, even breads, butter, honey, or fruits can behave accordingly functional and are advisable for PMS cravings. Herbal formulas revolve around licorice, red dates, longan fruit, and/or rehmannia root. Keeping in mind that excessive consumption of sweet foods can also weaken metabolism by creating fluid retention in the gut. It can be mitigated by exercise and foods that are mildly bland or acrid, such as ginger, cooked onions, and steamed vegetables.
Finally, we have grief. Logically the opposite patho-mechanism to heart fire, grief causes vital substances to plummet in the body. Fluid metabolism is impaired as a result and we feel heavier, lethargic, depressed if you will. The body requires the opposite of bitter: Spicy, when appropriately dosed, can help metabolize fluids and bring our energy back up. Ginger, garlic, onions, turmeric, and even moderate doses of chili pepper. Herbal formulas might revolve around dry-fried ginger, Sichuan peppercorn, aconite, cinnamon, or ephedra. Keeping in mind that excessive consumption of “acrid” foods can weaken metabolism by dehydrating the gut’s mucosal fluids and digestive enzymes. It can be mitigated by exercise and foods that are mildly sour or sweet, such as yams, rice, and lemon water.
Clearly, and unlike my daughter, we are rooting for BITTER! Sleepless nights, heart palpitations, and a touch of anxiety, are symptoms any die hard Knicks fan would sign up for a few days of in exchange for a title. So get your green tea, kale, and dandelion greens ready. GO KNICKS!
Halloween: from a Chinese Medical View
FEAR, in Chinese medicine, is said to harm the kidneys, a mechanism that is easily relatable and biomedically translatable in that when scared, our brains signal to our adrenal glands to release cortisol and adrenaline, which in turn subjectively exhausts our hormonal reserves, or the Chinese concept of healthy blood and fluids.
This blood and fluids are necessary to attract our excitatory hormones and neurotransmitters back downwards so they can do things like transform fluids and allow us to sleep and relax. As they deplete, with age, stress, and self-destruction, we become more prone to more easily releasing cortisol, which perpetuates the vicious cycle. Eventually we run out of cortisol, adrenaline, as well as our fluids that fall under the concept of “blood,” and we die, buried in the ground like the ghouls, goblins, ghosts, and skeletons that started this whole problem in the first place!
CANDY, in Chinese medicine, is said to harm the spleen, which really just means it destroys our digestive system—the system whose job it is to produce the blood and reserves that are necessary to mitigate the side effects of adrenal and cortisol spikes that are relatively unavoidable in modern life. I’ve had many patients who grew up in foreign countries relate to me that while they had plenty of sweets and treats as kids growing up, nothing was as saccharin sweet as what they tasted upon arriving in the U.S.
While it’s nice to be nice to ourselves, forgiving and all that, I believe packaged junk food that really doesn’t expire should be invisible to us if we wish to have any hope for long term health. My wife and I unapologetically shelter our daughter from it as much as possible for as long as possible to give her organs as much time to develop sans the perversion of corporate crap.
With that said… the reason many of us experience sweet cravings when stressed is because cortisol and adrenalin are up, therefore blood and fluids are down, and what substance to better mimic the mush of mucosal fluids than SWEETS? The ancient Chinese used (relatively) sweet flavor herbs, such as red dates, licorice, and rehmannia to “calm the liver”—that is to mitigate hyper-reactions of adrenaline.
SO IT MAKES SENSE! THE LOGIC OF HALLOWEEN IS CONSISTENT WITH THAT OF DAOIST BIOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES! Go out, get scared, have fun, then come home and enjoy a few treats 🙂 Discard or donate the rest. Ignore candy and forget about treats for the rest of the year, or at least until Christmas, for God’s sake, and use healthier options to reattract your stressed floating “yang qi” downwards:
- Nut butters like from Fixx and Fogg
- Dark chocolates like from Blue Stripes
- Coconut yogurts maybe with red dates, goji berries, and/or maple syrup, and/or nut butters with dark chocolate… ANYTHING besides refined junk food, please.
Just as “fear harms the kidneys,” excess anger is said to harm the liver, grief does the lungs, and worry harms digestion as much, if not more than poor diet. None of us, myself included, will ever be immune to worry (no vaccine for that (yet)!), so friendly reminder to have a context of friends, spiritual practice, and/or spiritual community to lean on.
Happy Halloween!
8 Benefits of Practicing Regular Meditation
Meditation has a reputation for several health benefits but here are the top eight reasons establishing a regular meditation routine can improve your overall health and wellbeing. But first, what is meditation? It is defined as the regular process of training your mind to focus and redirect your thoughts. continue reading
Can It Be All Stress?
“It’s just stress,” is a diagnostic platitude commonly heard by patients when relaying either to friends or their doctor about some odd or non-immediately fatal symptom that lacks any conventional, empirical treatment.
It would be an over-simplification to label this stock response as wholly or always dismissive—in my opinion it is more often a result of the listeners’ lack of knowledge of physiological nuances, disease spectrums, and of course the entire internal paradigm of Chinese Medicine.
The mind is en vogue in the past generation, so much so that people jump at the opportunity to sound mentally acute even while being mentally lazy in its default citation as a scapegoat for everything, the way fat was in the 20th century or sugar is now. It makes them feel aware of the more mysterious, all while maintaining an orthodox adherence to conventional medicine’s present understanding of things. I picture people picturing themselves as if sipping a small cup of whiskey wearing Coke bottle glasses and a bowtie in their reply: “It’s (probably just stress),” then putting their cup back down and nodding their head as if they’d just cured HIV.
While no one could dispute that stress is an important variable in the etiology of most illnesses, it is also just that: One important variable. So why when we have curious symptoms that conventional medicine has no explanation or treatment for do they never say: “It’s just diet?” “It’s just your sleep hygiene?” Or: “It’s just your exercise routine that needs refinement or reduction, or simply needs to exist?”
Why when one person experiences incredible stress does it show up as digestive issues, while for another it does as insomnia, and another as hives all over their skin? “People are different,” idiots might shrug and say, which isn’t untrue, but is an egregious oversimplification. People are different, which means if we each consumed diets and partook in exercises suitable to our own individual constitutions, we’d likely be able to ward off the ill effects of short or even medium-term life stressors.
If stress causes you low back or neck pain we know there is “dampness trapped on the exterior layer of the body.” If stress causes stomach issues we know there are already stomach issues, since most or many people can endure stress without such symptoms. If stress causes headaches or migraines then there was likely already some dysregulation of cerebrovascular flow in particular neurological pathways
In this way stress can be invaluably informative, by tipping our internal scale and showing us where we are weak, where in our bodies we are retaining pathogenic fluids, so we can properly treat, instead of dismissing it. Because odd, inexplicable symptoms are never nothing. They are not “all in our minds” or insignificant. Instead, from a Chinese Medical perspective, sadly they are potential coming attractions—foreshadows of diagnoses to come.
I apologize if this sounds dark or ominous. My intention is the opposite, to offer optimism and agency to those of us who have been repeatedly implied to that we must resolve all of our internal turmoil in order to be free of a particular problem. While I am all for a daily practice of meditation, prayer, community, and anything else that reduces stress, we should be able to also rely on medical providers to step in with something more to offer during periods where our practice of psycho-emotional work and discipline just is not enough.
Shower Clogs and Chinese Medicine
One of the recurrent flaws in our Jersey City apartment of the past few years has been the plumbing. Within months after moving here we had an inexplicable leak from the kitchen sink that forced management to have to tear up and replace the living room flooring. Of course, my neurosis coupled with faith in ongoing communication from the subjective realm diagnosed this as a sure sign from the universe (and my own spirit guides) that leaving New York City was the wrong decision. My wife on the other hand diagnosed it as a plumbing crisis.
More chronic at home has been our need to regularly flush out the shower drains, and each time we do so we’re sure to use not just hot water, but a pot of boiling water to chase the Liquid Plumr or whichever product my wife deems most ideal to unstick the grime and/or hairs that cause the clogs. It reminded me of one of the most important principles in Chinese medicine, the diet, and lifestyle we encourage of human beings.
Grime or accumulation in pipes is no different in theory than “dampness,” dysbiosis, or plaques in human vessels, arteries, and pathways. Call it what you will—any of the aforementioned, otherwise inflammation or fluid retention, ultimately all paradigms of medicine can consistently observe and cite such blockages as the underlying etiologies to most diseases.
This is why Eastern medicine discourages our consumption of anything and everything cold. Whether cold drinks, cold foods, such as salads, yogurts, or smoothies, or using ice on injuries, cold constricts and solidifies accumulations instead of dissolving them, thereby making such substances counterintuitive to our perpetual intention to reduce inflammation.
Cold foods are often yummy and convenient, which makes them that much more appealing in our fast-paced society, although convenient should always be a red flag when it comes to caring for the planet and ourselves. Microwaves are convenient, as are plastic bags and take-out containers, as well as gasoline cars, all of which are obviously and equally basic and destructive.
Western medicine often alleges there is “no known cause of arthritis,” which really just means they do not know what causes it. In Eastern medicines we know better. This doesn’t necessarily mean our treatment towards full resolution is simple, but its cause is. The human body is made mostly of fluids that have to constantly circulate, often through relatively microscopic spaces surrounding joints and ligaments. This circulation is created by our “qi,” or overall cellular energy, which obviously wanes with age. Exercise can help, as can a good diet, but all of us over the age of 30 are gradually losing energy, which means our fluid circulation is slowing, which leaves us vulnerable to cold clogs, constriction, and inflammation.
As we seem to instantaneously traverse from summer into a rather chilly fall this is an important concept to keep in mind. While anti-inflammatory diets and nutritious foods can be great, many times our bodies can benefit by just pouring hot water into it every day. Whether in the form of herbal teas, pu-erh tea, barley and ginger tea (message me for this recipe) green tea (only for those of us with heat patterns), soups, and/or bone broths, or shiitake mushroom broth for my vegan friends, a daily ritual of these edible, nourishing versions of Liquid Plumr can have immeasurable preventive benefits if consumed consistently over long periods of time.
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