open appointments:
Fri 1- 6pm (May 31)
Sat 11 - 6pm (May 31)
Friday Yoga, 9-10am, summer venue change! 🌞
Drop-in hatha yoga class has returned outdoors for summer, to the grass park right outside Abalone Apothecary. Flowing and grounding, designed to develop a home breathing and movement practice. Stay for tea afterwards…
for the Ladies 💃🏻 Womb Literacy 101 with Chanana starting this autumn!
Join me for this 6-week online course taught by my talented colleague & friend, Chanana McGarry. I met Chanana while she was teaching a class in the Moon lodge at a primitive skills gathering. I have done quite a bit of womb work, and I was impressed by her depth of knowledge, her creativity, and her connection to the earth and ancient wisdom. I knew I had to take this class and I am SO excited to finally learn exactly what is happening with my cycle, day to day, guided by a trained expert. Reach out if you want to hear more, or just sign up!
birthed into flowers
We’ve just come into Yang season, warm and kinetic. Can you feel it? Birthed into the solar fire by springtime, who, through contraction and struggle, pushed us out of dark, cold, watery subterranean Yin.
According to classical Daoist medicine, springtime is not just about new life unfurling… it is the act of birth itself. The energy of springtime is contraction. The element is wood, or ‘mu’ 木 which also means “to butt” - as in rams butting heads. As in, our bodies and spirits butting up against our own internal heaviness, against the wet cold earth of winter, to unfurl with great effort, like a seed sprouting out into the light. Spring, despite the cute bunnies and pretty daffodils, is not meant to be easy. If you’ve given birth, or witnessed a birth, you’ll know what I mean. The arrival of new life is a gritty, roaring, volcanic act of defiance against inertia. We’ve just made it through a collective birthing and now - if we are aligned with the qi of the earth’s turning - we may finally be unfurling into expressive action, motivated to create and celebrate all this sun-drenched beauty of life.
In the Chinese earth-based calendar there are 24 qi nodes, and around May 6th we stepped into the 7th node - “Lì Xià” or “summer begins” - midway between the spring equinox and summer solstice. It lines up with Beltane, the Celtic earth-based celebration of maypole and flower crowns, of making love upon the earth to summon fertility, of fields, women, the fruits of mother earth.
This first qi node of summer invites us to revel in flowers, but there’s more. Lì Xià comes on the heels of the previous node’s Clear Light festival, an honoring of our dead, letting our ancestors know we made it all the way through winter. Daoist time flows in a circle - a beautiful concept that is not so easy to embody in our linear goal-oriented culture where death is seen as a tragic and terrifying finality, rather than natural offering towards new life. The classics tell us that if we do not align with the seasons, we’re in for a rough ride. The beginning of summer only holds as much promise as our last season’s good work. Have we cleared the sludge of spring to allow new growth and flowering? To allow our intuition to express freely? This is a big project, when most of us have a backlog of decades of living out of harmony with the seasons.


Speaking for myself, I have been in springtime mode… I’ve been pruning and going through all my physical stuff to clear space for some new projects which I’m on fire to bring forward. Hard personal truths have been gestating within me and I have recently given birth to a new vision for radical self-responsibility - a babe that needs constant nourishment to grow. I am tired, from decades of too much work, too little rest… I am grieving a bit… and I am a bit disconnected, too, even as I practice every day to be more seamlessly present and embodied. I am just back from a flu-thing and teaching and soaking up the good humanity at the Buckeye primitive skills gathering. And I’ve been indulging my cravings to garden. Maybe you see yourself in some of this. We express a collective qi, not just our own path.
pain, with love
There is a saying in the Huang Di Nei Jing, the Chinese medicine classic text:
不通這痛,痛則不通
Tong Ze Bu Tong; Bu Tong Ze Tong.
“If there is free flow, there is no pain; if there is pain, there is lack of free flow.”
For years I held this as a fundamental truth of healing, but not anymore. Now, I understand that it is only half of the story. If there is no free flow, there are actually two possibilities: there is pain - or we are numb.
What I am about to share is radical, and may be triggering. But it is the path I am walking and the deepest medicine I have to offer. Let me know what you think.
If we have pain, we are in luck. It means we are not dead to ourselves; something is stirring, ready to transform. Something has come up from our depths that is craving attention. Butting against a dense knotted tangle within us, wants to expand, unencumbered, to take up more space, to alchemize into a more enlivened version of ourselves. Perhaps, wants to warn us that we are in trouble if we don’t pivot. Pain is the portal to internal alchemy, a teacher and guide.
Pain demands us to be present with ourselves.
Have you ever found yourself more irritated when in pain? Pain wants us to go inward and *feel* - not answer questions or go grocery shopping. If we face our pain with gratitude and love, bit by bit, it leads to our hidden truths. It might not vanish, but it will often transform, and it will always teach us about ourselves.
What does it look like to claim responsibility for our pain, create space for it, allow it to speak. Release the blame and diagnoses and stories; try allowing your pain to be formless, pure sensation. Forget, for just a moment, that “I have inflammation” or “my disc is ruptured”.
Not easy. Sometimes all pain will say is, “you’re stuck.” This is not a life sentence or a quick fix. It is an invitation to walk a path of listening and attuning to self.
We were born into the era of the quick-fix, get something for nothing, ends justify the means. This ethos pervades every system of modern life, enshrined in the unconscious temples of our colonized minds. We were born into a medical philosophy of materialism - the idea that our flesh and the earth are mechanized systems, best manipulated by physical invasion, surgeries, drugs, strip-mining, fences, mono-crop farming - rather than animate, regenerative, infinitely intelligent vessels for the divine.
materialism
/mə-tîr′ē-ə-lĭz″əm/
noun1. (Philosophy) The theory that physical matter is the only reality and that everything, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena.
2. The theory or attitude that physical well-being and worldly possessions constitute the greatest good and highest value in life.
3. Concern for possessions or material wealth and physical comfort, especially to the exclusion of spiritual or intellectual pursuits
We can make diamonds of our pain by exploring its underground roots - there is no way out but through. This advice can land as insensitive, offensive, victim-blamey. How dare you trivialize this hell I am living which you do not walk or understand. How dare you minimize what I have been through, gaslight me about the awful things that have happened to me.
Pain is a symptom of being alive, and it can definitely be hell - more so when we resist it, or externalize it as a betrayal of our body, a malfunction, an injustice. What I am proposing is to assume - just for a moment - that we are a victim of nothing - that our pain is our job to tend - like a new baby or an answered calling to arms - not fun, but - worthy. And that is a path for the heart, because the only way I have found to truly alchemize pain is to regard all of ourselves - body & spirit - with courageous love and truth-telling. Welcome the pain with a full and tender “yes”. Ask for support. And be willing to let it dissolve into mist when it is complete; liberating our identity for whatever unfolds in life, and body, next.
It is an alchemist’s path.
This newly arrived summer brings our joy, moves blood warmly through our vessels. It is also time to feed our shen, housed in the heart - the yin organ that rules this time of solar yang. Expression and activity, and spiritual expansion. If we are all balled up in pain, something is getting in the way of our spirit, blocking our child-like free-flowing happiness and exuberance.
For example,
the stress fracture I had in college when I was pounding 8-10 miles a day on pavement as a cross country runner. Started with an ache. I ate a few ibuprofin every day before practice, the pain stopped, I kept running. For months. Until the bone just cracked. And I was out for 8 weeks, left to deal with my stormy emotions, without the outlet of my running, my happiness. When I healed, I learned from my body that if I ran for an hour, I needed to stretch and breathe for an hour afterwards, and I would have zero pain. if I skipped stretching, my ankle would hurt. No expert medical advice needed.... my ankle told me herself.
Or, more complicated… the pain in my shoulders and neck. Speaks to my need to control everything, my over-intellectualization, hyper-vigilance, maybe a wise coping pattern setup when I was a tiny eldest child who cared a lot and felt a need to caretake everyone else so we would all be okay. My belief that I need to carry the whole world on my shoulders alone. Sound familiar? I can get acupuncture and put herbal salves on, and hydrate, and move my qi and nourish my muscle tissue with internal herbs & nutrition. But to truly honor the pain at the root, I also will have to slow down to body-listening pace, work less, let some responsibilities slide, let myself cry sometimes, and learn how to ask for help. Go to bed earlier. Or maybe my neck/shoulder pain is from Lyme co-infections and compromised cervical spinal discs - an invading oppressor and a broken machine, intractable, further outside of my control. Same thing, different languages. Which one empowers you?
We are the vibration and energy of our ancestors and our experiences; and we are biological cellular physicality. Light is a wave and a particle.
Can we fix our body’s symptoms without listening deeply and accepting the invitation to transform? Maybe for a little while, through the colonial mind-trap - our own comfort at the expense of the exploitation of someone outside our view. Except the exploited, in this case, are our precious internal organs, our indigenous souls, who can only stay silent for so long before they speak truth to power in the language of pain.
We are in a cultural moment where discomfort, let alone pain, is avoided at all cost, where convenience is worshipped above integrity. Numbing, pain-masking, symptom-silencing drugs are promoted by our medical system as a boon, the only “scientific” solution (check out my IG highlight reel on that topic here) - when at best they are actually just triage to get out of deep trouble while we figure out what’s really up. Masking symptoms is not the truest answer to our bodies' call.
Chinese medicine and Vedic medicine believe that we are nature, our bodies are the earth, imbued with the same infinite intelligent design. Human intellect is not smarter than nature. Our bodies are radically trustworthy. Follow the wisdom of our bodies, and we can’t help but attune to the wisdom of Pachamama.
We heal, she heals.
Not easy. There are no mainstream modern vision quests, rites of passage, sweat lodges, village circles and wise elders to guide us through crises of the body and soul. Our current culture is so, so broken - but what if we are not victims of the system? We’ve been born into our own complex violent beautiful time like every human as far back as forever. Yogic cosmology says the universe manifests every imaginable horror and beauty in order to experience and know itself. Same inside each of us.
No one gets initiated by avoiding discomfort.
And - according to the Chinese medical classics, our summertime hearts prefer softness. We can, and must, titrate our pain. Physical and emotional pain can be relentless and exhausting. We are trying our best, doing what we need to do to get by. Too much pain can cause us to clench up and retract. We can heal gently…
I am in it with you. While we’re listening to understand what our body is trying with all of her might to tell us - sometimes we need a break, to lighten the mood, get through a day. Take Ibuprofin, binge on Netflix (loved “Mo”!) drink wine, submerge in projects, or hobbies, or caretaking others… take ourselves lightly...
Ideally, we learn to design breaks that are self care - breaks that don’t dig us deeper into trouble, but instead, offer nourishment - getting into wild water; consuming programs/music/poetry that are art, not rubbish; getting acupuncture or massage; dialing a diet that gives us good clean energy; moving our bodies. Allowing ourselves to rest. So we return refreshed, ready to face our shadows again, with self-love, humility, bravery, and new insight.
On the flip side, sometimes we identify with our pain, curling up in it, to keep from facing its excruciating truths and the terrifying changes that they demand of us. We all heal in our own time. But what if the truths aren’t so excruciating once we greet them? When we surrender, open, allow it in, what is on the other side is tender, a softening into flow, of tears, or blood circulation. A decision that needs to be taken for our lives. Anyone who has gotten trigger point acupuncture from me knows what I mean. We reflexively hold on, and when we let go, the embodied ache can feel good, if we can take the space to rest, soak, hydrate, take the rest of the day off. And sometimes its too much to let go all at once, and we need to take smaller steps.
If we cannot alchemize our pain, we can’t access the lighthearted joy that is the signature experience of this season. Alchemizing our pain is the portal to our happiness. Gently, with tenderness, feel it. Breathe… jump in the bay, like we did in our Embody Chinese Medicine class this week. Take naps, take breaks, keep returning. The message is in there somewhere, leading us to unwind a blockage that may have been an inheritance from our ancestors, a childhood fright, a recent injury. We don’t need to know where it comes from. We only need to pull on a thread and unravel. And if it is more than we can bear, reach out for help.
This winter I had the profound blessing of supporting one of my patients, and kindred friends, as she separated from her body (a phrase I learned from her hospice nurse). She was in pain, at times, and I cannot tell you where that pain led her in the end, but I trust that she is exactly where she is meant to be, and expanding ever further into her destiny. I miss her like crazy.
I don’t have answers. These are just my musings as I machete through the jungle my own healing, and have the honor to help midwife yours. I’ll probably keep circling around these themes for a while. The Embody Chinese Medicine: Wild Spring series is already more than halfway through! This group has lit a spark of inspiration about how we alchemize in harmony with the turning of the seasons and the spiraling rhythms of birth, growth, maturation, harvest, death, and compost, again, and again, until that day comes when we, too, will fly on…
sending summer softness and radical embodiment,
Ali
All items listed above belong in the world
In which all things are continuous,
And are parts of the original dream which
I am now trying to discover the logic of. This
Is the process whereby pain of the past in its pastness
May be converted into the future tense
Of joy.
'I Am Dreaming of a White Christmas: The Natural History of a Vision'
Robert Penn Warren