The chirping of the alarm barely rouses you enough to pry one arm out from under the blanket. Your hand automatically navigates its way to the bedside nightstand and inches its way to the alarm clock, a move ingrained by years of repetition.
Despite your best intentions of arising on time, not only do you sleep through the first alarm, but somehow manage to hit the snooze button twice more, rationalizing to yourself that you don’t need that much time to get ready for work anyway.
Finally, the Critical Alert goes off in your head. GET UP NOW OR GET FIRED!
You shower at hyperspeed, grab breakfast on the run, and you’re out the door. If only you can beat your boss to the office…
The bad news: The boss man is already waiting for you at your desk.
The good news: You don’t have to worry about your alarm in the morning.
The problem in this scenario is not that you ignored your alarm, but that you did it day after day after day; until finally your whole life was thrown so far out of balance that you simply could not recover once you hit your tipping point.
Unfortunately, the same story is played out every day by those of us who ignore our own internal “alarms”, otherwise known as symptoms. You see, symptoms are your body’s warning systems, built in to alert you of a potential crisis.
What are your options when symptoms arise?
First, you could choose to do nothing, which is what most people do – at least for a while.
Many hope that by ignoring the problem it will somehow go away. Even if the pain eventually subsides, the underlying cause rarely resolves on its own.
When ignoring the problem proves ineffective, your next course of action might be to pop a pill. This is what most of us have been encouraged to do (mostly by the kindhearted souls who make the drugs). Drugging a symptom is like hitting the snooze on the alarm. It just delays the inevitable, which is the fact that you eventually have to wake up and address your problem in a sensible, effective manner.
That brings us to your third option: Acupuncture. The focus of acupuncture care is to remove meridian system blockages and imbalances within the body, allowing the free flow of the bodies energy and to express 100% life. Symptoms don’t exist in the absence of an underlying imbalance. Eliminate the cause and the symptom goes away once and for all.
