Physics Summer 2017

My experiences receiving acupuncture treatments showed me that it is powerful energy medicine. After the first treatment I ever received, I could feel energy circulating through all the parts of my body. It felt as though I had only been living in half of my body and I was welcoming back the parts ignored to live with me again. I have begun crying of deep sadness with the insertion of a needle; I have felt anger and frustration spewing from needled points as well. There are many more examples I could list just from my own experiences of healing with acupuncture; they all lead me to conclude that acupuncture is effective energy medicine. Human intent effects health; as healers and recipients of healing it is very important to be aware of intention. Placebo and nocebo effects are widely documented. Some in the west choose to interpret these concepts as a marker of ineffective practices or medicine; I see these effects as compelling evidence of the power of intention. I appreciat...

I know I am a living system because I have a will to live. It is a miracle to be alive. The odds of any of us being here are incredibly small. I believe that children choose their parents; they choose to be conceived and to be born into this world. We do not know where it all will lead, but we take a leap to live this life. I am a living system because a spark, the coming together of light and sound, created me. I have the will to keep becoming, changing, adapting and creating. It seems silly to me to try to isolate biology, physiology, health, and physics. Biophysics is integrative and allows one to widen their gaze within the scientific framework. I think it’s very appropriate to engage with biophysics as Chinese medicine practitioners. It can provide a framework and language to articulate some of the more intuitive aspects of a system of holistic care to the western audience, including ourselves! I have experienced amazing results from Chinese medicine as a patient, with no exp...

My E-Prime Day This morning I awoke at 7am, according to the widely agreed upon concept of time in San Francisco, CA. I poured water into a kettle and turned the dial on the stove until a flame ignited on the burner. When the kettle made a noise that I call a whistle, I turned the dial to discontinue the gas supply to the flame. I removed jars filled with dry herbs from a kitchen cabinet and added them to a vessel with the hot water to make tea.   I ate food. I walked outside of the building and down the street. I stopped walking at the space on the street marked by signs as a bus stop. When a bus marked 30 stopped next to the curb and the doors opened, I stepped up onto the bus and sat down in a seat that did not contain a human. I removed the notes I took in Physiology from the bag I bought with me and read about the respiratory system in the human body.   When the bus stopped and the doors opened at my intended destination, I departed from the vehicle and walked to t...

Synchronicity is “the coincidence in time of two or more casually unrelated events which have the same meaning” ("Carl Jung") . This description of synchronicity was given by psychologist Carl Jung to describe occurrences such as: having a thought about someone you have not spoken to in years, and then minutes later running into them on the street.   The characteristics of a synchronous event are that there is a “meaningful connection between the outer event and the person’s inner psychological state,” and this connection is without a causal connection (“Carl Jung”).  This question of causality is what defines Jung’s phenomenon of synchronicity as a Western concept. Jung describes a patient who was “psychologically inaccessible” due to her “extremely Cartesian rationalism” (“Carl Jung”).   This patient held a prevailing tenant of Western thought, Rene Descartes’ concept of dualism, which holds that the mind/soul and the body are two separate entities ( "Cartesia...