Fear | Michigan Associates of Acupuncture and Integrative Medicine

Finding Balance When the World Seems Out of Balance.

January 17, 2017 By Karen Siegel Propis Leave a Comment

For each new year, we often set health-related goals. We want to eat better, exercise more, balance our lives, and try to behave in a kinder way in our world. When we strive for balance, we don’t often think about balancing our physical health and our emotional health. We tend to focus on the physical aspects of our being. However, our emotional health impacts our physical health in ways we don’t often realize.

Chinese medicine recognized thousands of years ago that an important relationship exists between emotions and physical health. The Chinese Canon of Medicine recognized that emotional and psychological factors are important causes of physical illness and can negatively affect the internal organs of the human body. It states that “anger hurts the liver, joy hurts the heart, brooding hurts the spleen and melancholy hurts the lungs.”

[Read more…]

Healing Touch

May 10, 2013 By Julie Shindler-Cohen Leave a Comment

I recently had the pleasure of being hospitalized for 8 days. I call this a pleasure because I have never been hospitalized before and it was quite a learning experience (that I hope to never repeat). Also, because my personal experience with Western medicine is relatively limited, my hospital-stay can be likened to a fast-track course in how Western medicine operates. It was fascinating! [Read more…]

Making friends with our emotions

February 26, 2013 By Julie Silver Leave a Comment

As acupuncturists, we sit with our clients and talk with them about their emotions. Emotions are an important part of the intake process for Traditional Chinese Medicine. Emotions affect our physical health and physical health affects our emotional well-being.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine – most organ systems have an emotion associated with them. When someone is angry or irritable, we think of the Liver and how to work to balance the flow of Liver Qi. Fear is associated with the Kidneys, Grief, the Lungs, Heart – joy, and the emotion associated with the Spleen is worry. Since we so often experience many emotions, one can speculate the effect the emotions have on our health.

I want to make a pitch for making friends with our emotions. So often, we try to push our feelings away. This may be done through drugs and alcohol, food and other addictions, exercise or medications. An informal industry has been developed in order to support us in NOT FEELING. What this ultimately does is add an additional layer to our pain and suffering. We still feel the emotions we don’t want to feel and we self medicate ourselves to get away from the feelings we still feel! Doesn’t make sense! [Read more…]

Creating an Intention for your IVF Cycle

September 12, 2011 By Monica Mae Leibson Leave a Comment

For women going through IVF, it’s a very emotional time. And it seems sometimes easier for the human psyche to worry about the negative rather than create a positive future. Now if having a baby were as easy as “creating a positive future,” we wouldn’t need IVF! This practice is simply used to focus the mind, rather than letting anxiety and fear get the best of us.

Step 1. Release the past.

If our mind is cluttered with memories of yesterday or anxiety regarding tomorrow, we cannot truly create from a blank slate.

Breathing in, I allow myself to come into this present moment.

I choose to consciously release the past at this moment. I internally declare that the past has no power over me and I release and let go. (Deep sigh of relief).

Step 2. Create an intention

With an intention, you begin by stating your desire. Be sure to use juicy adjectives like loving, nurturing, and fully self-expressed. You want your intention to feel like it really resonates with why you desire to have a child.

The flow of the intention can go something like this…

I would love the opportunity to be a loving mother to a healthy child.
My intention at this time is be a nurturing mother in a beautiful family with a child.
Who I am is the possibility of peace, love, and joy.
I am a stand for loving families on our planet.

Step 3. Release and let go.

Oftentimes this is the hardest part. But just practice it and see how your heart opens. You can speak your intention with love and gracefully follow it with a releasing meditation.

“I have shared my intention with the universe and know that it has been received. With that knowing, I release and let go. I release the attachment of my intention and choose to stay focused on who I am being, rather than what I am asking for.”

“I choose to have faith in this life. I know it is not always easy but regardless of the outcome, I choose to have faith in my journey.”

Step 4. Rinse and repeat

I recommend writing down the intention you’ve created and include the releasing meditation. You can carry it around with you in your wallet. You could put it on the mirror in your bathroom. The honest truth is that you might need to say it a lot in each day. Worry and anxiety can be so familiar to our brains that it becomes our automatic thought process. This will truly be a lesson in consciously creating your thoughts. Enjoy!

Affect Damage

February 10, 2011 By Julie Shindler-Cohen Leave a Comment

Affect damage is a concept within TCM that describes how our emotions affect us on a physical level. It is the concept that our emotions play an integral part in our state of health. There are five basic emotions recognized within TCM: joy, grief, thought, fear and anger. In a well-balanced system, it is expected that people will experience each of these emotions in their appropriate context. TCM views pathology when any one of these emotions is felt more than others or is displayed in an inappropriate manner. We have the potential to damage ourselves in this manner every day. In fact, most people who come into our office are under a heavy load of stress that leads to excessive worry. If continued unchecked, this worry and stress can wreak havoc upon the body. As awareness grows within the mainstream for the mind/body/spirit connection, people are becoming more aware of exactly how much our mind affects our body. In the meantime, it is important that we all develop our own methods of keeping our stress in check.

Here are a few tips that I have found to be particularly helpful:

Stop yourself! When you become aware that you are worrying or stressed about something, take a physical inventory of your body. Do your shoulders hurt? Did you lose your appetite? Are you craving something? Try to first make yourself aware that you are in a moment of stress, and then try to figure out where you are placing this stress within your body.
Take 10 deep breaths. Deep breathing is a mechanical way that you can help calm your nervous system and calm your mind.
Live in the moment. Yes, it is a cliché. Remember that we have little to no control over the future. Rather than worry about what is coming up tomorrow, focus on what is happening today! You can control your actions today and that may have an effect on what happens tomorrow.
Remember that the world is bigger than you. This is a personal one for me. Whenever I become overcome with the stresses in my own life, I remember that there are more troubles and bigger issues in the world than the ones I am dealing with. Not to discount my own experience but gaining a wider perspective is a great coping method.
Get a hobby. (Hopefully a healthy one—like exercise, rather than a daily cocktail) Sometimes a little distraction is all it takes to chill out.

Finding Balance When the World Seems Out of Balance.

Healing Touch

Making friends with our emotions

Creating an Intention for your IVF Cycle

Affect Damage

Contact Information

Recent Posts

Newsletter Signup