Hello, my friend!
This week I’ve been thinking about what healing actually looks like — not from the outside, where it’s all white coats and treatment plans, but from where I sit. Which is closer to the ground than you might imagine.
↓ In today’s email:
- This week’s inspiration: The reciprocity of healing
- Latest blog post: Second Spring — what Chinese medicine knows about menopause
- What I read this week: Eleven whales and a lesson in showing up
This Week’s Inspiration: The Reciprocity of Healing
I’ve never loved the word “patient.” It implies someone is broken, and that my job is to fix them — as if there was some kind of top-down intervention from the person in the white coat. Chinese medicine sees it differently, and honestly, so do I.
We are all, to some extent, out of harmony. My role is simply to help remove whatever is blocking the flow, or to refill the well when it’s run dry. What surprises people sometimes is how much of a two-way street this is. Yes, my clients gain a great deal from our sessions — but so do I. I learn about the world through them. One might be studying Acadian at Brown. Another brings me a book that changed them, and I read it too. Over twenty years, I seem to have attracted the loveliest people — and what we’ve quietly become is a loose consortium of kind souls, all just trying to live well and feel at home in our bodies.
My full title is Doctor of Acupuncture and Chinese Oriental Medicine, which might conjure a certain image — crisp white coat, clipboard, a very clear diagnosis and treatment plan. That’s how I was trained. But in practice? It doesn’t really go down like that. There’s a lot of listening. I take cues from posture, tone of voice, the expression on someone’s face. I look at the tongue, I check the pulse, and from all of that, I get a sense of how to proceed — for that person, on that day. No two sessions are the same.
What I’m really doing, at its best, is weaving two people’s energy toward a shared goal. I often ask my clients at the start: How do you want to feel when you leave today? It tells me so much — where they are physically, emotionally, and where they’re hoping to go. Someone might say, “I want to breathe more deeply” or “I want the pain in my hip to ease.” And then we work toward that together.
Within an hour, most clients leave feeling genuinely better. And honestly, so do I. There’s something that doesn’t get talked about enough in medicine — the privilege of doing work that actually means something, with people you genuinely like.
Latest Blog Post
Second Spring: What Chinese Medicine Knows About Menopause That Western Culture Forgot
There’s no good press about being reproductively unviable — and fear-mongering about menopause is absolutely having a moment. But in Chinese medicine, there is ancient, well-worn literature describing menopause not as a decline, but as a second spring.
In this week’s post, I dig into the seven-year cycles of the Huangdi Neijing, the cross-cultural research showing that the story your culture tells you about this transition actually shapes your symptoms, and the genuinely wonderful parts of not bleeding — including white pants, whenever you want.
What I Read This Week
Eleven Whales and a Birth
I came across a story this week that stopped me mid-scroll. Off the coast of Dominica, researchers witnessed something remarkable: a group of eleven sperm whales gathering to assist one of their own through labor — lifting the newborn to the surface so it could take its first breath. Half of the attending whales weren’t even related to the mother.
Scientists are calling it evidence of social reciprocity in the animal world.
Read the full story in the New York Times →
Here’s to showing up for each other — always.
Dr. Catherine