Cultivating an Appetite for Life from the Heart Shen
License permission via Shutterstock: Image of Rice cultivation
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 in 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.
Since we’re in the last couple of days of the Qi node Summer Begins* I thought it would be a good time to talk about the Shen, so often referred to as the Heart Mind in TCM. To be clear, we’ll be observing Shen from the medieval Chinese point of view.
Essentially, shen means spirit. The ancient term was also translated as ghost, which we see in characters of the Hun and Po spirits.
As part of Wuxing (Five Elements/Phases) philosophy, there are five correlating shen (spirits)—one of them being the Shen which resides in the physiology of the heart. It’s helpful to remember when we’re talking about the organs in Chinese medicine that we aren’t talking about little Casper spirits, nor are we referring to the substantial anatomical organs of modern medicine. We’re talking about energetics. Energetically, wuxing associates the southern direction and the season of summer with the radiance of the heart Shen.
In the modern practice of TCM, most students are taught that the Shen of the heart equates to a definition of the mind. What often ends up happening is a conflation with psychology and the Shen, but the Shen is not the mind that we think of in modern time. That would be compartmentalizing the body, mind, and spirit like modern medical practices do. TCM does do this in its own way, but this more of a misunderstanding as a result of the revolution and its influence on Chinese medicine practices.
A lot of English translators also call the Shen the soul and directly translate the five shen as five souls. But this might be even further off the mark of something elusive because the concept of “soul” isn’t really part of the Chinese tradition in the way that psychologists and other religious traditions recognize. As the center and ruler or director of the other four shen, we could say that the Shen is something like the body, but again, the modern understanding of body as a suit of flesh, blood, and bones isn’t sufficient in defining body by this cycle of teaching. Modern medicine would have us convinced we know what the body is, but it leaves us so much of the sociological aspect of what it means to be human that many walking the path of Chinese medicine would disagree. Brushing this off as “the philosophy part” of the medicine is to marginalize the body of Chinese medicine. In the tradition of the medicine, we are compound. When Jing and Qi are made compound, they result in a third appearance of luminosity that we call Shen. These are never found separate and it is through the Shen that we experience the presence of the other two.
The Shen (when present) is the quality of a person that radiates. It’s the thing we can sense in a body we recognize as being human. We can see someone is “in there”. Conversely, when someone we love and care about dies and we attend their funeral, we see the substance of the body, and we cry because we can still sense the Shen, floating nearby, which is no longer in that body we once knew. It’s not the corpse we miss, but the Shen we long for.
I’ve written a little about Jing here and there in previous Wu Woo Wednesday articles, but as a refresher for anyone who isn’t familiar with the concept, and in the unique voice of Liu Ming, “Jing is the tendency to appear. Jing is something like water, while Qi is something like wind…We’re basically like some kind of vapor.”
If you know that wind/water is the translation for Feng Shui, then you know that he’s saying this is what we are.
Feng Shui isn’t just a phenomenon of the land, architecture, and environment around us, it’s also a study of the human as architecture— what we might call containment—earth, and environment. When you refer to the character for Qi, for example, you’ll find a depiction of a pot of rice cooking, with steam rising. It’s not a substance, but if we notice it’s appearance is similar to the changing state of water and life as is observed by the animistic views of Chinese cosmology.
Liu Ming came to the conclusion that “Shen is our countenance. It’s what you see when someone approaches you. You could close your eyes and could feel part of the countenance. If it’s an old friend from across the room, for example, the countenance will strike you stronger. It’s like two countenances already hugging, reaching out to one another.”
Having entered into the Qi node Summer Begins makes it an appropriate time to point out that good conduct in the summer is equivalent to sufficiency and generosity of Shen. That is to say, there will be joy as the heart Shen is associated with joy. This is a vague notion for a lot of modern people and Westerners. We tend to imagine happiness as effulgence of persona. Sometimes we equate desire with happiness, but desire can lead to destructive yang fire if let run wild. We imagine real happiness should be as intense as the sun’s beams. But if you try to walk out on the street under the sun you’ll notice that you cannot look up without getting blinded by the scorching light. Hence, the image and symbolism of the emperor/royalty and the sun, for those who would look directly at the sun would be forced to look back down. This is also a nod to the dangers and cautions one should take during the heat of summer as it’s the time of year when we can do most damage to our health.
This is when we really easily get careless and end up wasting away years of our life by overworking or living out of balance with the season… think sunburns, all-nighters (rock star lifestyle), too much rich food, dehydration, and heat stroke. Too many modern people think they want to live like a rock star, but the behavior of “Sleep all day, up all night!” is an archetypal image of overly aggressive yang destroying the yin.
Too much happiness exhausts the Qi just as too much laughing slows the Qi. Have you ever smiled so much it made your face hurt? Or have you noticed how good it feels to make it home and rest in your own familiar space after a fun night of celebration? Karaoke is wildly fun, but that kind of Shen projection every night quickly depletes the body, mind, spirit.
If circulation is too slow for too long it can lead to stagnation and blockages just as stress, fear, and anger can.
A little happiness is good, like the gradual fattening of asparagus stalks growing through the season. But too much of it can lead to aggressive desire (big yang) over time. What happens when someone or something interferes with the heat of another’s desire? The desire (passion) burns you up. It’s essentially an image of greed growing out of control…in the season of Summer Begins we’re encouraged to enjoy a little happiness together thanks to the land’s generation (this is the demarcation of the first small harvest before the big one in the fall/late summer).
This harvest after the spring is happiness. Nourishment is joy. Waking up to a new day is joyful. The people around you make it enjoyable, because otherwise there isn’t much depth (yin) to be experienced . This is also our experience of the greater harvest that is shared in feasts and celebrations in the fall.
Appreciation of resources is happiness, plain and simple. But when greed warps that because the Qi has been squandered through dramatic demonstrations and not practicing self care (not over indulgence, but taking interest in what you must be responsible for), this season can lead to an aggressively/yang person who tries to eat up other people’s resources.
Clinicians of Chinese medicine are encouraged to see patients not just with their eyes, but with their countenance. To see someone’s countenance, you gaze with your whole body— with your Jing, Qi, Shen. (This is what we refer to as the subtle body in modern woo speak.)
It’s part of the reason why developing a solid rapport over time is so important between practitioner and patient. The sparkle in the eye, the complexion, the tongue’s coat/shape/color, the breathing pattern waiting to be noticed behind the voice, the gate, the pulse depth/shape/pace, the organic fragrance of the person’s body are all part a person’s constitution and a few parts of their Shen that can recognized by their practitioner when their health is well. To take it further, fate is also read in the countenance of someone. This is why a geomagnetic or astrological education makes a clinician well rounded and prepared.
If the countenance can’t be read it’s hard to see what the prognosis will be. Diagnosis and prognosis aren’t the same. The former defines a specific pattern of imbalance or pathology while the latter is a prediction of outcome. Although modern medicine’s predictive methods are mostly through the use of statistical means, practitioners are inclined to hold a view that the numbers and chemistry can in fact predict outcomes, say for example, in the chances of surviving cancer. At best this is a kind of divination, in a religion of materialism. At worst it’s guessing, which professionals and experts can make a career out of… I digress.
Treating for illness and imbalances is a facet of the journey that leads to witnessing a person’s unimpeded constitution, which when flowing and vibrant, allows for deeper play and resolution of ancestral predisposition (karma) so that there is freedom to pass on in a liberated fashion.
This is getting a little ahead of the matter, however. The Shen is that unchanging facet of what we are. The heart Shen doesn’t really have a job or function, hence it’s traditional association with the emperor. From a modern/Western point of view, we’d associate this with the Sun in the natal chart. The Chinese tradition knew that the jie/calendrical qie goes right into and through the Shen. Thus, we are a precession of time, moving, reflecting, assimilating, generating, and projecting through space. As humans, we are experiential...
Founders of various somatic based psychotherapies, like Somatic Experiencing, understand this largely because of their exposure to indigenous medicines, including Chinese medicine which shares many similarities (no coincidence). Somatic Experiencing has chosen the word “resonance” to describe the practice of observing and communicating with a patient from the Shen/body.
Sometimes this leads teachers and practitioners to idealize the Taoist path as Chinese medicine itself. In other words, they might compare TCM with older Chinese medicine practices, which were eclectic (based on lineages and tribes and regions) and not uniform or standardized, and say that all the great doctors were Taoists and therefore one must follow the ecclesiastical Chinese Taoist religion* in order to truly understand Chinese medicine. *Chinese Taoism as an ecclesiastical religion isn’t the only way of Taoism and just writing this is getting further from what the vagabonds (the Tao ren) would notice about Tao.
What all the great doctors of the Chinese tradition, that most of us in the practice want to look up, have in common is a similar biography. We might conclude that it’s sort of a message from the Chinese tradition, which would be that a person has to have an appetite to maintain their own Shen in order to practice medicine. (LM) They were adept at keeping their Shen well and in place... for lack of a better word we will say constitutionally normal— even though Americans don’t really like the sound of “normal” and what it might imply!
Medically, this tradition teaches that the heart governs the Qi and Blood. It isn’t its job the way the Hun is in charge of emotions or the Yi in charge of assimilation. It does this simply by being and sitting in its throne. Other shen might get bumped out of their seats and a person can still live, but in the absence of Shen, a person doesn’t really survive. We also often see this phenomenon in patients who suffer episodes of heart attacks. If they live, they either have had an experience of rebirth or they sink into states of depression (lack of joy).
As the governor of Qi and Blood we see that vitality is what the Shen brings. Physiologically this means blood goes out to the periphery and hurls back to the center. This the Qi, carried by the Blood, radiates outward and comes back in (like a solar pulsation). This is central to the Chinese medicine perspective of what embodiment is. Blood circulation is essentially one of the ways to define what we are and what we do as humans. (LM)
When this circulation occurs harmoniously— our Shen is full of radiance and enjoyment. It’s from this heart space that we are meant to cultivate our appetite in dietary habits and spiritual development, alike. Although there were all kinds of formula for breathing patterns, postures, directions to face, and vocal demonstrations to repeat by ancient healers and shamans predating even the medieval practices of Chinese medicine, there isn’t a complicated formula or set of strict requirements to maintaining the Shen in a harmonious state. You only need to cut through illusions of complication and false ideas about a self abiding reality.
Rather than trying to force some ideal of consumer level of exalted happiness, allow yourself to appreciate the simple pleasures of life that are always present, even in the simplest of experiences and you’ll soon recognize that your Shen is at the center of your experience. You don’t have to worry about “doing it wrong” when it comes to upholding the Shen. You only have to drop pretenses and come to life from the heart.
Edit: As of January 24, 2022 this entry and following entries that were part of the series called “Wu Woo Wednesday” are being left with the title following the designated category of “WWW” posts. This has been done in response to and out of respect for the word Wu and its meaning as “shaman” in the Chinese language. This post script is here to create accountability rather than to erase a poor choice and to show respect for the culture, people, medicine, and ancestors of East Asia.
References:
Liu, Ming; Possession/Healing Apprenticeship, Da Yuan Circle