Community Acupuncture at OurSpace

Somewhere along the way we learned that after a long, hard, stressful week at the job site that we owe it to ourselves to go out and have a drink on Friday night to blow off steam and get ready for the weekend. For many of us, that one drink turns into five, and our promising weekend gets compressed into a Saturday hangover recovery and a Sunday scramble session to get ready for another mundane Monday...

If you want to experience a way to leave the frenetics and stresses of your week behind that actually works, drop by OurSpace Acupuncture. I'll be there serving up acupuncture pin doses of rest, detoxification, and relaxation. Walk-ins are welcome, so bring a friend, co-worker, or significant other with you!


Thursday, November 10, 2011

Diet: The latest addition to the list of four letter words you shouldn't say around your grandmother Part 2.

I think our biggest fundamental flaw as Americans (next to our lack of awareness born of being on auto pilot way too much of the time) is our tendency to short cut.  We’ve been inculturated to get things done as fast as possible - because time is money.  Out of this impatient impulse grows the false need for faster Internet, faster cars, and faster food.  The part that most fail to realize is that all this speed is paving the road to faster death as well...

So how does this apply to dieting you may ask?  Well, the focus gets shifted from “Hey, let me develop some good habits that will have me looking good and feeling fine,” to “How fast can I lose 20 pounds?”.  Most of you would agree it’s crazy to go on a crash diet and lose 20 pounds, only to regain that weight and more in a couple months.  The crazy thing is that weight loss pills, water diets, and the latest low [carb, fat, salt] food options set us up to do just that.  Who wants to go around eating 100 calorie snack packs for the rest of their lives?  Not me!  

So what’s the way out of this fat rat race?  Well, fortunately for us, you’ve read Diet: The latest addition to the list of four letter words you shouldn't say around your grandmother Part 1 (and if you haven't, stop here, scroll down the page, and read it NOW) and have already craved out an extra hour of time to use on your latest self-improvement project (i.e., your bod!).  Now dig this - the signals your body sends you for more food, water, sleep, and sex are almost identical.  Didn’t know that now did ya?  Fortunately for you, the word almost is key here.  That means that sometimes when you think you’re hungry... (wait for it).... you actually need a nap, and with enough practice you can actually tell the difference!  What have you been trained to do instead?  Reach for a latte or a Red Bull packing more empty calories for your body to find a room for when the Weight Inn is already full so to speak.  

So here’s what you’re going to do with your new-found free time:  Next time you get ready to grab some grub, your going to get still, close your eyes, put your hand on your stomach, take a big belly breath, and ask yourself “What does my body really need right now?”.  Stay this way for 15 seconds.  Don’t be discouraged if you don’t get any clear answers for the first week or so of doing this self-awareness project - with enough practice, you’ll blow yourself away with the new “cravings” that show up.  In Diet: The latest addition to the list of four letter words you shouldn't say around your grandmother Part 3, we’ll go into some strategies for how to meet these "new" needs.

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Diet: The latest addition to the list of four letter words you shouldn't say around your grandmother part 1

Diet.  Now there's a term that has lost all meaning.  What does it mean anyway?  The first words that pop into my head when I hear the term are "tough", "no fun", "bland food", "hungry", and "not anymore".  That last one is my favorite - when I said to my friend that those fries probably aren't a good idea if she's on a diet, she said "oh, I'm not on a diet anymore!".  With thousands of books, videos, and pills devoted to the arena of weight loss and dieting, shouldn't we have this thing licked by now?  I mean goodness, if we collectively devoted the same time, attention, and money to finding a cure for AIDS, there would be so many more people alive and healthy that the food shortage would take care of the problem of over-eating by itself!  I thought acupuncture was mysterious, but at least I know that when I put pins in somebody weekly, they are guaranteed to feel at least a little better.  Of the dieters I know personally, the only thing I can count on is that they'll have a cupboard full of "health food" that they are so afraid to touch you'd think it had arsenic in it, and another story of losing 10 pounds only to gain it all back and more in a couple of months.

Now that I've gotten the small-minded pessimism behind us, we can talk about the larger issue.  The single, immutable law behind losing weight is this:  if you make it about losing weight, you're waiting to lose again.  No if's, and's, or butt's about it, you can't lose weight without losing the weight of bad habit, flawed beliefs, and misplaced priorities.  The first diet anyone making a foray into the realm of personal health has to go on is a diet from your mind!  I like being clever, but this is serious business; so serious in fact, I'll say it again once more with feeling: 

Any diet that looks at changing your body by only changing what you eat is doomed to fail.  Our words, thoughts, beliefs, and actions play a much bigger role in losing weight and maintaining health than you could ever imagine.

Now that's not to say that what you put in your shopping cart doesn't matter, or that things like herbs or acupuncture can't help.  They most certainly can.  In fact, or the personal that has the right tools at their disposal, acupuncture and food energetics can do loads to affect total health.  My experience is that they change what I'll grossly lump together as "willpower".  But more on that in part 2 of this "diet against diet" campaign.  The single change I will ask any client to master first before working with them on the arena of weight loss is a mastery of time and time management. 

"Huh?".  Yes, I know, didn't see that coming did you?  In my experience, diet and exercise (yes, there will be plenty of exercise too!) plans fail not because people are not wanting to be serious about their diet or exercise, it's because they don't have the time to be serious about their diet and exercise.  Take a deep breath and lock that in:  in order to maximize your greatest material resource (your body), you must take control of your biggest non-material resource (your time).  Time is a double sleeper too because not only must you have time for everything that goes into total health, what you spend time thinking about sets the stage for how the whole dog and pony show unfolds.  Whether you're an artist, a doctor, a rapper, a janitor, a chef, a teacher, or an investment banker, you know that in order to produce top quality work and results that last, you have to put in the time.  No way around it - it's a law almost as immutable as gravity. 

"Okay... so now what?" you're no doubt asking.  Your first assignment is this:  carve out one extra hour in your day, every day.  And when you carve it out, here's what I want you do to with it - nothing.  That's right all-star, I want you to spend 20 minutes less at work, shave 15 minutes off of your time on the internet, turn the TV off 15 minutes early, and cut gossip hour down by 10 minutes.  And after you find that everything in your life will not fall apart if you take an hour a day and do nothing with it but sit and listen to relaxing music (which will yield its own health benefits - trust me), come back and read about the next steps in Diet: The latest addition to the list of four letter words you shouldn't say around your grandmother part 2.

Monday, August 15, 2011

360 Degree Failure

I'm going to anger just about everyone with this post - and I welcome it.  Anger properly used is an amazingly galvanizing force for change.  It has little to do with acupuncture, food, or wellness directly; however it has everything to do with why droves of children are starving in Somalia, London is on Fire, and why the US government just took over for Barnum and Bailey as the number one circus in town.  It's because nobody has a clue what the hell they're doing; and nobody has a clue because we all seem to have forgotten our roles.  Women, your job simply put is to tell everybody what is important.  Men, our job is to figure out how to best get that done.  And as a man, I'll be the first to say that all this crap is mostly (if not all) our fault.  And women, as much as we need your help in fixing things, if you try to do both your job and our job, we're going to be no better off in the long run.

Now I'm the last guy you could ever call sexist.  I praised the woman (with better biceps than mine) that helped me carry this behemoth of a bookshelf down 3 flights of stairs a couple of months ago.  I'm glad to hear any woman's thoughts on any topic.  And I'm not the man that's going to let my lady or my mother go in the kitchen and slave over the hot stove by herself.  Not never (the double negative is for emphasis).  I've got your back 100% of the time.  However, I've run into a recent pattern of women in my life not trusting me to lead the way.  After a discussion about what's fair, reasonable, right, and most important (a conversation during which a least half of my notions are exposed for the flawed mess that they are), the execution of this top priority mission hits a major snag - the Zero Faith Factor.  See, if there is one thing I have done near flawlessly since being a young lad, it's getting $&*+ done.  Plain and simple.  You give me a goal, what I can use for resources, and a deadline and you can count on a big "Mission Accomplished" banner blowing gently in the wind not too far off in the future.

My problem is some dumbass of a man (more likely 20 of them) has come along right before me and proven to the women I am eager to serve that accomplishing the task we men were charged to do is of priority Level 4.  Greed, ego, and power crept into the agenda at some point in the past, and now getting the job done right just doesn't matter as much.  So what happened?  Wonderfully beautiful, gifted, and caring women have transformed into headstrong head honchos who have to have it their way or the highway.  And I don't blame you women for having developed the strength and conviction in yourself that all the men you see around you lack. What I lament is this:  if the cycle continues, good men will give up, inefficiencies will ensue, young men will never try, and while women run the world, no one will have the time to remind us that love is the most beautiful thing in the world.

Now I'm not naive enough to think that the energies of men and women are absolutely separate with no cross-over.  There are women who have leadership ability that comes naturally and wasn't born out of necessity.  There are men who thrive in the role of sensing truth and directing us all in how to maintain its essence.  I'm not talking about these minorities - you guys keep doing what you're doing.  What I'm saying is that if you are a woman calling the shots, but you know deep down that you're better in a support role, find a decent man to get behind and help take his game to the next level.  If I could find the people who perpetrated the lie that leadership is more important than support, I'd rap away at their knuckles until my hand got a cramp from holding the ruler.  As the home base and foundation for everything that is meaningful and good in the world, I'd trade the gifts of 200 women for the "Talk a good game" attitude of most men any day.

And fellas, I'm sorry I've chipped away once again at our fragile collective ego.  I guess I'm just thinking that after lifetimes of beatings, murders, rapes, and wars, some man's got to formally apologize and acknowledge the real issues.  Now lick your wounds, go deeply listen to what these fine women have to say, and then take it on as your life's work, giving it every ounce of strength, skill, and cunning you can muster.  I'll meet you on the other side.

Sunday, July 24, 2011

Karma-kaze and Feng Shui

If I didn't learn anything else from my days in Sunday School as a child, it was this:

"You reap what you sow"

So universal is this principle that it might as well be signed into law by Congress (except they've got their hands busy with a whole bunch of reaping from some not-so-thoughtful past sowing at the moment).  The Golden Rule, "What goes around comes around", "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" - it's so inescapable, yet we bash ourselves over the head with the same ole bat of bad habits and wonder what just happened.  I'll tell you what just happened - you're a Karma-kaze.

The Buddhists summed it up in one word - Karma.  It's the law of cause and effect.  At the exact moment you have a thought, speak a word, or perform an action (causes), a corresponding seed of unripened potential registers in your ____ (life, future, soul, destiny, path, consciousness, mindstream - pick whatever word you want).   The reason that so many of us fail to live by this law is that the effects don't often happen until much later; until the seed we created grows up into a flower (or weed or thorny cactus sticking us in the butt or whatever).  We can't connect what's going on now with anything that just happened... because it probably didn't just happen.  What just happened is perfect arrangement of space and circumstances just feng shui'ed itself into your life, and that seed you planted way back all the sudden grows up on you real quick-like.   Like when I should've have been bad-mouthing my knees for all that time because jumping off of that high pull-up bar was the perfect chance for my knee to really get mangled and give me something to really complain about!  It has been a year since I karma-kazed myself into that unfortunate accident.  I intend for it to be the last....

The good news is Karma works in the other direction too.  If you really want something good to come into your life, gear all your thoughts, speech, and actions toward it.  Erase all seeds of doubt and negativity.  And the part that we all forget -  create the space for that thing to enter your life.  You've got to pull a clutter busting clearing of crap junk food in your cabinet if you ever hope to lose weight.  That negative person you're holding onto in your "relationship" hoping Mr. or Ms. Right will come along and save you?  Gotta clear the weeds in your romantic garden before you can even think about getting some roses (this really just happened to a friend of mine... trust me, it works if you work it!).  Get some acupuncture, a little Feng Shui, and take your karmic rewards to new heights.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

5 Pin Meditation

I did an acupuncture treatment for a relative yesterday - it was her first experience with the medicine.  I used a very simple set points that involved one pin in each foot, one in each hand, and one in the forehead.  The treatment is called the "Gates of Buddha" in some circles.

Now this is the part where I'd tell you I cured all her ailments, she ascended to Enlightenment, and is chillin' out with Buddha himself, talking about some real heady stuff as we speak... I'd of course be stretching the truth (just a tad though!), but I will go out on a limb and call what did happen a minor miracle.

Before I put the pins in, she asked me three questions:  "Can I watch TV?", "Can I talk on the phone?", and "Can I at least keep chewing my gum?", to which I replied "No", "No", and "Okay... so be it..." (a man has only so much willpower you know?).  After the treatment was done 20 minutes later, I asked her how she felt.  "You know, it was kind of nice to just sit there with my thoughts.  I couldn't do anything about them because I couldn't move, but they didn't bother me like they usually do.  I should come home and sit down without the TV on everyday for a few minutes after work".

Me to myself:  "Holy Shit!  That's all meditation really is!  This rocks!"
Me aloud to her:  "Yes, that's great.  It's nice just to be sometimes isn't it?"

Serious business though, everybody seems to have a sense that meditation would cure a lot of their problems, but most seem baffled by how to actually do it.  The key is really to do nothing and give your body/mind/emotions/spirit time to work stuff out... and, eureka (!), I think I've finally learned the key to helping people meditate - pin their proverbial butts to a chair!

Peace friends.

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Feeling Well About Wisely Using Resources

I bought a $12 dollar air pump from Home Depot the other day because I had finally grown tired of trying to dribble my poor basketball and watching its blob-like form take on the shape of the flat blacktop and proceed to stick there like a bucketful of pancake batter (only a slight exaggeration I assure you!).  Excited about this big, red, Husky brand behemoth of a pump, I started to dream about all the other things I could do with it... I woke up from that dream 30 seconds later with not so much as a "hmm... I wonder..." to show for it. 

You see, even though it was only 12 bucks, it's 12 bucks locked into a pump that I won't use for anything else because, let's face it, I'll buy a brand new basketball or give it away before it ever deflates.  Besides, at the pace I'm going, I'll end up selling the pump in a garage sale before my next move.  Of course you're now coming down on me with the common sense "Well, why didn't you just borrow a pump, silly man?".  Well thanks a lot, Baby Einsteins - all 17 of you are coming with me whenever I go to the store from now on!

The larger point I'm aiming to make here is my thought process and the fundamental flaw that's so engrained in our mentality in this country that it may well be our downfall unless we develop some major awareness about its insidious nature:

My basketball is flat = I need to buy (and thus individually own) a pump

As my dad Farris, Jr. would say "You are corr-WRONG!".  What I "needed" is to be a part of a community where "I" is instead "we" and "my" is instead "our".  Sure, everybody needs their own pair of shoes, but does every single person need their own treadmill?  Their own deep fryer?  Wet vac?  Quite possibly if you run every morning while frying chicken and often spill the oil everywhere and need to vacuum it up, but I don't know that person - do you?  Zipcar is making a killing off of a principle that we learned back in kindergarten.  Yep, sharing.  I think the more we share, the less we'll waste, and thus one step closer to what life is all about. 

Just let me know if you're in the area and want to save 30 minutes, $12, and a few miles on your tires... you can definitely borrow my pump!  Peace.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Start up is a beast (i.e., a real challenge)!

Howdy.  I just graduated from Tai Sophia with my Master's in Acupuncture, but now is when the real schooling begins.  Between getting licenses, malpractice insurance, business cards, websites, renting space (and trust me, the list goes on...), I feel busier than I did in school!  The purpose of this post is to do two things:


1.  My apologies for this basic looking blog/website!  I had to get something up here because I'm placing my business card order today... It would be a shame to put my web address as www.farrisacupuncture.blogspot.com on the cards and find out two weeks from now with a stack of fresh cards at the front office that it was already taken now wouldn't it?  I promise to do a much better job on this blog thing... probably much later...


2.  The basics of what I do - I primarily practice acupuncture, which involves inserting tiny pins into the skin in order to promote your body's natural capacity to heal and stay well.  Therefore you leave Farris feeling fine, feeling well, and with less of whatever brought you in to see me.  This could be "stress", headaches, fatigue, back pain, "anxiety", menstrual issues, sleep issues, depression... the list goes on.  While it may not go away with one session (although it could, I've had it happen before), if it negatively affects your body, mind, emotions, or spirits, acupuncture can probably help with it.

Right now I give one-on-one sessions in Silver Spring, MD on a sliding scale of $45-$100.  That means you decide what's affordable and appropriate for you to pay.  It doesn't much matter to me, I'm just thankful to be doing something that I like that's helping people and not making more of a mess of our country and our planet!  Feel free to contact me at ftjiii@yahoo.com.  Peace.

-Farris