Rice Grains

Herbal Recipe: Sesame Orange Cookies

Herbal Recipe: Sesame Orange Cookies

Now that you’ve made your own food-grade herbs in the form of dried orange peel (see previous post with directions), here’s an idea of how to make something tasty with them! These black sesame, cardamom, and dried orange peel cookies are a wonderful treat to support digestion, nourish us in this yin time of winter, and open the new year.

Bonus: the ingredients help move and counteract some of the stagnation from heavy holiday meals (so these would also make a great dessert for Thanksgiving or December cookie swaps). Enjoy in moderation, of course.

999 Sutter and a Sign of Relief

999 Sutter and a Sign of Relief

I’m moving my acupuncture schedule full time to the Healing Arts Building on Sutter and Hyde in San Francisco this September, which is a big milestone to celebrate. I love how calm this clinic is and patients often remark how relaxed they feel. I’m glad to be spending more time with you in this beautiful healing space!

When I visited before deciding to rent here in Spring 2018, there were many things I loved about the whole building right away. It's beautiful with a lot of old-style character. The Sutter Healing Arts building is brick, which always feels warm to me, was built in the 1900s in Beaux Arts style, and originally housed a urology practice on the first floor with the doctor living upstairs. So there’s a lot of history here as a medical space, yet it’s also been a home from the beginning, making it the perfect place to create a clinic that’s not clinical.

Spring Energy

Spring Energy

Happy First Day of Spring! Spring is when new green shoots rise, tendrils reach out for the next hold, and the world gets a bit warmer and brighter. I hope holding that image in your mind helps you find what the majority of my patients said their goal was for this year: more energy.

I think we're so tired in part because we're expected to come out of the gate of the New Year bursting with energy for new projects and self improvement. I've never been one to make New Year's Resolutions, but this year it felt especially off, setting us all up for failure. It's just not the right time. Winter is when we want to curl up in front of a fire with a good book, a blanket, and a hot beverage. No wonder we fail so routinely at most of our resolution setting and everyone coming in in January was so incredibly fatigued!

Love and Luck

Love and Luck

Two beautiful and unexpected things happened this weekend. I had recently lost my pocket tiger's eye and I found the perfect replacement. And I thought I'd have a hard timing finding the moon plant I had in my college dorm room for four years, but it presented itself precisely when I needed some greenery in the office!

I don't know a lot about stones, but I'm just starting to dip a toe in (with a hefty dose of skepticism). At any rate, I started carrying the tiger's eye last year because it was smooth and I've always liked tiger's eye and it was nice to have something to run my fingers over when I got anxious. Anyway, I lost it, probably in someone's car, and I was uncharacteristically ok with it (I normally hate losing things), but my friend had just come back from the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show and generously opened her wealth of stones to me to choose a new pocket stone. I've had carnelian on the mind a lot lately because I thought getting an orange crystal to put inside my orange lightsaber would be fun and nerdy (in Star Wars lore, kaiburr crystals are force-attuned and integral to a working lightsaber). I have a friend in my lightsaber group who has a purple crystal in his purple saber and I love the idea. So she not only gave me a beautiful carnelian pocket stone, but two carnelian beads to put in my saber.

Why Is There Green Plastic in My Sushi?

Why Is There Green Plastic in My Sushi?

Ever pull out that piece of green plastic from your sushi and think, "why is this always here?"

The plastic clearly isn't useful and it's not meant to look like a child's drawing of a grassy lawn. It's meant to represent the perilla or shiso leaf, which should be included with your raw fish for far more than aesthetic purposes.

Just in case there's anything wrong with the raw fish, both perilla and ginger are traditionally included with your meal. Taking bites of these combat the effects of bad fish on your system:

Perilla leaf is known as shiso in Japanese and zi su ye in Chinese. It is an aromatic and warm herb that disperses cold and promotes sweating (helpful for the immune system), circulates qi and harmonizes the middle (digestion), detoxifies food poisoning from fish, and calms a restless fetus. So it's a lovely herb for morning sickness or nausea or vomiting with a cold (especially the kind that has chills, coughing, and clear or white phlegm).

Stress Relief and the Pantone Color of the Year

The Pantone Color of 2017 is Greenery. Leaves. Fresh greens and dark, shadows and tendrils. The classics say green is the color of Spring and of its associated meridian, the Liver (not to be confused with your anatomical organ).

The Liver is easily injured by anger, whether felt rightfully when we are not respected or felt in excess when we seek more than we're due. A smooth Liver meridian allows for the free movement of energy (qi), properly nourishing other body processes and meridians and relieving pain, stress, and tension. Since the Liver governs the sinews and tendons, we can stretch and move freely in our physical body as well as in our emotional range when the channel is free of stagnant energy and substances.