The Stomach Channel in Chinese medicine and post-birth qi: how we get energy to live after we´re one year old

Well, god knows how we do that, really, given the stresses life can bring with it. But in Chinese medical view, there are two main different types of energy that powers living beings: xiantianqi and houtianqi, pre-heaven energy and post-heaven energy.

The stomach is much more important in China than in the West. This is not unique to the Chinese, it´s simply a reflection of a society were food is scarce and starvation a real possibility. The Stomach becomes crucial, something reflected in the old Chinese greeting which used to be ”Ni chi fan le ma?” - have you eaten? In the 19^th century, due to Western traders, ”How are you?” came into the Chinese language instead in the phrase of ”Ni hao.” These days in the West, most have forgotten what it is like to constantly worry about getting food (interestingly, the Earth element that the Stomach and Spleen links to, has worry as a pathological emotional state). Everything in us is full, all the time, we can buy whatever we like in the store and the risk of a famine is as real as a science fiction series on TV. Due to this, most people have shi, problems of excess energy, in the West, while most people in China and developing countries often have a high frequency of xu, problems of emptiness or deficiency.

Daoism and Chinese medicine both see that up to the age of about one-and-a-half we use xiantianqi, pre-heaven energy, where we take in nourishment from the outside in a small way but keep on charging energy from the universe like we did in the womb. Once that age is past, we go into houtianqi, the energy of post-heaven, where we get nourishment and energy from three things: 1) food, 2) rest, 3) air. Long-term Daoist qigong- and meditation-practice will change this and slowly relink a person to the pre-heaven qi over work of many decades of training, while continously upgrading and refining our post-heaven qi and its ability to work in our body and life.

The Stomach is seen as the most important pivot for this, as it brings in crucial nourishment through food. It is seen as transforming food into guqi, ”grain energy” that nourishes our body. The Stomach is paired with the Spleen in the Earth Element, and they together are responsible for ”ripening and rotting” food while transforming some of it into pure qi that will work in our body. There is a long sequence of organs involved in distilling and refining this food qi to usable qi in the body, while the simultaneous western view of food disgestion takes place. Both exist simultaneously.

The Earth Element is also the Element that integrates things on all levels, all the way from our life to our ideas to information we get. It is the one Element that is destroyed the most in the lifestyle of the industrialized West. It is the Element that integrates the other four. In older Chinese drawings, sculptures or incense burners, the five were often depicted with Earth in the middle and the other four around it.

The ability of the Stomach to digest food is very important. If the system is unbalanced, the body will not properly digest the food coming in and the person will become sluggish, with too little heat inside to transform food and move the body. This is often a problem with the Earth element itself, a yin problem. A yang problem would be too fast metabolic rate and no interest in food, where food is only fuel to move the organism. To the first person, food would not be particularly interesting, and they would eat very little but prefer sweets or carbs if they can. To the second one, food will be important to eat but won´t really taste much – it´s just fuel, something that has to be eaten. If the Earth element works well, the Chinese medical classics say ”You taste the five flavours” - that is, you truly taste and enjoy the food you eat, feeling each nuance of flavour clearly and savouring them.

In the Five Element cycle Fire releases into Earth like summer into indian summer. Earth opens into Metal, like indian summer opens into autumn.

Linking to the channels in the body, what is called interior-exterior paired channels, the Spleen is linked to the Lung channel, while the Stomach is linked to the Large Intestine channel. Spleen and Stomach is part of the Earth element, Lung and Large Intestine is part of the Metal element. This relationship is also seen between Earth and Metal, in that Earth is seen as creating the zhengqi, the Upright Qi, our ability to remain upright and straight and simply work or walk without becoming tired. If this fails to work well with Metal, which is linked to our spine and lungs, our spine will slumping, weaker, and tired.

The energy of the Stomach, Spleen and Earth element grounds us, integrates our life, puts both feet on the ground and keeps us centered. When in balance, it nourishes freely and gently, and lets us enjoy our earthly existence while we are here.

Back from China, old doctors (which you can´t find in the West) and changing universities

A lot of stuff in that title and a lot of stuff in this post.

I went to China for two weeks doing research for a book. The trip went very well, with some unique information coming out of it.

I also got the chance to attend clinic and learn from a laoyisheng, the honorific the Chinese use for ”Old Doctor”, usually a practitioner, man or woman, who is above 60 years old and has at least 30 years daily work in Chinese medicine behind them. The one I met is in his early seventies, with 40 years clinical experience in hospitals and clinics. He has also done deep research in trying to improve the skill and knowledge in the system he was trained in. Seeing his skill makes it all too obvious how much is lacking in the West, how little has made it over here. This man is, of course, at the apex of his professional life, and a naturally gifted doctor to boot, but you still feel sad about how little we have available of it. There are no Old Doctors in the West, pretty much due to the fact that Chinese medicine is too young here. Maybe we can produce some budding ones over the next century.

Another factor in this is the sheer number of patients. A typical Chinese doctor in hospitals sees an average of 20-40 patients in a day, sometimes a lot more, five days a week. A Western acupuncturist with their own clinic might have an average of 6-8 patients a day, and might not work every day of the week. Having access to the huge numbers means an increase in skills and diagnostics that the lower numbers simply will never approach.

I am also quitting the course at the university. The blog hiccups here a bit, over that, but the blog is supposed to be about what it is like studying acupuncture in the West, and my experience with some of the low-grade teachers is a very common complaint among students of chinese medicine in the West, so it is quite typical of what is like to study acupuncture here. Are they all Old Doctors and maestros of the art in China? No. Not at all. But the main Chinese training is five years minimum, full time at university, the chinese medical doctor course, and that will produce a very different level of skill than the average course in the West. There are downsides to the chinese training too, but just by it being closer to the source and huge in length compared to the courses here, it produces very different results.

So. Due to the way the course was structured at the first university, and due to issues with the teaching methodology of two of the modules (50% of the course), I will now be looking at another university course in London. This one is quite different to the first, with a stronger emphasis on Chinese medicine itself, and less a focus on the Western biomedical side as being something to adapt to. I will give more information about the difference between the two later.

I am also, due to 20 years of previous study and full-time work in the field, of course not the student these courses are designed for. So, right now, I am trying to find a course and way of training that will maximize my previous skills while upgrading the new ones. But at the course I am attending now, the past nine months of full time course has included 10 percent purely new information on the Chinese medical side for me. 5% of them, I can pick up straight out of books. The other 5% are the skills of good practitioners, and that is much more rare and valuable. But those are possible to reach without attending a university course where the amount of Western Physiology is 25%, packed with information and badly taught.

More on this later.

Next post will be about the Stomach, an organ much more focused on in China than in the West.

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.