6 × 90 minute sessions | a 3 month container | $1470
This is the nourishing journey of coming home to yourself. This offering arose from over 15 years of clinical work with women, my own journey through menstruation and motherhood, and being blessed by sitting in women’s circles with elders. And what I witnessed, was depletion. These women weren’t weak, they were some of the most resilient women I have known, and at the same time I could see the substances beneath were constantly being consumed without replenishment.
And I saw this across the generations, my mothers, the women ahead of me, the women alongside me and after me. Our culture praises hard work, productivity, endless expression, opening, and self reliance. And whilst those things aren’t inherently bad, from a Daoist perspective, trying to remain permanently at the crest of Yang is contrary to the movement of life itself.
For so much of a woman’s life, nourishment can move outwards, we feed children, tend to our families and relationships, create beauty in our homes, build careers, create and carry things that matter to us. But Chinese medicine reminds us that there must also be a movement inward and that receiving is not separate from giving.
Blood, in Chinese medicine, is one of the fundamental substances of the body. Blood nourishes the muscles, skin, hair, eyes and tissues. It has an intimate relationship with menstruation and fertility, but also with sleep, memory, emotional stability and our capacity to feel settled and present within ourselves. Blood is the mother of Qi and Qi is the life within us, what allows the Heart to beat, the Lungs to breathe, the Spleen to transform, the Kidneys to hold, the Liver to move.
Blood gives substance and for women, our relationship with Blood changes throughout our lives. We begin menstruating, we bleed cyclically for decades, we may grow and birth babies, breastfeed, experience pregnancy loss, move through periods of enormous output and eventually cross through menopause into a different relationship with our reserves.
THE SUBSTANCE BENEATH: BLOOD is a six session Chinese medicine container devoted to tending this substance.
Across three months, we work with acupuncture, meridian massage, moxa, food, herbs where appropriate, rest and the rhythms of your own body to support the making, movement and holding of Blood.
We also tend the organs and substances that sit around Blood, the Spleen, the Heart and the Liver.
The Spleen transforms what we eat and drink into the Qi and Blood the body can use. The Heart circulates Blood and gives Blood its pulse, its warmth, its rhythm, its passion for life and houses the Shen (our spirit). The Liver stores Blood and allows it to move according to the body’s needs, and houses the Hun, our capacity for vision, direction, dreaming and movement through life.
We may see its quality reflected in sleep, recovery, dryness, dizziness, menstrual cycles, fertility, postpartum depletion, emotional expression, the hair and skin, our ability to concentrate and the feeling that there is enough substance beneath us to meet our lives.
Part of the work is learning what genuinely nourishes you: the food you eat, how you digest it, how you rest, how you move, the rhythms you live within and what your particular body needs in this season.
Each session begins with time to understand what has changed and what your body is asking for, followed by an individual Chinese medicine treatment incorporating meridian massage, acupuncture, moxa and other techniques as appropriate.
Over the six sessions we will also explore some of the classical Chinese medicine understanding of Blood, nourishment and the female body, so that you leave with something more enduring than a list of health instructions: a deeper understanding of how to tend your own resources.
There are times when we need movement and there are times when there needs to be enough substance there to move.
BLOOD is an invitation to tend what is underneath: to make, nourish, circulate and conserve the resources from which the rest of life is lived.
Bo Kowalenko is an acupuncturist and Chinese medicine practitioner working with women through nourishment, the changing seasons of the female body and the thresholds of life. Her work brings together acupuncture, bodywork, moxa and Chinese medicine with a particular interest in the restoration of Blood and Yin, and what it means for a woman to feel deeply nourished, resourced and at home in her body.