It's a lot of wildly swinging hormones, for a lot of women in their late 30s and into their 40s (and 50s!).

That is a huge rotating portion of the population and yet most women are left in the dark about this inevitable period of time in their lives.

To be clear: this doesn’t mean shirking comfort! In fact, this is a an attempt to find more comfort in things. The more flexible you are with your definition of what it means to be physically comfortable, the more comfort you’re actually going to feel.

This mirrors the philosophical idea of “as within, so without” — as within meaning what’s going on inside of you, so without meaning what’s going on outside of you.

It’s not a perfect theory, but it’s a lens you can use as a tool to help center where you are and how your environment affects you: for instance, do you surround yourself with people who let you stay petty, or do your people challenge you to make yourself better? Do you exist in an environment that smothers you, or is it one that allows you to thrive?

A small way around this can be to engage in what's called microproductivity: where you break larger tasks down into smaller, more manageable bits.

When you do this, you reduce overwhelm and increase your odds of not procrastinating yourself into oblivion.

As an acupuncturist, I’m going to break down the spirit of what “boosting” immunity means. No, it doesn’t mean making your immune system so robust that it starts attacking itself: it means looking at your living self as the system that you are, acknowledging the interconnectedness, and using those facts as basic tenets of living in your body before reading any further.

I’ll wait.

Breathwork at Well Collab Acupuncture is not:

Easy, lol. Because it is work, and I don’t want you to think that you’re breathing softly and mindfully for 10-15 minutes and that’s it. There are meditations like that; this just isn’t one of them.

Western medicine consistently questions or is ignorant of the basic principles of Eastern medicine, and yet insists on studying from its own perspective. 

When people say “I don’t believe in acupuncture,” I often respond with, “That’s ok, because it’s not a faith based medicine.”

So even the ways we ground ourselves — cultivating yin, which is the flip side of yang — are actually, pretty ironically, still very yang in the framework of their nature.

Hour long meditations. Using relaxing melody apps on your phone. Hour long relaxing melody apps on your phone… while you get acupuncture.

Like anything where you learn, acupuncture treatments have a layering effect.

Treatment one is lesson one with a teacher.

Treatment ten is lesson ten.

You are much smarter after ten lessons than you were after one, believe me.

Signed, your teacher.

In 2016, Well Collab Acupuncture started as Acupuncture of Tarrytown: a collaborative project between two best friends who had weathered living together in a railroad apartment in Brooklyn and figured… we could do pretty much anything together, after that experience.