Remember about 6 weeks ago when I talked about an ambitious new project I was embarking on?  Predictably, a lot has happened since the day I wrote that post.  I’ve been working diligently, but have posted nothing.  Why is that?

Part of it is because I’ve been working too hard to talk about how hard I’m working.  Some might say that’s a good thing – doing something is more important than talking about the thing you’re doing.  For me, though, the reflective mode involved in writing  a blog post is a big part of my learning process.  When I’m unable or unwilling to do this, it usually means that something isn’t quite right.

Indeed, something hasn’t been quite right.

In that post, I decided to start at the first line of the Shanghan lun and proceed forward.  This urge was enhanced by my registration in the ICEAM Shanghan lun retreat, an invite-only event for people who have taken the canonical training.  Knowing that I would be walking through the text, line by line, with some of the brightest people I know really kicked my motivation into high gear.

But motivation isn’t enough.  I found myself going in circles, starting and stopping, starting and stopping.  The motivation was enough to keep me repeatedly hitting my head against the wall, which on the face of it sounds like a bad thing.  Ultimately, though, the willingness to come up against my resistance and inability over and over again is what pushed me over the obstacle in my way.

I was going about studying in the wrong way for me

My process was like this:

1.  Read the line in the Wiseman/Ye/Mitchell (W/Y/M) translation, including the commentary and any notes I have in my system about that line.

2.  Enter the line, with Chinese, pinyin and W/Y/M translation into my current favorite flashcard application, Mental Case.

3.  Spend some time thinking about the line, writing it many times, and using the flashcards to embed it in my memory.

4.  Spend some time talking to relevant folks about the line.

5.  Begin drafting a post about the line, sharing whatever limited insights I may have come to, and offering a space for the wider Deepest Health community to discuss it.

6.  Move on to the next line and repeat.

Trouble was, it wasn’t working.  I never really got past #3 on the list with any line, yet I felt committed to proceeding in a step-wise fashion.  It was a fine process in that it kept me engaging with the text, and encouraged me to look back through and organize some notes.  But, it wasn’t really sinking in.  I wasn’t making any progress, either in refining my system or in my own understanding.

So, I set about figuring things out

I tried a few different flashcard methods.  I tried some paper-based methods.  I tried working with other versions of the text.  I tried doing the translations myself.  I tried going back to some old flashcards of the formulas, and a couple of permutations of the same cards.  I tried memorizing in different places, at different intervals.  I tried harassing my colleagues with questions.  I tried abandoning the text altogether and starting with a patient, positing that a case-based approach would sink into my brain.

I did despair a bit at one point, thinking that I’m too long out of school to do any real learning.  With the SHL retreat looming, this prospect was particularly sad to consider.

Then I started mindmapping

I have always been a mindmapper – though I don’t swear by it.  I also like outlining, and tend to flip rapidly between the two.  I tend to use Mind Node Pro, an app available on the Mac and also on iOS. I sometimes also use Mindjet Mindmanager (available on multiple platforms) as well as occasional visits with iMindmap (the original – but curiously difficult to use).  For outlining, I use Omni Outliner exclusively, available on the Mac and on iPad- with fabulous syncing between the two.

I mapped relationships between the lines of the text, different pathology categories, formulas, herbs and other information.  That helped insofar that I began to see connections I hadn’t previously, and the memorization task became fun, an adjunct to this more exploratory, “right brained” activity I was doing with the mindmaps.

But that wasn’t quite enough

Mindmaps are static things, once created.  They also don’t hold a lot of information well, nor are they particularly friendly with the rest of my system.  I find them a better tool for freeform brainstorming that doesn’t need to be revisited.  While that might work for some aspects of my exploration of the Shanghan lun, ultimately, I want to be adding to my overall system of knowledge, so I might use it later on behalf of my patients.

I remembered a software program I explored a while back called Personal Brain – now called simply The Brain.  It’s like a mindmapping program, but more dynamic.  The basic version, perfectly acceptable for my use, is free.  There are premium versions available – if I end up needing one the price will be more than worth it.  Nodes can be connected multiple ways, and it readily absorbs lots of information.  The most important part of it is how it moves and changes as you add more information.

It becomes a little like a representation of your brain concerning that topic.  Pretty cool.

As I started to work with this program, my energy, motivation and understanding began to unlock in earnest.  I’ve been going at breakneck speed ever since, reaching new heights in understanding.  More importantly, I’m actually making good on a promise I made to myself years and years ago – to create a robust, interconnected system for holding all that I’m learning.  I know this isn’t an important goal for everybody – but it is for me.

I made a super quick video showing how one part of my “Brain” looks

It incorporates the W/Y/M translations of the lines and simple transcriptions of the formulas.  But, you will see it is so much more than that.  I hope to share more of these videos, and even some portions of the Brain using their web service, soon.  So, as I move forward with the project in that April post, it will look a little different than I expected.

But, the intention will be the same, to walk through the classical texts of Chinese medicine.  Again.

The post Using The Brain to solidify a comprehensive understanding of Chinese herbs appeared first on Deepest Health.

I love the classical texts of Chinese medicine.

Whenever I get a chance, I read through the translations I have on hand.  When I run into a sticky clinical issue, and a mentor isn’t available for conversation, I go to the texts.  This love was cultivated in me during my years at NCNM, of course. However, I’ve always had a love for material in any subject that is as close to the “source” as possible.  It’s just how I’m wired, I suppose.

All that being said, in the years I’ve been out of school, I’ve not made the time or space to go to the next level in my engagement with the texts.  In fact, the pressures of clinical practice (internal and external) have sometimes made me look away from my first love.

However, when I’ve strayed (however briefly) from a focus on the classical texts, my results have diminished, not increased.  Sometimes, down the road of some lark or another, I’ve remembered the texts and returned to them.  The patient inevitably gets better.  So it goes.

I’ve decided to recommit myself to the simple study of these texts.

I figure another 30 years should make a good start.  I’m going to come at them from every angle possible, and seek out counsel from those wiser than me at every turn.  But, in the end, nothing can compensate for the simple memorization and contemplation of the texts and the formulas they contain.  That’s what I’m committing to, and I have no doubt it will mean good things for my clinical practice.  That’s what it’s all about, right?

What texts?

When I’m talking texts, I’m talking chiefly about three of the canonical texts of Chinese medicine. The Shanghan lun, the Jingui yao lue and the Shennong ben cao jing are my constant companions.  The Neijing, Yijing and even smaller, fragmented texts like the Tangye jing are undoubtedly important, but they don’t occupy my thoughts and dreams like the first three do.

With the recent (long awaited) release of the Wiseman/Wilms version of the Jingui (link above), we finally have an easily accessible and clean translation of this all important text.  We’ve had the Wiseman/Ye/Mitchell version of the Shanghan lun since 1999, of course.  The Shennong ben cao jing is still awaiting a truly authoritative translation, but we work with what we have.

English is my native language, so I do rely chiefly on translations.  However, “a cut deeper” does mean me looking at those translations carefully and trying my hand at parsing the text.  That being said, I don’t have any idea of myself as a competent translator, so I know that any activity like that should be slow, careful, and frequently checked against the received translations.

Further, my focus is on understanding the formulas, and there is relatively little worry that those have been mistranslated, despite the conversation about translation of early Chinese units of measure into their metric equivalents.  This means that, while being able to read the original Chinese would be wonderful, I can still do a lot of important work by seeking to understand the formulas as deeply as I can, simply as formulas.

What does this mean for Deepest Health?

As always, Deepest Health serves as the place where I try to keep myself accountable for the kind of work I want to do as a student of Chinese medicine.  Like with the Year of Sagely Living and other projects, I enjoy making a challenge and promise of the stuff I find to be important to me.

That doesn’t always work, to be honest.  Mostly because I’m an Aquarius and a Fire Dragon and I have a good deal more ideas than I have time or energy to implement them.  Something that seems like a good idea in the morning, might well be evaluated and found wanting by the evening.  Such is the way of things sometimes.

But this thing, the plumbing deeper and deeper into the classical texts, this isn’t something left up to fashion, or my particular flights of fancy.  This is what all of my mentors have recommended, and what they have done.  This is what all of the people I admire, regardless of whether I’ve met them, have done.  This is, I believe, a foundational enterprise in the life of a person who wants to practice classical Chinese herbal medicine.  So, I feel confident that planting my flag and moving forward from that point of power is the right thing to do.

What am I going to do?

From now on, I will be dreadfully boring.

I will be spending an incredible amount of time and energy working with these texts.  So, that’s what I’ll be talking about here at Deepest Health.  Some of you will inevitably be a little annoyed – as your interests lie elsewhere.  That’s why we have fantastic writers talking about a whole host of topics, like Mauricio, Sunjae and Kimberly.

They’ll keep you ignited, don’t worry.

I’ll sometimes post just a quick line, some commentary, and my thoughts. Sometimes a case study.  Sometimes a deeper, step-by-step look at a formula.  Hopefully, I’ll be able to share audio, video and other information to enhance your enjoyment and understanding.

How can you participate?

If you’re a huge Chinese medicine dork, like me, I’ve got some things to share with you.  In the coming months, I’ll offer a few ways for you to be involved in this project.  Whether you’ve memorized these texts already and just want a global community with whom you can discuss them or have never even read Line 1 of the Shanghan lun, we’ll have something for you.

Regardless, it begins.  Today.  With Line 1 of the Shanghan lun by Zhangzhong jing.

太陽之為病，脈浮，頭項強痛而惡寒。

 

Tài yáng zhī wéi bìng, mài fú, tóu xiàng jiàng tòng ér wù hán.

 

In disease of the greater yang, the pulse is floating, the head and nape are stiff and painful, and there is aversion to cold

If you’re looking for me, I’ll be walking around the courtyard, muttering Chinese phrases to myself…

The post Working through the texts of Chinese medicine : a project appeared first on Deepest Health.

Imagine that your feet are bare, and the eddies or waves push the smallest bit of water between your toes. Even from this vantage point, you can feel the vastness of the water, its connection to every other body of water that there is. Every drop of water that comes in touch with your feet has molecules in it that have, at one point or another, been in contact with every other; by touching this body of water, you are touching every other drop of water. What stories does the water tell? Has it been rainfall, hail, snow? Has it been inside a tree, or underground? Water goes everywhere, is in everything, and the vibrations that it comes in contact with become a part of it, in turn transmitted to everything it comes in contact with.

This is the nature of water. To reach everything, flow through the places that men despise, and thus be like the Dao.

The human body is, in a sense, a closed system. Although it interacts with its surroundings in various ways, it does so through its own convoluted internal mechanisms and logic, which in turn serve the purpose of maintaining its own continuity against disorganising forces too numerous to count. That internal logic is, in turn, the emergent result of heredity as well as personal history, experience and education as well as environmental circumstances, yet its essential, original nature is unchanged. It is, in essence, an organizing principle, a purposeful tendency towards repetition of a pattern that serves its purpose admirably well.

Its information, codified at the cellular level as genes, and on through increasing levels of complexity as peristaltic pulsations, organ motility, and autonomic nervous response, and then through the medium of the myofascial connective tissue as habitual postures and movements, makes up a recognisable structure, so complex and closely knit that it is even capable of organising consciousness and self-awareness that allows it to learn and remember its own continuity. Waves of pulsation move through it, and their charge and motion become a part of the overall continuum through their repetition.

The medium for this phenomenon is highly organised seawater.

It vibrates and pulsates with the charges of the ions it contains, flows and eddies in an endless cycle of reiteration of its main characteristics. There’s places where it pools, others where it rushes, but like a river, the actual contents are never the same. At their own unique pace, every molecule of substance that comes to pass through this causeway of pattern and repeated form is eventually flushed through to make way for others of its kind, which will occupy a place, serve a function, for a time, and then be discarded, sometimes undergoing transformation, sometimes not.

We learn by repetition, by repeated assimilation of the motions that make up the continuity that we recognize as ourselves.

We are furthermore capable of changing in response to these repetitions, in order to better accommodate them and maintain a level of optimal functionality in the face of adverse conditions. We do this because the substance through which we enact and manifest these changes is constantly in a state of flux: in a sense we aren’t changing the substance, just the way that it is organized: it will be returned to the outside sooner or later.

In Chinese Medicine we speak of tonification and think of it as an “adding of substance” to the body.

In herbalism we talk of yang and yin and qi and blood tonics, and use words as “nourishing” and “enriching” to express the concept in specific clinical scenarios. Yet in truth, the wisdom of the body is to keep nothing around for too long, and even the most powerful medicinal substances that we can think of putting into us will eventually be discarded, barely touching the internal orderliness of the structure through a series of filters, membranes, and processes that ensure that our internal integrity is maintained.

If we realise and keep in mind the truth of the impermanence of substance within the body, then why do we think that pathology can be resolved by adding alien substances to the mix?

The system learns through exposure and repetition. In pathology, we are, in essence, caught in the repetition of a pattern that isn’t helping, but it’s ingrained enough that the inherent wisdom of the bodymind process cannot change it on its own. In a very real sense, we bring illness upon ourselves by persisting in patterns of thought, emotion, and behaviour that eventually become ingrained and so damaging that they begin to perturb the functioning of the internal coherence and logic that makes up the functioning of a healthy organism.

When we “tonify” the system, in Chinese Medicine terms, we are in essence providing it with new information, allowing it to remember a different way of functioning that breaks out of the repetitive cycle that we call pathology.

In a sense, we are suggesting a better alternative to the organising principle, hoping to replace the current one, which is damaging and erosive to the system. I say “hope” because ultimately, the self-aware entity always has a choice. We strive, as practitioners, to restore integrity to the system of the human process before us, but this encompasses more than prescribing herbs or needling acupuncture points, miraculous and effective as these interventions may seem. Sun Simiao has the right of it when he says that we must strive to first regulate the patient’s lifestyle, diet, and sexual life before we try to correct their imbalance with acupuncture and herbs. At this level, we are talking about finding harmony and restoring function with whatever resources are available.

We thus become agents of transformation of lives, as opposed to technicians occupied with fixing of broken parts. We cannot seek reversal of a pattern because it has been added to the system; we entrust the original pattern with the ability to reassert itself in some new expression, once the pathological influence has been ameliorated through introduction of new information.

The nature of the system is to remain fluid, like the water that it contains and organises.

Closed and highly filtered, yes, but subjected to constant suggestion from myriad changes going on in the outside world. In this context, everything we do by way of therapeutic intervention is a form of tonification, in the sense that it adds different information to the system. Even by our presence, as fellow models of the same organizing principle, we impose upon our patients a measure of our own manifestation of the pattern, and by so doing enrich their experience in unpredictable ways.

In our Western cultural milieu, we face an additional, unique challenge in that, in order to truly affect the pattern of this fully integrated being, we are called to step outside the role of the “doctor” and integrate the highly intellectual, opinionated, and “knowledgeable” nature of our patients in order to try and introduce new information to the system.

There is thus value in incorporating methods that address the highly sophisticated inner life of Western individuals, in order to help recruit their awareness as much as possible in effecting the change that they themselves seek. Psychological counseling, bodywork, and the so-called “movement therapies” thus integrate with corrections to lifestyle in a much larger scope of treatment than can be achieved with only weekly visits to the acupuncture clinic and a five-day herbal prescription.

It is my observation that it is only when the larger portion of the patient’s experience becomes involved in this process can its pattern be modified in the direction of health. It is a teaching, a transmission of information that, like salt crystals added to water, sink in while dissolving, thus becoming yet another inseparable part of the ever-changing, fluid whole.

This is the nature of water: collecting, aggregating, reaching deep and storing the history of everything that was and is. This is why information is tonification; ultimately, all forms of tonification in Chinese Medicine provide nothing but information that the body needs in order to heal.

The post The Resource of Water: Information as Tonification appeared first on Deepest Health.

We
began
by breathing
as newborn babies
screaming our lungs out
leaping into air and gravity.
Previously surrounded supported
filled and floating in fluid from the North.
Our kidney cold water released, heading East
we ring in Spring beginning the lunar year.
Our first breath brings the first birth
of the ten thousand things and
after screaming the lung
gets busy closely seeing
so it can teach
every single
One.

[Founders Note: Please welcome Tim Nelson, MSOM, LAc a new contributor to Deepest Health. Look for lots more interesting stuff from him to come, hopefully more on this topic!]

The lung plays a dual role in the body, rising with the beginning of things and decisively ending things.

Her energy correlates with the first month of the year, Spring, as well as the whole season of Autumn. As the sensitive organ, she observes everything between these two time periods, giving her invaluable knowledge of the rhythm of things. She understands the complexity of a situation, which gives her the power to know the precise moment to intervene in a situation. This ability to assess the entirety of a situation and make one effortless correction granted her special roles in the imperial court of ancient China. She filled the role of teacher, governess, and acupuncturist.

In chapter eight of the Neijing Suwen, fei, 肺, the lung, is the imperial official in charge of xiangfu, 相 傅. Xiang is to ‘closely examine’ and fu is a ‘teacher.’

By closely examining the characters of xiangfu, we shed light on the only occupation more ancient than prostitution, teaching. In our modern society, teaching is confused with informing. Informing is a one-way linear stream of information, a monologue. Teaching is a much more delicate process that involves knowing oneself and one’s student long before any information is ever given.

Xiang is a picture of an eye, spying from behind a tree.

The process of xiang is to patiently watch, allowing a situation to unfold without getting personally involved. The first step in teaching is watching. This keeps one impartial, gathers objective information, and identifies the whole context that surrounds the student. Only after an entire Spring and Summer of a steady xiang phase of closely examining, comes the teaching. Fu, 傅, is the teacher, and the pictogram for fu tells us about the process of teaching. Fu contains the radical for ‘hand’ suggesting this phase is not as verbal as we know it today. Rather, teaching is doing.

In our society, xiangfu is not a virtue of our educational system. Xiangfu is found more in good parenting.

In the Spring, or initial stages of parenting, children cry, flail around, and behave without any reservations. The role of the parent is, xiang, to observe without imposing. There is vigilance, a close examining and constant gathering of information. This is the birth of the lung energy and it will not take action until much later in Autumn. Even if the child experiences any problems, difficulties, or struggles, these are patiently watched. The entire context surrounding a problem must be assessed before any action can be expected to yield results. Furthermore, the parent learns how the child handles difficulty, and how the child reacts to success and failure. These are extremely important if punishments are ever imposed. We learn from chapter two of the Neijing Suwen, though, to meet no punishments in the Spring. Spring is a time of miraculous growth, and we must watch and learn that process for sometime before correcting problems.

In the Summertime of parenting, the ten thousand behaviors of the child have fully manifested. Problems and difficulties have arisen and are very apparent to the parent, who continues to watch from behind the tree. Still no strong or decisive moves are made. With the heart, the parent unconditionally loves the child along with the problems and difficulties. The Summer season is bountiful, and problems do not yet threaten the community or the family. Furthermore, the context surrounding the problem must be fully understood and soon the child must come to awareness of the problem. The patience required is immense but essential. We understand more when we read the rest of the line about the lung in chapter eight of the Neijing Suwen.

After being called the official of xiangfu, it is said that 治節, zhi jie, or ‘governing’ and‘timing,’ emerge out of the lung.

Pathological governing is judgment, and pathological timing is impatience. We all have seen what these two accomplish in our modern educational system. A student is immediately punished as problems arise and judged a ‘bad student.’ The deeper reasons for the behaviors and failures are never understood, neither by the student nor by the teacher. Over time, the teacher hands more judgments to the student and the cycle repeats itself. The situation seems hopeless, neither the student nor the teacher even try to understand what is going on. Behind a guise of any behaviors, sadness and a sense that all is lost quietly grow within and between the teacher and student. These are the pathological emotions of the lung. They are emerging just as the teacher should be preparing to take decisive action.

Had the teacher been closely examining the student this whole time, it would become clear the student’s failure to complete an assignment could have many reasons. It may have nothing to do with comprehension, and it may be as simple as the time of day when the student sits down to work. If it is approaching noon, perhaps the student needs to run around, eat lunch, take a short nap, and then take on the troublesome assignment. This is an insight only the lung’s continued watchfulness could arrive at. A complete understanding of the daily rhythm of the student gives us a basic template for the student’s problem within a larger context. With this valuable knowledge, the teacher finally begins the process of teaching the student, ironically by waiving a hand and sending the student out to play.

This is the beginning of a profound mentorship relationship between the student and teacher.

A wave of the hand, a simple solution contrasts with the requirements to arrive at that solution. The lung was watching all through the seasons of Spring and Summer, in order to make that single move in Autumn. The healthy lung seems like they are doing nothing, possibly ignoring the situation by sending the student out to play whereas the pathological lung is growing more and more active. Struggling with the student and meeting out endless punishments, eventually the large intestine is going to get involved and the teacher is just going to become an asshole.

Giving the student a bad grade or sending them to the principal’s office is an attempt to shame the student. Grief is inevitable as there is no hope for their relationship. The strong bond of deep relationship is not fostered in our modern educational process. Based upon time spent closely examining, the healthy lung has seen the natural process of the student’s growth, knows when problems come up during that growth, and understands the true complexity of the situation. The healthy lung’s job is one of governing such situations toward effortless resolution.

The process of governing, zhi, 治, requires a complete view of the entire landscape before making a move.

This process is illustrated very well by the ancient dictionary, Shuowen Jiezi. Zhi, 治 , is defined as 水出東萊曲城陽丘山南入海. “Water emerges from the fallow (radish) fields in the East, curves around the city walls, runs along the sunny side of the hills and mountains, and then headed South, it enters the ocean.” With the mountains representing the West, the ocean representing the North, and the city representing the center, zhi depicts water moving in every direction. A good parent, teacher, and governor all get to know the dips and valleys of the situation at hand, and know how a single move affects the entire landscape.

This, I argue, is the process of the acupuncturist as well.

A good acupuncturist literally gets to know all the dips and valleys of their patients by physically palpating the channels. The acupuncturist must also learn the mental, emotional, and spiritual dips and valleys of their patients. Only then do they know where to place a needle to make the most effective change. Metal, being the element of the lung, is the instrument of the acupuncturist. With one movement of the hand, especially of the thumb and forefinger where the metal channels flow, the acupuncturist and archer transforms the entire landscape.

Transforming the entirety of a person with a needle is a remarkable feat.

It requires an understanding of deep complexity and an understanding of how a single needle will affect everything else. This is the hallmark of the metal phase. Cutting back the complexity of the ten thousand things, the lung makes a pathway back to the realm two, of yin and yang. The lung as the bridge between the realms of ten thousand and two. This comes from chapter forty-two of the Daode Jing: “Two begot three, and three begot the ten thousand things.”[1] The realm of three is the realm of the lung. The realm of three is marked by qi, which emerges into the universe as a result of the mixing of yin and yang. The lung is the master of qi. Mixing the appropriate amount of yin to yang is a sensitive process and the lung is the perfect candidate to due to her skills of xiangfu, 相 傅, and zhijie 治節.

Finally, the Yijing further contributes to this cosmology of the lung. It ascribes the eleventh hexagram, tai, 泰, to the lung. In this hexagram, the pure yang trigram for heaven has come down to the lower position, and the pure yin trigram for the earth is raised up on high. A healthy lung enters the realm of two, of heaven and earth, and mixes yin and yang perfectly.

Qi and life are created, there are no problems, and great prosperity follows. Alfred Huang explains tai, 泰, as a picture of a person standing with arms and legs wide open. Between the legs is “running water proceeding forward smoothly with great ease.”[2] This image reminds us of zhi, 治, also containing the radical for water. By following these symbols and seeing the sheng, or generation cycle, quietly implied, we learn one final lesson about the lung, its destiny.

After floating patiently in every direction it returns us to the singularity of the ocean. This is the way of the teacher, the governor, the acupuncturist and the lung.

[1] Tsu, Lao. Tao Te Ching. Feng, Gia-fu. tr. English, Jane. tr. Vintage Books, 1997. New York, NY. Chapter 42.

[2] Huang, Alfred The Complete I Ching. Inner Traditions, 1998. Rochester, Vermont. p117.

The post The teacher, the governor, the acupuncturist and the lung appeared first on Deepest Health.

Note from the author, Mauricio.

Kimberly Brown, a fellow contributor to Deepest Health, recently reviewed a book I’d been meaning to read for a while now, Zhang Yanhua’s Transforming Emotions with Chinese Medicine. I was inspired to pick it up from the shelf and am now halfway through the book. I’m really excited about some of the subtler, albeit very important, distinctions that Zhang draws about the way that “emotions” and emotional disorders are conceptualised and treated by Chinese Medicine in China.

It is deepening my understanding of things I heard my lay-daoist teacher speak about many years ago, back when I was in school. This post represents a bit of my own understanding of what is actually going on when approaching treatment of illness with a strong emotional-affective component from a Chinese Medicine perspective. Being one of my favourite areas of clinical work, I hope to write more on this topic when I finish reading the book.

Feel free to comment and add your own opinions and experiences in this regard.

At the heart of the healing work of Chinese Medicine is the fundamental assumption that what we in the West term “body” and “mind” are actually one same thing.

At essence an affective, somatic, and physiological construct that is at once a tangible manifestation and a self-aware, reflective learning process.  There is a very famous passage in Chapter 8 of the lingshu that says “All disease is rooted in the heart” — in Classical Chinese Medical thinking, “heart” and “mind” are synonymous. The rest of that passage goes into detail about what sorts of illness arise from a person’s emotions and states of mind, as well as putting forth several ideas about how the cognitive process works, and how apprehension, comprehension, and interpretation of experience happen for us humans.

Photo by Izabelha – 2005 – http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Izabelha

In the West, we who study Chinese Medicine learn about this fundamental characteristic early on, as part of our introduction to Chinese Medical theories, and are fascinated by the idea of being able to treat a person as a whole.  Unfortunately, in practice very few of those ideas find practical application. Part of the problem is, regardless of what we’ve learned in class, the idea of separateness between body and mind is deeply entrenched in our Western minds.

Our clinical orientation is mostly towards treating “physical” illness, and very few of us receive any training in counseling or other forms of approaching the affect-mind of our patients. Many Chinese Medicine doctors I’ve met over the years keep an eye out for the emotional component of their patients, but they assume that it must be getting dealt with, secondarily and almost as an afterthought, as an extension of dealing with the “real” somatic manifestations of the disease.

However, in my opinion, it is precisely this connection which makes Chinese Medicine so valuable and effective in creating and maintaining health: its ability to understand and treat all kinds of pain, regardless of its origin.

Although Western Medicine is finally beginning to warm up to the idea of connection between body and mind, the prevailing understanding in the West is  quite removed from this Chinese concept of a real continuity between emotions and physical manifestations of disease.  Most of the time doctors pay little more than lip service to the idea.

In the eight years since I left school and went into private clinical practice, I’ve consistently come back to this issue of really addressing the emotional component of illness in every case.

Thankfully, I was exposed to a very old tradition of Chinese Medicine that emphasized 情志病 qingzhibing treatment.  I also got relatively far into the practice of a style of 導引 daoyin that delves into something that I’d never heard before: the idea that emotional trauma and pain are located in the physical body, and can be brought to consciousness and resolution through physical exercise and awareness practice. Armed with these two tools, I’ve been relatively successful in working with patients who’ve been willing to include their emotional experience in their treatments. I’ve often approached the actual emotional issues at hand with “talk therapy,” and then incorporating that knowledge and awareness in the treatment with needles, herbs, and so on.

This is treacherous territory for any Chinese Medicine practitioner in the West. It requires stepping back and reassessing the situation from a different perspective; one that forces the confrontation of the lived experience of the patient, pretty much on its own terms. However, there are rewards to this. I’d like to share with you some of the main pointers that I follow in incorporating this kind of “emotional awareness” into my treatments. First is my observation that, in terms of the real, embodied experience of a patient, the “cause” of the discomfort makes little difference; pain is pain.

Pain is at once a Universal and a personal experience.

Each one of us has experienced pain at some point in our lives, and it is guaranteed that we will continue to experience pain many more times while we’re alive. Chapter 13 of the daodejing says: “Accept misfortune as the human condition… Misfortune comes from having a body. Without a body, how could there be misfortune?”

We can talk about our pain, describing it in detail, and other people will have a more-or-less clear idea of what we are expressing.  Likely because they have experienced something similar at some point: stress, past wounds, trauma, loss, insults, accidents… However, no other person really “understands” our pain. We’re all alone in there, and this reality can be very difficult to grasp when working with another. The second thing that becomes clear is that responses to pain are unique, as many and as different from each other as the people who experience the pain. These responses are part of what gives us our sense of identity: the way we respond to our pain tells us who we are.

In Buddhism and other Eastern traditions, this is known as “suffering”: the organisation of a person’s identity around their pain.

These responses do not occur only in the mind. According to the Chinese Medicine school of qingzhibing that I studied and mentioned before, a person’s perceptual interface (that is, the place where the mind interacts with its surroundings) is located in all of the body’s tissues. Those knowledgeable about five-phase correspondences will recall that thought and worry are related to the Spleen, which is in turn related to the flesh of the body.  This is important. In these terms, the body and its sensations become a practical key to access the emotions during treatment.

Unwinding the body’s tension — or habitual holding, to borrow from bodywork terminology — should have some real effect on the emotional manifestation while simultaneously relieving any somatic distress. In my experience, this happens quite frequently in treatment, provided the patient is made aware of their emotional distress going into the treatment. This makes sense, since we Westerners spend so much time “in our heads” already.  It simply blows me away how ubiquitous emotional components really are in patients’ experience of their disease. The fact they don’t bring it up more often is due quite simply to their own, culturally-bound assumption that it is something separate that needs to be addressed elsewhere.

It is crucial to approach the patient’s pain respectfully, compassionately, and empathically. It must be done gradually, so as to comprehend (inasmuch as possible) the relationship that the patient has with their body and their pain. Opinions and judgments are irrelevant and useless. In fact, they can actually be detrimental. Pain exists because it is the only response that makes sense: in my experience, all cases of illness or suffering involve a relationship of the patient with their experience that manifests at all levels — physical, emotional, mental, even spiritual.

More importantly, the physician must maintain the continuity of physical pain, postural habits, emotions, and identity in mind at all times.

Unless it is approached this way, the patient’s suffering cannot be resolved. Why is this? In my opinion, it is because of what the daodejing says, namely, that our “misfortunes” arise from having a body. Actually, everything about being human is a function of embodiment. The body isn’t a “vehicle”; it is what and who we are. We are our bodies; we also are all of the manifestations, internal and external, of those bodies. This is why we all, consciously or unconsciously, demand at all times “proof” that what we are feeling in our subjective experience is “real”, especially when it is uncomfortable.

Think on it. Access to the more subtle levels (emotional, “energetic”, spiritual) is always mediated by an embodied experience. What we perceive is immediately accessible to us. Moreover, it is incontrovertible: we feel pain, and we also know when it has been relieved (or not), regardless of what anyone else says. Therefore it is important to address the experience of pain and suffering in order to alleviate its manifestations effectively, and also to help the patient understand the root of the problem.

Out of the constant interplay of the medium (body) and the forces that move through it (emotions), arise our thoughts and interpretations.

Our consciousness is the emergent function of all of these together, and cannot exist divorced from any of them. It is at the interface of these phenomena that the Chinese Medicine doctor can work his craft and truly attain the ideal of “holistic treatment” that addresses physical, emotional, mental, and other, more subtle levels at once. From this perspective, it behooves us as Chinese Medicine practitioners to look for the places where body, emotions, and thinking meet to create the unique phenomenon of life that presents itself before you.

Our job in this context is to aid manifestation and resolution, rather than “fixing.”

The post The emotional body in Chinese medicine appeared first on Deepest Health.

While there are other business programs out there, I think what I offer here at Deepest Health is unique.

We take our time (it’s a year-long program).  We talk about the inner and outer games of business (you know it’s more than marketing tactics, right?)  We weave in discussions of the 12 organ networks and other classical Chinese symbolism without being ridiculous about it.  We dive into personal organization and productivity.  We look into emotional literacy and self cultivation.  And, yes, of course we do all the heavy lifting around finances, facilities, insurance billing, marketing plans, legal issues and more.

It’s more than a business course – it’s a whole life chinese medicine business training program.  It’s going to be a great time, it’s a great value, and pre-registration is open until 1/29/13.  Premium options available in limited quantities.

The post Chinese medicine practitioners : don’t learn business appeared first on Deepest Health.

I’m a huge dork.  I geek out about Chinese medicine – herbs in particular – yes.  But, maybe even more frequently – and certainly for a longer period of time – I’ve been geeking out about a field of interrelated skills and knowledge-bases that I like to summarize as “business.”

Let me be clear, I’m no serial entrepreneur.  For many years, all I wanted was a nice University job.  The actual work of running a business seemed tedious to me – so I avoided it.  Yet, even then, I was honing the skills that today serve me as the owner of three businesses.  I learned how to research, how to study, how to organize myself and best utilize my time.  I learned to talk to people, to speak in public, to get to the root of my own insecurities, procrastination and trouble.

Then, when my wife began her journey to become a massage therapist, I started to look into helping her create her business in that profession.  Suddenly, my teenage years running cottage businesses out of my suburban home came back to me.  The sales background of my biological father and the service industry background of the rest of my family came into focus.  I started to enjoy it.

Then, while in school and while maintaining a robust and happy family life, I started Deepest Health.  I had already been blogging, and learning a ton about it, at that time – going through training on and offline.  I learned about building websites, about branding and logos, about blogging software, about search engine optimization, about newsletters and how to avoid burnout when running business online.  I had a crash course in taxes, in maintaining books, and all those other little details that frequently threaten to derail small businesses.

Early in my Chinese medicine education, I realized I was going to have to run a Chinese medicine business of my own.  So, I set about geeking out about everything I needed to know to be successful in that venture.  I read so many books!  I took every Chinese medicine or holistic medicine based business course I could find.  I was an intern with Heart of Business for a year.

I continued to work with “general” business materials on a variety of subjects.  Then, I got to work building the clinic itself – carefully, deliberately, and with a fair number of mistakes mixed in.  Combined with what I had learned running Deepest Health, things were frankly easier than I expected.  But, as you probably know, nothing in business is “easy,” so there was plenty of learning to do as I got on my feet.

Now, my businesses are at momentum.  I teach the business curriculum at NCNM.  Things are going pretty well.  Yet, I still have bumps and bruises, and I continue to reach higher, to try to do things more efficiently, with more balance.  So, I guess, I’m pretty qualified to talk to people about this stuff.

But that doesn’t explain why

For a long time, I’ve wanted to be something more than myself.

That’s a pretty hard thing for me to admit.  I have so many amazing people around me – particularly in the world of Chinese medicine – I’m always wishing I was as smart as my friends and mentors.  Their facility with Chinese language, their body work prowess, their keen senses for picking up little things in their patients.  I strive to bring my skills up to snuff, and long for the day when I’ll be able to live in China, to up my game in that seemingly critical way.  In the meantime, I have to admit I’m always a little envious of the incredible people around me.

Ruminating about this over the New Year holiday, I realized something.

While learning more medicine and even Chinese language is very important to me, obsessing over that actually serves to make me neglect my true gift, my true passion.  What I want to do, almost more than anything professionally, is to help other people get over the overwhelm and angst they have around building a career in Chinese medicine.

So many brilliant students and practitioners are brought to their knees by the details of running a business.  They don’t know how (or even whether) to get started.  They don’t know where to turn.  There are so many resources available.  So many missteps possible.  Many of us just throw in the towel, and abandon the medicine that we loved for so long.  That’s really sad to me.

And I think I can help.

So, a new course

I thought I would do something really simple.  Just tactical guides on simple topics – how to start a blog.  How to bill insurance.  Stuff like that – simple – to the point.  I know that many of you would like me to do that.  But, I just can’t.

Because this thing we’re all trying to do is SO MUCH MORE than tactics.  It’s so much more than simple moves.  It’s more than implementing a few sales techniques and building a newsletter.  I’ve seen people throw away buckets of money to learn the latest online marketing techniques or practice management strategies.  For a few, this works.  For many more, it is time and money wasted.  They trip up over some other element of business, or cannot figure out how to make point A connect to point B to point C and onward.

What is needed is a holistic solution and real support around navigating the terrain of business.  That’s what I’m here to offer, that’s what burns in me to give.

You can sign up for the course interest list by clicking this link and filling out the form.

There, I’ll release the details of the course, including cost and timeline.  Pre-registration will begin early next week (January 21) and the first module of the course will be released on March 1.  In order to make this sustainable for me, and allow me to give the highest quality possible instruction, I’ll need to reach a minimum registration threshold, like many University classes.

So, if you’re interested, sign up for the list and watch your email so you can register as soon as it is time.

I’m excited to see what this will bring

The post Being successful in Chinese medicine business is SO much more than business appeared first on Deepest Health.

Appreciating each of these universes for what they offer, and allowing them to co-mingle in your brain, is – in my estimation – a critical success factor in becoming an excellent Chinese herbalist.

In this article, I’ll reveal the first stage of information gathering – using a favorite herb as an example. In many ways, this first step represents the “must have” information that most every student gets to know early on in their Chinese herb education.

As helpful as the information below is, the unfortunate reality is that few go beyond this in their study of Chinese herbs.  You’ll find at the bottom of the article a mindmap you can download. This mindmap not only lays out this information, but also indicates the places where this data can branch out into other aspects of the Shennong method, as well as deeper study about foundational concepts in Chinese medicine.

未 Wei – Flavor

Right off the bat we have a place where deep education is possible – maybe even necessary. Briefly, we must remember that the concept of flavor is more than the sensory experience of taste. It references directionality, can be related to biochemical properties, and is a typical example of ancient Chinese “shorthand” – communication of a huge amount of information in a tiny character.

Further, there are many ways to understand what flavor “means” in terms of its relationship to the five elements and, thus, the five organs and everything else embedded in the system of five. We also often see differing understanding of the flavor of herbs as the medicine undergoes the normal scholarly process through time. One text might say an herb is pungent, another says it is bitter. These are fascinating points to explore.

In this case, gancao is unambiguously sweet.

We see this assignment through all the major texts, and I’ve not run into anybody so far who has a significantly different understanding. What does this mean? Well, we’re lucky in that there’s also not too much controversy around the concept of sweetness. Sweet is generally affiliated with the earth element, and thus the earth organs and their domain.

This is one simple way to work with flavor information. However, from reading into texts like the Shanghan lun and the Neijing suwen, we can uncover deeper and deeper layers of information about flavor. We might run across passages that tell us things like:

“Of qi and flavor, pungent and sweet effuse and disperse and belong to yang” (Suwen 5)

“When the liver suffers tightness, swiftly eat sweet to moderate” (Suwen 22)

There are dozens of passages in the texts that refer to the flavors of herbs, and scholars discuss their meaning and power to this day. One recent elaboration, by my friend and colleague Michael Givens, can be studied in the fine little herbal handbook for the Year of the Snake, called – appropriately – “Snake Oil.”

So, again, each bit of information about a Chinese herb can become a jumping off point from which we can deepen our understanding of medicine. I prefer a balanced approach, never getting mired in any particular piece of information, but allowing each to unfold and flourish and intearct with the others.

氣 Qi – Nature

The other fundamental piece of information affiliated with Chinese herbs is the nature, sometimes translated as “temperature.” Again, even this simple concept can become rich with even a small amount of consideration. Does the nature refer only to some thermal property? How does it relate to yin and yang, and how do these yin and yang facets relate to the flavor? Is the thermal nature within the herb itself, or does it have something to do with the interaction between the patient’s body and the herb?

We see a range of qi from cold to cool to neutral to warm to hot.

In gancao’s case – the verdict seems to be that it is neutral. When it is mix fried, as in zhigancao, it is often thought to be warm – as most mix fried herbs tend to be.  This herb, then, is unlikely to aggravate either cold or heat conditions – making it suitable for a wide range of situations.

Photo by Eric Grey 2011

Categories

This is one of the first thing most people learn about a Chinese herb – what bucket does it belong in? Humans are categorizing animals. We like to know what belongs with what – it simplifies understanding and remembering. Unfortunately, in my experience, categories can be misleading. A person who learns an herb as “heat clearing” often has a very difficult time thinking of it as having any other significant properties. This can become a real barrier to practitioner development, and results in negative outcomes for patients.

So, while I think it is important to learn categories – just as with all the rest of this information – it is one piece of the puzzle.

Resist the urge to over-simplify.

There are lots of categories available. Those available in the standard herbal textbooks, like Bensky’s ubiquitous Chinese Herbal Materia Medica, are the most commonly known. Examples include “Pungent, cool herbs that release the exterior,” and “Herbs that drain fire.” Sheng/unprocessed gancao is listed in the category “herbs that tonify the qi.” This, of course, tells us a lot about what physicians have used gancao for through the years. Just knowing that, we can have a basic sense for the types of situations where we might employ the herb.

But for the love of all that is holy – do not stop there.

The Shennong ben cao jing, which we will discuss shortly, has its own system of categorization. It lists herbs relative to one another as upper, middle and lower class. While this is an arbitrary classification, reading how the masters of our medicine thought of this concept can be instructive. This text also refers to herbs as coming from a particular class of thing – herb, wood, fruit and so on. This is a fine way to connect to the herb as a living thing, if only a little bit.

Gancao is listed in the Shennong ben cao jing as a superior class herb.

Herb is a rather broad category that includes the majority of the herbs in the text, which says little about it except that it is not a “wood”, mineral, animal part, fruit, or a member of any of the other categories. Being a superior class herb means it is non-toxic, suitable for taking long term, and of great utility in the project of “nourishing life” as opposed to simply treating an already existing disease.

神農本草經 Shennong ben cao jing passage

Continuing with our discussion of the Shennong ben cao jing – it’s always good to read the passage associated with the herb and add it to the growing pile of information we are gathering.

味甘, 平,無毒。主五臟六腑寒熱邪氣。堅筋 骨,長肌肉,倍力,金創 ,重尰 ,解毒。久 服,輕身、延年。生川谷。

Translation generously offered by Sabine Wilms:

Gancao: Sweet, neutral.  Non-toxic.  Governs evil qì of cold and heat in the five viscera and six bowels.  Hardens the sinews and bones, grows flesh, doubles the strength, treats incised wounds and swellings, and resolves toxin. Taken over a long time, it lightens the body and extends the years.  Grows in valleys with streams.

There’s a lot of information in each line of the Shennong ben cao jing. To begin working with it, you don’t have to be a sinologist who can call up the whole historical record and contemplate the intricacies. Already, just by reading the simple English translation, you get a sense for the herb. The more lines from the Shennong ben cao jing you read, the better you’re able to see patterns – these patterns are very important in classical Chinese texts, but it is not required that you comprehend the ins and outs completely before you benefit!

Gancao has a very broad range of application, as we can see.

It is related to all the organs, both cold and heat, it has both tonic (generating, strengthening) and clearing (resolving) powers. It has adaptogenic/nourishing life properties. In fact, Gancao has far fewer specific disease types mentioned in its line relative to many other herbs. Its power comes in its wide scope and lack of conflict with any particular organ system. These are just a few of the things you could take from the line – perhaps you can find more?

Botanical lineage information

Gancao is known as Glycyrrhiza uralensis, and is differentiated from the more common Western form of licorice, Glycyrrhiza glabra. Both are members of the Fabaceae family – also known as the pea or bean family. This family includes a huge variety of plants, many of them edible and/or medicinal. With this simple bit of information, you can do a lot of valuable exploring. Look into the species – what other types of licorice plant are there? How do they differ? Look deeper into the Fabaceae family – even such a large grouping can yield interesting facts.

While I’ve never had much success gleaning any real medical information from knowing these bits, it does help me to “know the plant” in a relational way. I feel that I understand it more as a living thing, which gives me a greater connection that increases familiarity and thus ease of use. But, there is plenty more to take from looking at the plant as a plant – outside of human classification schema.

Characteristics of the plant

Learning more about how the plant grows, and where, under what conditions, with or without other plants, and so on, can be INCREDIBLY valuable. We’ll go into more depth with this in the future, but I always like to begin with the most basic characteristics of the living form.

Gancao is a plant that grows a lot below (underground) and a lot up top (leafy!) but the connection between is relatively tenuous. The plants have a feeling of top or bottom heaviness. This makes me think that the plant has a “strong center” – it is able to grow strong despite the visual appearance of flimsiness. The roots are tough, and spread like crazy, this is a plant that clearly loves and thrives in the earth element.

You might think all plants are this way, but there are plenty of Chinese herbs I’ve grown (especially those that are channel unblockers or that treat the lung and/or taiyang organ systems) that clearly enjoy spreading through the air – creating only the barest root system necessary for survival.

These simple observations may seem TOO simple. But, again, the increase familiarity which can never be a bad thing. They can also be effective scaffoldings on to which we build more complex information – helping in recall and in making connections between disparate elements.

Critical classical Chinese herbal formula

Before we wrap up this review of the basics of Gancao, one more bit of information. While I like to do an in-depth study of the formulas that each herb are involved in, I always like to have an immediate sense for the main formulas the herb is involved with. As a person who loves formula science, it gets my brain churning right away if I review this information. As a student new to studying Chinese herbs, it can be valuable to do this – even if you don’t feel comfortable with formulas yet.

Gancao, of course, is in virtually every classical Chinese herbal formula. In fact, it can be more interesting to look at the formulas that gancao is NOT in. For now, though, we’ll note one important formula  where gancao plays a starring role. By learning these formulas at the beginning of our investigation, we have clinically relevant information right off the bat as well as developing a deepening understanding of the single herb.  In this case, the formula happens to be named after the herb – or rather it’s honey-fried version.

炙甘草湯 -  Zhigancao tang

Click here to be taken to a page discussing Zhigcancao tang  in some detail, including dosages, boiling instructions and some nice photos!

You can download this simple mindmap for Gancao

What’s missing?

You might ask – where are the “herb actions?”

Frankly, I don’t spend much time with those. The information above is enough for me to get started, and the further exploration I’ll reveal in future articles obliterates the need to oversimplify herbs into a few bullet points. For me, describing Chinese herbs that way is similar to trying to describe my wife or daughter in a couple of bullet points. Sure, I could explain some features of those two important people that way. Sure, that might be helpful sometimes. But, if I was “teaching” about these people to someone who was unacquainted with them? No. Instead, I would use those types of bullet points in the company of others that know them well already – as a way to simplify a conversation or task. Same is true of herbs.

(Note: There are some other ways to understand “action” – but here I’m talking specifically about the actions (and indications) referenced in standard herbal texts.)

You might also ask – what about “channel affinity?” Again, this is a concept I don’t find to be particularly helpful.  It can be helpful for students asked to learn hundreds of herbs and differentiate from them.  The idea can be part of an overall guidance system to lead you in the right direction when studying.  I find, however, that the information about channel affinity is too inconsistent, lacks stable classical referents and can be incredibly misleading when students start out in clinic.  There are so many other wonderful sources of information – I just don’t see the point in working with this.

In the next article, I’ll detail the results of my latest sensory exploration with gancao.

This will include results from tasting the herb by itself in a variety of preparations as well as the herb in a couple of simple combinations. I’ll also note some combined results from various groups of students I’ve worked with over the last couple of years to give a broader perspective.  I hope you’re enjoying this series so far!

It’s helpful to hear your thoughts – if nothing else it helps me to know that people are reading.  Leave a comment below discussing your initial thoughts about gancao, or perhaps a funny gancao story.  You can also check us out on Facebook and share your thoughts there.  Thank you!

The post Exploring the Chinese herb Gancao 甘草 – Licorice – Fundamentals appeared first on Deepest Health.

Can you observe time?

Not directly, I suppose.  But you can observe the patterns of time as they influence the world around you.  You can watch the periodic nature of birth and death, sprouting and flourishing, patient symptoms, business changes and everything else.  As Chinese medicine practitioners, we are called to be observant of nature and – in particular – nature’s cycles.

My friend, colleague and hero Brandon Brown teamed up with two of my favorite people on the planet - Christopher Thombs and Michael Givens – to bring the world something pretty amazing, the aforementioned Year of the Snake classical almanac and its herbally oriented companion, Snake oil.  Amazing as these offerings are, they may bewilder the mind and confound easy use – particularly for those who have little background in classical Chinese calendrics!

Thus, this podcast.

After many months without a podcast, we emerge refreshed and ready to take on the Year of the Snake.  Brandon and I sat down in my newly appointed office to discuss the meaning and purpose of the almanac, how watching the cycles of energy as manifested in nature can be beneficial to all types of Chinese medicine students and practitioners, and more.  Don’t wait another second – listen to it today.

If you like the Deepest Health podcast, and hope I will do more, would you do me a favor and rate this in the iTunes store?  Just click this link, then click on “open this podcast in iTunes” and near the bottom of the page you will see the place to add your rating/review.  Thank you!

The post Deepest Health Podcast 23 – Year of the Snake / The Power of Observing Time appeared first on Deepest Health.

Founder’s note:  Here’s a brief book review from DH contributor, Kimberly Brown.  We’re going to be offering a lot more product & service reviews on the site from now on, so Kimberly’s contribution is quite timely!  If you follow a link in a review on DH, very often we will get “credit” for your purchase – helping us to expand our offerings here.  Thank you!

I recently ran across a book that caught my attention. It’s the type of book that doesn’t necessarily jump out off the shelf at you. Rather it was the type of book that continued to cross my path in conversations, bookstores, and idle thought enough that I finally had to have it.  Finally, I got my hands on a copy of the book.

My experience in a nutshell?  The material therein transformed the way I approach mental health in my practice.   I am glad I took the time to seek out the text!

The book is Transforming Emotions with Chinese Medicine by Yanhua Zhang. Within the confines of Zhang’s textbook, he interprets the seven emotions with clarity and terminology derived from Chinese medicine’s most fundamental philosophies. I would say that he possesses a keen understanding of mental health and outlines ways to achieve harmony for patients. Through the course of his book, it became easier to see how both practitioner and patient can understand the effects of emotions on the physical body and, in turn, learn more adaptive ways to achieve optimum health.

I am a practitioner of Chinese medicine and a poet to boot, so you could say that I enjoy words and how—when placed with appropriate context—words can be used to heal. And as a result of this book, I began to listen more closely to the emotive speech of my patients, finding subtle clues in word choice and body language. As one might imagine, happier patients tended to be healthy and overly angry or sad patients had a tougher time of things. For some of my other patients, emotions quite literally ruled their lives, and they existed timidly in their angry, makeshift worlds.

After observing through Zhang’s transformative lens, my patients and I began to unravel the roots of emotive force and how one could achieve balance in a world that can, at times, be a little heavy-handed.

In various contexts, we discussed topics like the potential effects emotions can have on the physical body, and how if left unchecked some emotions can cause a great deal of harm. We would talk about our own simple observations of emotions in daily routines. We would retrospectively recall instances when emotions flared or when they lingered a bit too long. We talked about techniques to cycle through to more supportive and productive emotions where breathing and concentration methodologies tended to supplement the dialogue.

Most importantly, we placed emphasis on self-awareness and honoring the natural cycles of emotional rhythms.

Patients who used this approach were able to achieve health through a greater awareness of their own emotions. For those patients who were at the mercy of their emotions, these conversations felt like handing them the reins to their own psyche and saying, “Here, Buckaroo, you guide your own horse for a while.” Overall, patient satisfaction improved.  If you are in search of well-written strategies to bolster mental health, this text affords such an opportunity.

The post Book Review : Transforming Emotions with Chinese Medicine appeared first on Deepest Health.

Founder’s note:  Another post from Mauricio Quintana, who is now formally more than a guest.  He will be a regular contributor to Deepest Health, and will soon have a bio of his own to share.

My previous post for Deepest Health was a blast to write.

It reminded me of how much I’ve come to love this medicine for its underlying guiding principles, particularly those that relate to the Techniques for Fostering Life, or 養生法 (yangshengfa). Today I’d like to go a little more in-depth on this topic, and reflect on what I believe to be the crucial idea that guides the work of the Chinese Medicine Doctor. This idea is a guideline for personal cultivation, the most accurate measure for success in clinical work, and the ultimate yardstick for success, happiness, and realisation in life. Bear with me, this is going to be fun.

We’re going to flip yin/yang on its head.

The Chinese character 生 (sheng), which is in the phrase yangshengfa, refers to the vitality, birth, and growth of all beings. It is a highly stylised drawing of a little plant, with the ground and roots, stalk, leaves, and even a flower or fruit on top. This character clearly reflects the view of the ancient Chinese about life: we exist between Heaven (yang) and Earth (yin), and health requires a balance between these two complementary and polar opposites. Their energies move around us and within us, but this balance does not come about on its own.

Each of us creates his or her destiny through their complete participation in their own life.

“Fostering Life” (yangsheng) is the highest ideal of all Daoist practices, whose purpose is health and longevity. Many of those practices are part of the life of cultivation of the Chinese Medicine doctor, such as meditation, qigong, diet, and even the prophylactic applications of therapies like moxibustion, massage, and herbology. The famous Sun Simiao laid down in written form a lot of these, which likely were already ancient by the time he wrote his encyclopaedic Emergency Prescriptions Worth A Thousand Gold, which I’ve talked about before. The common denominator of all these practices is the intention to foster optimal conditions for life to flourish.

Following the analogy of our little plant, we need:

• Enough soil and water, i.e., ways of receiving yin energy. This means eating properly and getting enough rest, relaxation, and sleep.
• Enough growth and change, i.e., ways of expressing yin energy. This refers to finding enough challenges and goals in life without losing our sense of freedom.
• Enough leaves to catch the sunlight, i.e., ways of receiving yang energy. This is accomplished by finding enough companionship and intimacy in our lives, while also allowing us to enjoy periods of being alone.
• Enough flowers and seeds, i.e., ways of expressing yang energy. We need to get enough exercise, space to express our feelings, ideas, and activities in the world, an perhaps even exploring our spirituality.

Did you notice how often I used the word “enough” for that explanation?

It is because this is the crux of the matter. How much (or how little) is “enough”, exactly? In today’s health-conscious world, we find tons and tons of guidance about how to lead a “healthy” life. We who seek to help people by the use of Chinese Medicine are frequently doling out such advice: eat like this, exercise like that. However, regardless of how good our advice is, as the current so-called “health crisis” in industrialized countries shows, our advice frequently falls flat on its face and fails to produce the desired results.

In my not-so-humble opinion, the reason for this is that we don’t know about “enough”. There isn’t a lot of advice out there on how to determine “enough”, just on how to do more. Even when the advice is “don’t do this”, our collective cultural assumption is that you should take that “not doing” as far as it will go. We even go as far as labeling foods, activities, and lifestyle choices as altogether “good” or “bad”… In my opinion, this kind of thinking is exaggerated, because underlying it is still the concept of “doing more”.

Now, anyone who has even a passing knowledge of Chinese philosophy knows about the concept of yinyang. What is yinyang? I think that the most appropriate way to think about yinyang is as a standard measure of quality, describing complementary, polar, opposite aspects of a given something. What this means in plain English is that in order to talk about yinyang, we need to know three things: first, what is the phenomenon (the “something”) that we’re describing; second, what aspects of that phenomenon we are talking about; and third, how are those aspects related. This is important.

The ancient Chinese philosophers who developed Chinese Medicine tell us that when things reach their extremes, they turn into their opposites.

When we in the West talk about self-expression, or relationships, or eating and exercising properly, the underlying assumption is that of making things better, bigger, or more. Too frequently we forget that there is also benefit in doing worse, smaller, and less. We learn from our mistakes, and also from uncertainty and confusion. Boredom spurs creativity. Illness lets us recoup and grief and suffering bring us to look at things in perspective. My question to you, dear reader is this: can you conceive of these seemingly “negative” aspects of life as also necessary and complementary to the whole of *your* experience?

We’re talking about what constitutes a human life — any human life.

The daodejing says that we should “accept misfortune as the human condition”. Why? Because the misfortune that we experience is as much a part of our experience as the joys and pleasures we experience. It is a necessary outcome thereof, even. Each of us has to find the measure by which all of these aspects are fulfilled and manifested in the world, and here’s the real secret: no two answers are the same, and they are all correct.

So, how do we know what is enough? Can anyone tell us how any of these aspects work for us, individually? I don’t think so.

Each one of us has to make this decision.

Enough is up to you.

The post The wisdom of enough in Chinese medicine appeared first on Deepest Health.

As you know, I teach Chinese herbs both here at Deepest Health and also at my alma mater, NCNM.  I teach differently at both places, but in each scenario I try to drive three things home:

1.  Quality of understanding is more important than quantity of herbs known

2.  Sensory & energetic engagement with the herbs as plants (or animals, or minerals) is at least as important as data

3.  Classical information, particularly that from the Han dynasty and previous, trumps anything that’s been revealed over the last 75 years

We have fun with Chinese herbs, we explore them, we get to know them.

You know, relationally.  It’s a wonderful experience, probably even moreso for me than for the students, and incredible projects are produced.  The projects are less common with the online courses, mostly because I’ve not found a way to effectively encourage students to take part.  In the live class at NCNM, the projects are required.

These projects delve deeply into a single Chinese herb and seek to understand it using both analytical and creative faculties.  At NCNM, I require students to stick with a single herb all year.  It becomes their best friend and confidant.  Well, sometimes.

Want to see some examples of student projects?  Just click here.

What you find on the page of student projects is just a bare snippet of all the amazing work that’s been done in my classes.  I hope to share more as I get more permissions from creators.  If you’re a student of mine, reading this, and are interested in sharing your work with the world, let me know by email!

In case you need that URL again – click here to be taken to these incredible Chinese herb student projects.

The post Look at what students learning Chinese herbs can create! appeared first on Deepest Health.

The survey indicates that people want to see more basic information – more stuff about acupuncture and herbs – more digging into patho-physiology.  To be fair, plenty of people also wanted to hear more about the history of Chinese medicine and popular debates within the field.

But, those wanting the basic, practical information outweighed everybody else 2 to 1.

But here’s the interesting thing – when we offer that sort of information we don’t get much back.  Few, if any, comments.  No emails.  No surges of traffic.  No increase in sharing across social networks.  The information is posted to the blog (or elsewhere) and simply seems to disappear into the ether.  So, while people consciously desire that type of information, it doesn’t seem to be what MOVES them.

That movement is what energizes us, as content creators, and also what helps create interesting conversations and continue to build our community.

Things are different when we offer a podcast or blog post that really digs into what it means to practice Chinese medicine.  We get comments, emails, bumps on social media and enthusiastic conversations among people we see in person here in Portland.  The same goes when we discuss how to use technology in Chinese medicine, self-cultivation for Chinese medicine practitioners, business tools and tricks, reviews of materials and so on.  But, ostensibly, that’s not what the readers want to see.

What gives?

Are the readers of Deepest Health confused about what you want?  Or is it that the content that is asked for, but not responded to, is valuable but not worthy of interaction?  Or something else?  I’m interested to know your take on this seeming contradiction.  If what we want is to build a thriving, interactive, engaged community discussing classical Chinese medicine online – what should we do?  How should we interpret these various signs, whether survey results or blog comments?  Please, even if you’ve never commented before, scroll down to the bottom of the screen and give your two cents.

Anyway – it was valuable information

From the basic demographics (we’re an international community) to understanding more about the types of practice you’re in (most of you use acu-moxa and herbs equally, but there are a LOT of bodyworkers out there, too) it was a very valuable experience.

And there were winners!

We promised a drawing, and a drawing we did – we used a random drawing service and drew two names.  Each of these folks will receive a Deepest Health course of their choice and a Chinese medicine themed grab bag of various things we have accumulated over the years.  Fun, right?  If you’re interested in learning more about the drawing methodology – please contact us.  If you didn’t win, do not despair.  There will be more opportunities.

Tara Danloe and Alexis Goldstein are our winners of the DH 2012 Annual Survey Drawing!

Congratulations from the whole Deepest Health team!  Oh, and don’t forget to comment to let us know what you think about the contradiction discussed in this post… it’s easy to comment and no registration is required.

The post Building a Chinese medicine community – survey results, and winners! appeared first on Deepest Health.

Founder’s note:  This is a guest post by Mauricio Quintana who writes and shares about his diverse interests and clinical skills over athttp://thewanderingdragon.net.  You might want to pay particular attention on Wednesdays, when he posts specifically about alternative medicine.

I don’t practice Chinese Medicine.

Sure, it’s what I do for a living. My website says so, as does the shingle outside my clinic. Make an appointment, and you’ll get treatment for what ails you. And the treatment will provide relief quite frequently and effectively, or so I’m told. I have a ream of papers hanging from my wall saying that I have spent the last ten years of my life learning it. I love it. But it isn’t a “practice”. I am not a “practitioner”. Allow me to explain.

When I went to school to become a Chinese Medicine doctor, one of the courses that I was the most skeptical about was yangshengfa, which translates as “Techniques for Fostering Life”. We spent the entire time talking about proper sleep, diet, and exercise; the seasons, the movement of planets, the sun and the moon and the way they affect us were all discussed at length. I thought it was a waste of time. I wanted to learn acupuncture, herbs, the works. Gimme the stuff that heals people, I thought.

All the nonsense about diet and exercise seemed to me like useless arcana.

Who lives that way? No one. This is the real world, right? We need to adjust the paradigm, bring these techniques into the modern world where they’re useful.  Right?

Maybe. Concomitantly, I had had a passion for the martial arts since long before I started studying Chinese medicine, so when I found out that my History of TCM teacher also taught martial arts at a nearby park in the mornings, I signed up. His knowledge was nothing short of encyclopaedic, and he was always interspersing his classes and lectures with references and snippets that intrigued me: classical Daoist quotes, cooking tips, stories about his calligraphy teacher, and the way to drink tea in the morning.

My martial arts practice changed. Not only did he make me reconsider and relearn everything I thought I knew, my history teacher cum martial arts instructor (now also one of my closest friends) kept changing around what we did in class, explaining that this or that qigong form was more appropriate for the season, and giving us special things to do at sunrise, sunset, or at equinoxes and solstices. The results were always interesting, and thus I kept doing whatever I was told. Autumn turned into Winter, and then into Spring, and the yangshengfa lecture passed. However, what I was doing was becoming more and more interesting.

That spring, I got sold into trying out a cleanse developed by another one of our teachers, a lay-Daoist who had been one of the founders of our school. I read the manual that he’d written and was even more intrigued by the way in which he wove together Chinese medical theories with pretty down-to-earth dietary and lifestyle advice that was coming from modern Western scientific research. It was the hardest thing ever, completing this 4-month program, but by the time I finished, I couldn’t believe the change. I felt healthier than I ever recalled feeling, lost a ton of weight, and understood some of the things that yangshengfa lecture was talking about.

It started to dawn on me that I was shoulder-deep in Chinese medicine.

Eight months into this, I injured my knee very badly and had to stop practising martial arts. I was in pain, but mostly I was conflicted. Trying to get treatment for my knee through the infinitely bureaucratic Canadian Health system would be a nightmare of paperwork and annoyance. Further, I’d seen people get orthopaedic treatment for knee injuries before, and was non-plussed by the results, to say the least. I was also in the middle of learning acupuncture techniques and convinced that TCM could heal all. (This is the “kids, don’t try this at home” part of my story)…

So, I decided to get only Chinese Medicine to treat my knee. Partly by volunteering to be the dummy for things like blood-letting and through-needling in the labs, and partly by getting treatments from both the Dean of my school and the student clinic, I pushed on. On my own, I practised what qigong and daoyin techniques I could, and gradually I entered into a long, patient relationship with my knee that lasted for another eight months. Then one day it didn’t hurt, and I realised with a mixture of concern and glee that I couldn’t remember the last time it had hurt. Without so much as a warning, I headed out to the martial arts class the next morning.

My teacher was happy to see me, and we pretty much picked it up where we left it off, with the agreement that we would stop the moment my knee started hurting. Amazingly, it didn’t. My teacher was almost as impressed as I was, but not only because of my pain-free knee. “Wow,” he said. “You really know your legs now”. I couldn’t make sense of this statement for a very long time, but I did spend a lot of time paying attention to my legs over those eight months: how my knees tracked over my feet, how I stood habitually, and what I was doing whenever it started hurting.

I had taken up the practice of standing meditation a few months before, with the commitment to do it every day, no excuses, for five years (a gift from the ever-taunting lay-daoist guy I mentioned). Yep, I had come to “know” my legs through this process, and miraculously, my knee healed. It hasn’t hurt since. Back then I realised for the first time, that I wasn’t only studying this stuff.

Between the dietary advice of the program, the cooking tips and the exercise and meditation, and my knee, I was actually “doing” Chinese Medicine pretty much all the time.

The last two years of my Chinese Medicine schooling I remember as a constant struggle to learn as much as I could from my acupuncture teacher, a man whose technique and scholarship are beyond compare and who a lot of the people at my school were intimidated by. He was cryptic and annoying; he replied to questions with questions, and was remarkably strict when reviewing our treatments at the student clinic.

I admire him to this day; at the time all I wanted was to be as good as he insisted everyone studying at his school should be. I expected being grilled and put on the spot (which happened many times); I expected being ridiculed (which he saved for a particularly special occasion).  What I didn’t expect was what he said to me when I graduated:

“the person who achieves academic excellence in this field is not the one who reads the most books or has the most perfect technique, but the one who best embodies its principles in all aspects of their life”.

I was floored.

I still practice daoyin a few times per week, and standing meditation every day (eight years and going on strong!). What I’ve learned hasn’t been so much the result of what I’ve read or absorbed from the books or the lectures, the continuing education seminars or workshops, but how these things come into play while I’m actually doing them in the clinic, and how much they make sense to me in my own body, in my own life. Sometimes, helping out another person is mediated by needles and herbs; other times, some dietary and lifestyle advice will do. I carry my needles everywhere I go (a bit of a drag when I fly in airplanes these days), and regardless of whether I actually do anything, I observe almost every interaction through “Chinese Medicine” eyes.

I don’t think that any of my teachers explained it to me in as many words, but I learned from them and these experiences that a lot of people who study TCM in the West do so through the “let’s get the useful part” approach I described earlier. However, I think that the real value of Chinese Medicine is that it has an orientation, a guideline, that goes beyond just clearing symptoms and curing ills.

There is a way of doing this that implies a deeper commitment, an acceptance of the principles of this science/art/practice into one’s life that allows better understanding.

Sun Simiao

Sun Simiao (孫思邈), the seventh-century hermit who is nowadays considered “the Ruler of Medicine” in China, had this thing about Chinese Medicine being more than just a concern with offering treatments for specific diseases with a set of proven remedies. Rather, he postulated that “Great Physicians” were those who understood the relationship between the Universe and the human body through their own embodied experience. He advised, in his text “Great Physician’s Professional Practice” (大醫習業 da yi xi ye) that, in addition to learning exhaustively about acupuncture, moxibustion, pulse diagnosis, herbs and formulae, the “Great Physician” should know omen-reading, the calendar, numerology, astrology, and the yijing.

As if this weren’t enough, Master Sun advised his reader to “wade through the General Literature” and thus learn poetry, history, philosophy, Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism. Other chapters of the encyclopaedic Essential Prescriptions for Every Emergency worth a Thousand Gold (備急千金要方, bei ji qian jin yao fang) – which contains the “Great Physician” admonitions – give advice on physical and sexual cultivation, both intended for the medical practitioner to apply in his or her daily life as a way to “treat disease before it arises”.

Quoth master Sun: “if a person’s virtue in actions is not abundant, even if they constantly take elixirs of jade and pills of gold, they will be unable to extend their longevity”.

For me, taking up Chinese Medicine as a life-path was a very long process, one which is still very much in progress.

However, I’ve recently come to the realisation that I am not interested in a “professional practice” that presents TCM as a product for easy consumption. I think of myself not so much as a practitioner of a technique, but rather as a living example of it. How well I am able to mediate that exemplary nature with “real, everyday life” is the more compelling question, and one which I find new answers for every day.

I have written elsewhere about my proclivity to become involved in other people’s processes; the truth is that, in the role of the healer, we cannot enter an exchange with a patient without being changed ourselves. Sun Simiao points the way: inasmuch as we become insightful about these theories and techniques (as they become embodied realities), we can become able to spot and realign the disharmonies that are at the root of others’ discomfort. We do this, again quoting from Master Sun, first by subtle means (exercise, spiritual practice, meditation, sex, and breathing); then by modifying and adjusting diet, and only as a last result through interventions like acupuncture, moxibustion, and medicinals.

We embody Chinese Medicine in order to practice it for the benefit of others. This is why I say that I don’t “practice” Chinese Medicine. I live it, and in so doing attempt to inform others about what it can do for them, and for us all.

The post The Way of the Chinese Medicine Doctor appeared first on Deepest Health.

My baby Gancao plants

One of the happy side effects of being a Chinese herb teacher is that I get to learn more about Chinese herbs.

As I prepare for my latest teaching opportunity, I find myself thinking a lot about herbs that are commonly overlooked in texts, in online interactions and in most college/university courses.  This includes less understood herbs like Fuzi, Caowu and Tongcao but, especially, extremely common herbs like Dazao and Gancao.  As a Chinese herb dork – I love them all.

Over the coming weeks, I’d like to share what I uncover about one of these stalwart friends – Gancao.

I’ll be sharing in the same order that I commonly work.  Even when I know an herb fairly well, when called to study it again, I follow well-worn paths of exploration.  These roughly correspond to much of what I teach in the Shennong course – so if you’ve taken that course it will all look pretty familiar.

In brief, I look into:

1. The basic data available about the herbs in standard Chinese herbal textbooks.  This especially includes comparing and contrasting different interpretations.
2. Information I can get – if any – from a live specimen.  This includes more esoteric stuff (plant spirit type exploration) but also simple botanical observations.
3. Anything I can learn about different preparations of the Chinese herb and other “herb industry” information.
4. Ecological and lifecycle information – learning how it grows, when, where, under what circumstances, and how that has changed over time due to cultivation and habitat shifts.
5. Information from as many classical Chinese sources as possible.  I typically limit myself to Han dynasty texts and anything I can get from Sun Simiao.
6. Notes and conversations with my teachers as well as patient data from my own records.
7. Sensory exploration from touching, tasting, looking at and playing with the herb in various forms.
8. Biochemical information as well as any interesting scientific studies into the plant and its constituents.
9. I’m fortunate to have lots of Chinese herb related student projects to look through – sometimes these yield interesting information I wouldn’t have found elsewhere.  This is particularly true of creative interpretation type projects.
10. Perhaps most importantly, though I list it here at #10, is information that comes from the formulas/relationships that the herb finds itself in.  Of course, in the case of Gancao – that’s very many indeed.  Partly, I like to look at the dynamics of the formula, but also noting if it’s in a lot or just a few is information in and of itself.

Other bits and pieces of information come up, depending on the herb.

What do I do with all this information?

Well – I put it in my database (of course) for one.  While I’ve posted EXTENSIVELY about Evernote, and still use it about a hundred times a day, I’m mostly using Devonthink right now for medical information.  I go back and forth as software evolves.  I like Devonthink for its artificial intelligence features – they make finding connections just that much easier, accelerating my learning process.

Having this information in my database (and synced to my iPhone & iPad) allows me to access it before it’s memorized, and also to remind me in those frequent cases that my memory simply doesn’t serve.

But, more than that, I study this information.  My study process for a Chinese herb (and most other htings) at this point has four major pieces:

1. Reading, sitting, tooling around : This is the fact finding part.  I research, but I don’t push too hard.  I read, I engage, I write down what comes to me.
2. Filling in the gaps : This is a more intensive process.  After the first phase is done, I look around for things I don’t understand or wasn’t able to find at all.  For instance, if I learned a ton about an herb, but couldn’t figure out where it was typically grown, I’ll go hunting.
3. Writing or teaching about it : Whether my unwitting peers and family or my slightly less unwitting students, I like to solidify what I’m learning by trying to tell other people about it.  Sometimes that’s on the blog, sometimes it’s on other private online projects, and sometimes live and in person.
4. Organize everything : As a final step, I review what I’ve learned and try to codify it into something concise and informative.  Sometimes, that’s a single sheet of information, but more typically it’s a small digital “booklet” of information.  These are revised as more information comes in – another place where the database comes in handy.

During this whole process, I’m usually using the herbs in practice of course.  My initial education, including the many extra curricular seminars I enjoyed, were more than enough to make me competent.  My years of practice since then have added to my knowledge and ability.  But, there’s always reason to study.

Particularly for a youngin’ like me.

So what’s next?

In the next post, I’ll divulge all the information that falls under “basic info” for me.  This is the stuff I get from books and other standard sources, though not all of it will be familiar to everybody.  Then, I’ll go from there.  You’ll learn with me.  To be fair, Gancao is an herb I know quite a bit about, and have growing in my garden.  So, some of what I will be doing is just going back over information – reorganizing – adding – reconfiguring – enlivening.  But, it should be fun.  I’ll not be able to share everything publicly – some information was bequeathed to me in lineage confidence – but most everything is fair game.

Sounds like fun, right?

The post Simple beauty – Exploring the Chinese herb 甘草 / Gancao / licorice appeared first on Deepest Health.

However, what if someone asks us for advice as to how to treat an illness without these techniques in mind?

After all, the modalities of Chinese medicine are still foreign to a large percentage of the potential western patient population. The question then becomes: How can you translate the strategies and tools of Chinese medicine into meaningful applications for these curious, yet reluctant patients?

Over the past years, I adopted a role as a roaming practitioner of sorts who stuck to the dusty roads where access to health care is minimal.

My patient base has ranged from migratory workers to backcountry ruralites and many others who were hesitant to accept Chinese medicine because the modalities were too exotic for their taste.  Adding to the situation, my access to things like needles and Chinese herbs was limited.  So, I had to think on my toes. I focused my efforts on translating Chinese medicine into accessible tools and applications for my patients. To do this, I had to  understand what aspects of our medicine are most easily understood and applied by a patient base in areas of our fair country that know very little about the practices of Chinese medicine.

The result was a distillation of strategy, where I would forego the more alien techniques in favor of Chinese medicine’s philosophy of pattern recognition.

This seemed like a rational, step-by-step approach for timid patients who sought to understand some of the basics behind our medicine and, in some cases, this strategy was a gateway for further insightful discussion. I relied most heavily upon the Eight Principles of Chinese medicine and the Six Excesses, which I employed with my patients to introduce healthy change in their lives.

The Eight Principles are based upon four pairs of opposing patterns that are used to describe constitutions for our patients and, if taken a step further, to diagnose qualities of disease. The Six Excesses delineate the characteristics of patient constitution and diseased states even further into categories based upon conditions of wind, heat, cold, dampness, dryness, and summer heat. These concepts when combined, on a very basic scale, are rather useful for the type of patient who sits on the fence about Chinese medicine, yet wishes to learn more about the patterns of health and disease when applied to his or her own personal wellbeing.

Typically, in a relaxed setting, I would explain the contrasting and complementing elements of the tai ji symbol and how I perceive this pattern in my everyday life.

Once the tai ji is understood by the patient, I explain the remainder of the Eight Principles and Six Excesses over a course of time that seems reasonable and digestible; most importantly, I describe the concepts in terms that are appropriate, relatable, and applicable to each individual patient.

Perhaps it was my patient-base, as the individuals that I worked along side were tough as nails on the survival scale, so their motivation for optimum health was rather high. Or maybe it was because access to knowledgeable resources was tremendously lacking in these areas and helpful, ongoing perspectives gave them personal power over their health that was not experienced before. For whatever reason, after my patients learned and began to understand the Eight Principles and Six Excesses in their own lives, their health showed marked improvement.

After a short while, these patients not only understood the theory behind these time-tested concepts, but also actively sought out ways to maintain balance on their own accord.

The most common personal practices to create health for my patients were based on lifestyle and nutritional changes, and, as we all know, any form of change can be just as foreign as therapeutic applications from afar. To soften my patients’ personal transitions, I emphasized perseverance and at the same time patience, two qualities that seem to out-win any unreasonable desires to obtain health quickly with little effort. Moreover, I kept an open dialogue with them about how the Eight Principles and Six Excesses have affected their lives in relationship to their maintenance of health.

After a while, their minds began to open to new ideas and concepts, flexibility entered their daily routines, and items like acupuncture needles and Chinese herbal formulas seemed less strange.

My patients had, on their own accord, created their own personal and dynamic relationship to their environment and health. Trust me, it was (and still is) a refreshing feeling too see them flourish so readily given a useful perspective from the taproots of our medicine.

What can you learn from this?

The next time someone expresses an interest in Chinese medicine, yet at the same time appears reluctant to sit shotgun for your treatment strategy, take a moment to communicate the basics of pattern recognition. The results far-exceeded my expectations, and (somewhat selfishly) I am happy that my patients require less and less of my expertise to maintain personal health. This means that I have more time to help others, and that I also have more time for myself and my own pursuits of healthy living.

The post Translating Chinese medicine into meaningful applications appeared first on Deepest Health.

Let me put my cards on the table: I’m a Guizhi type to a T.

The textbook “effeminate bookworm.” I’m thin as a rail, tend to have cold hands and feet, and you can see my heart beating through my shirt from ten paces. Mine is not what you might call a robust constitution; in fact, I have reason to suspect that coffee is to me what methamphetamine is for most people (an unreasonably strong stimulant with the potential to destroy families and melt faces). I am, shall we say, sensitive.

So it might seem strange for me to be writing about being a warrior. I mean, who ever heard of a skinny bookworm Hercules?

All I can say is that when the call comes, you answer.

And if you spend enough time barking up the healing tree and sniffing out the straight and narrow path of the Heart, you just might find yourself on the steep switchbacks of the way of the Gallbladder.

It’s a curious pair: the feminine, receptive, immaterial Heart (xin) and the vigorous, archetypically masculine, active and very physical Gallbladder (dan). They sit opposite one another on the organ clock, the Heart residing at midsummer and heralding the return of yin, the Gallbladder occupying the winter solstice position and initiating yang’s return. The Heart is yin within yang, the Gallbladder yang within yin.

As polar opposites, these two organs have a lot in common; just swap black for white, masculine for feminine, and you transform from one to the other. As with yin and yang themselves, the Heart and Gallbladder are interdependent. And as a pair they’re central–the organ clock’s vertical axis runs from the Gallbladder at the bottom position through to the Heart at the top. The verticality of the image suggests the meaning of the Chinese word zheng, uprightness. Who must be more upright than the noble lord (Heart) on the one hand, and the footsoldier (Gallbladder) on the other? And their uprightness is interdependent: the footsoldier relies on the lord to guide his mission just as the lord depends on the footsoldier for her defense.

The Heart-Gallbladder axis is a two-way street, and it can be a slippery slope as well.

Ask my friend L, who discovered this after praying for initiation as a healer–the way of the Heart, she thought. That weekend, she was bitten by a tick and contracted Lyme disease. Since then, the narrative of her life has taken on the contours of an epic battle. As the spirochetes wage siege on her body, she has had to discover and draw on deep reserves of strength and resilience. In the process, she is finding that she is developing the determination of a warrior–pure Gallbladder energy–alongside the compassion of the Heart.

The moral is not only “be careful what you wish for.”

It’s that health is not something we can take for granted; often it’s something that must be fought for tooth and claw. Most often, though, the enemy is within us, in the form of negative habit patterns of (in order of increasing importance) action, speech and thought. In order to help lead others towards their highest health, which is no different from alignment with their destiny, we must first face our own obstacles to cure.  And I don’t know about you, but in my experience these obstacles don’t budge easy.

As healers in training we are conscripts into the army of love, light and life; as such, we have to be what Chogyam Trungpa called “spiritual warriors.”

Whether you’re an effeminate bookworm or a barrel-chested titan, it takes the courage–the gall–of a warrior to grow into ourselves and put the healing mandate of our hearts to use. As the gongfu school where I’ve started training implies in their policy, whereby they only teach their system of tuina and craniosacral therapy to those who learn and practice their martial arts, if you want to come into the light, you must work through the dark.

In order to heal, you have to be willing to fight.

Jonathan Edwards

The post Warrior, Heal Thyself appeared first on Deepest Health.

Teacher always told me there would be days like this…

I’m a little dense at times, and unlike some of my more exalted colleagues, I find that the most foundational lessons are unlearnable to me through books, translation and the like.  Instead, I just have to get my hands dirty – living this crazy life – messing up and figuring out better ways to do the things I must do.  The role of metal, and the power of autumn, is one of those things I’ve had to learn the slow and dirty way.

In the spring, all full of life and promise and windy heat, I started about forty new projects.

Most of them fell away due to lack of feeding.  During this explosion of activity, I started to wonder whether Chinese Medicine Quarterly were something I wanted to keep alive with my scarce time and energy.  Personally, I believe it’s important to examine one’s commitments and make sound decisions about their importance.  I decided to let it lie for the summer, and see what happened.

What happened is simple.  As autumn approached, and the busy commitments of the flourishing yang calmed down, new writers came out of the woodwork.  One editor gracefully stepped down and another took her place.  Things started to coalesce.  The more I considered what we’d already done with the magazine, the more I realized that it was worth continuing.

It took that focusing, simplifying energy of the autumn to get my head straight.

So – we’ve got another issue for you.  It’s definitely the best we’ve produced so far.  To make things even more exciting, we’ve decided to drop the price on CMQ across the board – all the old issues and this new one, too.  Instead of $5.99, it’s only $4.99 for the digital copies.  Paper copies are still significantly more expensive due to the expense of producing something in paper that’s really worth buying.

I’m really excited about this issue and can’t wait for you to get your eyes on it.  I hope you’ll come back to this post and tell me how you liked it.  Even more, I hope you’ll be so excited about what we’re doing at CMQ that you’ll want to learn more about how to get involved.

Want to learn more about the issue and maybe make a purchase?  Please just click this link to be taken to the issue page.

The post The peculiar focusing power of the autumn appeared first on Deepest Health.

When I was working as a chemical engineer after college I had a boss who was fiercely brilliant and inventive. He was over 50 but had the mental flexibility of a teenager, and was armed with the knowledge base of a PhD who had decades of real world experience. Observing his process taught me the value of maintaining a constant curiosity about one’s surroundings, as well as the importance of having an adaptable mindset in the learning process. He was a fascinating character, having hobbies as varied as his technological areas of expertise. He enjoyed fishing, the ancient game of go (he was a childhood star), gourmet cooking, competitive tennis, and other interests too numerous to list.

One day, during one of his spontaneous pep talks, he told me in a thick Korean accent, “Whatever you do, it’s important to do your best because you’ll always learn something. No matter what it is, if you get really good at it, then you can become good at anything”. This statement rang true to me and shed some light on my experiences with creative pursuits and the commonalities that most learning experiences share. Everything informs everything else in a unique way.

As a student of Chinese medicine and naturopathy I’ve found that my learning process has been invaluably informed by my experience in other pursuits such as martial arts, music, and more recently, painting and calligraphy.

Just to briefly mention the obvious– the first benefit of having creative pursuits is simply having the outlet to offset the stresses of school. In a setting where the left brain, information-absorbing mode predominates, it makes sense that some right brain, creative output is necessary to maintain some balance. Many creative pursuits also directly facilitate relaxation via intentional movement and breathing, which then feeds back into the ability to study.

But in addition to these general benefits, I’ve found that each hobby I’ve pursued has contributed to my study process in unexpected ways. For example, the process of learning new music and committing it to memory helped me establish a memorization technique that works great for me– a specific protocol for rhythmic repetition and visualization.

I grew up playing violin and piano from kindergarten, then picked up saxophone in middle school, and upright bass in highschool. I learned that in order to memorize a piece of music, I needed to allow my mind to rest on a few things at one time, and be able to maintain a steady rhythm of recalling back the information. This rhythm would imprint the music into memory while also serving as a diagnostic tool. When the steady rhythm was broken, it indicated that was a spot that I needed to focus more on.

I use this method all the time when studying new information. If I can’t recall it in a steady, rhythmic fashion, I don’t really know it well enough.

Sometimes I will take a chunk of new information and repeat it on a loop in my mind at a steady tempo, and then on a larger scale, repeat those loops at a steady rhythm as well. I’ve found that in whatever setting of learning, the phenomenon of rhythmic regularity (or at the least, rhythmic awareness) can be a very valuable tool in engaging one’s being.

Rhythm and repetition were key components as I learned Taekwon Do growing up as well.  To progress to the next rank we had patterns that we performed during testing ceremonies in front of our instructors as well as friends and family. To pass, one had to execute these patterns at the very minimum with the right moves but ideally with a steady and graceful rhythm. From these tests I learned the value of rehearsal in the learning process. Learning a single pattern to this extent would require meticulous repetition over weeks or months.

Taekwon Do also taught me, among other things, the value of relaxation. When I first started training I marveled at the upper ranking students–how strong they kicked, how many boards they broke, how high they jumped. At the time it seemed to be all about gaining strength and speed. What I didn’t learn until much later was the yin component to this equation– Greater strength and speed requires greater relaxation. After 10 years of training, as I prepared for my fourth degree black belt test in college, I found myself starting all over again with the most basic punch, realizing all the different areas of tension I had been holding up until that point.

I believe this applies to the learning process as well–anytime there is a great feat of energy expenditure there must be a corresponding degree of relaxation.

In a physically or emotionally tense state, I find that I can barely do any studying, whereas some of my greatest learning comes when I am completely relaxed and in the flow. It is in these states that free associations can be made and visualizations spontaneously arise, which to me are some of the most helpful tools when learning new information. Painting and calligraphy have also helped my studies in this way. I picked up both in my third year at NCNM and they have sparked a fire in my visual imagination that I didn’t know existed.

Much of the material that we learn at NCNM is rich with imagery, whether it is depicting the different energies of the seasons or the subtle energy flows throughout the body. Associating the words in class to images in my mind (which sometimes then manifest as paintings) is helping me to gain a more visceral relationship to the material. I’ve found that calligraphy in particular has provided a bounty of advantages when it comes to studying Chinese medicine– not the least of which is just getting a little more familiarity with important characters and phrases. Although I am an absolute novice in terms of actual technique, this doesn’t prevent me from feeling a real bond with certain characters, almost as if they are people with whom I interact. Having this extra association has proved helpful as many of these key characters are repeated in different contexts within the classics.

On a more subtle level, the act of calligraphy also seems advantageous as a future acupuncturist in terms of the act of cultivating qi.

Oftentimes after spending some time practicing calligraphy, I find my hand coursing with blood, tingling with qi–the amount usually corresponds to how relaxed and how coordinated I am throughout my body. Generally, if I don’t have good posture, a deep and slow breath, or a focused mind, my calligraphy goes from looking amateurish to downright nauseating. Words from our school’s founder, Heiner Fruehaf, ring true regarding calligraphy and painting: “the brush doesn’t lie.” It is a direct indication of one’s inner state and therefore a priceless method of self calibration.

Recently, I had the blessing of meeting and studying under a calligraphy master in Korea, who promised to teach me as long as I learn the proper foundational technique which I had skipped over in my avarice to learn new characters. I spent 2-3 hours a day for 5 weeks, practicing just one horizontal brushstroke, which was admittedly very complex due to subtle twists and turns of the brush at each end of the stroke.
By the end I graduated to vertical brushstrokes, and he gave me a list of 8 characters to practice and show him when I returned in the winter.

When I returned and showed him my characters, I was confident that he would be impressed with my progress and see how much effort I put in. Instead he asked me if I had practiced at all, and then showed me the right way to do it again. Indeed, I saw that my so-called progress was essentially nothing and that without his guidance, I had lost the techniques I had learned over the summer. This was a great lesson for me, especially during a time in my life when there is great pressure to have the air of expertise.

I’m learning through calligraphy that no matter how skilled I feel at any point, I should be open to starting over completely from scratch and embracing the beginners mind in order to progress.

These are just some of the ways in which artistic pursuits have positively influenced my journey as new student of Chinese medicine. Looking to the future, I know that these experiences will be crucial as I transition from a student to a practitioner as well. As with any other field, but perhaps more so than conventional medicine, Chinese medicine seems to marked by a diversity of schools and philosophies. Some practitioners are strictly TCM, some are more bodywork-oriented, some practice Japanese style, some rely heavily on certain medical classics but not others, et cetera.

At our school, every single faculty member practices in a completely unique way and I imagine the situation is no different elsewhere.

Thus some creativity must be used to synthesize a unique clinical approach, or even just a coherent approach, considering that the basic medical classics now and then contradict each other. This context and feeling is very similar to my ongoing journey as a jazz musician– a music in which there are numerous contradictory schools of thought in terms of style. Swing, bebop, post-bop, free jazz, fusion, are all categories of jazz but are stylistically incompatible with each other, easily demonstrated if you were to assemble a group with one player from each style.

I’ve found that to grow as a musician, the best approach for me is to employ “relative absolutes.”

I try to be open to many musical truths while honing in on the truths that I find to be most compelling even when they are contradictory; I love Charlie Parker and Albert Ayler equally even though they play the saxophone with a completely different set of rules. In a field like Chinese medicine in this day and age, where it is rare for a student to learn strictly from one lineage or mentor, it seems that I have to take a similar approach; learning as much as possible from the doctors around me without being closed to others due to philosophical conflict.

My favorite era in jazz is the 1960’s, when players had the technical facility of the post-bop era but the desire to experiment and break free from that same technique. I find the music from that decade as compared to others most beautifully portrays the ability of the human spirit to transcend, recognizing limitations and growing beyond them. In the same way perhaps an important aspect of all artistic pursuits might be described as learning technique and, in the process of synthesizing an original approach, breaking free from technique. We are learning the notes and scales and styles of Chinese medicine at this point, but soon we will be confronted with the reality that we must produce a coherent, effective, and unique method of healing that goes beyond what we are taught in school.

Finally, being an artist has taught me important lessons in business and self promotion.

At this point I’ve had almost a decade of experience in organizing events such as concerts and exhibitions. I taught myself how to build a website and how to make fliers that are simple yet compelling. Through many failures I’ve learned about the importance of factors such as timing, location, and advertising to the success of a concert. The tools that I use to attract people to my artistic events are the same ones that I will be leveraging as a doctor as soon as I graduate.

I wish that I had the ability to articulate the deeper aspects of why I believe it’s important to pursue the creative arts, the more visceral feelings that propelled me to write this article in the first place.  I’ve laid out what I believe to be plausible arguments as to why one should take up these pursuits, but there’s no way to convey the actual feeling of how similar it is to hold a calligraphy brush and an acupuncture needle, or the particular “alchemical transformations” (as we say in school) that occur in one’s body when performing music regularly.

Regardless, it is my hope for both our profession as well as society in general that the creative arts will be integrated with other pursuits in a way that supports anyone’s creativity in any context. Everyone is an artist, whether they’d like to admit it or not- some just don’t recognize or neglect their art. Even the most seemingly dry pursuits can be approached from creative ways; the possibility for creative synthesis is everywhere, not just in some places. Given this, it makes even more sense that a profession like ours would benefit from a healthy dose of right brained activity.

Of course, there is always the danger that taking on too many hobbies will spread one too thin and prevent mastery of any one thing, as the old “jack of all trades, master of none” saying goes.

This other end of the spectrum is clearly just as, if not more counterproductive to the ultimate goal of deepening as a scholar/practitioner, compared to the student who doesn’t take on any creative pursuits. To this I have two responses.

First, it seems to be far more common for students and practitioners (people in general, really) to abandon what creative pursuits they once had when they were younger, than it is for them to be spread too thin because of creative pursuits- so this is generally less of a concern.

Second, this integrative approach is indeed challenging, one that requires feats of organization, adaptability, and focus in order to not fall victim to mediocrity in all areas, but that’s it is worth every bit of extra effort and will pay dividends not just as a practitioner of Chinese Medicine but in one’s quality of life in general.

Founder’s note: You may notice that Sunjae Lee is the writer of this post.  He’s also created some great t-shirts, now available at Deepest Health.  You can check them out by clicking this link.

The post Chinese Medicine and the Creative Arts: More than a Luxury appeared first on Deepest Health.

Even though farmers may be tired from the growing season, they do their very best to collect what will help them survive the darkest part of the year, shedding and transforming that which is not sustainable.

In this way, the entirety of the garden becomes efficient in its ability to grow more food. This form of seasonal transmutation is akin to that of a Chinese medicine practitioner who observes seasonal change, acts in accord, and thereby demonstrates to patients a balanced way of living. Much like farming practices, preventative medicine underpins the dynamic nature of the external environment and creates synergistic relationships to optimize bodily strength, and at the same time bolsters any bodily weakness.

Another farmer-oriented analogy, which I find to be a great way to relate concepts of classical Chinese medicine, is that of a seed: a rather genuine article and tangible item of sustainability. During autumn’s harvest, seed collection is at its height. A skillful farmer collects the seeds of the most successful plants, each which represents a direct and robust reminder of what has survived, and these capsules have the greatest potential to survive the following year. In essence, the garden is a pastoral canvas that becomes refined and redefined as the seasons dictate.

Harvest offers us all an opportunity to distill down to the essentials of life; to take stock of what resources are available.

It is now that we can consider what we would like to continue to pursue, and what other aspects of life can be better supported so that self-sufficiency and health are at an optimum. It is a time to streamline ideas and personal practices and to remove the excesses of the year, thereby fortifying our personal constitutions.

According to the Jieqi solar node this time of year is about Zhechong pei hu 蟄蟲培戶, a time when “Hibernating Insects Reinforce Their Shelters.” So it makes sense that when autumn draws to a close, as practitioners of Chinese medicine, we offer our patients skills and tools to reduce extraneous variables and to refine health at every potential level. Key concepts for our practices in medicine would include items such as dressing appropriately and eating foods that are nourishing to the body and spirit, which are essential to maintaining vitality for our patients.

A core concept that pertains to maintaining a good garden as well as optimum health is that of discipline.

Here with the context of a farmer’s life and the desire to sustain life through the winter months—a time when resources are naturally scarce in the external environment—motivation is a useful tool to get the job done. In a similar manner, a practitioner of health can assist patients plant ‘seeds of healthy change’, which will help shed and transform that which is not sustainable for our patients. Helping our patients prioritize personal goals ultimately gives our patients a more in-tuned and balanced approach to living. Keeping our patients balanced means keeping them healthy, and more likely to seek out healthier choices on their own.  This not only benefits our patients directly, but those around them as well. This idea is exemplified in Wilhelm’s I Ching, where he delineates the transformative progression of Hexagram 45 (Gathering) as it moves from its first position to the sixth.

As practitioners of Chinese medicine we are taught to remain in tune with the natural ebb and flow of our environment.

For me, the changes of our environment, and in particular the descending energy of autumn, is a form of refinement that goes beyond physical, the intellectual; it even goes beyond the esoteric. Instead it rests upon the ever present tangential, that which has the potential to rub you raw, if not to make you the diamond in the rough that you actually are.

I am not unlike the seeds that I collect from my garden: I am a product of my environment. And every autumn, I pare myself down again, distill my essence to that which is most important and that which somehow managed to make it through yet another year. These seeds represent my personal capsules of sustainability, as they have quite literally stood the test of nature’s hand.

The environment shapes our lives and refines our skills. Much like a farmer, I’ve learned that it is in my best interest to watch and participate in the environment’s patterns and act in accord. Autumn is a time where it is possible to observe what is viable and what is not. I’ve begun to harvest that which is abundant and remains important in my life, and leave behind that which is not.

Through this process, year after year, I gain a deeper perspective and have an opportunity to select what I will broadcast the following spring.

I’ve found this to be a worthy exercise, not only for myself, but for my patients as well. You could say that adopting the role of farmer has changed me in ways for the better. I’ve started to become a keen observer and participant in the game of life; I nurture viable seeds for my patients and myself and help to transform those aspects that cannot withstand the balance of nature’s scales.

To be a successful practitioner takes perspective and the ability to recognize patterns.

Harvest represents an excellent opportunity for us to participate in an annual and revolutionary change, and it is during this time that we can assist our patients through preventative and sustainable techniques. The changing of weather patterns are not unlike a disharmony caused by a diseased state and the conditions of the soil are more akin to a patient’s constitution than one might first imagine. Much like a skillful farmer, it is essential, as practitioners of health, to plant and cultivate beneficial concepts that will continue to grow in the seasons to come.

The post Reap What You Sow – A further meditation on Chinese medicine, harvest and farming appeared first on Deepest Health.

The symbols behind harvest expand beyond the literal context of gathering fruits from the former half of the year.

Harvest also marks a time of transition, which drastically affects the environment and, in turn, every one of our patients. Much of us are versed in the multitude of ways to create health for our patients with our herbal formulas and acupuncture techniques, yet what I’ve learned as a roaming garden gnome of sorts, is that harvest time gives us an additional, more powerful opportunity to change patient lifestyles and create sustainable avenues for the pursuit of health.

What I’ve gleaned from the word harvest, as a farmer and a poet and disciple of Chinese medicine, is that whatever you broadcast in the spring, be it plant or idea, if placed correctly, this will sustain you through the darkest part of our yearly dance around the sun. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, oftentimes, it is not so simple. Most of us tend to plant a lot more than we can manage, and this leads to unnecessary stress, a lack of personal focus, and, not surprisingly, an opportunity for pathogenic agents to affect our health.

With that being said, it can be hard to know where to start when one seeks to understand the heart of harvest time.

It can be even harder to find the right medium to transmit harvest’s essence to our patients.  Of course, this is critical, as the principles we use to govern ourselves as practitioners should also become teachings for our patients as they look for right relationship with nature and themselves.  In general, I find some of the symbolism from Chinese medicine  is difficult for non-Chinese patients to understand.  This is particularly true in rural parts of the United States and other areas undernourished by social health care systems. As a result, I consult our foundational Chinese medical and philosophical texts and look for classical counterparts in contemporary society to make the symbols more real-to-life for my patients.

The life of a farmer during harvest is a befitting analogy for practitioners of Chinese medicine because, much like a farmer, it behooves our profession to follow the successions of seasonal change.  This is particularly true during harvest time. This closing of an annual cycle comes second nature to a farmer due to the profession’s close ties to the rhythms of the sun, the resulting patterns of life and death, and the inherent and dynamic relationship between the two extremes.

This is not unlike the core principles and practices for Chinese medicine, which are elegantly outlined in the Daode jing, and in particular a verse lifted from Chapter 16:

“Everything flourishes; each returns to its root
Returning to the root is called tranquility
Tranquility is called returning to one’s nature
Returning to one’s nature is called constancy
Knowing constancy is called clarity.”

This is the annual time of year when discipline is at a climax and a farmer must work in accord with the seasons while discerning between that which is weak and that which is strong.

Farmers act in a manner with scythe in hand as they spend autumn’s days harvesting summer’s vegetation, all the while maintaining fledgling crops for the winter season. The goal is to have maximum amounts of viable fruits and vegetables cut, dried and on their respective ways to being eaten or preserved before the first frost. And here’s the kicker: frost is the absolute deadline for getting the act of ‘harvest’ all done, and the date for first frost is never fully known beforehand. In short: the task of harvesting contains a great deal work in a brief span of unpredictable time, so the farmer remains steadfast in his pursuits to gather the year’s yield, knowing that inefficiency will result in unfavorable consequences.

As a result, most farmers I’ve worked alongside tend to become more introspective in their work, letting the physicality of the tasks dictate their day, setting the timetables for eating and sleeping, thereby reserving strength through the farmer’s ever-present motto: Work smarter, not harder.

The Huangdi Neijing’s second chapter offers similar advice for harvest time:

“…The three months of autumn, they are meant to be peaceful and calm, the sky is high and the wind is rushing, the earth is cool and dry, go to bed early and get up early, follow the rooster’s life schedule, in order to keep the conscious stable and safe, and soften the autumn harsh energy, withdraw the emotion and mind to fit into the calmness of the autumn energy….”

Look forward to the rest of this post tomorrow…

The post Reap What You Sow – Chinese medicine lessons in farming appeared first on Deepest Health.

I teach Chinese herbs at NCNM, and every year I learn something new.  It’s gotten to the point where I’m actually doing a lot of research into how teaching topics like this has been done in various times and places.  I’m also engaging in plenty of coursework myself to see how others are doing it in the here and now.

I want to draw a picture of how Chinese herbs are generally taught, while suggesting how the picture may be problematic

Let me note at the outset that there are many, many fine herbs teachers in the world.  Some of them even get to teach some of what they are passionate about.  But, the sad reality is that the licensing situation in the US, economic pressures and a lack of any real encouragement for teachers to pursue new vistas in their teaching create an unsavory situation for all of us.
We’ll use a favorite herb of mine as a case study – Chaihu 柴胡.  You might be interested to read some bits and pieces of my take on Chaihu in one of my latest blog posts.  I also did a little video about Chaihu, if you’ve not seen it – go give it a look.  It’s worth your time, I think.  When you’re done, come back and read this.  I can wait.

Chaihu as typically taught in a college course

Most Chinese herbs courses at colleges and universities are required to cover something in the neighborhood of 300 herbs during 2-3 academic terms.  That’s too many, by more than half.  This is probably the reason that the following information is about all the average student will get…

• Name of the herb : Chaihu, bupleurum root

Strangely, many people do not learn the official scientific binomial name of the herb in question.  This causes real problems if the person seeks to do some additional research, say into biochemistry, personal propagation or even simply to learn more about it in the Chinese medicine texts.
Fortunately, Bensky does list the scientific name of the typical species, and a few other besides.  However, many people learn and remember one or another common names, which can cause confusion.

• Category : pungent, cool herbs that release the exterior

I never, ever teach Chinese herbs by the categories set out in the standard Chinese herbal texts.  Why?  Because the vast majority of our best herbs do not fit easily into a single category.  When students and teachers are seeking to economize in their teaching and learning, they tend to remember the category, the name and not much else.
In the case of Chaihu – thinking of it as a pungent, cool herb that releases the exterior will NOT help you to understand the vast majority of classical formulas containing Chaihu.  These categories are intended to simplify learning, but in most cases, it just further confuses the issue.

• Channel affinity : Gallbladder, Liver, Triple Burner and Pericardium.

Note that these are usually represented by their shortened forms (GB, LR, TB, PC) and almost never are interesting relationships pointed out (Shaoyang and Jueyin).  While one could argue that one is supposed to know this, the fact is that most first year herb students either don’t know enough yet or are never taught to note these relationships.
While I don’t agree that this kind of shorthand is actually helpful, it’s made even less so by the poor state of patho-physiological education in most Chinese medicine institutions.  (That’s why we’re teaching courses like the Essentials course on the Six Conformations).  When a student finds out that an herb “enters the Triple Burner” what on EARTH can this possibly mean to them?  How should they use this information in clinic?

• Flavor / Nature : Pungent, bitter and cool

Though most books and websites that list this information do so prominently, few teachers emphasize it and even fewer require memorization of the information.  Apart from that, there is almost no effort made to discuss what these concepts actually mean, the historical development of those concepts and disagreement about the flavor and nature of herbs through time.

Though a nuanced discussion of these issues would take a class all by itself, even a simple mention of the flavor in our foundational text – the Shennong bencao jing – would seem to be a simple addition to any class.

• Herb Actions

Herb actions are essentially short-hand for the most important things an herb does in the human body.  The Clif Notes version.  The sad part is that most of these are memorized as a list, and the larger theory about when and why these things happen is usually not addressed.  Further, this takes students far, far off the path of holistic understanding.  If you begin to think about herbs in terms of “actions” you are typically banished to “symptom” thinking.

At this point, the herb has the character of something like the shell of a new building.

A few walls, a ceiling, a floor.  Straight lines, an open box.  This can be ok – it’s open, it’s ready to be filled, it’s fairly simplistic.  In fact, from the perspective of many teachers and long-time practitioners, the information seems insanely simplistic.  So, it must be easy for students – right?
Wrong.  The reality is that this simple, bland structure often reaps more confusion – and given the sometimes deadpan delivery andpressure of testing – it can be too much to take.  Students drop out, do poorly, or zombie walk their way through.  Some enterprising individuals manage to fill the empty walls with color, to find sources of information that energize them.  Others come with pre-existing knowledge that keeps them inspired – they are excited no matter what they’re learning!

I created the Shennong Relational Herb Learning Method to share the way one enterprising young student (myself) solved the problem of loss of inspiration and interest in Chinese herbs.  Many who have gone through the course have enjoyed it, and people jump on board with the course to this day.

But, it’s not enough.

In that class, I talk about the method.  I talk about the HOW of learning Chinese herbs.  That works for some people, but not everyone.  Further, in my teaching of that course, I’ve learned new things and refined my own understanding of some particular herbs.  People both on and off the site have asked me to share this information, too.

I’m going to be doing just that…

Offering a single herbs course isn’t something that sounds very exciting.  Especially if you’ve already been through a university/college course in the topic, you might break out in hives at the mere mention!  But, I have a real passion for this – and I think I’d like to offer an online course about Chinese herbs that avoids all the deficiencies above, excites people about what they are learning, and puts the tools for actually applying this knowledge to real patient problems in their hands.

I’ll combine short, engaging lectures that cover sensory information, the best of Western science, visual aids, classical texts, clinical cases, botanical and ecological tidbits, exercises that appeal to a variety of learning styles, and interactive community building in a very reasonably priced package.

We’re going to do it differently – one herb clan at a time

I’ll build each modular course around a single herb family – a series of related herbs that work well together.  That way, students will be learning the basics of what they need to know to learn formulas.  People who already KNOW formulas will have a leg up and find that the single herbs blossom in their understanding as they understand further complexities.

If you want to learn some more details and get signed up – just click this link!

The post Why most Chinese herbs education doesn’t work appeared first on Deepest Health.

The thing is, I’m not sure how typical a student I am. 

I don’t really study per se; though I read plenty about Chinese Medicine and herbalism, I mostly do it out of interest, for fun. Sitting with Matthew Wood’s Earthwise Herbal or Huang Huang’s Ten Key Formula Families, hours will go by before I realize what’s happened; I once spent a whole evening watching one after another of our program guru Heiner Fruehauf’s Classical Pearls videos just because I was fascinated. I should have made popcorn. 

But as soon as a particular reading is assigned, I find myself unable to focus. I count down the printed-out pages, start skimming, soon give it up altogether as hopeless. 

I think I’m allergic to homework.

I don’t intend this as a boast; I’d no doubt be a better student if I spent more time with the material. I might actually know the GB and UB points on the scalp. But I wouldn’t want to risk contracting what I’ve come to think of as ‘studentitis,’ either. This epidemic ailment involves a reflexive tightening-up that seems to be the default response of so many students, in whatever field, when faced with the expectation that they’ll learn something. 

It’s an ironic response to stress, given that the end goal is presumably to internalize the information. It’s as if, faced with a large meal one is expected to finish, one’s opening move were tying a tourniquet around their throat. OK, weird analogy! But you see what I’m getting at. Tightening up around something won’t help it go down. What are we, in anaphylactic shock triggered by information? We should be hungry for the stuff.

Then again, it’s hard to maintain a sharp appetite while being constantly inundated by more and more sustenance. 

No sooner than we’ve chewed and swallowed one mouthful, another is on its way. Moving from one class to another, we’re stuffed with a sometimes incongruous assortment of knowledge. Chocolate covered cherries here, pickled herring there. Understandably, at some point during such a smorgasbord, nausea is bound to set in. The dreaded counterflow qi!

While you’re seated at the table, might as well relax and enjoy the stuffing. It goes down easier if you don’t fight it. Just let the jello slide down your throat. But beyond a certain point of saturation, the only solution I’ve found is to excuse oneself from the table a little early. Politely decline the seconds or thirds (or fifteenths) we’re expected to shove down at home. Take a breather between the fifth soup and the third entree, in the form of what my mom used to call a ‘mental health day.’ 

Back then it probably meant a morning of cartoons and maybe an afternoon at the zoo. Now it’s more likely to involve en epic brunch complete with bacon and bloody marys. But the idea is the same: stay away from school. Give yourself a chance to digest the weeks and months of accumulated information; at least finish chewing before heading back for more! 

Give your poor spleen a chance.

The post View from the Student Fishbowl: In Praise of Playing Hooky appeared first on Deepest Health.

Image by jayofboy (http://www.sxc.hu/profile/jayofboy)

Chinese medicine pop quiz: what do yin, yang, and qi have in common? I’ll give you a couple minutes.

All right, I admit–it was a trick question. Because from my point of view, the only thing yin, yang, and qi share is that they don’t exist. What?? Absurd! These are some of our most fundamental concepts, after all. But before you brand me as a heretic, allow me to make my case.

Does imagination exist? Does ephemerality? Of course they do–in a sense. In another sense, they don’t. There’s no “there” there. Nothing to point to, nothing to measure or to catch in the act. These are useful concepts, but let’s not let the fact that they are nouns dupe us into thinking they have tangible referents. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed this out in the mid 20th Century: that even as it allows for communication and conceptual thinking, the structure of our language traps us in a web of our own devising.

We name abstract ideas so as to pin them down and be able to talk about them, then convince ourselves these concepts have an objective existence. It’s a sort of circular reasoning.

I know only the smallest snippets of Chinese, but I would venture that the ancient Chinese, especially, had less of an issue here. The classical Chinese language’s fluidity between nouns and verbs must have instilled a conceptual fluidity as well. The thinking in the Neijing, for instance, is more associative than both English and modern Mandarin, and less materialistic. The ancients have bequeathed to us the inestimable treasure of a time-based medicine that focuses on change and transformation instead of fixating, x-ray like, on one’s physical state at a particular moment in time.  We risk throwing it away if we see this emphasis on change as a liability and insist on pinning everything down to a material form.

So what about yin and yang and qi? I don’t deny that these are essential concepts for us, and highly practical ones. That doesn’t mean that there’s such a thing as yin or yang, or indeed qi. They’re not things; these terms are best understood as descriptions of processes.

They have as much to do with time as with space.

Maybe this seems like pedantic hair-splitting. But I’ve recently become aware of just how much our unconscious materialist conceptions influence our understanding and, ultimately, our practice of the medicine. TCM talks constantly of “yin deficiency,” “yang deficiency,” and “qi deficiency.” I do not aim to ridicule these notions, as no doubt they can be useful clinically. But it’s worth considering what we’re really talking about. These terms can easily foster the image of the patient as a vehicle with separate tanks for yin, yang, and qi.

In this metaphor, the physician becomes little more than a technician, topping up whatever fluid is looking a little low. This picture is especially absurd when it comes to yang and qi, as these terms refer to specifically to immaterial processes. Yin can be understood as form, yang as function; in modern terms we might look to our metabolism and body temperature, what the Ayurvedic tradition calls our “digestive fire” (agni) as manifestations of yang. Seen this way, our yang–our level of vital warmth–can indeed by deficient.

But yang is not a fluid to be topped off, a tank that needs filling. Simply giving yang-tonifying herbs may not do the trick, since healthy yang relates to the functionality of the body as a whole. Perhaps we should hear the “yang” in “yang tonic” as an adjective: these are tonic herbs of a yang sort, as opposed herbs that tonify the yang.

Qi is in some ways a more difficult concept–and a topic for another article.

Suffice it to say that we might start paying more attention to the quality of the qi and less to its quantity. A diagnosis of “qi deficiency” should alert us to qualitative dysfunction at the level of the zang or the channels, not cause us to search for some way to “boost” the qi without taking care of the underlying disharmony. (The Nei Jing gets much mileage out of the word tiao, to tune or harmonize.) When obstructions are removed, the qi will flow. Each of us has the potential to serve as a conduit for as much qi as we could possibly need; my feeling is that the problem is never as simple as “there is not enough qi to go around.”

Analogous points can be made for the five phases as well. Calling them “phases” rather than “elements” helps remind us that they are steps of a cyclical process. and as such cannot themselves be “excessive” or “deficient.” I would go as far as to propose that we rename wood, fire, earth, metal and water “sprouting,” “flourishing,” “pivoting,” “gathering” and “storing.”

No one is likely to start talking about “sprouting deficiency!”

To close, most of the materialism so rampant in Chinese medicine is not the result of any deliberate ideological stand, just a by-product of our everyday, materialism-infused conceptions. This makes the situation more difficult to deal with, as it’s bound up with the very structure of our language and thinking. But re-examining our Chinese medical terminology offers us a starting point for moving closer to the roots of the medicine.

The post Materialist Thinking in Chinese Medicine appeared first on Deepest Health.

It was in September 2007 that I started blogging in earnest, though the site was technically begun long before that – in August 2006.  On this day, five years ago, I wrote an article about the importance of qigong.  Interestingly enough, I still have plenty to learn from that humble article.

When I teach the business class at NCNM, as well as when I talk to students and practitioners all over the world, I find myself repeating one piece of advice.  ”Write it all down.”  That goes for planning, but even more so for developing your knowledge.  You don’t really know something until you know what you don’t know about it.  You learn this most quickly by trying to explain what it is you think you know!  Not as complicated in practice as it sounds from that sentence.

Over five years of writing, and in the last 18 months, teaching about Chinese medicine – I’ve learned a lot.

Because of my success in accelerating my own learning process, I do often suggest to people that they start up a blog.  Many people have taken my advice, and still others came to the blogging Chinese medicine path of their own accord.  It occurs to me that I’d like to create a curated list of all the best sites related to Chinese medicine on the web.  I know most of them – but I’m wondering if you might know a few that I don’t.  If you would like to see your site, or someone else’s, on the list – please respond with the URL in the comments.

Deepest Health is still built on a foundation of free content.

With new contributors being added, and new passions springing forth all the time, there’s never a shortage of blog posts coming out.  We’ve got the podcast too, of course.  Now we’re getting into video (Danggui coming soon)!  We’ve given out various free bits and pieces via our newsletters, and hope to do even more along these lines.

Of course, as most of you have noted, we’ve started up with paid offerings.  That was a necessity – as we want to do so much with the site and need support to make that happen.  Everything about offering content costs money, particularly if you want to do a great job with it.  Chinese Medicine Quarterly is there, of course.  A new issue is coming later in the autumn after a slight delay.  Our courses are doing well – with the offerings expanding all the time.  I’m currently contemplating how to structure a single herbs course in a way that is both theoretically weighty and clinically relevant.

Anyway – to combine the spirit of the free content with the “help support Deepest Health” reality of the paid content, AND in honor of our approximate birthday as a site – we’re running a sale.

For the remainder of the week, all paid products are 25% off.

This includes the newly registering Six Conformations course taught by Brandon Brown and all of the rest of our courses.  It also includes all the issues of Chinese Medicine Quarterly!   If you’ve bought anything from us in the last week without this discount, just contact us and we’ll refund you the difference.  A gift is a gift.  To take advantage of the discount, all you have to do is type the word BIRTHDAY in the coupon field during checkout.  If you have any trouble, just contact support.

Thanks everybody – we’re looking forward to the next five years.

The post Teaching what you want to learn & a (sort of) birthday sale appeared first on Deepest Health.

While I’m not suggesting that everybody get a smartphone implanted in their heads, I do find that effective use of technology can increase connection and cut down on excess work!  Let me show you how you can stay updated with Deepest Health’s content without having to manually visit the site every day.

Reading the Blog

The Deepest Health blog is a pretty amazing place.  Years of archived content about Chinese Medicine, and more coming every day.  But visiting every day, checking for new content, is inefficient.  You may miss something, anyway!  We can’t have that.  You have two main ways to avoid this terrible fate.

1. Blog updates using an RSS reader

You do not need to know what RSS means.  Just think of it like a digital subscription.  All you need to do to get this subscription is use a little bit of technology that knows how to retrieve it.  If you want to learn more about how this works, I suggest you read this article.

The simplest RSS reader available uses your Google Account, and it is called Google Reader.  You can read all your favorite sites from a single webpage using this beauty.  And, if you log in to a Gmail or Google+ account, you will be able to easily select Google Reader from within that interface.  You can learn more about Google Reader here.

To add the Deepest Health blog to your Google Reader (or other software) just press that little orange button in the address bar.  It’s pretty simple from there.

You can also use one of the many available apps on the market to access your Google Reader feeds, or subscribe to feeds directly.  My favorite is Reeder on my Mac, iPhone and iPad.  It’s beautiful and so easy to use.

2. Blog updates via email

For those who just don’t want to use this RSS stuff, but do want to get immediate updates about the latest blog entries, we offer a blog subscription by email.  This is DIFFERENT FROM THE NEWSLETTERS listed below.  This is simply a copy of each blog article delivered to your email.  If you would like to get signed up for that, just click this link to be taken to the form.

Listening to the Podcast

I’m hard at work finding new folks to interview, and considering various ways to use audio to build community & engagement in our profession.  That’s a backhanded way of saying that I’ve been a little slow in my podcast release over the last 4-5 weeks.  That will soon be rectified.  Regardless, there are 20+ archived episodes, from interviews with great Chinese medicine practitioners to my musings about database software for Chinese medicine students and practitioners.  If you want to stay updated with the latest episodes, there’s are three main ways to do so.

1.  Use the blog update methods above

Each time a new podcast goes up, a new blog article goes up.  This is actually how podcasting works, though different websites implement it in different ways.  Anyway – if you stay updated with the blog content, you can easily stay updated with the podcast content.  However, you will have to listen to the blog episodes on the page, or download the audio file to your computer manually.  For some of you, this is ok.  It’s certainly functional.

2.  Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes and listen on computer or via manual transfer to a MP3 player (iPod or similar)

Our podcast is in the iTunes podcast directory, you can access the iTunes page by clicking this link.  If you press the “View in iTunes” button on that page, it will open iTunes and subscribe you to the podcast.  Depending on your settings in iTunes, you may keep the last few recent episodes, only one, or all of them.  Regardless, all the episodes should be available to you.

You can then listen to them from within iTunes, or upload them to an iPod or other MP3 player.  To learn more about how to do this, click this link.  (You may want to Google instructions for your particular type of MP3 player).

3.  Subscribe to the podcast using a “podcatcher” application on your Apple or Android device

If you have a smartphone or advanced MP3 player (like an iPod touch) you can use a podcatcher application.  Apple makes their own.  There are some for Android devices.  But, I use one called Instacast on my iPhone.  You simply follow the app’s instructions to add a particular podcast – most use centralized podcast directories to help you find the content you want.  Every time you open the application, it updates your device with the latest episodes.  So easy!

Watching our Videos

You may know that we just started releasing videos!  That behavior is only going to continue – even escalate!  We will, of course, be posting the videos on the blog, so being subscribed there may cover you.  But, you can also subscribe to our channel at Youtube.  It requires you have a Youtube account.  However, since Youtube is now owned by Google, many of you will already have the beginnings of an account there.

Learning about Courses

The simplest way to stay updated about upcoming courses is to subscribe to the individual course email lists.  Those lists are used to tell the stories of the courses, to help you understand the details, and to let you know when registration and other important events are taking place.  They tend to be busy near registration times, and quiet for the rest of the time.  You can unsubscribe at any time, there will always be an unsubscribe link in the email body.

We tend not to talk too much about courses on the blog, except in passing, so the email newsletters are really the best way to stay informed.

The Shennong Relational Herb Learning Course list

The Chinese Medicine Essentials Course list

Getting weekly wrap-ups of all the content, with a few bonuses

Aside from the course related email lists, we also have a “main” newsletter.  This delivers content to your inbox weekly.  Usually, I try to find a common thread among the various posts, videos, podcasts, Tweets and Facebook posts in the prior 7-10 days, and tell a story with them.  The emails are always informative, and occasionally entertaining.  You’ll even get a free “Treatise on engaged, rooted Chinese medicine” that I wrote during the relaunch process for the site, just for signing up.

Note well, though, that you will not receive notification of ALL THE SITE CONTENT with this newsletter.  You’ll miss stuff if you rely on the newsletter alone.  Most people find being subscribed to the main newsletter and also using one of the RSS blog update options above to be the best strategy.

If you want to sign up for the main newsletter – simply use the form in the sidebar of the front page (and almost any page) or click this link to learn more.

Social Media

I enjoy using social media, particularly Twitter.  Deepest Health’s official Twitter account is actually also my personal account, so there’s a mix of information there. We have fun, though.  The Deepest Health Facebook page is only for DH.com related information.  We do post notifications of content there, but we also share other stuff from around the web that may be of interest to our readers.

It’s also a fantastic way to interact with me, and in the case of Facebook, with other Deepest Health contributors.  Yet another way to bridge the distance between all of us.  Please do come and connect with us.

Whatever you do – stay updated!

This has been a long, and likely boring, post.  I hope you will make good use of it and stay updated with the site.  We really cannot do it without you – it’s the interaction that keeps us going.  So, watch for new content, leave comments, talk with us on Facebook and Twitter, and see how quickly new, informative content gets released.  Thanks!

The post Staying connected with Deepest Health – a primer appeared first on Deepest Health.

Remembering this can help us unlock all kinds of clinically useful information.

For instance, as the article linked above teaches us, when we see the number 5 – we can think of Earth.  On the other hand, when we see the number 6 – we think first of Heaven.  The number 6 is used in the context of Chinese medicine study when we are considering the 6 Qi & 6 Conformations.  It’s easiest to think of the 6 Qi as a Heavenly weather (or climactic) influences on the Earth.  These weather influences are microcosmically represented in the body as the 6 conformations.  These conformations, of course, have qualities that resonate with the 6 Qi.  It’s complicated – in many ways – but the basics are easy to absorb.

This system of six is incredibly powerful, clinically.

In fact, one of our best existing classical clinical manuals - the Shanghan lun - is structured around this system.  The entire text uses the 6 Conformations as its premise in diagnosis, explaining how each layer has distinct but sometimes interacting symptoms. What is made clear as you read the text is that the six conformations are not independent, but rather part of a system that is constantly transforming. The key to using the 6 Conformations in clinic is understanding them in this way – not as static layers or, even worse, just pairs of channels.

In many ways, this is the most essential topic for students wishing to enrich their understanding of classical formula prescribing and the biggest gap in most modern TCM education. Even the later Warm Disease theorists (in the Ming Dysnasty) state plainly that knowledge of Cold Damage (and thus the theories of the Shang Han Lun) are the most important to know and understand – this of course includes the 6 conformations!

In my opinion, this theory is the most engaging and interesting of them all.  Once you see these different layers in the body, it really informs your practice of internal medicine.  It’s one of those things you cannot “unsee.”  You wouldn’t want to!  Symptoms that seemed disparate and confusing suddenly seem clear and connected.  Treatment philosophies that, previously, wouldn’t be considered are suddenly the obvious way forward.

Eric provides this example from his own clinical practice:

I had a patient come in on a referral from another practitioner, a friend, who does not use the 6 conformations in her practice of Chinese medicine.  The patient, a woman in late middle age,  was presenting with a fairly standard peri-menopausal pattern, with particular emphasis on unrelenting hot flashes that would be accompanied with intensely red and itchy eyes.  She also had a tendency to have serious emotional outbursts, and had a feeling of having no “barrier” between herself and other people, especially emotionally.

The practitioner, feeling a quite weak, deep pulse and a pale, flabby tongue had started to use formulas that enriched the kidney yin, also incorporating a formula to treat simultaneous high blood pressure. But she found it difficult to find a formula that would incorporate the menopausal symptoms, the red eyes (which she identified as being chiefly a liver wind problem), the blood pressure, the emotional problems and various other, smaller, symptoms the patient was experiencing.

When I felt the pulse, I did sense the “weakness” that the practitioner described, but the pulse was what I have learned to describe as “verging on expiry” as is discussed in the Shanghan lun, associated with the formula Danggui Sini Tang.  Thus, I started thinking about the patient’s case as a Jueyin disease.  This perspective allowed me to look at the pericardium, liver, blood and other associated tissues and layers, which brought all of the symptoms together in a way that made sense to me.  I proceeded with treatment along those lines, and the patient had no hot flashes within 5 weeks of taking her formula regularly.  Thanks, Zhang Zhongjing!

Interested in learning more about this important theory?  Want to learn how to put it in practice?

Click this link to learn more about the upcoming six conformations course and to register.

The post The clinical usefulness of the six conformations appeared first on Deepest Health.

I considered having a bunch of guest speakers come to the class.  After all, I have only one perspective on this business thing – despite my diligent efforts to read widely and learn often.  Wouldn’t it be great – I thought – to get a bunch of practitioners in to talk about how they do things?  Unfortunately, getting practitioners lined up for class visits is difficult.  Everyone is busy, and schedules don’t often sync up.

It occurred to me that I could use my old friend the Internet to solve yet another time-space discontinuity problem.  Ask a variety of practitioners questions and serve them on the Deepest Health site, and let everybody benefit!  I’m still looking for folks to contribute their wisdom – do get in touch if you would like to be included.  I’m particularly interested in hearing from people outside the US, or using unusual business models, or with life experience that is out of the ordinary.  But, anybody can apply.  :)

If you would like to read through the questions and answers, learn more about the practitioners who contributed, and learn more about getting involved – you can get started by visiting the Chinese Medicine Business – Questions Answered page.  Then come back here and let me know how you enjoyed it!

The post Collective wisdom about Chinese medicine business realities appeared first on Deepest Health.

So, we thought, let’s make some Deepest Health videos!  The survey (click here to take it if you haven’t already) reveals that a lot of people are interested in video content – and I love the medium – so why not?

So far, we’ve made two – with many more to come.

We’re starting out with herbs, but will branch out eventually.  We’re hoping that these are fun and accessible enough for anybody to enjoy, and compelling enough for you to share – on Facebook – on Twitter – with your friends in the halls of your school – by email to colleagues and so on.  Please feel free to comment at the Youtube channel itself, or on these posts.

We’ll be archiving all the videos on our new video page, which will eventually need to be redesigned to accomodate all the content!

Hope you enjoy them.  Oh, and to answer your question, yes,  I’m always like that.  ;)  If you are viewing this post via RSS, you will have to come to the site to view the videos or just go check out our Youtube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/deepesthealth)

Intro to the series

Chaihu 柴胡 – a simple teaching

The post Chaihu 柴胡 and the value of moving pictures appeared first on Deepest Health.

Not too long ago, I released a podcast I recorded in my car where I rambled about Evernote and various other Mac-based technology I use to study Chinese herbs.  Ifollowed that up with a quick post about Evernote itself, and how I have set up my Evernote system when it comes to Chinese herbs.  From the emails and comments I’ve received, I’m not the only one impressed with this versatile and ubiquitous software application.

I just wanted to finish up this train of thought by discussing how I actually use the system to study

Before I go there, though, I want to make something clear.  I believe a system like this only really shines when it is full of as much information as possible.  If I have a thought about a formula, it goes in my system.  If I sit in on a clinic shift, and the doctor says something interesting, I type it in a note.  I take pictures of pages of books I’m studying that contain interesting information.  I clip audio, video, pictures and text from the Internet using the web clippers Evernote comes with.  When I doodle something interesting about the organ clock or a particular herb, it goes in there.

Everything.

The advantages of a system like this should be clear.  No more lugging around all my books.  No more trying to remember in which notebook and where I wrote that thing that I think my teacher said at some point in the past.  Everything searchable, everything organized, everything on multiple platforms and accessible online.

I do believe that memorizing things is important, however.

The fact that all of this information is at my fingertips doesn’t let me off the hook.  There’s a special alchemy that seems to happen when you keep a bunch of information in your head about a particular topic.  Particularly when it comes to deeply interconnected systems of information – like Chinese herbal formulas – letting things marinate together is essential.  There’s a lot more that could be said here – but that’s not the point of this post.

How I use Evernote to do general study

This is simple.  When there is a topic I’m working with, I have Evernote always open nearby – whether on my Macbook Air, my iPad or my iPhone.  If I’m researching something primarily online, things are simple.  Let’s say I’m researching the herb Chaihu / 柴胡 / Bupleurum chinense.  I might want to know more about its ecology and lifecycle.  I may do a general web search, or look at Google Scholar, or poke around the various databases of plant information.  As I run across pages that add to my knowledge, I’ll read through them and use the web clipper to add them to a special Evernote notebook containing all of that research.

If you’d like to see a brief video of how this works – you’re in luck.

If I’m working with information in a book, or working with a plant directly, not much changes.  I still have Evernote open near me somewhere in almost all cases. I may take photos of the pages I’m reading or the plant itself, and often will type notes directly into Evernote.  Sometimes, having the computer with me is impractical. In that case, I carefully handwrite notes which I later scan or type into Evernote.  Evernote does a fairly good job of recognizing handrwriting – but you do need to have decent print handwriting.  Script works poorly and Chinese characters not at all.

So – as I’m studying a topic, I’m busy filling my database full of information I can keep, digitally, forever – instantly accessible.

How I use Evernote to memorize

As I said, I’m no stranger to memorization.  In fact, I spend a couple of hours every week just working on memorizing and re-memorizing basic data like lines in the classical texts, herb and formula properties and uses, acupuncture points and so on.  Evernote makes this easy.  Let me show you three ways I use Evernote in my memorization workflow.

Using Evernote’s companion product – StudyBlue

Studyblue is an online flashcard system that syncs with mobile devices (Android and iOS, including iPad) and has a nice web interface, too.  The integration between Evernote and Studyblue is through a special folder that Studyblue creates in your Evernote system.  Beneath that folder, it creates subfolders for each “class” you are working on.  Since I’m no longer in school, the “class” oriented system is a little clunky for me.  I simply invent class names for whatever I’m working on.

In those class folders that Studyblue creates, you can add whatever materials you like.  If I were studying Chaihu formulas, for instance, I might move all of my materials pertaining to Chaihu formulas into the relevant Studyblue folder.  These materials are then fully viewable on the Studyblue website.  This means that while I’m creating new flashcards in their system, I can quickly reference the important Evernote notes without going back and forth between my web browser and Studyblue – pretty handy!

Watch the video below if you want to see how I use this functionality – aren’t you excited?

Once I create flashcards, I can then review them using their apps on my iOS devices, which means I can study my formulas when I’m waiting for a haircut, stuck in the airport, or anywhere I like.  While paper flashcards are great, I like that I never have to “remember” to bring them along.  I very rarely leave the house without my phone, so they’re always ready whenever the urge strikes me to study.

Using Evernote Peek instead of regular flashcards

A quick note for iPad users.  Evernote has a fun auxillary program called Evernote Peek.  This is pretty specialized, as it relies on you not only having an iPad running Evernote.  It also works best if you have Apple’s Smart Cover.  However, there is a built in method for using the application without the Smart Cover.  Regardless, for most of you, this isn’t going to be particularly useful. Still, it’s a pretty fun way to study Chinese herbs notes that are already in Evernote.  You can watch a very brief video of me using this program below.

Using Mental Case -my favorite Mac based flashcards

I do realize that a majority of you do NOT use Mac or iOS.  I’m sorry to be so Mac-centric, I’m sure there are fantastic applications out there for Windows, Linux, Android and other OS users that do something similar.  Evernote, as I’ve mentioned, is cross-platform, so most of what I’ve said in this short series should be of use to a majority of you.  But, please pardon me as I swerve into Apple-only territory for just another few minutes.  I promise, no video.

For me, there are two reasons to use digital flashcards rather than paper.  First, the ubiquity factor – which I’ve already talked about.  I usually have my phone, and nothing else, on me.  That means I have my entire Evernote database available as well as any flashcards I have on the phone – whatever system I happen to be using to make them.  The other reason is that I can put a number of things on a digital flashcard that would be impossible or at least difficult if I were using paper only.

Mental Case does all of this for me, and more.  It lives on my Mac, my iPhone and my iPad.  It’s quick and easy to create cards, and I can add amazing things to each card, including audio, photos, video, drawings and, of course, text.  This means I can create a set of flashcards, quickly and easily, of various forms of an herb that I want to identify by sight.  I can also add pronunciation of various herbs or other Chinese words to help me sound less ridiculous when I speak.

I pull all of the information I use in Mental Case from my Evernote database. I also usually make duplicate cards in Evernote (just a title and short text note) for each Mental Case card I create – that way I can use Evernote Peek or something else if I desire. Yes, I know, that sounds like a lot of work!

One great thing is the app will help you decide when to study, and will feed you cards in a way that takes advantage of your natural memory capabilities (and weaknesses).  It uses the spaced repetition concept to maximize the effectiveness of your time spent studying. Read the information in that link if you want to know more, it’s a little tricky to explain and I’d rather Wikipedia do it for me.

Anyway, I really love Mentalcase – and if you have a Mac or iOS device, I think you will as well.  Go watch their intro video.

The point is – study!

Whether you use Evernote, some other software, or no database at all is not the point. The point is to study, and not to stop. I hope this short post series has inspired you to keep at it!

The post Evernote and studying Chinese herbs – Part 2 appeared first on Deepest Health.