Don't walk under a ladder or...

Now here in the UK you must have been living under a rock your whole life if you haven't heard the expression 'touch wood'. It's a way of counteracting 'bad luck' or 'jinxing' something and often happens after someone has said something such as 'It hasn't rained in a while... touch wood' and then they proceed to actually find some wood/their own head for the comical value, to knock with their hand :') Anyway I thought about these common superstitions and odd bits of human life and decided to write this blog post on some little superstitious ideas and beliefs. I for one would like to say I am an avid believer in Karma, what goes around comes around so to speak. I find it is incredibly useful to believe in Karma when you're in dire situations if someone has conducted them, someone who will later bring around 'bad karma' on themselves. I recently had a situation occur which was not my fault in any way and I would say that believing that nothing good would come out of the situation for the other people involved really helped me get through it. It was a tough time for me and I felt wronged as it was a situation which really affected me but was brought on by someone I was very close to and it was hurtful. Because of this I also began to think about how Karma couldn't possibly be real because bad things happen to good people all the time, death, illness, debt... The list goes on. However I did come to the conclusion that I only believed in 'every action has an equal and opposite reaction' and if you are a good person and do many good things, you will reap the rewards of that in a positive way, but if a disaster happens to you then it is natural, it was always going to happen. Even if you were a terrible terrible person, I would never wish death and illness upon your family, only an event to the same magnitude that you had provoked on someone else, but never on their innocent family member. So yes my beliefs may be all good and true for me until something upsets the balance and I no longer believe in the idea of 'Karma', but right now it's useful to think about balance. 

Now that all that's out the way I also want to talk about medical and physical ideas of balance that I have recently learnt and used a lot of this year. Earlier this year, around 9 months ago, I was diagnosed with a medical condition called 'Chronic Fatigue Syndrome'. I'm not going to go into it as it's rather boring and pretty much the most pointless illness ever :') Don't worry, I'm far past the worst of it, I'm merely bringing it up as there is no cure but during my worst part of it I tried out different methods of hopefully lessening the symptoms. I did a lot of research online and found out that CFS could actually be helped by the ancient art of 'acupuncture'. For those of you that don't know what acupuncture is, it is where a trained acupuncturist basically puts little needles into certain parts of your body to disrupt the energy flow onto the correct path. I had around 5 or 6 sessions of acupuncture over a period of a few weeks, each time the distance between the sessions getting longer, and each time I was there I asked my acupuncturist Lisa many questions about the art of acupuncture. She was very informative and I would definitely recommend her if anyone reading this actually lived near me :') Unfortunately as that was several months ago now, I couldn't tell you everything she told me but if you're interested then feel free to google it :)

Anyway, there is a lot of superstition about acupuncture and its 'nonsense', 'how could needles heal anyone?' I choose firmly to believe it has great effects on the human body as one of the major problems of CFS is the very low energy and extreme fatigue you have to cope with solidly and as acupuncture is to generate the flow of energy around your body, I found it extremely beneficial to my health and found myself 'craving' more, haha that sounds weird... But yes it really did help, and in fact my acupuncturist also suffers with bouts of CFS and used to work in engineering before being an acupuncture patient herself and deciding to switch careers and help other people. I chose to bring this up as a lot of my friends were like 'hmmm Em, I don't think it's going to do any good, they're just needles... I couldn't do it.' which of course was extremely helpful... but ACTUALLY it doesn't hurt that much as the needles are incredibly fine and pretty bendy as well! Even though a lot of my friends didn't believe in the 'voodoo' of acupuncture, I swear it benefited me greatly, even if it was purely because I believed in it. I had it all through my GCSE's as I could barely revise.

The point of this post was not for 'pity', not that you'd pity someone with CFS as it's pretty boring, but I was supposed to have another acupuncture session today to help with my condition through the winter months, but due to circumstances that's not going ahead :( Acupuncture is fantastic for all sorts of ailments such as chronic pain and even diseases! I would highly recommend it and also other practices such as acupressure. Recently we had a 'health day' in sixth form and due to my CFS I did find the exercise very difficult to do and I did push myself too far... bad Emma :P But we also had a lady come in and talk about Indian Head massages and acupressure. She was a German woman and had been living in England for quite a few years and opened her own practice. She taught us how to perform very relaxing Indian Head massages on others and I can still remember how to do it now! :D It was really good but the oddest thing happened to me... Ordinarily, Indian Head massages are supposed to relax you to the point of near sleep, one girl in our session even fainted, but for me it had the opposite effect as I was already tired! It was the weirdest thing! For once, everyone else was far more tired than I was and I had more energy than I had had in MONTHS which erm, ended up with me sort of being a bit dumb and using LOTS of energy in the next exercise we did and tiring myself out completely, but yeah we won't go into that... nice one. But you get the idea, I'm weird and things that relax other people make me go hyper :') I went and questioned her after the session and she told me that it was probably due to an acupressure point that my friend was disturbing when she was giving me the massage that gives you energy. How odd?!

I am really interested by all of these ancient remedies and I also enjoy doing yoga as I already mentioned I'm a gymnast (not ready to say I'm never going back yet) and so it's a great way of doing gentle exercise and also regulating your breathing which helps with being calm. I used to do yoga every day in order to help with my symptoms and I can honestly say I always felt far more relaxed and content. Perhaps if I had tried it recently I would have been far happier :') 

Sorry that this blog post has been rather long and descriptive but I just felt I would tell the world how I believe in certain things that some people are a little superstitious about. I don't know whether you enjoyed it or not, but perhaps if you read all the way to this point it must mean there is something worth reading! If you have any questions on anything I have mentioned, I don't mind answering them, we are all free to have our own opinions and beliefs. I do hope it was something different and informative for you to read even on this day where everyone is talking about their New Years celebrations! I hope you all have a fantastic night/morning with whatever you are doing :)

Oh and one more thing, I have started a twitter just for my blog which is how most people are viewing this right now at @emziecole7. Feel free to send me links to your blogs and I will definitely check them out and follow them if I can work out how to do so on some of them! So taraa amigos and see you in 2013! <3

(obviously I didn't take this photo so don't sue me! haha :) But that's a type of acupuncture)