Chinese Therapy : 7 Ways to Slash Stress

1. Start your day with meditation
Spend time every day in meditative relaxation, with calming music if you desire. Start with five minutes and work your way to 15 or 20 minutes each day. Meditation is your number one way to reduce the output of stress hormones and avoid adrenal exhaustion, serious threats to your health.

Try this Stress Release Meditation: Breathe consciously, relax, and with each exhale focus on relaxing each area of your body in sequence, starting from the top of your head and moving all the way down to your toes.

2. Manage your mood with diet and herbs
Chinese Medicine considers the liver to be the center of your emotions. To allay stress and balance your emotions, keep your liver healthy and happy:

• Every day, eat lots of green leafy vegetables, barley grass, seaweed - anything high in chlorophyll - to keep the liver in good health.

• Take 500 mg dandelion daily for a month or longer to cleanse the liver and help release built-up anger.

• Take 400 mg white peony root daily for 1 to 3 months to soothe the liver and balance your mood.

• Schisandra berry protects the liver from chemicals and calms the spirit. For emotional anxiety, take 200 mg daily for a month.

Take these herbs anytime during the day and before bed in tea or capsule form. All the herbs are available from health food stores and Eastern medicine practitioners. Many of my patients have had remarkable results with Calm-Fort Elixir, an all-natural formulation of herbs to calm your spirit. For more information, click here.

3. Suppress stress with positive thinking
Instead of letting your thoughts run wild with anxiety, say affirmations to yourself, such as "I can handle the tasks I have ahead of me. I enjoy my responsibilities and fulfill them well." In fact, repeating positive affirmations can actually suppress the cortisol that the adrenal gland releases in times of stress - leaving you peaceful and calm.

4. Get stress out of your head and on paper
Writing in a journal every day can help you release thoughts and emotions that are causing you stress. Write from the position of an observer, recording your thoughts without any judgments. Just write it down so that you can see clearly what is going on inside. The next step is to identify the source of any anger or stress so you can begin to make changes. Looking into your thoughts give you the opportunity to gain insight into your feelings and reflect the underlying issues.

5. Unblock tension with exercise
The constant pressures of your job and family can lead to chronically elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which is a direct cause of muscle and joint pain. Clenched jaw? Lump in your throat? Chronic back and neck pain? These can all be manifestations of stress in your body. Release physical tension and clear these emotional blockages by using massage therapy, exercise, yoga, tai chi, or qi gong to get the circuits moving.

6. A Retreat to Avoid Burnout
Overloading your brain is a recipe for stress and health problems. Information overload is particularly harmful at midlife because we have less tolerance for stress, which can contribute to high blood pressure and heart disease. Press the "reset" button on yourself. Give yourself a retreat from the stresses of modern life. Take one day out of the seven-day week to minimize "screen" time. Don't watch TV, don't check email, and don't look at the news - it will be there tomorrow, and after a day of rest, you will be refreshed and ready to look at them.

7. Perspective from the Natural World
Use nature to reduce stress. Go outside, hike in the woods, walk on the beach, anything that puts you in contact with the natural world. It is difficult to feel stressed when you are surrounded by nature's abundance of vitality and wonder.
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Accupuncture Points: BaiHui & Fengchi- Top Points at the Top of the Body

Frequently during your acupuncture treatments, your acupuncturist will place these ever so tiny needles on top of your head. They are virtually pain-free and at times they give a very nice calming feeling throughout the whole body. What are these points and what are they for?

One of the most common points at the very top of our head is called Baihui or DU 20. It is literally translated as "the meeting of the hundreds." It means a place where all the energies of our body converge and meet. It is a very powerful point and is used for many purposes.

To begin with, it has a wonderful calming effect. If your pulse feels wiry or tense, acupuncturists usually will select it this point. If you:

* are under stress or much tension in your life
* suffer from depression and anxiety
* suffer from irregular sleep patterns

This point is also the meeting point of all the Yang energy of your body. Translated it means by gently stimulating this point you will have an increased energy level and better mental focus and relaxation at the same time. It is therefore selected for chronic fatigue, lethargy, and poor mental focus and memory. This is also a point that is used to strengthen endocrine functions. Therefore, is frequently used in hypothyroidism, hormone weakness, and adrenal insufficiencies. As one of the highest points of the body, it is considered as the master point of all endocrine glands and nervous system.


Another point is behind your neck, called Fengchi or GB 20. It is literally translated as "the Pond of Wind." It is another powerful point with many purposes. Foremost, it is used for headaches and neck pains. It is a point that frequently carries the physical tension of the body. When our immunity is under siege, fighting sickness such as a common cold, this point can become tender and achy upon touch. It is also a very good point for regulating blood pressure and blood circulation.

These two points are just some of the many points in your head used for many different conditions. So next time, when you get "needled" in these points, you will know why!
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Chinese Herbs: Remedies for Depression, Anxiety, Insomnia, and Psychosis

In China before the mid- twentieth century, all mental illnesses were treated pretty much exclusively with herbal medicine. Since doctors and hospitals keep records, there is plenty of historical evidence suggesting that such treatments were often successful. Perhaps the best evidence is the famous Fog Tea of Tianmu Mountain, which, after the opium war, helped free millions of Chinese people from opium addiction. Some of us believe that the Chinese herbal psychiatric drugs of the 19th century were at least as effective as whatever European or American doctors were prescribing at that time.

This may still be true today. Despite obvious advancements in the Western pharmacy, I believe that Chinese herbs can still help sufferers of mental disorders by complementing any modern day prescription or therapy. The herbs are safe, and like a food, won't react negatively with any psychiatric drug.

Hard to Find a Shrink in China

Psychiatry never really took root in China where the culture never emphasized individuality. Spending large sums of money on personal improvement is a foreign idea and would be considered a kind of vanity. Even today, despite the deluge of Western ideas and money, you'll find only a handful of psychiatrists in the Beijing phone book.

Psychiatry might also not have evolved because the Chinese had less need for it. Having discovered a pharmacy of herbal psychiatric drugs, such interventions may have been unnecessary in many cases. These herbal methods may be among the great treasures of Oriental medicine.

Not a substitute for modern drugs or counseling, these medicines can still be a valuable tool in the hands of any knowledgeable practitioner or counselor. You don't have to be a Chinese herbologist to use them, however some basic knowledge of Oriental medicine can help. This article will help you get started.

Qi

'Qi' means the flow of our bodily energies. Practitioners of Chinese medicine believe that health is linked with these invisible flows, and that when our qi flows improperly we get sick.

Health is also about harmony or balance, or the lack of it. The terms yin and yang help to describe this. When life is out of balance, we say that yin and yang become unbalanced in our body, causing physical or mental distress and disease.

To practitioners of TCM, most any mental disease is, first of all, a sign of poor flow or bad balance. Phobia, paranoia, schizophrenia, depression, insomnia, etc. are symptoms of disharmony or congestion, not separate diseases in themselves. Healing these symptoms requires normalizing flow or restoring balance in the life of those afflicted. Herbal medicine can help immensely.

Chinese herbal medicine is easily the most highly evolved medical system in the world. Its immense scale of experience spans countless trillions of administrations over thousands of years. Its pharmacopoeia includes over 10,000 natural substances; vegetable, animal, and mineral.

Some of these may be strange to Western sensibilities; however this article will recommend only safe ordinary substances which can be easily obtained. Sour dates, hare's ear root, and mimosa bark may not be as available as coffee, tea, or marijuana, but you can easily find these mind bending substances on the web or in Chinese communities throughout North America, Europe, and Asia.

Mind Bending Herbal Drugs

Mind bending doesn't imply that these Chinese herbs are stimulants or psychedelics. Stimulant and psychedelic herbs have a more limited medical use. These herbs, when used in the right combinations affect the mind in far more useful ways. By mind I mean consciousness, emotion, imagination, remembrance, thought, memory, and intelligence.

The Troubled Spirit

We don't include spirit as an aspect of mind, because TCM reserves a special place for spirit, known as Shen. Shen resides in the heart, not in the brain. Mental disharmonies often indicate that the Shen, residing in the heart, is unsettled or troubled. We call this condition Disturbed Shen.

Anxiety, insomnia, and psychosis all originate with a disturbed shen. Though sufferers may exhibit deviant brain chemistry, these are not brain diseases. They are diseases of the chest rather than the brain, because the Shen resides in the heart, not in the head.

For most people, disturbed shen will not lead to 'heart disease' or any physical heart problem. Nevertheless, disturbed shen is a physical condition and will respond to therapies such as exercise, massage, acupuncture, and herbal medicines.

Disturbed shen can have many causes. Shen can be disturbed by events in our life or in our memory, by stagnation, heat, drugs, diet, loss of sleep, loss of blood, by constraint of emotion, or by excess emotions. Besides disturbing the shen, strong emotions can also affect our organs. Excessive joy or being startled can stress the heart, worry eats at the gut, grief endangers the lungs, fear taxes the kidneys, and anger assaults the liver.

Shen is disturbed by tension in the chest. Thoughts about loss, inhibited expression, and guilt among other things, cause the chest to tighten. In this protective state we feel fewer feelings and show less emotion. Modern clinicians call this condition 'depression'. We call it stagnation of the chest qi, or Liver Qi Stagnation (LQS), and we consider it to be the origin of many mental health problems. To us, clinical depression is not a definable disease, but a sign that the qi of the chest is stuck, constrained, or oppressed. In time, chest constraint can affect the underlying organs, generating anger by inflaming the liver, or anxiety by heating up the heart
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