Contemplating Contemplation

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Adventures in Acupuncture Part 2

After checking your tongue, the acupuncturist will check your pulse in 6 different points on your wrists. I think they have 30 something ways to describe your pulse.

Then they feel your belly to get a read of your body temperature... to see how warm your uterus is and stuff.

Then they ask you to describe your stool. Have you ever tried to do that? It's actually pretty difficult. Fortunately, they also have this chart:



It's not just number 2 any more, it's numbers 1-7...so helpful. (And, yes, gross too)

Bee liked my Kierkegaard Quote...

so here's another I quite like.















Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself;... In every man there is something which to a certain degree prevents him from becoming perfectly transparent to himself; and this may be the case in so high a degree, he may be so inexplicably woven into relationships of life which extend far beyond himself that he almost cannot reveal himself. But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love, and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all.


And I love Bee.

sure footed as a billy goat

To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.
Soren Kierkegaard

Adventures in Acupuncture Part 1

For the past few months I have been going through acupuncture therapy, primarily for the IT Band injury that dashed my marathon dreams (no pun intended). The great thing about holistic medicine, though, is that due to the very fact that it's holistic, treatment is basically one stop shopping for all of your ailments. Anxiety, depression, hormones, gastrointestinal disorders...you name it, they'll poke it!

I was at first a tad skeptical about using acupuncture to heal my leg injury. After many months off the leg and lots of strengthening and stretching, I was still experiencing pretty severe pain when I tried to do anything more than walk. I figured it might just be the end of my distance running career. But, since I had no other real choice except PT, which the orthopedic surgeon didn't even seem that convinced of, I figured I'd give it another shot. Without going too in depth about the process and my progress in this post, I'll at least say that I'm now up to 13 ish miles and running my first half marathon back this coming Sunday.

What I appreciate most about acupuncture is that it truly is a holistic approach to care -- every symptom your body shows is related to another, and has to be treated as such. This means that to treat your problems, the therapist actually has to listen to you and help connect the dots. That's right...listen! Really, acupuncture is half psycho-therapy/half physio-therapy and it's a very new experience for me to have someone treating me actually listen to everything that's going on with my body and, more than that, not tell me I'm crazy. (This isn't even that specific of a reference, just a general note about Western doctors who are now so zoned into their computers during visits that traditional standards of human interaction are completely stricken from existence).



One of the most fascinating aspects of traditional Chinese medicine is the diagnosis approach. In addition to asking questions about your history and current state, there are a few primary tests that they do each visit. The first of which, my favorite, is the tongue test. That's right, the tongue test. They don't run blood tests, they don't listen to your heart, they look at your tongue. Until I had my first tongue diagnosis, I had no clue that tongues could be so different, but in actuality they are each unique and tell the story of your health. After my first diagnosis, my acupuncturist told me what she saw in my tongue and then took out a big book o' tongues to show me the wide variety. In all honesty, the book is pretty nasty, but it's been rather remarkable to watch the shape and color of my tongue transform over the past few months...the ripples on the sides are gone and the color is becoming redder and less filmy by the day! Aren't you proud?

where in the world WAS meghan o. mahoney?

Today, as regularly happens, i was inspired to revisit the good ol' blog. perhaps because this all began as me writing about an unusual year of international travels, i've been wondering what in the world i could actually write about in an entertaining fashion now that i'm a boring 9-5 er and even more boring MBA student.

But then i said to myself, "self, even when you were traveling all you were writing about was the very experience of being boring. Plus, isn't that how Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld struck it big?"

So, if my life was just as boring 2, 3, 4 years ago...what was I writing about then that I thought others might find interesting? Let's see....

FOUR years ago, I was in Denmark, working out my loneliness and angst. And apparently continuing to discover Rilke. I was actually just searcing the other day for the quote I posted and Caitlin just hung it on our dining room wall.

THREE years ago I was running and fell on my face. I still do a lot of that, too.

TWO year ago, I apparently did find something interesting to post... my ostrich riding video from South Africa. I think I missed my calling as an ostrich jockey.

And LAST year, I was honoring one of the most amazing women I've been blessed to know and share genes with. It's too bad blogs didn't exist during her hayday.

And now we come to today. I woke up and read some T.S. Eliot, uploaded some pictures from my most recent travels (namely Greece and Cali) and I'm about to go for a run and will likely fall on my face. I guess some things never change.