It’s been a while since I’ve written a post – I hope the holidays went well for everyone, and happy new year. And a big welcome to those of you who are new to the Transformational Acupuncture blog. I had the wonderful opportunity to attend a weeklong spiritual retreat in the second week of December, led by my teacher Rupert Spira. Located in Westchester County about 45 minutes north of New York City, the retreat took place at a small retreat center called Bailey Farms. The days consisted of guided meditation, silent ...
Ba Zhen Tang – the quintessential Chinese herbal formula
My good friend Michele Collins, and her fiance and one of my best friends, Andres Vergara, are in town for a few weeks. It's been great because we've had a chance to catch up about their last nine months, which have been quite extraordinary. 6 months studying advanced Chinese herbal medicine and the integration of western medicine and Chinese herbal medicine at the Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, along with a trip to Michele's birthplace in the Marshall Islands and a 6 weeks in Israel. Quite awesome! One of the first things I asked Michele to do for me when she ...
A philosopher should be a man willing to listen to every suggestion but determined to judge for himself. He should not be bound by appearances, have no favourite hypothesis, be of no school and in doctrine have no master. Truth should be his primary object. Michael Faraday (1791-1867) Ah, cholesterol. And its good friend, saturated fat. Invariably, when the topic of healthy eating comes up, one of the first things many people bring up is how they eat a health low-fat diet, and try their best to stay away from those bad, evil, high fat foods. Immediately following ...
A patient asked me the other day about how to take his herbs. He was taking the herbs based on the Sexual Health for Men Over 40 herbal protocol that I featured in my last newsletter. (By the way, he had already started on the dietary recommendations in the article and was experiencing excellent results.) As I was writing down the dosages for each herb, I realized that there were some important insights I had gained over the past years of using herbs that I wanted to communicate to him, but we didn't have time because it was the end ...
How to Eat and Prepare “Real Food”
Just before the holidays, a patient of mine asked me a simple question: What do you eat? She was interested in changing her diet to improve her health. We had talked about including more whole foods, vegetables, protein, high quality fats from real foods, fiber from whole food sources, and so on. So, I was beginning to list out all of the recipes I use for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, when all of a sudden, two Sundays ago in the New York Times, I ran across a short article that seemed like it was practically written for ...
From The Transparency of Things, by Rupert Spira www.rupertspira.com Pages 34-36 Meditation is not an activity. It is the cessation of an activity. . . However, in order to understand that meditation is not an activity, we first come to the understanding that it is the cessation of an activity. This understanding is a very efficient tool for undermining the belief that meditation is something that we do. Once we have fully understood that meditation is not an activity, the activity that we previously considered to be meditation will naturally come to an end. ...
Unusually for me, I found myself fairly wide awake last night, around 2:45 am, and I started wondering how I was going to get back to sleep. I remembered that my mom had mentioned a book by a woman who had tried all the western and alternative cures for insomnia, and had finally found that qigong was the only thing that really helped her. I have to say that I like the title: Wide Awake: What I Learned About Sleep from Doctors, Drug Companies, Dream Experts, and a Reindeer Herder in the Arctic Circle, by Patricia Morrisroe As a ...
Rupert Spira, in his book, The Transparency of Things: Contemplating the Nature of Experience, explains in greater detail exactly what is involved in the process of welcoming difficult emotions. He also connects this process to the deepest spiritual perspective. From The Transparency of Things: Contemplating the Nature of Experience, by Rupert Spira, pages 240-242. Italics in […] are my commentary. Questioner: What part do feelings and the body have to play in this investigation [of Consciousness and Presence]? Rupert Spira: Much of the mind’s activity is designed to avoid feeling. For instance, any form ...
Why do many people turn to meditation? They are interested in relieving their suffering. Suffering comes in many forms – physical, emotional, and mental. As I mentioned in a previous article about finding a meditation style that is right for you, there are many meditative approaches to healing on all three of these levels. In this article, I’d like to discuss a form of meditation that I’ve found to be very helpful for the emotional and mental levels of suffering. It centers around the concept of welcoming, or allowing things to be just as they ...
When I first started meditating and studying spiritual philosophy in earnest, about 12 years ago, my goal was spiritual enlightenment. I clearly remember, in 2000, participating in a group meeting at the Heartwood Institute, a holistic healing training center where I was doing a work-study program right out of college. Everyone in the group was stating their life goal, and I boldly pronounced that my goal was “Self-Realization,” or enlightenment. At the time I think I had some vague concepts about what enlightenment was. They were mostly centered around ideas of a blissful ecstatic awakening experience, after which I would know ...
