Create Space, Relish Change, Celebrate Authenticity--Three Branches of Slow Paths Philosophy

The motto here at Slow Paths Wellness is "Create Space * Relish Change * Celebrate Authenticity." What does that have to do with acupuncture?

The short answer is, everything. Acupuncture, when administered by someone trained in Asian medicine, is used in accordance with principles designed to bring balance to every system in your body, and extends to physical, mental, and emotional function. 

The longer answer involves much more than acupuncture. Slow Paths Wellness serves patients using all aspects of Asian medicine, as well as principles from interpersonal neurobiology. After nearly two decades of practice, I learned that patients are much better served with encouragement in owning their own healthy life than "doing" something to them. Acupuncture, herbal therapy, and other aspects of Chinese medicine definitely serve people, but in ancient times the best doctor was someone who could treat people with interaction and only needed the more interventionist tools like herbs and acupuncture for emergencies or when a treatment based on relationship did not help a person enough.

Today, we tend to wait until problems become big before we look for help, so it makes sense to do more treatment than would once have been ideal. Slow Paths Wellness is my approach to give treatment within the context of healthy practitioner-patient relationship, which lets you be the one driving the changes in your life. I am here to help you on your path, not create a path for you.

Here's how the three branches of the Slow Path build health and wellness.

• Create Space means to step back from the hustle in your life to make time for you--your goals, your dreams, your health, your relationships. Creating space has several facets, including taking breaks to be mindful of your life and your needs, shifting down to make extra time in your day for planning; preparing, and being there for yourself and others; and committing the time and energy to self-care before emptying your cup for work, family, or even recreation. I can help you make this healing space for yourself with coaching in developing healthy boundaries, realistic goals that take you where you want to go, and plans for self-care that feels ridiculously indulgent, but actually frees you to be your best self and feel great while doing it.

•  Relish Change is a mindset that allows things to happen with a sense of equanimity. Change is happening constantly inside and outside of us. Our body chemistry constantly changes based on temperature, diet, stress levels, sleep (or its lack), how we perceive the events in our lives or the actions of other people, exercise states--basically everything about our environment creates changes in our system. Each of those changes creates its own changes. For many people, especially those who have had a traumatic history, change, especially change that comes with uncomfortable feelings, is something to be avoided.  Even positive things in our lives, like quitting smoking or working towards a more fulfilling job, can create uncomfortable feelings and that might cause a person to avoid making the change. Learning to relish change as a constant of life makes choosing the changes we want much easier.
• Celebrate Authenticity is my phrase that covers a lot of ground. Authenticity is what is real, so celebrating it means being in favor of reality--whether that's generic truth as opposed to falsehood, or the reality that you prefer the color pink to yellow, or that you do better with 8 hours of sleep. Celebrating the things that are real help your mind look for those things. Plenty of brain science confirms that what you choose to focus on creates pathways in the brain that can be healthier (or not). Celebrating your reality, and looking for the parts that build you up and accepting your ability to change many things that you don't want is a great way to have everything in your life improve--health, sleep, relationships, and just your overall sense of wll-being from one minute to the next.

I use a ton of different tools, exercises, herbs, acupuncture, acupressure, and just getting to know you in my practice. Having a life that is focused on a sense of love and well-being for yourself and others makes life a lot more fun, and making time to really know and express your authentic self makes your interactions with others more fulfilling for everyone involved. Please contact me if you'd like to learn more about how you can open your life to Create Space, Relish Change, and Celebrate Authenticity.

Now Accepting New Patients

A Slow Path
Photo Credit: Teresa Y Green

Slow Paths Wellness (formerly Green AcuClinic) is now accepting new patients! If you are interested in living a calmer, happier, less drama-filled life while dealing with your health issues head-on, this is the place to be. I help people dealing with anxiety, depression, PTSD, chronic health conditions, and those wanting to live in a way that makes them less likely to ever get sick. 

I call my approach the Slow Path, and it includes learning to Create Space in life, Relish Change as a path to growth and health improvement, and to Embrace Authenticity for not only its mental and emotional health benefits, but also for its ability to improve physical health. Within these three headings, I work with people to develop a self-care lifestyle, nurture a joyful curiosity to each day, and to learn to set boundaries for yourself and what you allow for others in your life. We focus on gradual changes that yield good results over a lifetime rather than quick fixes or "bootcamps" that often leave you with little lasting change.

My health practice background is in Asian medicine, including acupuncture, Chinese herbal therapy, mindfulness practice, and acupressure. Since then, I've added more skills to retrain brains to be less reactive and more happy, as well a years of study in the factors that prevent illness. Earlier this year I completed a certification in health coaching to further expand the toolbox available to patients wanting a more complete approach to wellness. Each aspect of my health training has a place in helping people along the Slow Path to Wellness.

If this post interests you, and Slow Paths Wellness sound like a good fit, please feel free to contact me at slowpathswellness@gmail.com, or call the clinic at (804) 683-2979.

Life in the Time of Coronavirus

This year, I have been working behind the scenes on renewing my practice and and my philosophy of life. I have a slew of blog drafts, hoarded like toilet paper, that I've been working on.

Last week everything changed.

Covid-19, coronavirus--whatever we end up calling this bug in the future, it has been a wake up call for many, and has crystallized many ideas I've tossed around as I try to define my practice and my life. Here's what I've got so far:

• It's not all about me. While I hope I've never looked at life in a self-centered way, we all do at times. But life is about connection, and about what we give. Everyone I've ever read who talked about finding meaning in life sees life as a gift you give to others. 
• It's all about me (and it's all about you). As confusing as it sounds, the only way to be able to give to others is to do the work you need to do on yourself. The inner work I've done for the past 3 years has taught me a lot about what my unique gifts are, and had also reminded me that most people with health issues have a harder time dealing with the feelings and thoughts around the illness than the symptoms themselves. Fatigue is not as hard as feeling useless because you're tired. Pain is not as hard as feeling you're powerless to manage your own body. Self-work on how we think, and allowing ourselves to feel, are critical parts in healthcare. 
• Slow is usually better. Life moves fast. The recent changes in North America associated with Covid-19 (that Asia and Europe have been experiencing for weeks before us) has left many of us feeling overwhelmed, anxious, and like we are behind and can't catch up on simple things like having food and income. Unless you are being chased by a lion, usually the best way to handle overwhelm is to slow down. Allow yourself space to look past the hysteria in yourself, the media, and others, and give your fight-or-flight response a chance to fade so you can look at life rationally and critically. Slower is how my practice runs, and it's how I encourage my patients to approach life, too.
• Authenticity is all. If you aren't who you really are, or looking at what really is, you're lost when you have to deal with a challenge. Denial and hysteria are two sides of the same coin--they are turning away from reality. In our current situation, pretending this virus is not a serious health threat to thousands of people and not taking precautions for the sake of everyone is denial. Forgetting that for most people, this virus means a few weeks being cooped up at home, possibly with bad cold symptoms, is buying into hysteria. All of life has the denial and hysteria paths, and also the path of accepting reality, feeling what you feel about it, and dealing with what's at hand. In my practice, I use mindfulness as a path to authenticity.

As 2020 seems to roar on, each of us has the chance to make our life work our way, even in the face of challenges. Accepting that routines will change, and there will be problems as well as triumphs is part of authentic living. I hope you will find a path to balance, get to know yourself so you can give to others, slow down to enjoy life and face it calmly, and be the wonderful you that you really are. 

A Brief Intro to Acupuncture (VIDEO)

Here's a video I did for New Year New You at Montpelier Family Chiropractic. I plan on doing more videos this year on topics ranging from foods to eat when you have a bad cold to how the seasons affect your emotional health. You can follow my channel on YouTube, or my Facebook page to always get my videos as soon as they're up. Feel free to suggest topics!

Big News for the New Year--I'm in Montpelier!

After five years at what is now Ariya Chiropractic, I have decided to move on to new things. Effective immediately, I will be moving to Montpelier Family Chiropractic in beautiful downtown Montpelier. I will be there on Sundays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.

Dr. Tree, Mark Atkinson, and Angelica Valencia

I am joining an amazing group of colleagues. Theresa Neiss ("Dr. Tree") is the chiropractor at Montpelier Famiily Chiropractic. She has been my family's chiropractor for the past five years. She has helped me, my husband, our friends and my patients stay healthy and happy, often with problems that were not improved at other chiropractic offices. She has a background in nutrition, and is well trained not only in spinal manipulation, but in adjusting every joint in the body. I didn't know until recently that some chiropractors have little training in adjusting anything beyond the spine. Dr. Tree's expertise with the entire body has been a great help when I come to her with a hurt ankle or wrist.

Mark Atkinson is the massage therapist here. The massage I got from him was one of the best I've ever had. He has special training in pregnancy massage and mobility stretches. His enthusiasm for life will infect you, too, when you see him.

Angelica Valencia is the chiropractic assistant extraordinaire. She is dedicated to natural living, homesteading, patient care and interesting information in general. I love going to the office just to learn what amazing thing she's learned since my last visit. If you are curious, certainly about healthcare, but also about just about anything else, you will find a kindred spirit in Angelica.

Colleen and Tara round out the office support staff. Everyone at Montpelier Family Chiropractic is friendly, knowledgeable, and interested in you and your health. You will love coming here as much as I do.

The office is a star in itself. It is beautiful, and feels relaxing and open. They have put lovely plants everywhere, and the walls are a lovely green--perfect for me!

Snazzy Waiting Area

A Peek Into Mark's Treatment Room

Angelica's Domain

The First Door is My New Treatment Room

Stay tuned and check your email (be sure to sign up for email updates using the box in the upper right if you aren't getting them yet) for a series of special promotions celebrating the move to the new office.

Please feel free to stop by and say hi. We're at 17212 Mountain Road in Montpelier across the street from the Montpelier Center for Arts and Education, at the corner of Mountain Road (Hwy. 33, which is Staples Mill Road in Richmond) and Beaverdam Road.. 

Self-Care When Illness Strikes

An unintended side effect of illness: I've lost some weight!

This summer has been interesting chez Green. I've had two illnesses that landed me in the hospital, and needed a procedure that put me out of commission for about a week. It has been a month since I was declared more or less back to normal, and I'm still low on energy and don't feel anywhere near recovered.

I've been shell-shocked by the whole ordeal. As a natural health practitioner who eats clean and uses herbs, acupuncture, chiropractic and other holistic healthcare nearly exclusively, the world of beeping machines and various pills, antiseptics, and scary diagnostic things that zap my insides is overwhelming. And I didn't even need surgery.

I treat people every day who make multiple trips to a hospital or outpatient facility for procedures each year. Most of my patients take some kind of prescription medication every day, and many more see their doctor for health concerns frequently. After my brief sojourn in the land of modern medicine, I feel for them.

The doctors and nurses who have treated me have been almost universally professional, kind, and compassionate. They have also been overworked, and in a system that treats bodies like machines.

It is surprising how quickly you begin to feel like a piece of meat when people take your clothes and blood, and make your bodily fluids their business. Even knowing it is exactly what I needed to get well did not make me feel positive about the experience. Feeling my body reel from each medication and procedure disoriented me and made me distrust my natural knowledge.

I am used to using food and herbs to gently allow my body to heal. In most cases, this approach is ideal, allowing your body to makes the minute adjustments that encourage balance. In an emergency, you take care of the potentially life-threatening problem and then help your body recover from any side effects. I have had to develop some strategies to help me recover from the more extreme but necessary healthcare I've had over the past several months. Here are a few things that have helped me:

1. Remember every person recovers differently. I have taken far longer than I like to get my energy and verve back. My husband and friends keep reminding me that while I was very blessed in not having as severe a health issue as I could have had, I was still seriously ill. They also remind me that I have always been slightly frail, for lack of a better word, and usually take longer than average to recover from anything, even a night of poor sleep. Once I stopped fighting the time I needed to get better, I noticed I improved more quickly.


2. Take better care of yourself than usual. I already eat well and try to give myself plenty of rest and moderate exercise. But this illness has made it necessary for me to be extra careful in my food. A little too much sugar, too much starch, or a food I know I do not digest well, and I will feel bad for at least the next twenty-four hours. A night's lost sleep means a nap the next day, no arguments. If I don't take care of myself, my muscles hurt, I can't focus, and I'm likely to have an emotional meltdown. So I try to eat mostly simply cooked food with an emphasis on vegetables. When I stick to this diet, I feel better than when I eat too much sugar or spice. I also give myself plenty of rest, and try--the hardest thing for me--to keep calm thoughts and stay optimistic. I am a recovering worrier.


3. Make a plan for the future. I have been diagnosed with a chronic illness that requires some maintenance. Since I've been used to mild symptoms and did not realize they signalled something more serious, I've had to educate myself. I knew the "book-knowledge" information from my schooling in healthcare, but learning what symptoms feel like in my body has taken concentrated study. I now have a plan for a)diet changes and herbal supplements as preventative changes when symptoms start, b) at what point I will go to a doctor, and c) when the best course of action is rest.


4. Accept managing illness is a process. I am still learning the exact parameters to best manage my health. I have made mistake in overdoing things, and I suspect I could have pushed myself sometimes and did not. After being lectured by my friends and family to take the advice I give to others, I took the pressure off myself to be perfect. Now I don't worry too much about misteps. My goal is to be healthy for years to come, not to be perfect today. I think my strategy is working.

I hope these tips will help you, whether you are dealing with a cold or a serious illness. If you are not healthy, you cannot enjoy life to its fullest. Take the time to take care of yourself so you can enjoy your time on this lovely planet.

Does Acupuncture Help Weight Loss?

image courtesy of freeimages.com

After "Does acupuncture hurt?" questions about weight loss are the most common ones for most acupuncturists. The short answer is "yes, usually." Many people lose weight more easily when they add acupuncture to a healthy lifestyle of unprocessed food, healthy exercise, adequate sleep, and good stress management. Changes happen more quickly, and the good habits are easier to follow.

But that is not because acupuncture makes you lose weight. Losing weight may or may not be healthy, depending on your circumstance. And weight loss is not (or should not be) a goal in itself. Everyone agrees it is better to be a normal weight than obese. But if you somehow manage to lose weight while eating overly processed food, sleeping poorly, and stay highly stressed, you will still have health problems.

Acupuncture regulates qi.  Qi roughly correlates to our nervous and endocrine systems--the nearly sentient interactions that keep us alive with minute adjustments to every part of life. Our immune system, heart rate, metabolism--even what our brain focus on in the world around us--depend on how we interpret the internal and external data that comes through our senses. In Chinese medicine, we call the "stuff" that makes that interpretation qi.

Acupuncture allows qi to work as efficiently as possible. When you are stressed, or trying to overcome eating a cheeseburger laced with MSG-laden flavor salt and drinking a diet drink, or haven't gone for a walk in a week, your qi suffers. Your system is backlogged with problems. Like a computer with glitches, you don't work as well. Acupuncture allows your system to "reboot," much like a good nights rest allows your body to process the thoughts and emotions of the day.

Your body, unencumbered by the stresses and injuries of the past, feels good. Exercise is a joy. As acupuncture treatments continue to calm your nervous system, it minimizes your "fight or flight" moments in the sympathetic nervous system. Little things, like traffic jams, feel less and less like emergencies. You start to feel stable and safe. Living in this state allows you to release food cravings.  Your body stops hanging on to every bit of fat it can get as a protection from a sense of deprivation and lack. You will begin to lose weight.

But you will do so much more. You will catch fewer colds, have fewer allergies, feel fewer aches and pains. You will sleep better, be more alert at work, and less likely to strike out in anger because life will feel manageable.

Does acupuncture help weight loss? Only tangentially. Acupuncture opens the pathways inside of you to allow your body to work the way it always should. In health and wellness.

Information used in crafting this post: TED talk: Why Do We Sleep?

Hitting The Problem From All Angles--Using Multiple Modalites

Photo Credit: Stock.xchng

For the past four months, I have been in pain. An old back injury got aggravated, then aggravated some more. As an acupuncturist, this situation has hurt my pride. I treat back pain all the time, and one of the reasons I got into acupuncture is because of the pain relief it gave me. I've tried lots of different things--acupuncture, of course, but also stretching, acupressure, massage, and chiropractic. Each one seemed to help, but after a day or two the pain returned. And I was discouraged.

In the past two weeks, I decided to play "what would I do for a patient in the same situation?" The answer was easy--I would suggest a slew of treatments all at once--throw everything we had at the problem in hopes of subduing it.

So that's what I did. This week, I've had two acupuncture treatments, two chiropractic adjustments, and one massage. I have also had better improvement than I have in months. I believed I couldn't spare the time to make these treatments a reality. But now I see that the time I wasted feeling bad led to reduced productivity, reduced creativity, and certainly did not help me be an example of the benefits of natural living.

Natural remedies, while often quite effective, are also often quite gentle. They guide your body back into balance instead of dragging it, kicking and screaming, to a level of forced functioning. Building health sometimes takes many layers of effort--a little adjustment to diet, some slight changes to exercise, and maybe a few forms of treatment to address all areas that affected by a health problem. So if you're dealing with depression, therapy or herbs or diet changes or exercise alone may not be enough to solve the problem--they may need to be used together. If allergies are your issue, you may need to avoid known allergens, build your system with health food and supplements, and deal with stress, which compromises your immune system.

Going the natural path sometimes requires more effort than filling a prescription and popping a pill. (And, of course, there are some things in our modern age that require doing that in addition to healthy life changes.) Layering therapies is a way to get more out of your natural living strategy.

I'm not completely out of the woods yet, but I am hopeful that slow and creaky is not my new normal. Sometimes when you have a problem, you have to attack it head-on and throw all your resources at it. Have you had a similar health experience? Tell me about it in the comments!

A Typical Acupuncture Treatment

Here is a quick description of a typical acupuncture treatment in my office. Each acupuncturist has their own style and way of doing a treatment, but for those who are curious, this post will give you some thoughts on how a treatment goes.