Nourishing Life Method
Healing with Dr. Saraswati
Health Meets Consciousness
"I’m just getting older,” or “It’s genetic.” I hear these phrases daily. To begin healing, often, women don’t know where to start. They feel a need to be really heard, and then they want their symptoms explained to them – written out right in front of them. Women want to know, in clear English, what they need to do every day in order to see the changes they want. That’s the mission of Nourishing Life.
It’s not uncommon for women to come to my practice with no obvious disease – no clear structural or functional issue diagnosed by a Western doctor, but still feel like they are unhealthy, irritated by challenging symptoms. This limbo state between health and disease, sub-clinical complaints, is a challenge for Western medicine because it views everyone from a disease-centered focus. If patients don’t have a disease that can be diagnosed, then they don’t have a problem. Worse – patients are often prescribed symptom-chasing medications like the dangerous cocktail of antidepressants, anti-anxiety pills, and sleep aids that middle-aged patients are often expected to take for the rest of their lives. From this vantage point, health becomes simply the absence of disease.
Your hormonal balance and your fertility are not separate from any other aspect of your life. Symptoms are a reflection of living out of harmony with your environment, which what Chinese medicine calls the Dao.
Daoism is Yang Sheng
In the Huang Di Nei Jing – the “bible” of Chinese medicine that dates back more than 2000 years – the Yellow Emperor asked the court physician-sage:
“Ancient people lived for more than 100 years, and their bodies did not seem to have the problems of aging. Now people who are half as old, with only 50 years, are becoming weak. Is this because the world has changed or because people do not know how to nurture life?”
People are the same today as they were 2000 years ago. The court physician-sage Qi Bo replied,
“The ancient people who followed the Dao of Nourishing Life knew how to adapt to the laws of yin and yang and how to follow the ways of nurturing life. They ate moderately, slept regularly, avoided overworking, and were cautious of having excessive desires. They were flourishing in both body and spirit. They lived to 100 years as a gift given by Heaven.”
Day to Day Daoism to Prevent Disease
The core concept – that gift from Heaven – is day to day Daoism to prevent disease. One of the most ancient expressions of Daoism is "Yang Sheng.” Yang means to cultivate, to nourish, or to nurture, and sheng means life, growing, freshness, or survival. Yang Sheng, therefore, means Nourishing Life. Treating “pre-illness” occurs through Yang Sheng. It is the ancient science that can provide you a long, healthy, and vital life. You accomplish this by cultivating your spirit-mind and happiness, moderating your consumption and desire, doing physical exercise and following a non-sedentary lifestyle, and striving for an engaged mind. Yang Sheng also includes the health maintenance practices of acupuncture, self-massage, healing herbs, qigong, and yoga.
Your Experience with Nourishing Life
Through our courses and live experiences you will begin to understand the underlying causes that explain most if not all of your symptoms. Through this work you will identify your imbalances in a very personal way. We have moved away from the idea that medicine revolves around techniques and cookie-cutter protocols – instead, we strive toward an outcome where you learn how to recover the ability to heal yourself and how to nurture your own well-being.
Chinese medicine is especially relational, as patient-doctor, and woman-to-woman relationships develop, as ritual and devotion are explored, along with other Nourishing Life techniques - a personalized approach to managing and healing specific symptomatic expressions unfolds. We have 30 years of practical, clinical experience, and now the intuitive healer is emerging creating a powerful healing experience.
Understanding and addressing the four comprehensive parts of your being:
- Your nutrition (what and how often you eat)
- Your capacity for restorative sleep
- Your hormones (what they are doing), for which we could use the help of modern labs
- Your day-to-day life (what most important to you) and how best to support you
Many traditional doctors are trained to identify a problem and correct it with a pill. Often, however, real healing happens when we can find a solution that revolves around a functional change in your life. It is so important to think outside of the box, becoming honest with yourself and listening to yourself is really the key.
Reinvent Yourself - Make Fundamental Changes
Most women, we’ve found, don’t want a “cure-all” pill anymore – they want to know why they don’t feel well; they want something that helps them reinvent themselves: they want a way to make fundamental changes. They want to know what’s really going on – and not just to get rid of symptoms or mask them. Most women want their bodies to function without the support of medications.
At Nourishing Life, we meet the patient where they are and suggest medications in combination with or after trying supplement, nutritional, lifestyle and herbal strategies.
Click here to make an appointment with Dr. Saraswati.
Introduction to the Nourishing Life Method
Step 1: Dao of Beginning
For any healing to occur, there first must be listening. Let it be okay to be a beginner and recreate your image of yourself and your life as something new, something fresh and fertile. The Nourishing Life method has its roots in the ancient Chinese science of wellness, longevity, and potency called Yang Sheng, which literally translates as Nourishing Life. These are specific techniques proven through the test of time. When practiced on a regular basis, Yang Sheng increases your healthy energy, reduces stress, and slows down the aging process, while also raising your subjective feelings of happiness.
Step 2: Dao of Essence
The Essence (Jing) is a Chinese medicine term and is an aspect of your Kidneys, which dominates your fertile potential, hormonal balance, and healthy aging. It is your inherited constitution associated with the genetic contribution from your parents. It is actually your lifestyle–the way you eat, move, think and rest– that has the most depleting impact on your Kidney Essence. All those all-nighters studying for exams, skipping meals only to end up carbo-loading on chips and cookies later in the day, and ignoring the deep stream of your inner voice that has been trying to guide you to balance all along.
Your Kidney Essence gathers deep in the lower abdomen and is connected to and one in the same as the flow of energy in nature. Discover how connect to the universal stream and to channel it into your body to enliven your ovaries and uterus. Restorative sleep is a key feature of this stage of healing. Rest is the very ground upon which we stand. Additionally, identifying your core values helps to ensure your life is rooted in your most meaningful truth. Learn how to skillfully spend, save, and bank your energy back into the pelvic bowl. Understand the metabolic process of storing up and using resources.
Kidney Essence is directly related to your reproductive vigor. It determines genetic predisposition, innate health, and the ability to grow, develop, become pregnant, mature, and age well. As you guard your Jing (hormones), your aging process slows down.
Step 3: Dao of Food
We are what we eat… and what we think! A cornerstone to a healthy life is our commitment to eating nutrient-dense food. If we put garbage in our bodies, then garbage comes out by way of our tissues, our thoughts, and what we manifest in our lives. This means we have to make every bite of food we put into our mouths count. Only then are we really being fed, through and through. This doesn’t mean we can’t occasionally enjoy the guilty pleasure of our favorite foods, but many of us must be retrained to turn towards that which feeds us. Literally.
Chinese medicine also has a long history of adding healing herbs to soups, stews, and congees. So another principal to learn is to adjust the foods we eat to fit our own individual needs. By following the laws of yin and yang — hot and cold, excess and deficiency — we can select foods that are the most appropriate for us to balance our individual strengths and weaknesses.
Step 4: Dao of Relaxation
Our emotions — how we think, feel, and relax — have a great bearing on our health and happiness. Just like when we’re nervous and can feel butterflies in the upper abdomen, our emotions affect the way energy circulates in our bodies. Anger and resentment can cause our energy to rise up and become heated, where sadness and grief dissolves our energy and creates deficiency. Over-thinking binds the energy together in knots so that we are doomed to think the same thought over and over again.
All emotions are energy; energy provides the power to transform. The solutions involve learning to unravel the layers of emotion, tease apart the stress response, and then begin to cultivate positive mind states. As we practice generating positive feelings like generosity and kindness, new groove-like patterns form in our brains. As we cultivate these new patterns, we become more likely to turn to them in the future.
Over-thinking, overworking, and over-stressing tax our energy. These actions consume our qi. The ancient literature speaks of mental purification as the practice of concentrating the mind in an effort to manage our energy and resources more skillfully. We can then use our energy to heal our bodies and engender feelings of peace and well-being in our lives.
Step 5: Dao of Body
Learn the health advantages of movement. Exercise and a lack of sedentary living is a centerpiece for getting healthy and staying well. Our bodies are meant to move; when we stop moving, that’s when problems arise. Exercise has been shown to have a healing effect across the whole body-mind matrix. Qigong and yoga focus on both the musculo-skeletal system and on the energetic flow through the acupuncture meridians and yoga nadis. When we practice from nourishment and authentic vitality rather than from hyper-drive, our bodies shift into its deepest healing potential, all fueled by our breath and radical presence.
Step 6: Dao of Spirit
The Ancient Ones said that human beings are first spirit. As you cultivate your relationship to spirituality, you are able to reach something within that is intact, an unshakable resource. Sometimes, patients don’t get better. Sometimes, symptoms don’t improve. As your body purifies, opens, heals, and relaxes, its energies become receptive to exploring and experiencing the role that spirit has in healing. This perspective redefines healing as the movement from symptomatic expression to peace. This is where the deepest treatment and healing lie.
