At its core, Chinese medicine believes that all disease (dis-ease) and its associated symptoms are a physical form of ‘resistance to change’. I want to offer a different perspective based on my lived experience and examine it further.Change is a constant in life. Yet, many of us feel a deep resistance to it. Why is that? It may seem like we’re actively resisting change, but the truth is often more subtle. What if what we’re experiencing isn’t actual resistance but rather a form of unconscious living — a drifting away from our true selves?
Tune into your ‘self’ — where is the aliveness in your body? Can you feel the I am-ness of you?If we have experienced trauma, pain, or emotions we didn’t enjoy — so have all of us — then we can begin to drift away, to forget. When we are not present, the symptoms in the body can be seen as alarms and warning signals, like the blinking lights on a car dashboard telling us there is a problem.Yet we are taught — at school, in life – not to listen. We are told to trust the mind instead, the rational and logical voice that keeps us on track. But have you ever really watched what the mind does?...
We’ve been taught that if something isn’t working, we need to make it shift. If there’s pain, we try to fix it. If an emotion comes up, we analyse it or try to move past it. If our body feels off, we stretch, release, manipulate – anything to get it to change.The whole idea is that change happens through doing – that we have to intervene, push, activate, or clear something for things to move. But what if this is actually getting in the way? What if forcing a shift doesn’t resolve anything, but just buries it deeper – only for it to show up again later, in another way?...
At some point it becomes clear that acupuncture doesn’t ‘do’ anything. Not in the way we usually think of medicine or healing. Not in the way that fixes, corrects, or even helps in a direct, linear sense. It doesn’t work on you. It doesn’t make something happen. If it works, it’s because there is a remembering. A softening. A surrendering. Not as a technique, just a falling back into what’s already here. And in that space, what we call the body, this field of sensation and awareness, begins to reconfigure itself. Not through effort, but through its own quiet intelligence. Not because of a point, a protocol, or a plan...
In Chinese Medicine (CM) blood is not merely a physical substance but a vital force that nourishes the body, mind, and spirit. It grounds us in the present, giving us the steadiness and clarity needed to fully experience life as it unfolds. Yet today, I see a significant number of patients who show the signs of what we call blood deficiency – a state that reflects not just a depletion of physical resources but a more profound imbalance brought about by a culture fixated on the past and future, rarely anchored in the present..
