Daily Practices & Energy Medicine
If you've been interested, curious, or have even explored energy medicine practices you still may have a lot of questions. They’ve been around for centuries, even thousands of years, which is a lot of street cred, but is that why they have they lasted? Do any have evidence-based backing? What do people who’ve spent their lives deeply immersed in any of these ideas even say about evidence-based research? Do you have to immerse in years of practice to realize any benefits of Traditional Chinese Medicine . . . yoga . . . Ayurvedic Medicine . . . meditation . . . acupuncture . . . mantras . . . mudras (for real? those hand postures do something?) . . . chakras (do I have them or are they metaphorical?). . . Qi Gong . . . crystals . . . essential oils . . . herbology . . . massage as therapy . . . Where would you even start?
This question and my two professions drove me to start organizing. What came out of dozens of notebooks, client interactions, sticky notes documenting it all, and eye-rolling conversations with my kids (who thought it would never make it out of notebooks and sticky notes) was Daily Practices, or what I like to call a Mind Body Tune-Up.
A Tune-Up is a manageable task or idea, easily integrated into your day ~ a mini experience into diverse, energetic holistic practices. Think of them as doorways leading to a deeper relationship with life, yourself, experience, and meaning. The deeper relationship is the goal, but the way through is accessing your ability to feel energy.
I’ve seen it happen over and over again in twenty years of private practice as a massage therapist. So many physical and emotional issues begin to clear when people begin to integrate body and mind, external and internal. The ability to do that integrating is accompanied by a heightened sense of feeling energy that then becomes more subtle. One example among many is a client who stuck with the process long enough to ‘aha!’ that the reduction of neck and back pain after each session lasted a lot longer once he was able to pay attention to subtle clues nudging him to get up and move or stretch during long meetings or desk work. But that paying attention was not even available consciously at the beginning of our work. At first, massage was an external process. Eventually he wasn’t able to ignore the clues he was getting from too much sitting and was then able to have a connection with his own physical energetics. Body and mind getting connected led to a deeper healing than if he just ‘got a massage’ - now he was participant in the process. And once that happened he shared that he was somehow noticing all sorts of communications, cues, and personality dynamics with others at work. Body and mind reconnecting (not to mention not having to focus on pain all the time) led to a deeper sense of knowing ‘what’s going on out there’.
How can you ‘tune-up’? (besides finding a fabulous massage therapist?!) Start sampling the Daily Practices on the home page (you can purchase more for the rest of the current season). Each day is divided into three times - a simple division of the energetic times that match the system of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), from where acupuncture arises. Get Going, Centering, and Winding Down. And each of these three times describe practices from breath work to pressure points to meditation to exercise ball techniques for your feet. In TCM and Ayurvedic Medicine, the seasons of the year are associated with certain energies (spring = growth) which then govern aspects of our bodies/minds that match energetically. Wouldn’t it be great to know what to do when and why?!
Daily Practice Tune-Ups are researched for when they fit best into the energy surrounding us in each season, so they become like super-powers. You can experience something at the exact optimal time to experience what it offers.This synchronized organization around the energies of the day and of the seasons will help you begin to feel energy. Maybe one will be a place you want to build expertise. Maybe Tai Chi will become your deeper exploration. Maybe you’ll just love diving into a lot of practices from all over the world.
The home page of BestBodyMind will get you playing in the energy of the current season; then you can purchase the remaining weeks to stay in Best Body Mind health. Happy Synchronicity!
