The Power in Cultivating Your Life Force with Dr. Keema Shield

In my practice, I use acupuncture and herbs as well as lifestyle as my main medicine.

My passion is for helping women achieve healthy pregnancies and using the power of the female menstrual cycle as a way to improve metabolic and hormonal health. So that menopausal and perimenopausal women can have years of vitality.

I want to offer a few simple tricks from the ancient practice of Chinese medicine. The ideas that I’m going to talk to you about today all came from the repeated conversations that I have had with patients. They’re small tools that, done consistently over time, can give you really good. They’re free.

They’re easy. And the best part is that they put you in the position of being your own best healer.

I’m going to take you through the changes in the seasons of a year, as well as look at a cycle of a day through the lens of Chinese medicine. This is an ancient medicine, and it has tools to optimize your health built right into its core.

We all have energy to varying degrees, but this energy can be cultivated or lost by lifestyle choices, stress, trauma, some things that we can’t control and some that we can. So let’s take time to look at the ones that we can control. Firstly, the theories that form the base of Chinese medicine were cultivated thousands of years ago by the ancients or naturalists. They observe nature’s temperature and the subtle energy body. The ancients had the direct experience that when they align themselves with nature by supporting their bodies with foods of specific flavors,

Movement sleep patterns and right thinking that they had more health and vitality or energy flow at the core of this premise, or this theory is that we as humans are part of nature and therefore we must reflect nature.

They rightly understood that nature works in ever-changing cycles and that there’s a right time for everything. Broadly, we can look at the cycle of a year of our life, and we can also look at the minutia of a day, the cycle and rhythms that go through each of our days; I have observed that we have more access to our vitality when we’re working with the energy that’s already available in our environment.

For example, yoga teachers understand that poses have different effects on us. And they take us through very different poses based on the time of day, working to align our physiology with the energy in the day.

I call this being right with time.

When we see someone in flow, how often have we observed that they were in the right place at the right time?

This is common. Our bodies also function well when they’re aligned with time. So when we’re not, we don’t feel great. What I mean by this is that we can use symptoms as clues to see where you’re not in sync with time.

If we’re having issues in, say, one area, and we see that the issue is repeated in a cycle of a day or in a season, this gives us more information. We want to notice when it happens. If we have trouble starting or finishing a project or trouble with the middle, or perhaps just with the transition, each phase is ruled by an element.

So we want to look at that because it gives us clues into where we are really strong in our energy and also where we need more support.

The simplest example of being right with time is in our waking and sleep cycle. Ideally, we want to see that our energy begins to rise with the sun and decline. As the sun goes down, we want to be able to fall asleep and stay asleep until the sun begins to rise.

If we see recurring night waking at 2:00 AM, this tells us something because this time of the night relates to the liver. If every spring we suffer from a similar malady or emotional experience, we pay attention to this too. If you reflect a little right now, Can you see where you’re having an experience or a symptom and check if it recurs in a cyclical way, you can also reflect on where you tend to end up physically or emotionally when things don’t go well for you.

Our tendencies are to repeat patterns, and these patterns can shine a light on what is wrong with us and where our system needs support to be in a better relationship with itself.

Our job is to set ourselves up so that our internal conditions are right and in harmony so that nature can do its job and we can be well.

Observe the gain and the drain; you need to look at the true cost of how you are setting up your life! 

So how do we take advantage of what nature has to offer?

We definitely can. Before I go into the seasons, remember what I opened with the missing link that I think differentiates between lack of disease and vitality. I’m going to show you one way that I hope will help you build your energy and bridge this gap.