Read the entire piece on Substack! Link in Bio.
“I’m writing this a month into the tour. Which means I’m writing it from inside the experiment, not from the comfortable distance of reflection.
Here’s what my days currently look like: I play the show. I do telehealth consults with my patients back home between soundcheck and stage time. I’m in a doctoral program, which means research papers and case studies are open on my laptop in the hotel room at midnight. I practice the horn, at the very least a good warmup. I try to write music. I try to sleep.
Working out — real training, the kind I love, the Boxing gym, the Jiu Jitsu mat, the MMA gym — has largely gone out the window. I’m getting by on calisthenics and Qi Gong when I can grab twenty minutes. Ten years ago I would have found a way to do all of it, grinding myself to a nub in the process, wearing the exhaustion like a badge. At 64, I’m trying to make a different kind of choice. I’m trying to preserve my Jing — what Chinese medicine calls the body’s deepest vital essence, the reservoir that doesn’t replenish the way it did at thirty. I’m trying to be honest about what’s actually sustainable, as opposed to what my ego insists I should be capable of.
That tension — between what you want to do and what you can actually sustain — is what this piece is really about.”
#findingbalance☯️
#touringmusician
#chinesemedicinepractitioner
#landofhopeanddreamstour
Happy to be back in the clinic today!
A full day of patients, my last final exam for the semester tonight. Still a few more weeks of shows with the EStreet Band.
Feeling very blessed!
#findingbalance☯️
#chinesemedicine
#servingothers❤️
#healthiswealth
Road Dispatch #2: Link in Bio to read the entire piece on Substack
“To work out or to sleep — that is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler in quest to go to the gym and hit the heavy bag, row for fifteen minutes and then lift some weights, or whether it is wiser to take my ass to bed and get some well-deserved sleep.
Shakespeare almost certainly didn’t have this in mind. But I’m pretty sure Hamlet would have understood it. There’s a particular kind of suffering that comes from being a person who has always defined himself partly through physical discipline — and then slowly, undeniably, having to renegotiate the terms.
I turned 64 in February. I’ve been a nose-to-the-grindstone guy my whole life, especially when it comes to training. For decades, arriving in any city in the world meant one thing before anything else: find a boxing gym, an MMA gym, a grappling class. Doesn’t matter what country. Doesn’t matter what time zone. Doesn’t matter that we just played a three-hour show and have a long flight tomorrow. There’s a place to get some work in, I’m going to find it.
These days, the wear and tear of doing that has begun to outweigh the benefit. The knee with no meniscus has a vote now. So do the hips, the shoulders, and roughly every other joint that has participated in four decades of martial arts, Boxing, Muay Thai, Kali and Grappling. They are all casting ballots and they are not voting for the 7am session at the local boxing gym.
What I’ve had to learn — and it has not come easily to a person wired the way I am — is that preservation is not surrender. It’s strategy.
Chinese medicine has a concept called Jing — often translated as essence, or constitutional vitality. It’s the deep reservoir you were born with, the fundamental resource that underlies everything: your energy, your resilience, your capacity to heal and recover. Jing is finite. You can preserve it, you can nourish it, but you cannot manufacture more of it. And you can absolutely burn through it faster than nature intended.“
#findingbalance☯️
#themiddleway
#thegrindneedsresttoo
#touringmusicianlife
Link in Bio to read the entire piece on Substack.
“In the last 150–200 years, every group that has come to these shores — Irish, Italian, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Latinos, Arabs, wave after wave of immigrants — has had to pass through what might be called the gauntlet of American racism before being admitted, however incompletely, into the full promise of the society. And every one of those communities has produced music that mirrors that experience back — music that says: this happened, this is happening, this is what it costs, this is what it means.
That music is not comfortable. It was never meant to be. Comfort is what you get from music that tells you what you already believe, that reflects back only the most flattering version of who you are.
The other kind of music — the kind Mrs. Nudd was playing for a classroom of white kids in Hampton, New Hampshire in 1973 — asks more of you. It asks you to look at the full reflection. The beautiful parts and the broken parts. The distance between the ideal and the real.
Music doesn’t close the distance between what we are and what we claim to be. It makes that distance impossible to pretend away — and it does so with such beauty that you almost don’t notice it happening. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, the song says. But in the hands of a Billie Holiday or a John Coltrane, there is no separating the two. The sweetness and the truth arrive together, and by the time you feel one, the other has already quietly rearranged something inside you.
And then it puts the question back in your hands: Now that you can see it — what are you going to do?”
#musicismyweapon
#alovesupreme
#changestartswithyou
#americanmirage
My first in a series of “Road Dispatches”
Link in Bio to read it in it’s entirety on Substack!
“So here I am, at midnight, in a hotel bar somewhere in Europe or the American heartland, the excited musician in me and the Chinese medicine practitioner in me in a full grappling match. Nobody is giving up any ground. Both are fighting to the death.
Usually, I compromise. Protein. A cheeseburger without the bun, if we’re somewhere that has one. Sometimes just hydration — water, maybe an electrolyte drink — and I call it a night. Sometimes it’s pizza and I enjoy every bite.
Which brings me to the thing I’ve come to actually believe, as both a practitioner and a person who has been on the road most of his adult life: the 80/20 rule is not a compromise of your principles. It is the principle.
If I make a wise, body-honoring choice 80% of the time — and I mean genuinely try, not just aspire to it — then the 20% that lands on ice cream or late-night pizza is not a failure. It’s a human being living a full life. And here’s the clinical truth that Chinese medicine has always understood: the Spleen is damaged by worry and overthinking just as much as by bad food. The self-flagellation over the cheeseburger may be doing more harm than the cheeseburger itself.”
#findingbalance☯️
#theeightytwentyrule
#thebattlewithin
#touringmusicianlife
Link in Bio to read the entire essay on Substack!
What We Cannot Yet Measure: Traditional Chinese Medicine and the Limits of Modern Science
“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance — it is the illusion of knowledge.”
— Daniel J. Boorstin
“Modern physics has established that the universe contains forces, fields, and phenomena — dark matter, quantum fields, the behavior of subatomic particles — that are real, reproducibly measurable in their effects, yet not classically explicable. Science accepts these realities because the evidence of their effects is consistent. We ask for the same framework to be applied to a system of medicine whose effects have also been consistent — across populations, practitioners, centuries, and cultures.
The question is not whether TCM works. The question is whether our current instruments are sophisticated enough to fully explain why. Dismissing what we cannot yet measure is not science. It is the premature closure of inquiry — the very antithesis of what science claims to stand for.
TCM is not asking to be exempt from scrutiny. It is asking to be scrutinized fairly — with the same intellectual rigor, the same methodological creativity, and the same willingness to follow evidence that we rightly demand of any healing tradition.
This rebuttal is written not in opposition to Western medicine but alongside it — by a practitioner who has studied both, respects both, and believes deeply that the patient is best served when the full spectrum of human healing knowledge is brought to bear. The question was never which medicine is right. The question is always: what does this patient need?
We are confident that when TCM is scrutinized honestly, without institutional bias or premature conclusion, the medicine will speak for itself.
It has been doing so for 2,600 years.”
#classicalchinesemedicine
#ilovescience❤️
#noteverythingcanbemeasured
#aprioriassumption
Given the political overtones of the tour I’m currently on, I wanted to dive a bit deeper into the history of music-not only as entertainment - but as a catalyst for social change.
Here’s my latest piece, link in bio to read the entire thing on Substack.
“There’s a comment I see regularly. It arrives in various forms — on social media, in comment sections, occasionally shouted from the general direction of someone who used to like the artist in question. The message is consistent: Just shut up and play.
The implication is clear. You were hired to entertain me. The moment you say something that makes me uncomfortable — about the country, about justice, about the direction we’re headed — you’ve violated the terms of our agreement. Get back in the box. Do the thing I paid for.
I want to talk about that box, because I think it’s worth examining what we’re actually asking for when we demand that artists keep their mouths shut and their opinions to themselves.”
#shutupandplay
#bam
#artistsseetheworlddifferently
#bitterfruit
#wakeupcall
I was finally able to make it to an ASNY event. Was happy to see some of my teachers, school cohort, meet some esteemed practitioners/ colleagues,
and hang with some current interns who are about to graduate. Great to sit with other Jersey City practitioners. @lhasa_oms thanks for the swag!!
Special thanks to Dr Tom Leung and @kamwoherbs for supporting all of us and our profession! ❤️☯️🙏🏼
A fun night and a welcome change from touring musician life.
#asny
#chinesemedicinepractitioner
#healingpeopleonesoulatatime♥️
#findingbalance☯️
“This is why the question of mythology is not abstract. The story a civilization tells about itself determines what it optimizes for. And we are approaching a moment when our tools will be powerful enough that what we optimize for will be, functionally, irreversible.
So we return to the question at the root of all of this. What happens when a mythology stops working? What story comes next?
I don’t think the answer is a political platform. Every tradition I have lived inside is clear on this: transformation of the collective is not possible without transformation of the individual. Not as a substitute for structural change. As its inescapable and necessary precondition. You cannot build equitable systems out of unexamined people. Socrates warned us of this in 399 BCE.”
Link in Bio to access my Substack page, where you can read this in its entirety.
#societalchange
#thestorieswetellourselves
#whodecides
#socraticwisdom
An excerpt from my latest Substack. Link in Bio to read it in its entirety.
“Yesterday, two friends reached out to me—one lives in Europe, the other in Canada. Interestingly, they both asked me the same question: Why aren’t Americans angry about what’s going on? And why won’t they do anything about it?
As someone who has tried to stay attuned to the political ebbs and flows of this country for the last forty years—and to look beneath the surface into the societal structures that shape the world I live in—I wanted to give an answer worthy of the question. Because the tendency is to reach for comfortable tropes: America always does the right thing after it’s tried everything else. We’re rugged individualists—we’ve just hit a downturn. Don’t bet against America.
But I’m not sure any of those things are true this time.
The Architecture of Exhaustion
The reason I don’t think the old reassurances apply is because a system has been put in place that, for all practical purposes, renders most Americans neutered.”
#silenceiscomplicity
#landofhopeanddreams
#wereareallwegot
#thesystemdoesntworkforyou
