Wu Woo Wednesday: The Yi + Your Body Intelligence
In Chinese, Wu is translated as a number of words. A few relevant to this series include: Five (wǔ), as in five spirits or elements, shaman (wū), and dance (wǔ), which is also symbolic m the context of the five elements/spirits.
In this series, I’ll write about the context of healing through Chinese medicine and what it means to be supporting the continuity of humanity and helping people maintain or return to their sense of being human. That’s quite a feat living in today’s sped up and fragmented world, though I hope to offer inspiration and maybe some clarity when you think about health, healing, medicine, humanity, and what you’re doing here.
Today I’ll briefly explore the Yi spirit (what might commonly be thought of as the earth element/phase in Chinese medicine) and just how important digestion is if we are to live as a healthy, intelligent, embodied human.
First, let’s consider the characters for medicine, 藥.
The top half, 艹, (yào) means grass (including herbs). The bottom portion, 樂, (lè) is its own character with two different meanings. One is music. The other is happiness. The character’s roots start from the bottom up, pointing to the origins of medicine being in the form of music (drumming and singing) to heal disease, predating the more common use of herbal medicine.
Chinese medicine allows people to live in harmony and in rhythm (like music). If there were a most simplified way to describe what we do as clinicians, it is to improve circulation. Chinese cosmology (and medicine) explains life through relationship patterns and the basic way this happens is through the idea of yin and yang. Moving the Qi is key and supporting the blood (yin) is fundamental because without blood, there is no Qi (yang). They’re not static and each is constantly flowing into the other. That said, our existence depends on yin being inherently more dominant in nature.
“The Valley Spirit never dies.
It is named the Mysterious Female. And the doorway of the Mysterious Female
Is the base from which Heaven and Earth sprang.
It is there within us all the while;
Draw upon it as you will, it never runs dry.”
We breath heaven Qi through the nose, we take in earth Qi through the mouth. Living in harmony, in a natural rhythm, and in relationship to all around us, we carry on the existence of being a true human. That might sound weird or confusing, but just because we appear to be human (living as a sentient body), does not necessarily mean we are living as a true human. In Chinese cosmology the three treasures known as Jing, Qi, and Shen are reflected in the earth, person, heaven dynamic. The relationship between them is dependent on nourishing their processes of becoming one another so that life and consciousness continues. It’s completely possible to look fine or functional and actually be so deficient in Qi and blood that a person is in a state of being vanquished. There is no zhen Qi (True Qi). If you’ve ever been extremely sleep deprived or starved you might imagine how this feels or looks, but that is a limited way of looking at it. This state is what ancient Chinese cosmology would call being a ghost (gui). There will be more to share on this later, but some (perhaps many) happen to live in a sort of ghostly state (gui) as a result of our modern, hurried lifestyles and linear views of life that lead to something other than embodiment.
Though it isn’t taught in American or modern TCM schools of Chinese medicine, another way to understand what qi is, as pointed out by Liu Ming, is that qi is also time, and so when we take our first breath, we are given a birth chart that shows our constitution... essentially it is our predisposition for death that comes from our ancestors. In Ming’s words, “The cause of death is always birth!” So naturally, even death is a form of recovery. Nothing, not even sickness, is permanent. Sit with that for a minute.
One of the first things many Chinese physicians will ask clients/patients when inquiring about a complaint or about their health is how their appetite is.
The digestive system— namely the spleen —is the most intelligent of the organ systems according to Chinese medicine as it offers us the capacity to turn food into blood and from blood comes Qi (for lack of a better translation, Qi is energy/ life force /movement); it is not a substance! In other words, thanks to the spleen (which stores the yi spirit), we can transform a bowl of soup into a song. Upon assimilation, an apple becomes our voice; a bowl of oatmeal becomes cognitive awareness. That said, what we eat, how it is grown and prepared and cooked is also important to how well we can assimilate and what we can get out of that assimilation. Generally speaking, eating complex foods that are chewed offers the body the chance to exercise its intelligence, and living on smoothies or eating too late in the day or in the evening puts the native body intelligence in a slump blocking our ability to support clear thought and to sleep deeply, dream, and finish digestion— all very important foundations to living as a true human. (Liu Ming)
From a traditional Chinese standpoint, babies are able to start assimilating food around 3 months old. The mother’s milk doesn’t always need to be the sole source of nutrition anymore because they’re able to make blood from other foods, though mother’s milk is still a very good source of complementary blood in the diet because the milk is an ancestral super food- when foods are introduced varies by family and by the baby’s constitution and readiness, but nursing up to 3 years is not abnormal. Because we begin digesting food as soon as we put it in our mouths, it’s wise to introduce first foods to baby with mother’s saliva in it. Ideally, the first foods are a staple food (a carbohydrate like rice or oatmeal, for example).
Like a bird offering food to her chicks, mothers are encouraged to first chew up or wet baby’s first foods with their own saliva and digestive juices to teach baby’s system how to do this more efficiently. (Liu Ming) It’s a gentle way of introducing foods to the baby’s spleen and stomach.
Because the Yi spirit is fundamental and central to our body’s intelligence, it’s no small thing to always look at the diet before assuming complex herbal formulas and acupuncture are the solution, when working in a clinical setting. (Liu Ming)
Since we’re currently in spring, this is a good time to recalibrate your body by getting up early enough to eat breakfast between 7-9 AM during the spleen’s hour. The yang is rising with the sun so the most powerful time for digestion occurs in the morning before noon. Eating a big breakfast is one of the best ways to start changing your blood chemistry and making sure you eat enough in the day so you don’t over eat later and accumulate dampness or food stagnation. Because it is spring, it’s also helpful to eat less meat since the body is coming out of hibernation from the winter and to eat digestive aids or more acrid herbs in the food (such as cilantro), and less sour foods that are more ideal before winter, to support the spleen and your body’s energy as we move through a season of fast changes (wind), the months get warmer, and dampness in the environment increases by the time we reach summer.
Recognition:
Sleeping Daoist Meditation
Chen Tuan’s Sleepimg Gong
Tom Bisio
Vocabulary and articulation of Yi, the body intelligence, and diet/blood in development are concepts taught by Liu Ming and his Healing Apprenticeship for whose insight and unique voice I’m endlessly thankful for.