🌗 Reflect & Manifest annual template │ November newsletter

 

We live in complex times. My heart goes out, comes back crying, and settles back in my chest. Breathing, feeling, expanding. Present, painful, here. We live in complex times. May you find your breath, anchors and glimmers of hope and beauty, amidst the pain. Don't get lost. Come back. Come back.

The leaves are falling. The world is goldening. Dry air. Growing and falling tides, swell, change. This is my favorite time of year. The transitional season. Coming inwards again. Tide receding even as the winter tide grows, even as the winter stones pile up against our surf-stairs, even as we change into our winter wetsuits, water colder than air. Change happening. Wars. Weddings. The works.

Anchors and touchstones are everyday bits of extraordinary grace that help presence us back in our bodies amidst adversity. This can be a practice like taking three breaths, an object like a special stone that you keep in your pocket or by your desk, or an idea like a word or phrase that you return to throughout the day.

In rough waters, what anchors you?

Reflect & Manifest

I’m embarking on a big writing project. Elements are organically falling into place. This was on my 2023 “Manifest” list, and a Big Dream far before that.

Have you ever had a Childhood Dream or Big Goal organically manifest? What conditions supported this manifesting?

After Halloween, I start reflecting on the year that came before, and visioning the year that lies ahead. As the darkness grows, I feel a delicious reflectiveness settle in. This is the time of year where it feels most natural to ponder big questions— and write.

What are your Big Dreams— or Childhood Dreams? What's calling for your attention? How can you cultivate the soil so that the fruit knows that this is the perfect place to grow? What reflective processes and timing feels natural to you?

Here’s my “Reflect & Manifest” template for reflecting on 2023, and manifesting the 2024 of your dreams. Download, share with friends, print… do as you please. And:

1. I hope that you have some kind of “Reflect & Manifest” process— ‘cuz it’s important to look back before stepping forward, so you can learn, refine, and move with intention. When done right, manifestation works.
2. Have fun!

Download template & guide:

REFLECT & MANIFEST

EarthBody Substack

Substack is a blog-meets-newsletter style platform where I will share book tidbits, seasonal reflections, and more. I am just getting started (and open to ideas).

Join me on Substack!

SUBSTACK

Coming up

• Elemental Creativity at Green Gulch Farm— art, movement, and meditation with Zen Monk Fu Schroeder, Art Monk Abbess Suiko McCall, and me! 11/29 - 12/3 (Get to know us on video here! This retreat will be extra special with the radical teacher trio of Zen monk, artist, and acupuncturist)
• The Five Elements of Yoga & Chinese Medicine retreat at Esalen with Paula Wild and me, 12/11 - 12/15 (Love hot springs with an ocean view, alongside yoga practice and Chinese medicine goodness? Come join us!)
• Ojai Herbal Symposium in Ojai, CA and online. 12 CEUs for acupuncturists! 11/11 - 11/12
• Ecstatic Dance at Bodhi Salt, end of the month

Recommendations

• Love ethnobotany? Mimi Hernandez just published her gorgeous new (and first) book, The National Geographic Herbal-- watch for our upcoming November Tea Talks interview!
• Made in Taiwan is a new (and first) cookbook from my favorite young Asian American New York Times author, Clarissa Wei! (For gluten and sugar "okay" folks, see her sweet and savory mooncake recipes on NYT)
• Poignant interview with herbal author Chanchal Cabrera (author of Holistic Cancer Care) about Holistic Cancer Care on HerbRally
• Fun interview with herbal author Robin Rose Bennett about Green Witchery on Herbal Radio

❤️ Happy beginning-of-the-holiday-season, and welcome to the darkening days, 

Jiling Lin, L.Ac. 林基玲

acupuncture . herbs . art

JILINGLIN.COM

INSTAGRAM

FACEBOOK

Book your acupuncture appointment here

BOOK NOW

If someone forwarded you this email & you loved it, then subscribe here!

SUBSCRIBE

PS- Want to share my "Reflect & Manifest" template? You can share this link here. ❤ Enjoy!

✨On Ritual & Incense ⎸ October newsletter

 

As cultures around the world gather to celebrate our ancestors in autumn, we can consider our own small rituals, such as making incense.

I love small rituals. Having lived out of a backpack for most of my twenties and still traveling a lot in my thirties, small yet potent packages of transportable sweetness help me create a sense of belonging no matter where I land. On most adventures, I commune with the landscape of my inner and outer terrain with my traveling trifecta of tea, journal, and incense.

You can create a traveling incense box from upcycled matchboxes or mint tins. Consider adding:

• Matches or lighter
• Small incense holder
• Other aromatic incense plants, such as sages, cedar, or palo santo
• A meaningful poem or picture 

Walk, bike, or drive to a special spot outdoors. Bring a little tea, incense, and perhaps some poetry. Laozi's “Dao De Jing” (老子道德經) is perfect. Sit solo, or with a friend. Watch the landscape, sip tea, and savor aromas. Meditate on dancing smoke, commune with your ancestors and the spirits of the land, and wiggle your toes. Feed your free and easy wanderer self with beauty and breathe. 

Read more about how to...

MAKE INCENSE

Labrador tea (Rhododendron columbianum, Ericaceae). Sierra Nevada, CA

Coming up

• ✨Acupressure Meditations✨ class at Ema's Herbs by donation. 10/8, 3-4 pm
• Samhain Ecstatic Dance at Bodhi Salt with community-DJ Karlos Benavides! 10/20
• Ojai Herbal Symposium in Ojai, CA and online. Offering 12 CEUs for acupuncturists! 11/11 - 11/12
• Elemental Creativity at Green Gulch Farm— art, movement, and meditation with Zen Monk Fu Schroeder, Art Monk Abbess Suiko McCall, and me! 11/29 - 12/3
• The Five Elements of Yoga & Chinese Medicine retreat at Esalen with Paula Wild and me, 12/11 - 12/15

Recommendations

• Facial Guasha tutorial, my newest blog & video for Mountain Rose Herbs
• Ketamine Assisted Therapy Training with Horizon Healing, two weekends in November
• Upcoming Tea Talks interview with Robin Rose Bennett, author of the upcoming Green Witch's Pocket Book Of Wisdom! (Releasing 10/31)
• Celebrate your ancestors with Waves of Grief, a free year-round Ocean & Surf Therapy program. Second Sundays at Solimar with Dr. Anna of Hydrotheory

❤️ With gratitude,

Jiling Lin, L.Ac. 林基玲

acupuncture . herbs . yoga

JILINGLIN.COM

INSTAGRAM

FACEBOOK

Book your acupuncture appointment here

BOOK NOW

If someone forwarded you this email & you loved it, then subscribe here!

SUBSCRIBE

ACU-WAITLIST │ Having trouble booking an appointment? Get on my waitlist here. I will only message if spaces open (maximum once a week). If necessary, please remember to reschedule your appointments at least 48 hours in advance, to prevent being charged for the full rate of your appointment. This allows others the opportunity to receive treatment. Thank you!

🌝glacial intersectionality & sturdy feet | September newsletter

 

“Send me a picture of your feet.” 

A text from my sister surprises me near the end of a long day of back-to-back patients. I’m tired, and texts like this simply elicit thoughts of spam. I text back, “?” 

“Oh I’m curious about your toe spacing, since you’re often barefoot.” 

It’s her. That’s her voice. I snap a photo and blitz it over. I can imagine her grunting on the other side. 

“We have sturdy feet,” she shoots over a picture of her own, “Yours remind me of Ma’s.” 

As we shift from the Fire Element heat and fanfare of summer into the contemplative Metal Element clarification of autumn, we rest into the in-between space of Earth Element late-summer or long-summer (chang xia 長夏), where the days feel like they lengthen as they noticeably shorten, it gets hotter before it starts cooling (here in so-Cal), and we bite into the two apples of Autumn Equinox (秋分) on 9/22, and the Moon Festival (中秋節) on 9/29. 

My big sturdy feet with well-spaced toes tromp around above glaciers and glissade down mountain passes, tromping back and forth between America and Taiwan, Ventura and Los Angeles counties, and intersectional places of thinking, feeling, and being. The Lunar New Year (新年) and Moon Festival are the two biggest Chinese festivals of the year, coinciding with the first full moon of the New Year, and the full moon that falls in the middle of the lunar calendar. 

I feel both childlike delight and aching loneliness during these holidays. Living in California again, as I have for almost a decade now, I am divorced from the familiar traditions of families gathering, friends celebrating, fireworks, incense, ancestral offerings, and more. I feel adrift, anchored only by memories and phone calls. Reweaving the quilt of my indigenous ancestry within the urbane oceanic fabric of my modern life here in Ventura on the edge of the Pacific with various other cultural orphans, we cocreate. I spearhead grassroots community ecstatic dance, the “Tea Talks” podcast series, a new Moon Lab, my clinic and retreats… 

I am an idea-machine with finite energy but boundless vision. I know what deep connection feels like: laughing uncontrollably glissading down a snowy mountain pass paralleling my old friend, in as full control of the situation as we can be, left hand sturdy on ice ax head, right hand leveraging ice ax handle into snow, flipping onto our bellies when we start rolling too fast, self-arresting by jabbing ice ax head deep into snow, where it holds. 

A mountain seems stable, but rocks are always moving, changing, shifting. Snow. Ice. Fire. Sun. Floods. Flowers. Changes loom, happen, make themselves known with scree fields, avalanches, and whole swathes of trees broken at the same level. Eyes moving across a landscape as I tromp, I stop. Close. Take a breath. Open. 

Cultural traditions seem like mountains, steady and unchanging. But, lightning on the high crags. Rain. Hail. Sleet. Snow. Sky. Sun. Changes always happening. Active verb. Present tense. Usually small, sometimes an avalanche. 

Walking between-with-through the intersectional landscapes of first-generation American citizenship, Chinese medicine practice, and more− I cup my hands to my mouth, sipping the fresh glacial melt of rock-water from mountains and sky: unchanging change. I am open yet deeply rooted. All that came before passes through me onwards into all that comes ahead. My only prayer: Let this be beautiful.

Glacial melt, up and over the pass. Eastern Sierra, CA

Coming up

• Equinox Ecstatic Dance at Bodhi Salt in Ventura, CA. Free for members, sliding scale $15-30 for public. Next dance Sept. 22 with community-DJ Nohemi Ramos!
• Elemental Creativity at Green Gulch Farm in nor-Cal— art, movement, and meditation with Zen Monk Fu Schroeder, Art Monk Abbess Suiko McCall, and me! Nov. 29 - Dec. 3
• Ojai Herbal Symposium! Nov. 11-12 in Ojai, CA and online. Offering 12 CEUs for acupuncturists! (Pending CAB approval)
• The Five Elements of Yoga & Chinese Medicine retreat at Esalen with Paula Wild and me, Dec. 11 - 15

Recommendations

• New Nurtured Herbalist | Tea Talks Roundtable podcast interview with Camille Freeman & Erika Galentin
• Plant Stories with Richo Cech, interviewed by Thomas Dick and me!
• I am delighted to find the podcast of fellow intersectional author & human Joanne Lee Molinaro− who wrote The Korean Vegan (yum)
• I often miss the wilderness for weeks after backpacking trips; I often have trouble reintegrating back into ordinary reality. Listening to this book-on-tape while doing the dishes and folding laundry, life feels a bit more manageable: The High Sierra: A Love Story by Kim Stanley Robinson

❤️ Unchanging change,

Jiling Lin, L.Ac. 林基玲

acupuncture . herbs . yoga

JILINGLIN.COM

INSTAGRAM

FACEBOOK

Book your acupuncture appointment here

BOOK NOW

If someone forwarded you this email & you loved it, then subscribe here!

SUBSCRIBE

ACU-WAITLIST │ Having trouble booking an appointment? Get on my waitlist here. I will only message if spaces open (maximum once a week). If necessary, please remember to reschedule your appointments at least 48 hours in advance, to prevent being charged for the full rate of your appointment. This allows others the opportunity to receive treatment. Thank you!