Have you ever tried planting seeds in frozen ground? While effort is being made, the conditions aren’t right for growth to occur. This is a trap I’ve not only fallen into in my own life; I’ve also witnessed it in the treatment room.
Sometimes our desire to help a patient can be out of sync with the season they are in. On top of this, we can be out of harmony with the literal season occurring outside the treatment room. When these incongruencies happen, patient commitment wanes and treatment outcomes suffer.
In Chinese medicine, timing is everything. Just as nature moves through seasons of growth and rest, each person’s healing follows similar rhythms.
I recently had a woman who was struggling to incorporate healthier habits, like drinking enough water, into her life. She had a 14-month-old baby and had recently experienced several deep losses. Week after week ,she returned looking a little more defeated, with news that she simply hadn’t been consistent. And then it hit me: We were trying to plant flowers in soil that wasn’t ready.
When I took a step back, I could see that her foundation, her nervous system, was frayed and overextended, as if every cell was bracing for the next insult. In this state, making lasting changes was impossible.
So, we pivoted. I explained to her that it wasn’t her fault that making changes felt so difficult. When our nervous system is dysregulated and we are in fight or flight, it’s like trying to reprogram a computer while it’s overheating. The system has to cool down before it can take on new information.
With this new awareness, our focus shifted to treatments centered on nervous system stabilization. Her homework shifted to slowly incorporating practices at home that she agreed would be easy and not add an additional burden to what was already on her plate.
The two places we started were: having her take five minutes, three times a week, to step outside in her backyard, take off her shoes, and ground into the earth; and finding a space in her home away from everything where she could create a corner of calm. In that corner she was to incorporate things that signaled to her body that she could let go and relax. She decided to buy some plants and place her essential-oil diffuser by a comfortable chair and expansive window that looked out onto the backyard.
Slowly she started showing up with more energy and motivation, which in the long run is going to create conditions for the healthier habits she wants to adopt to bloom. Now that I’ve recognized the importance of energetic alignment, when I feel resistance in the treatment room, I ask myself, What season is this person in, and is our approach aligned with that?
As we enter the fall season, it’s got me thinking. How can my treatment approach shift? Instead of constant planting and moving by adding energy to the system or focusing on the movement of qi and blood, how can my treatments begin to focus on slowing down, going inward, and conserving qi and blood?
To do this, we have to move from the periphery to the core, from yang activity to yin receptivity. The treatment focus becomes calming the shen, nourishing yin, and sealing and storing qi and essence.
There are acupuncture points that can anchor energy, restore reserves, and nourish jing, such as KD 3, KD 6, BL 23, and CV 4. Other points stabilize and harvest qi for nourishment, such as ST 36 and CV 12. To help the system let go and soften tension that prevents turning inward, we can use points like LV 3. And to calm the shen and settle the spirit into stillness, points like HT 7 and PC 6 are useful.
Each patient is different, so as we always do in Chinese medicine, it’s important to treat the constitution as well as the specific imbalances presenting through the pulse and tongue simultaneously.
Ultimately, by harnessing seasonal energetics within both the patient and the outer world, we deepen their commitment and greatly improve treatment outcomes. When we take all of these varying dimensions of a person into account, we are able to treat them more holistically.
What are ways you can shift your approach as we approach the fall season to meet yourself and your patients right where they are?
Mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS) affects more than 15% of the U.S. population but evades most practitioners’ radar. Just five years ago, it wasn’t even on my radar, despite already having 20 years of experience as a clinician at that time. The more I dug (similar to leaky gut and post-COVID syndrome), the more I found my patients were suffering from this disorder.
Research supports the effectiveness of selecting the distal acupuncture points for the treatment of microtrauma and for relieving pain, particularly in cases of chronic shoulder pain. But to make the treatment results long-lasting, clinical experience and research suggest that instead of treating the most painful structure first, we identify the inhibited driver, restore reliable recruitment, confirm it with immediate re-testing, and only then address the painful area as a branch of a deeper pattern.
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The motivation behind our practice of medicine is important, impacting not just our experience but also the experiences of those we treat. It is perhaps for this reason that the aspiration to help not just some, but all beings heal, has historically been an important part of the medical tradition. To explain this, we need to consider how medicine is interwoven with other social domains.