Hiatus – How can acupuncture help me stop procrastinating?
I’m good at writing blogs, so I have been told. I enjoy writing them; I am enjoying writing this. Why then the massive gaps followed by the regular blogs, followed by the massive gaps?
Yes, I have been busy, preoccupied – haven’t we all?. Ask me to give detail with what and I might struggle very quickly to tell you what occupies the 30 minutes required to write this. Perhaps I have had some illusion that my life is so busy with important things like working at the NCA, running a busy practice, attending to family, life, and my gravity-prone body, that writing my blog is less important.
Or perhaps it requires more effort. The ‘life’ stuff comes at you, often with the velocity of a fire hose. A blog needs me to commit. It’s optional. It requires discipline.
Hiare means to gape or to yawn in Latin, and the dictionary also tells me that hiatus can be an interruption, a pause in an activity, or a gap, where something is missing.
Where something is missing – sounds familiar. Sure, the missing thing is the blog, but that’s the symptom; it must be something a little more profound. The energetic principles of Eastern medicine see symptoms of lethargy and procrastination in yawns, sighs, and overthinking. This indicates energy not flowing as it might. The energy is there, by which I mean it’s not missing, or I’d be suffering weakness or fatigue. And the energy is not stuck. If it were, I might be experiencing mental or physical pain. It’s just sluggish and slow.
In medicine, Hiatus is used to describe a natural opening, a passage through bone or muscle, and in its most common use, the hiatus hernia is the top of the stomach pushing up through the diaphragm. In Eastern medicine, the reflux symptoms associated with a hiatus hernia would be described as energy flowing in the ‘wrong’ direction.
Eastern medicine provides insightful, mysterious metaphorical descriptions of health and disease. In the Daoist system of yang-sheng; literally “nourishing life”, the antidote to sluggishness is movement, foods that are low in carbs, eaten slowly and thoughtfully, and widening one’s view from the narrow thoughts of the job in hand.
Acupuncture treatments have inbuilt effects to help move sluggish energy. Yes, the placement of a few fine needles in specific points helps to ‘move the qi’ and clear sluggishness. They enable deep restorative relaxation and are very good for counteracting inflammatory conditions. More than that, the act of lying down, talking to someone, and giving yourself time to relax, breathe, and reset is priceless.
So here is the blog. 40 minutes plus editing in all.
I think I’ll go get some acupuncture now. I’ve clearly been neglecting myself……….. food for thought as they say 😉