Reflections of the Moon on Water 20th Anniversary Edition:Healing Women's Bodies and Minds Through Traditional Chinese Wisdom

The 20th-anniversary edition of the groundbreaking women's health classic by Xiaolan Zhao, one of the world's leading practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine, with new material on living healthily into old age.

In Reflections of the Moon on Water, world-renowned Traditional Chinese Medicine doctor Xiaolan Zhao explains the unique philosophy behind the healing practice of TCM, a way of living that is especially liberating and empowering for women. Sharing stories from her own life and the lives of her patients, she shows us how we can develop new relationships with our bodies and our emotions. The first edition concentrated on the challenges of a female body’s reproductive life, from puberty to the transition past menopause: problems with menstruation, pregnancy or infertility, post-partum depression, menopausal symptoms and cancers of the reproductive organs. Women birth the world, as Xiaolan writes, and “the cultural and healing wisdom in Chinese medicine has so much to offer them.”

In this new anniversary edition, Xiaolan extends our understanding with two new chapters: one devoted to ways that women in their seventies and older—their “golden hour”—can continue to live healthy and fulfilled lives, and a second focusing on ways to think differently about the final sunset of one’s life. With health care increasingly fragmented, out of reach or unaffordable, Xiaolan shares how ongoing preventative self-care can help women better their health and vitality as well as prevent illness. By making simple changes in diet, lifestyle and the way we deal with stress and our emotions—time-tested by Chinese medicine and life-tested by the more than 20,000 patients treated at the Xiaolan Health Centre—we can profoundly improve our health no matter our age. | XIAOLAN ZHAO trained as a surgeon and a doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) in China before she moved to Canada in 1988, where she earned master’s degrees in pharmacology and cancer research. Inspired by the growing interest in complementary therapies, she opened a small Canadian practice in the early 1990s, which led to her founding the Xiaolan Health Centre in Toronto, where she and her staff care for more than 20,000 patients from North America and Europe. Xiaolan is dedicated to helping people achieve the harmony between body, mind and spirit that maintains physical and mental well-being. Her writing is designed to bring her approach to TCM to the mainstream; her first book, Reflections of the Moon on Water, was published in Canada, the U.S. and the UK, and translated into fifteen languages.