However, an even more amazing thing about the face is that it’s not just a reflection of what’s going on internally, but treating the face and releasing the tension you carry in it can positively affect your overall health. If you release the tension in your face, your overall vitality will increase and thus your beauty, and light of your spirit increases and shines brighter.

Facial Rejuvenation through Gua Sha and Cupping is extremely popular all across Asia and has been for thousands of years. Millions of people incorporate Gua Sha and Cupping into their daily routine.

If you apply these Facial Rejuvenation techniques to your face, it will increase the tonality of your skin, improve the color and glow, and thus bring better health to your whole body. In addition to smoothing wrinkles, these techniques have many other health benefits, particularly for headaches, TMJ, tinnitus, and relief from old head injuries.

In this class, you will be introduced to the benefits of Facial Gua Sha and Cupping and instructed how to do it on yourself, your friends and loved ones, or for your clients if you are a healer, massage therapist, or esthetician.

Who is this class for?

Anyone who wants to look good and feel good.
Anyone who wants to provide Facial Gua Sha and Cupping to their clients.
Incorporating these techniques into your daily self-care regime will bring better health and beauty!

4 NCBTMB CE Hours Pending

Do you ask yourself: Isn’t there more to life than this? If so, Alchemy is for you.

“The Stages of Alchemy have changed my life completely. Alchemy is an evolutionary process. It asks you to walk through doors fearlessly—doors that open up new worlds to you, but are difficult to explain or describe to anyone.” — Leta

The Nine Stages of Alchemy are a set of linear directions developed by the ancient Chinese Alchemists. The stages are a roadmap… telling you to go left here, right here, etc.

The Nine Stages of Alchemy are lessons in wizardry—becoming a wizard of your own life. The Nine Stages are a set of treatments, exercises, and meditations that describe different states of mind or lessons to learn so that you can master your own life. Think of the wizard Gandalf in Lord of the Rings. He was very powerful, but he was on his own journey. He was gray, and then he evolved and turned white. He was on a path of evolution, even as a wizard. The Nine Stages of Alchemy are about becoming more and more realized, awake, and aware in your own life so that you can stop being a little boat tossed at sea and become the captain of that little boat with a rudder and a powerful on-board engine.

Many people ask how to start down the alchemical road of authenticity, happiness, creativity, and self-love.

The number one struggle we have in this modern world is BALANCE. How do we balance all the aspects of our lives: family, work, children, love… leaving for last the most important… SELF. Without our own SELF-cultivation, the rest of our lives suffer.

This workshop is an introduction to the Nine Stages of Alchemy and how to begin a journey of your own Alchemical self-cultivation using the ancient wisdom of the Chinese Alchemists.

We will begin this workshop with an explanation of the history of Alchemy and in particular a discussion of the Nine Stages. We will then go through each stage and develop an understanding of what they are about, using exercises to understand them for ourselves.

Our objective is to give you a launching pad for your own self-cultivation and a discovery process for what your deepest desires in life are and how to achieve them.

This workshop will help you develop a strategy to resolve your challenges in your outer life, so you can have enough peace in your life to work on your inner life. In particular we will give you a framework within to work

We create a safe, non-judgmental environment for all learners. All questions are valid questions, and we embark on a quest of self-learning together.

Walk your road on your own terms. If you are ready to really take the time to work on yourself, then this one-of-a-kind workshop is for you. Join us for this exciting day.

When life is too much, we get overwhelmed and stuff our emotions in our waist. Along with those emotions, we may be stuffing a big pile of toxins as well (chemical, bacterial or viral – like long-COVID). These toxins can get stuck in the belt channel and can’t find a way out. They may contribute to body fat accumulating in the waist and lead to many health challenges that Chinese Medicine addresses on many levels – with many diagnoses of pathology, treatment strategies, and so much more!

by

Leta Herman, Alchemy Learning Center & Alchemy Healing Center

The good news is: Your body is wise and resilient – and it naturally knows what to do to “fix” things that we subject our bodies to like internal pathogenic (emotions) or external pathogens (coming from outside of you). Let’s look at this a little bit…

First of all, you already have an amazing purging system built right into your body. Fluids can be excreted on a daily basis or released through sweat and a number of other mechanisms such as urine, feces, and even tears. Our human bodies already know what to do to clear these “toxic things” when you’re overwhelmed emotionally by life or physically by toxins, bacteria, or viruses (like COVID). Your body has a smart survival strategy… and that strategy is to store things until they can be dealt with later…UNTIL… things get compromised, damaged, or even completely suppressed.

How does the body store things like trauma, emotions or toxins?

The body stores things in a number of places.

• Uncomfortable feelings – For general unresolved emotions, the first storage area the body creates is a network of little spider veins in the body, called the Luo Vessels. As we get older, we may see more and more spider veins, and according to Chinese Medicine, that just means old resentments and unresolved emotional baggage. These can be treated with  Luo Channel  treatments in Chinese Medicine.
• Physical toxins – But sometimes we have more physical toxins in our environment, and the first line of defense is to store those in our joints. These are called the  Divergent Channels  – and it is a great strategy for the body, because offloads those toxins so they won’t hurt your vital organs. But over time, this can develop into arthritis. Divergent Channel treatments can help dredge out those toxins from the joints ( We have a class on how to do Divergent Channel treatments  in the ALC).
• Trauma and toxins – But what happens when we become really overwhelmed by emotional toxicity (negative emotional patterns like resentment and bitterness) or physical toxicity (such as with long-viral conditions, like long-COVID). Now the body needs another storage mechanism that can handle more intense situations – and that’s your waist – the Belt Channel (called Dai Mai in Chinese).

The How and WHY of the Dai Mai…and what you need to know for yourself and your clients!

The Dai Mai is how our ancestors passed down their unresolved traumas to us. It is like storing our toxins and emotions in our deepest part of us, our essences or DNA.

The body’s hope is… since we are overwhelmed and cannot handle this situation, we can then pass on the problem to our children. Maybe the children can heal our genetic line. (And there is a belief that when the children heal, they also heal up to 5 generations back of the ancestors).

This may be a really new way to think about healing for you, but here’s why it’s a really interesting thought.

As some of us get older (not all of us!), our body shape can change. Some of us can see the distribution of our weight change and gather more around the waist, with some pudginess below the belly button and love handles over the hips. While we may blame the food we are eating, it is not necessarily from overeating or eating the wrong foods. The body may need that extra fat around the middle to store the toxic emotional and physical baggage that it was unable to deal with.

When we store stuff in our Belt Channel, our bodies must work very hard to keep these toxins away from our vital organs. Because holding onto this latency in the Belt Channel takes a lot of effort, it often results in exhaustion and compromises a person’s ability to create and reproduce. Eventually, if this accumulation of dampness and stagnation continues, the Belt Channel will become full and will no longer be able to contain what is being stuffed, resulting in physical illness.

Essentially, what has been suppressed begins to leak out and cause many different types of symptoms. Causes of latency may include long-term negative emotional situations, trauma, and viral illnesses. Dai Mai treatments often are quite extensive and require a unique strategy for each person. The Dai Mai Extraordinary Vessel (Belt Channel) can release toxins, emotions, patterns, and virtual load that the body has been unable to purge.

Backhoein’ the toxic sludge in your belt channel…it’s a good thing…

The Dai Mai is like breaking up after a long-term bad romance… not pleasant but you know you need to do it!

When we begin to treat the Dai Mai in Chinese Medicine, we slowly dredge out these toxins from the waist. I suggest that these treatments span a minimum of a three month period and can go as long as a year.

Over the past 20 years in my practice, the results have been pretty amazing both in improving a person’s health but also in the physical changes to the waist (e.g. quite dramatic loss of belly fat).

But before you rush to receive Dai Mai treatments as the latest weight-loss scheme, you need to know, the Dai Mai treatment protocol is not for the faint of heart. Undergoing a series of Dai Mai treatments requires that the person FIRST be strong enough to purge and not in an overwhelming life situation at this time. The purging can come out in many ways (and sometimes all at once!). So the body needs to be strong enough to handle the purging. If it’s not, the body’s survival mechanism will put the toxins right back in the Dai Mai, just as it should do! (rather then let those toxins swim around your body and cause illness).

To summarize the readiness of a person for the Dai Mai:

• First – be strong in your physical body (your energy is good, you) and in a not-too-stressful life situation
• Second – be willing (and able) to commit to a series of treatments for over at least a 3 month period
• Third – want to be free the toxic sludge being carried around in the belt channel

As a Chinese Medicine practitioner, I love to explore and dive into a number of considerations to think about before suggesting whether a course of Dai Mai treatments would best serve a client. This takes a bit of practitioner/client collaboration to best understand the factors that determine the most successful treatments.

This is one of the most successful ways I have found to treat long-term viral conditions (like long-COVID), deep emotional pain that contributes to a host of mysterious symptoms, unusual belly fat that seems unrelated to dietary choices.

If you have any questions or would if you would like to dive even deeper into this fascinating treatment – OR want to learn how I determine whether or not to use Dai Mai Vs. the Ghost Points… we have a super deep dive Livestream class on the Dai Mai in April 2023. Follow the link below to get more info and save your seat.

Thanks for reading!

Leta

Visit the Alchemy Learning Center

Winter is the most yin time of year. Yin is the energy that condenses and contracts inward, like something gestating, so that in the Spring, the energy can burst forth and become Yang again.

Late December and January in particular are the darkest, most yin days of all. It is the time of the deep recesses of the Water element—which is the best time of year to nourish our jing and boost our vitality for the Springtime, which is soon to come.

Jing is our essences, our vital life force, the deep reserves of energy we draw upon to live out the truest expression of an authentic life. Everyone needs more vitality (there’s actually no limit!) and therefore everyone needs to nourish their jing. 

Stress, overwork, and stimulants like coffee and refined sugar… these are the cornerstones of modernity that all drain our deep reserves. Luckily, alchemists all over the world have been developing techniques to replenish jing for thousands of years. 

One of the most simplest ways we can boost our vitality is by choosing foods that nourish the body-mind and protect against premature aging. Here are some basic Winter tips:

• Eat simple, warm, cooked meals.
• Drink plenty of water and herbal tea.
• Cut back on stimulants to promote the nervous system’s capacity for deep rest.
• Consider incorporating foods rich in nucleic acids that protect the body from degeneration: micro-algae (chlorella, spiraling, wild blue-green), fish, liver and organ meats, bone broth, and cereal grass.
• Snack on almonds and cook with grass-fed clarified butter (ghee), both of which build the bones and aid in the assimilation of nutrients.
• Sip on nettle tea, which enriches the blood with minerals.
• Eat foods that can nourish our vitality… There are so many… chicken, walnuts, mussels, black and adzuki and kidney beans, seaweeds, royal jelly and bee pollen…

And, if you are feeling energetically depleted, come in for a treatment or schedule a nutritional consultation in-person or over Zoom if needed! Call now (413-213-0303) to book an appointment!

Colette Legarrigues is a licensed acupuncturist at the Alchemy Healing Center, in Northampton, MA. She is also a Chinese Medicine herbalist in the states of Massachusetts and California, and she is nationally certified as a Diplomate of Oriental Medicine by the National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (NCCAOM). She holds a master’s degree from the Acupuncture and Integrative Medicine College and a bachelor’s degree from Brown University.

This interview with Servet Hasan for a podcast called Intuitive Ink is a wonderful conversation about Chinese alchemy and how intuition works according to Chinese philosophy. We also end up talking about the different kinds of psychic abilities and what aspects of the “spirit” it comes from.

Servet Hasan is the award-winning author of Life in Transition, An Intuitive Path to New Beginnings, as well as The Intuitive Heart of Romance, Finding Your Own Path to Lasting Love, and Tune Him In, Turn Him On (all published by Llewellyn Worldwide, Ltd). A student of the mystic masters of the Far East, Hasan is also a renowned motivational speaker who inspires others to attain their full potential through her television and radio appearances, live seminars, and workshops. Born into a psychically gifted family in Pakistan, she is also a citizen of England, Canada and the United States. She considers herself a spiritual ambassador of the world.

For more podcasts, check out our Podcast at InspiredActionPodcast.com.

Chinese Medicine theory believes that our bodies have a natural ability to expel most of the toxins we encounter. If we eat or breathe in something toxic… no problem! Our body processes it and lets it go. In Chinese Medicine, there is also the theory that negative emotions (anger, sadness, bitterness, fear, resentment, etc.) can be toxic. These also need to be somehow released by the body. (Later in this post, I’ll get into why Gua Sha can be a key component of the healing.)

But what happens if you’re going through a really tough time in your life, emotionally or physically? Your body’s natural ability to get rid of toxins might be unable to cope with the overwhelm of that time. The toxins will remain inside your body, and your body now has to figure out what to do with them. Rather than letting the toxins harm your internal organs, Chinese Medicine believes your body is very smart. It can store the toxins in places that will keep them safe (and keep you alive). These places are…you guessed it… the joints! I always tell people with joint pain how lucky they are that their body is keeping them safe by storing their toxins in those joints instead of letting them endanger their lives!

One of the fascinating things about how the body stores these toxins is that there is a progression. You don’t just wake up with pain in your fingers one day. If you do, it’s probably not arthritis but some repetitive stress issue you’re having. It’s more common that the first joint pains you have are in your knees, low back, and neck. Those areas are associated with the Bladder Meridian, which is the first Meridian that “Diverts” toxins away from the organs to the joints (hence it’s called a “Divergent” Meridian).

Divergent, the Meridians Not the Movie

I’m Leta Herman. I’ve had a blog at my site: www.LetaHerman.com. I will be republishing some of those topics here plus many new posts about Alchemy and Chinese Medicine. Stay tuned! And do sign up for our mailing list to get news about new topics in our blog.