6 × 90 minute sessions | A 3 month Container | $1470
Yin is often reduced to rest and stillness but in Chinese medicine, Yin is much more than that.
Yin is substance, structure, it is the depth, the dreaming, the nourishment, the mystery, the fertile dark from which life emerges. It is the material aspect of the body that receives, contains and nourishes, it gives Yang something from which to arise and somewhere to return.
We need Yang, we need warmth, movement, activity, transformation and expression but these cannot exist independently of Yin, the two continually make, regulate and depend upon one another.
THE SUBSTANCE BENEATH: YIN is a six session Chinese medicine container devoted to tending that relationship, with particular attention to the substance and reserves beneath our activity.
For many women, there are long seasons of life in which we are extraordinarily capable of continuing. We work, mother, create, care, bleed, conceive, birth, breastfeed, grieve, organise households, tend relationships and meet the innumerable ordinary demands of a life. The body can draw deeply upon its resources to allow us to do this.
What is all of this arising from?
Yin gives us a way of thinking about the deeper material resources of the body: the fluids that moisten us, the Blood that nourishes us, the Jing held by the Kidneys and the capacity to replenish after periods of activity and expenditure.
When Yin becomes insufficient, we may see signs such as dryness, feeling hot at night, disturbed sleep, restlessness, anxiousness, changes to menstruation, reduced cervical fluid, tinnitus, night sweating or a sense of being tired and yet unable to completely rest.
These patterns become particularly relevant through some of the great transitions of women’s lives: fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, years of mothering and the movement towards and through menopause.
But YIN is a container for gathering and expanding, rest and activity, substance and function, stillness and movement. Across six sessions, we use acupuncture, meridian massage, moxa, food, herbs where appropriate and the principles of Chinese medicine to understand what your particular body needs.
Over the three months we also explore how Yin is made and conserved in ordinary life, through food, sleep, rhythm, fluids, movement, relationship and the ways we move between expenditure and replenishment.
Day moves into night, activity gives way to rest, winter gathers what summer has expressed, Blood fills and empties. Across a woman’s life there are seasons of growth, fertility, harvest and eventually a drawing inward and refinement and Yin is part of this rhythm.
YIN is an invitation to tend the deeper resources from which you live, not so that you simply rest, but so there is substance beneath your movement, creativity, warmth and life.
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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.