Hydration in Denver
After I graduated from school and had time to think about self care again I knew the best place to begin was with hydration. It might seem like a strange connection, but let me tell you how not paying attention to hydration took it’s toll on my daily life!
When I first started school I was pretty overwhelmed by the rigorous schedule (my school was an accelerated program, typically a 4 year program done in 3). I wanted to stay strong during the program and the only time I could squeeze exercise in was commuting via bicycle to school. Lucky for me Denver is one of the best cities for commuting on bikes around! My ride was about seven miles both ways. I would go fast to get some good cardio and by the time I would get to school I would have sweated all the way through my clothes (I’m sure my classmates loved me). After a stressful day of classes I loved shaking it off riding home fast, and again sweating all the way through my clothes. Now, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I was so busy being a mom, student and wife that I didn’t think about replacing the fluids and the electrolytes that I lost on these daily rides (in TCM terms I was depleting yin fluids).
Now comes in the after effects of depleting Yin. I began to have a lot of digestive issues, heart burn, heart palpitations, racing heart, extreme irritability, vaginal dryness, headaches, shoulder tightness, pain and insomnia (I’ll do an entire post on insomnia later, sleep is a big commodity around our house). By the time I was in my second year of school, I constantly felt like I was riding on fumes. I longed for a good night’s sleep and my body just could not drop into solid slumber. For my TCM people, I watched my tongue peel from the tip to the back and my pulses were extremely thin, weak, and deep in the rear positions.
In my third year of school I began to see a practitioner who is amazing with herbal formulas (he happens to be my mentor as well) he prescribed some pretty complicated formulas for me. It took a while for things to begin to go in the other direction. This kind of deficient pattern came from a long time of me neglecting and depleting my yin. My pattern was layered with excess and deficiency. It was complicated, like most people. But as time went on and I started to take better care of myself my heart racing/palpitations completely went away, I can sleep through the night again and lucky for my family my irritability decreased a lot.
As I wake in the morning to make myself a glass of warm lemon water I see it as an offering to myself and my family. Lemon water wouldn’t have fixed my depleted Yin when it was at it’s height, I needed to make some lifestyle changes, take herbs and get acupuncture. Food is such powerful medicine. This small act of self care is a nod to Yin, to life sustaining fluids and to this medicine that I love.
