Introduction & Early Stages

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September 2007

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

I’m treading into the great unknown. Acupuncture. For 25 years (as in “my whole life”) I have heard about acupuncture from second- or third-hand sources. There has always been a mystery surrounding those little needles which once frightened me as a child. And lately, there has been an escalating drum beat in my mind, making me more and more curious. I essentially sat down and weighed the options – go up on all my medicines, or give something new a try while holding all other treatments steady.

“How bad can it be?” was the answer to every skeptic who asked why I was going to try it. And coupled with the fact that I wasn’t going to do something stupid, like stop all of my medicine, I embraced this new project with open arms. Part of the reason I wanted it to work so badly was because I needed it to work. And it’s like they always said: “mind over matter.” And like I always said: “but if you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

I found an ‘energy therapist’ named Richard Chin – who has been practicing Eastern and Western medicine for many decades. He’s a physician and an acupuncturist, so I knew I was in good hands.

What happened next was amazing. I took his book home (“The Energy Within”), began reading it, and started understanding how the Eastern medicine views our bodies. And it fascinated me. For instance, we all have ‘energy within’ – it’s what allows us to take air and water and food and turn it into something which allows us to walk up stairs, stir coffee or life a pencil. And for most of us, how all that works is beyond our ability to understand. Kind of like your remote control. Somehow when you push “0-3”, channel 3 comes up on the TV across the room. To someone from 2,000 years ago that would be pretty creepy, but to us it’s all a matter of fact. The same goes for our bodies. How does it all work? Where does this energy come from and how can I balance it properly?

You have to figure many, many smart people have spent their whole lives, over the course of thousands of years, studying the ‘energy within’. Which is part of what makes Eastern medicine so cool: there has been an awful lot of work put into it. Granted they didn’t have the benefit of Western science, in other words they didn’t do any MRI’s or DEXA scans, but even using that technology today, many of the core principles of Eastern medicine still hold true.

And here’s the bottom line: I’m loving it. I feel better off after I see Dr. Chin than before. I look forward to my next visit. In between visits I read and learn and apply it to my life. So far, so good. Finding good health is like finding a needle in a …

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

The big question for me is “when do I go to the gym?” It’s not such an easy question to answer: mornings are rough because I’ve never been a morning person, and I try to sleep as late as possible (sleep has always had a certain healing quality for me – whether it was after a long day of work, before the SAT’s, you name it, I’ve slept before and after it…!). So a morning workout is really tough to schedule. Afternoon and evenings are equally hard because by the time I get there I’m so pooped from the day it’s a moot point. Although now and again a day will energize me enough to get sweating. Weekends are a good call because a workout makes me feel productive.

But then what does that mean? Two days, one after another, of working out per week? That doesn’t make sense at all.

I wish I had a more flexible schedule. Sometimes I do – and when that’s the case I do jump on top of it – but for the most part, I’m a slave to my energy level, schedule and whereabouts. So why isn’t there an exercise pill I could take?

Now there’s an idea….