Hungry Ghosts
Well, here we are again …with another playlist.
Today was one of those simultaneous extreme opposites days. The sort where you find yourself dragging your little booty across town, all the while your head is in a semi-conscious fog of bleh. But after a little rest and maybe even some divine intervention, that swirl of creative energy comes spinning in to fill the room like a gracious golden tornado of goodness. Suddenly, writing projects that have been stalled for weeks start to bud, and a playlist somehow forms itself in that beautiful way that only happens when you're in the flow. Each song seems to plug itself into the matrix of some magical crystalline structure, battening down the energetic signature of the moment. Preserving it like a ship in a bottle. A time capsule for when future you may need a dose of just that specific type of magic.
This may seem like a hard pivot, but I promise it's not, so just hang tight.
In clinic today, I was seeing a lot of cases where people were holding on to things they knew were no longer serving them. They just couldn't quite figure out how to let their body know it was safe to let them go. This showed up in lots of different ways, like mental rumination, constipation, physical pains triggered by an emotional event, and even the attunement to more subtle energetic blockages within the system.
Welllll… In the first song on this playlist, Gregory Alan Isakov sings about ghosts, and that little melodic nudge took me down an oh so wonderful rabbit hole.
Enter the ghosts
Sorry, not Casper.
In Chinese medicine, we think of ghosts as one may think of a sticky banana taffy. Kinda cool when you wanted it the first go around, but after it's somehow gotten stuck in your hair and lodged into that back right molar, you find yourself really quite over any positive qualities it may have brought to the table in the first place.
Think of ghosts as obsessions. Thoughts you can't seem to shake, ex-lovers or partners that come to visit you in dreams, an unfillable internal emptiness you may try to pacify by acquiring external validation, material goods, or needless busyness, or even food cravings you are unable to satiate. Hungry, horny, and wandering ghosts are all subcategories of these kinds of sticky, obsessive loops we can find ourselves puttering around in. In the practice of acupuncture, we have multiple different systems dedicated to helping loosen the grip of these ghosty patterns, and even 13 specific ghost points that we, at times, add to more mainstream treatments. We have specific herbal allies we can bring on board when it comes to working with these patterns as well.
On the functional medicine side of things, I think of stealth infections like Lyme disease, toxic mold syndrome, biofilms, and mono / Epstein-Barr Virus as having very ghost-like properties.
We can work with all facets of ghost-like disease states through both the Chinese medicine and functional medicine lenses. But if you aren't getting into the clinic anytime soon, and you find yourself in one of those fun, middle-of-the-night spiral-y shuffles down old ghostly hallow lane — pop this sucker on. See what kind of shifts your system will make when you offer the ghosts a song or two (or 11).
With abundant love to you and your ghosts,
EB
