Fill Up Your Tank
If you know a little bit about acupuncture and Chinese medicine, you may have heard practitioners like myself compare how western medicine looks at the body and how we look at the body as being similar to the difference between a mechanic and a gardener. Western medicine looks at the body like a car, with lots of different parts. If a part is broken, a specialist will fix that part. Battery old? Replace it. Spark plugs failing? Get new ones. If your paint is rusting, no one is thinking it’s due to an engine part.
In Chinese medicine, if there’s an issue, we look at the whole system, like a gardener would. Brown leaves on the plant? Let’s check the water supply, fertilizer and sun exposure and see what could be causing the issue. This is one of my favorite analogies because it clearly illustrates the different philosophies.
So it might surprise you that another one of my favorite analogies relies on seeing the body as a car! When flushing out some ideas for one of my books Aromatherapy for Self-Care, I found myself coming back to this one again and again. We need to put enough gas into our car to get us where we need to go. The key to avoiding burn-out is making sure you are filling your tank faster than you are emptying it. Just like you wouldn’t wait to fill your tank until you’re running on fumes, you can’t wait to fill your own tank until you’re exhausted either. If you’re planning a cross-country drive, you would budget for fuel costs and make sure you’d never end up stranded in the middle of the desert, so don’t do that to your body, either!
And just like different cars have different fuel requirements, our bodies have different needs too! Maybe you’re a fast and flashy sports car who requires premium fuel to be able to accelerate quickly and make sharp turns. Or maybe you’re a vintage convertible who needs lots of garage time and enjoys leisurely Sunday rides but can’t really hang on the highway. Or (like many of my patients) you’re a rarely-celebrated but always trustworthy minivan who is on the go from dawn till dusk. The minivan might need more regular oil changes and tune-ups than a car that sits at the train station all day.
So, if you feel like you’re always running on empty, here’s a little assignment for you. Sit down with a piece of paper, and separate it into two columns. At the top of one write “FILLS MY TANK” and on the other write “EMPTIES MY TANK”. Start putting things in both columns. The point is not to not have anything in the EMPTIES column, but instead it is to make sure you have enough in the FILLS column to keep your fuel-light from constantly going off. It might mean taking a look at what you can outsource that you find really draining, or it might mean making self-care more of a priority. As silly as this sounds, my patients often find the “homework assignment” very enlightening!