Thinking, another bad habit

Right. Sorry for the gap in comms. I am currently thinking of changing universities, as another one with same length of study has opened up unexpectedly. This one has much less biomedicine than my current one, and from what I hear when checking, no teachers as unprofessional and insecure as the two of mine who currently make my life rather difficult at the present course.

Not sure yet, but I hope the shift will be possible.

Next post coming up concerns the Stomach Channel, and houtianqi, post-birth qi and how we make our daily living off food, air and rest.

Learning is happening, with added Seven Emotions of Chinese medicine

Right. Learning is happening. Students go to classes, do tests, discuss things and debate what the teachers say. Some classes are interesting, some less so, as in all university programs. Clinic goes on, with discussions of diagnostics and treatments both in video-clinic and observation-clinic.

We found out that the class in ”qigong tuina” actually is a class in anmo, basic chinese massage, which the teacher said her teachers called it when she learned from them. I don´t know how this then became renamed qigong tuina, as that is something quite different to anmo, just like normal tuina is something other than qigong tuina too. Oh well. Like some other things here, I file it under the folder Shi ma? (”Oh, really?” in Chinese.)

The class in theory is currently looking at the causes of disease, the sanyin. These include both internal and external causes, and then how their aetiology works, how they shape an imbalance in a person, and how this manifests in different ways depending on how deeply it has gone. Again, old Chinese medicine recommends treating before there actually is an illness noticeable at all, and the diagnostic skills of classical Chinese medicine teaches how to do this with great skill and precision.

If your qi is good and stable, you are rarely affected by external factors at all. But if it starts to weaken, they become a bigger factor. You also have the internal factors, one of which is the ”Seven Emotions” (qi qing). Well balanced, they are simply there, making life life and letting us enjoy it for good and for bad. Unbalanced, they can give rise to deeper imbalances pulling qi and physical body down with them and creating ill health that actually has emotional causes.

They are: anger, sadness, joy, grief, pensiveness, fear and fright.

Having too much of any of them will injure our health. If they do it for a long time, it will shape it and let the injury settle deeply in our system. The longer they go on, the more tense the person becomes and the easier they have for feeling that emotion even more, so the vicious cycle goes around and around, deepening.

Pensiveness might be interesting to look at a little deeper. It´s not a word used a lot. What it actually covers is blockages in the Earth element of the person: a constant worry or never-ending thoughts that just keep nagging and never stop just go on and on and keep going on without stopping and often just repeat the same things in loop on and on and on without stopping and never –

You get the point, right? Good.

This is called sixiang in Chinese: obsessive thinking. If it´s done in a loop the size of a centimeter instead, it´s called mental illness.

Chinese medicine can treat emotional problems quite well, if the acupuncturist is skilled. It can´t do magic, can´t fix them, but it can balance them a whole lot and make someone´s life more harmonious and balanced both inside and outside. Westernized acupuncture cannot do this, so if you look for that kind of treatment, you need to find an acupuncturist trained in old chinese medicine, classical chinese medicine in one school or the other.

Emotions can be the joy of life, as well as the bittersweet. But they should not be the poison of it. Then there are treatments and ways of training that can, could, and will help to make life more worth living again.

Another Shi ma?-filing last week was a comment in clinic where a patient was coming in for treatment for infertility, which acupuncture usually treats very well, but she came in after 14 miscarriages and had four children before that, the youngest of which was 17. The reason for wanting another was that ”the others were too old now”. This seemed like a doubtful case for me to treat and help get more children, and I asked about that. The teacher answered, ”If you don´t, someone else will.” Really? They might, but the choice you make is always for your system and your integrity, not someone else´s. It´s the same logic that goes towards ”I won´t help homeless people because they probably get help somewhere else”.

Shi ma. Oh, really? File.

London 2011

Overheard on a bus: a long talk between two young black guys on how to sit in the bus to avoid ambush, how to place yourself, how to walk in the street, and descriptions of how they had felt when robbed, or acted during it.

”...you´ve got to learn this stuff, okay, you´re eighteen now, a big man, you need to take care of yourself, I can´t do it for you anymore...”

Leaving, I see them on the staircase and think they are brothers, one older, one slightly younger, both dressed in black, discussing tactics for survival on a bus passing projects and London housing estates.

Knife-crime is up a lot here, even though the government tries to change it.

They have now announced that the armed police will start being present on the Tube trains. This is a monumental piece of news in England: police here carry no weapons at all. Only truncheons for the regular officers, and only elite and specialist armed police are trained to carry handguns and submachineguns or sniper rifles. The news of having armed police on the Tube trains, carrying MP5 submachineguns...still shocks me, actually.

Last week a young black man was killed on the bus I usually travel on. He was chased into it by a gang after a football-game. The bus-driver closed the doors and drove off, with the teenager bleeding on the floor of the bus and a nurse trying to help him. He died. Now his face looks out from posters in the neighbourhood marked ”Murder – can you help the police solve this crime?”.

Semester 2 started

Yes. It has. All students are still here. Some of the first tests are done and beyond us; some worked well, some less so. We just started going through the Bladder channel, the longest channel of them all at 60+ points.

We have started to go deeper into the causes of disease in Chinese medicine, both the internal and external ones. Students have for the first time in class done tests on their own Five Element makeup, so that they start to understand which Elements that are part of their main personality, body-structure and health.

More clinic is being had, both video- and observation clinic. Physiology is back, as it will be once a week for the next two-and-a-half years. First year´s Physiology will turn into Patophysiology year 2, followed by Western differential diagnosis year 3. All this is part of making the course a Msci (Master of Sciences, or with three years, Bachelor of Sciences, civilingenjörsexamen) instead of something to do with the arts. The university seems to have a very strong bias towards Western medicine and science in their set-up compared to many schools. I talked to someone who does the Chinese herb course for the same amount of time, and they are doing massive amounts of western chemistry to pick apart the herbs, something which has as little to do with chinese herbal medicine as Physiology has to do with learning acupuncture. Oh well. Not much to do about it. The only good thing about it so far is giving me more and more knowledge about how good Western science works (”We´re not really sure about anything, but we keep looking at it”) contrary to bad Western science (”This is the way it is, we know that for sure”) which is always amusing. A brilliant book I read on the side for fun, is Bill Bryson´s A Brief History of almost Everything, which goes through Western science with both depth, lightness, precision, and humour.

We have also started a class in what is called Tuina, which it isn´t, but a version of massage techniques called anmo from China. I trained in qigong tuina, which is even more rare to find and really works less with the physical body than the mind and energy itself.

...and...yeah. That´s probably a brief overview of things right now.

It´s soon Chinese New Year. Year of the Metal Rabbit coming up.

Seen in London

For Margaret: a cab-firm proudly labelling their cars ”Wedding Taxi´s”.

A middle-aged, worn woman at the bus-stop early one morning, who was reading a book called Tempt me to Darkness. The cover showed some very tasteful flesh and promised hinted pleasures over boxes of chocolate inside.

A balloon, flying happy and red on the roof of Spitalfield Market, lost, lost, by a small hand.

A private hire cab driver outside a theatre premiere in the West End, who on his passenger seat had a laptop that seemed to be showing gay porn while he was waiting for his client to come out.

A sign: Dulwich Ukulele Group looking for more interested members!.

Seen. In London. And all these faces. All, so many, so varied, and most of them, so human.

Full moon over London

and the homeless are fighting in the alleys. A man stands at Tottenham Court Station and takes pictures of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road; the voluntary corps of motorcyclists who block the city´s roving car-cameras are out, some of them in V-masks; a beautiful black woman on the bus smells of Africa, sandalwood, spices – so strong I´m almost there; the little kid at the Chinese take-away has eczema around his mouth at eight months old; there´s a charge in the air, a charge, but more quiet in this time of winter that is still isn´t really Spring.

But the evenings are clearer already, there´s a feeling of happiness and freedom and movement hiding just around the corner, like a director proudly standing in the wings, watching his actors hold the house in their hands.

I walk through London streets thinking of diagnostics in Chinese medicine. I look at people, a training I have done in huge amounts over the years. The goal is to be able to watch someone and set a first basic diagnosis in five seconds. In that time you see a lot; huge amounts of information is collated and discriminated, immediatly analyzed, cross-checked, deductions and inductions made. You also see if they have any particular tensions or injuries that change their body, and form ideas of how that might have impacted their health or might do in the future.

"The skilful doctor knows by observation, the mediocre doctor by interrogation, the ordinary doctor by palpation."

– Zhang Zhongjing, 200 AD, author of Shang Han Lun

With time and training, you gain the skill of seeing their energy and shen, ”spirit”: their spark of life and connection to the outside world. This primarily resides in the heart and one of the places it shows is in the eyes, but it has many layers to it. Then you think of how you might treat this, and how to weave that together with the other treatment.

Full moon over London. Hark, listen to those sirens in the night.

The Governing vessel and Conception vessel: Du and Ren channels and different layers of energy-work in Chinese medicine and Daoism

Some of the meridians we have gone through lately are not common meridians. The main meridians that seen as ”meridians” are the 12 that are paired and linked to the internal organs – what are called the yin and yang meridians, some of which we´ve looked at here before. These are usually called jing. On top of these are the luo; a network throughout the body of small energy-flows, like a fine mesh and web nourishing everything with qi. Some acupoints are specifically linked to link: they are called luo-points, and aid the flow between one meridian or organ and another.

The two latest ones are not part of these, however. They belong to a group called the Eight Extraordinary meridians – the Eight Extras, for short. We will look at these later. Usually they are not part of the main sequence of meridians except for two: the Governing and Conception meridians, the Du mai and Ren mai, which are the channels we have looked at before Christmas and now on the course. The other six have no points on them, they are only reached from other meridians and are pretty special cases. The Du and Ren, however, have their own points directly.

The Du and Ren mai are the body´s two main yang and yin channels. The Du goes up the spine; the Ren down on the front of the body from the mouth to the genitals.

They are said to form earlier in the fetus than the 12 yin and yang meridians and the luo. They are the main systems for yin and yang energy as a whole in the person: Du, going up the spine, into the brain, up over the head and down to the mouth, governs yang energy. Ren, going from the mouth down to the genitals and passing all down the soft, yin front of the body, governs yin.

These two are linked to a huge number of procesess and treatments in the body. In some qigongs and in Daoist spiritual practice, they also form part of the work called the xiaojiutian, or the Small Heavenly Orbit, where the practitioner moves qi through them in a circuit, sometimes stopping at specific points for specific work there. This is a technique that has been much misunderstood in the West. It shouldn´t really be part of health qigong. It´s Daoist training for spiritual work. The older traditions will prepare and train the body and mind in various ways for a long time so that the orbit opens up softly and gently by itself before doing anything conscious with it. In many systems that have come in fragments to the West, the Small Heavenly Orbit is done forcefully, or simply with the person trying to push qi through a tense body and mind, a practice that is much riskier for both physical and mental health than the softer one.

The Du channel treatments focus a lot on health of the spine, health of Yang energy in the body, and the health of being upright – the zhengqi. It also has a major facet of the connection between spine, brain and heart. All the Eight Extras border Daoist work rather than Chinese medicine, and like in other parts of Chinese medicine, there are many treatments that can only be done by a person with enough energy and clarity in their system. The people who wrote them down had it, later practitioners might not. Sometimes they call treatments ”arcaic” or ”ineffective”, without knowing that they themselves simply don´t have enough qi or clear intent to pull them off.

The Ren channel treats yin of the body, and on it we also find the so called front mu points, direct gateways to some of the internal organs and their functions, points which are placed on the Ren channel itself and has a strong effect.

”The Conception and Governing vessels are like midnight and midday, they are the polar axis of the body ...there is one source and two branches, one goes to the front and the other to the back of the body... When we try to divide these, we see that yin and yang are inseparable. When we try to see them as one, we see that it is an indivisble whole.” Li Shizhen, quoted from Deadman, A Manual of Acupuncture.

Various kinds of qigong and Tai Chi work the fascia and flows of the front and back of the body, including the channels. It´s generally seen as much more effective to have training that focuses on working the fascia, releasing it and relaxing it, rather than just working qi in the channels themselves: if the fascia is tense and not moving as one piece, the channels themselves will still be blocked, no matter how much one tries to move energy through them. In Daoist energy work, the Ren and Du are quite superficially placed. There are several further depths into the body with channels. Another one, next layer in from the Ren, and also one of the Eight Extras, is the Chongmai – the Thrusting Channel. But there are other flows even deeper than these, that form core work in classical Daoist work. Good training, however, will take the practitioner deeper in layers, letting the body open naturally, like a flower – much the same way a skilled acupuncturist will allow the system of a patient to open up too.