Found creek. Lost paddle.
I now know it wasn’t a fluke that I had no womanly cramps during the workshop weekend. In preparing to do a gall bladder cleanse this weekend, I picked up Paul Pitchford’s masterpiece Healing With Whole Foods from my bookshelf. Immediately it opened up to a page on the condition of liver wind. An acupuncturist once told me I had it, and it doesn’t have anything to do with smelly farts, thank you. It’s a condition of a swollen, stagnant liver (stagnation of either qi or blood or both) and its symptoms include, amongst other things, a peripatetic nature. The perpetual traveler. C’est moi.
I’ve slowed down a little in recent years, but in the span of 11 years in California, I lived in 12 different apartments. This is understandable given that my reasons for moving were one of these three: flea infestation, leaky roof, or psychotic housemates. All of these are rampant in the Bay Area, but I don’t know anyone who moved around as much as I did.
Anyhoodle, the quote that popped out at me from the tome:
“Dietary strategies to relieve a stagnant, swollen liver are essential since nearly all liver imbalances, including liver-related heat, blood and yin deficiencies, and wind, originate with stagnancy. The first remedy in every case (except malnutrition) is to eat less.”
[emphasis mine]
I’ve long known that menstrual difficulties are related to the liver, since in TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) the liver and uterus are related. Like sisters. In my case, they are sisters who pull each others’ hair and fret every time they look in the mirror. Yes, my inner child is actually two adolescents. And that weekend, with only a modicum of food, for the first time in their lives, they behaved.
Now, due in large part to the change of season, they are back to misbehaving. This is not new; I have an internal switch where dietary changes are concerned. And I have yet to figure out its raison d’etre, but it has an amazing ability to turn on, and I will suddenly adopt a new way of eating and I will be 100% diligent about it. And then it will just as suddenly shut off, and I revert to a more reptilian age of eating.
It’s off.
I know myself well enough to know that there is something beside the rain underneath the reptilic reversion. Because I know how good it would be to get back to the conscious eating for pleasure mentality that I was introduced to just a few weeks ago. I’m just not sure what it is yet.
If any of you see a paddle floating by, I’m up the creek. Call me.
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