Whatever comes to mind. Sometimes a story I read, sometimes something that came to me while holding my mala beads.
A cool gust on a late-summer night told me summer was truly over. White Dew — the most beautifully named of China's twenty-four solar terms. TCM says autumn is for the lungs. I ignored that for years. This year I finally cooked the soup.
A blonde woman on TikTok was scraping her jaw with a small white stone. The comments were all "adding to cart." I stared at that stone for a long time — it's a gua sha board. My mom keeps one in her bedside drawer, buffalo horn. In my home it treats heatstroke. Across the ocean, it's a $35 beauty tool. Same board, two destinies.
The cicadas went quiet, and the calendar said Chushu, the solar term where heat ''comes to rest.'' An old tai chi master by the river once told me: heaven and earth stop first; whether you follow is your own business. A soup that takes an hour to cook might be how an ordinary person catches up with the season.
On a lost path behind Mount Qingcheng, I met a Daoist who had not eaten lunch in seven years. Bigu is not dieting, nor fasting — it is another kind of relationship between a person and food.
An 80-year-old TCM doctor taught me zhan zhuang — Chinese standing meditation. I didn't believe it at first. How can standing still heal anything? After 100 days, my insomnia is gone, my hands are warm, my temper softened. This is my honest record of those hundred days.
A blonde girl on TikTok doing Ba Duan Jin with imperfect form. After three years of practice, I realize — it doesn't matter if your form is perfect. What matters is whether you're willing to give your body eight minutes a day.
A TikTok video of a girl sunning her back went viral. This is exactly what my mom forced me to do every summer — and I finally understand why.
Three years of insomnia. Melatonin, white noise, counting sheep — nothing worked. Then I met a Daoist monk on Mount Qingcheng who taught me three breathing techniques. A month later, I was asleep in fifteen minutes.
A few days ago, I came across a video. A foreign girl looked into the camera and said, "Ear seeds changed my life." She had...
Last week I visited a Chinese medicine doctor. He asked no questions—just looked at my tongue for three seconds and knew everything. What can a tongue reveal?
At eleven at night, my brain was full of work. My mom said: go make millet porridge. When your stomach is warm, you settle down. Those twenty minutes at the stove worked better than any meditation app.
3 AM. Again. Not from an alarm, not from a nightmare. Just eyes flying open. I discovered that in Chinese medicine, every two-hour block has a meridian "on duty" — and waking at 3 AM is your Liver meridian sending an SOS.