Making Bone Stock

I often recommend bone stock for restoring the energy and providing condensed, high quality nutrients. Within Traditional Chinese Medicine, making this is extracting the essences of the animal that provide tremendous nourishment.

This is the basic way to prepare bone stock:
To make bone stock, start with 4 pounds of beef or pork bones (pork neck works really well). Pork bones will be more cooling, while beef will be a little warming. Bake the bones in the oven at 350 for 20-30 minutes. Then put the bones in your stock pot, add 1 gallon of water and 4 tablespoons of rice vinegar and bring to a boil. Cover and turn down to a simmer for around 8 hours. Strain the bones and let the stock cool. Refrigerate what you will use within a week and freeze the rest. As it cools it is normal for it to solidify into gelatin. This can be used for making congee, as the base for soups (diluted with water) or added in small amounts to soups, stir fry, steaming water for vegetables, cooking grains, etc.

Qigong Demo at Dr. Rong Rong Zheng's Banquet

I've studied with my teacher, Dr. Rong Rong Zheng for the past 19 years. In April there was a banquet honoring her accomplishments and celebrating her 70th birthday. It was a great time with patients, doctors, friends and family coming from China, Japan and all over the US. 

As part of the event Dr. Zheng asked me to do a demonstration of the Moving Qi Gong. Here is a video of the first half of the demonstration. I’ll post the demonstration of the six advanced exercises and closing exercises later.

Elimination Communication

Elimination Communication ("EC"), sometimes called “Infant Potty Training,” is based on the observations that it is natural for infants and babies to cue their parents before they eliminate, that they can learn cues to facilitate elimination and that they do not want to sit in a soiled diaper (who does, after all). It is a soft, awareness based approach that is both amazing and totally natural, once you can wrap your mind around it. Following this gentle approach, we haven’t used diapers with Lily since she was 6 months old (she is now 10 months old).  

There are several books that we have found helpful. You can order these from your local bookstore or use the links below to get them from Amazon.

Infant Potty Training, by Laurie Boucke. This is a more comprehensive look at EC with a cross-cultural perspective.  A nice view on the subject from one of the people that began to re-popularize EC here. 

Infant Potty Basics, by Laurie Boucke. This is more of the basic, how-to kind of information. Very practical and useful.

Diaper Free, by Ingrid Bauer. If you can find this used (it is out of print now) is a nice introduction although a bit repetitive. This is what we started with. I recommend getting the information that you need and skipping around from there.