There is a substantial gap in the various approaches that we take to thinking about (and teaching) Chinese medicine theory. There are four principle areas that overlap with one another in any discussion of the body from a Chinese medical perspective, and in TCM theory we only really pay attention to 2 of them, while the Shang Han Lun model (and a big swath of herbal theory) tends to address the other two. I would lay it out like this:
The four categories are SPACE, PATHOLOGICAL SUBSTANCES, NORMAL SUBSTANCES, and ORGAN FUNCTIONS
ORGAN FUNCTIONS: This reflects the organic movements of qi in the body, their interactions to generate NORMAL SUBSTANCES and their relationship to SPACES in the body. Through their dysfunction we come to understand how PATHOLOGICAL SUBSTANCES are formed.
NORMAL SUBSTANCES: These are qi blood body fluids, yin and yang, etc. They fill the SPACES and are integral to the composition and function of the ORGANS. They can become pathological when they come out of right relationship with the normal substances and functions.
PATHOLOGICAL SUBSTANCES: These are environmental pathogens, internally generated disturbances, wind, accumulations, phlegm, static blood, etc. They fill SPACES and have actions that they perform on their surroundings. These might include emotional states if they are considered pathological.
SPACES: These are the areas where the business of the body gets done; some are defined by relationships with organs (e.g. eyes and vertex for liver) milieus for movement (san jiao, channels, etc). Critically, they also include the organs themselves, as they “store” a substance, and are consequentially spatial in nature…this will let us understand some of the stranger aspects of heat clearing therapies and the tendency to drain while supplementing...
I think that TCM theory focuses on ORGANS and NORMAL SUBSTANCES and touches on PATHOLOGICAL SUBSTANCES, and does not think about space at all. This leaves much of the logical grace of SHL theory outside the understanding of TCM and attempts to shoehorn it in as a system tends to meet with blank looks.
SHL focuses almost exclusively on PATHOGENIC SUBSTANCES and SPACES; when we look at many of the SHL formulas in this context they start to make much more sense. There is little or no mention of organ function per se in SHL, and certainly not the type of thinking that corresponds with modern TCM ideas of ORGAN function.
The irony of this is that herbal therapy is using a very different perspective on the information than they started with, while acupuncture gets shafted because the SPACE and PATHOGEN idea is really quite effective for them as well... and it encourages palpation and physical assessment and conceiving of a physical and spatial body as opposed to the western "energetic" made up hoo ha.
Friday, November 5, 2010
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
More on male and female in TCM
I think one of the potentially damaging aspects of modern life and culture is the notion of the the sexes being the same. Please mind that I did not say "equal". The disacknowledgement of differences between the sexes takes a toll on us, and obliges us to act out of character with our nature, regardless of what that nature is.
In TCM this tends to manifest in the liver, with men failing to express shao yang/spring energy leading to depressed qi, internal heat, and eventual blood stasis, etc. In women this seems to manifest as a Xiao Yao San pattern, with liver depression and blood vacuity, or vacuity heat.
In both these cases people can be assisted by allowing themselves to assert a more positive sexual identity. In Jungian psychotherapy there is the idea of the shadow, which is the manifestation of that which is inside and not allowed to express through other means. It seems that through basically disallowing positive sexual roles and stereotypes we have created a whole panoply of shadow stereotypes. In talking with patients who strongly dislike a parent, what I often find is that they are manifesting the shadow that they dislike in the parent. Through dialog with the shadow aspect, and an acceptance of hereditary nature, we can integrate the energetic nature that been stymied and allow them to be the best of what they are, as opposed to looking away from what will always be a part of themselves.
In treatment the paths to manifesting these positive aspects is not always very clear. Many people seem to want to "normalize" themselves, while, from a Chinese medical perspective this would go against their nature. Say you are treating an introvert (which would be on the yin side, so metal or water natured) who feels this is getting in the way of his life. However, regardless of treatment this person's metal or water nature is going to remain, and create a stress in day to day situations. It is easier, and more productive in the long run to assist the patient in manifesting their nature by nourishing it through meditation, and other inward practices. Usually this will allow them to build the strength they require to open up more. I find that treating the lung is also often useful, as people seem to store the stories that they have about their lives in their lungs and the po. This is doubly true for patients who have a very distinctive breathing or speech cadence that speaks to one element or another; like a laughing speech, a sobbing speech, a groaning speech, etc. If a patient is very insistent about being the way they are because of this or that thing that happened and you hear the story at least once per treatment really go after the lung diagnostically and see what you can find.
I think there is a bias that Chinese culture was relatively repressive to women, and I think in some regards that is born out historically, but in creating the yin yang paradigm the Chinese created a very firm acknowledgment of feminine power and importance. While the manifestation of this philosophical outlook was very uneven, in the present we can choose to use it as a positive tool to accentuate what is useful and incorporate what has been cut off. When we fail to acknowledge the positive masculine we end up creating the shadow masculine, with its anger and frustration.
In TCM this tends to manifest in the liver, with men failing to express shao yang/spring energy leading to depressed qi, internal heat, and eventual blood stasis, etc. In women this seems to manifest as a Xiao Yao San pattern, with liver depression and blood vacuity, or vacuity heat.
In both these cases people can be assisted by allowing themselves to assert a more positive sexual identity. In Jungian psychotherapy there is the idea of the shadow, which is the manifestation of that which is inside and not allowed to express through other means. It seems that through basically disallowing positive sexual roles and stereotypes we have created a whole panoply of shadow stereotypes. In talking with patients who strongly dislike a parent, what I often find is that they are manifesting the shadow that they dislike in the parent. Through dialog with the shadow aspect, and an acceptance of hereditary nature, we can integrate the energetic nature that been stymied and allow them to be the best of what they are, as opposed to looking away from what will always be a part of themselves.
In treatment the paths to manifesting these positive aspects is not always very clear. Many people seem to want to "normalize" themselves, while, from a Chinese medical perspective this would go against their nature. Say you are treating an introvert (which would be on the yin side, so metal or water natured) who feels this is getting in the way of his life. However, regardless of treatment this person's metal or water nature is going to remain, and create a stress in day to day situations. It is easier, and more productive in the long run to assist the patient in manifesting their nature by nourishing it through meditation, and other inward practices. Usually this will allow them to build the strength they require to open up more. I find that treating the lung is also often useful, as people seem to store the stories that they have about their lives in their lungs and the po. This is doubly true for patients who have a very distinctive breathing or speech cadence that speaks to one element or another; like a laughing speech, a sobbing speech, a groaning speech, etc. If a patient is very insistent about being the way they are because of this or that thing that happened and you hear the story at least once per treatment really go after the lung diagnostically and see what you can find.
I think there is a bias that Chinese culture was relatively repressive to women, and I think in some regards that is born out historically, but in creating the yin yang paradigm the Chinese created a very firm acknowledgment of feminine power and importance. While the manifestation of this philosophical outlook was very uneven, in the present we can choose to use it as a positive tool to accentuate what is useful and incorporate what has been cut off. When we fail to acknowledge the positive masculine we end up creating the shadow masculine, with its anger and frustration.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
I have been reading
I have been reading some feminist critiques of the "men's" movement. I have adopted some of the Jungian notions found in many parts of the men's movement into the parlance of Chinese medicine recently, mostly because I think about them as effective symbols. People are welcome to interpret this stuff as they will, and I don't have any particular agenda in regards to the oppression of the male outside of the fact that it seems to me the "mature masculine" has been lacking in our society in recent times. The polemic between "feminists" and the "men's movement" seems to revolve around who is more oppressed, and secondly, curiously enough, whether there is any difference between men and women. In the spirit of Buddhism (or at least what I think of as Buddhism) I think it is fair to say if one of us is oppressed all of us are oppressed. As to the difference between male and female: it seems evident that there are differences between men and women, and the roles and stories we have around being male or female in this (or any other) society. Are these roles inherent? Healthy? Fixed? These are moot questions in my mind... they are what we have, seem largely instinctual, and I doubt any amount of rationalization, as appealing as it is, will somehow transform the sexes or change our perceptions of these roles in a meaningful way. I think the logical thing to do is examine the positive and negative qualities of the roles and seek to exploit their useful aspects and recognize and avoid their negative aspects.
The idea of maturity is something that we don't see discussed much these days, but there seems to be a movement towards "responsibility" which will do in a pinch. I think that many of the challenges we face as a culture derive from a lack of personal responsibility, and a concurrent failure to recognize the world as it is. Partially this is due to the perception of the world as a more dangerous and chaotic place, which leads one to invest in fantasy and ritual as secure places for the mind to rest. While a level of ritual is important to bolster a decent sense of self the dominance of ritual eviscerates the experience of life.
Ritual is yin and in keeping with metal phase. In our culture many aspects of the wild and rambunctious are marginalized and medicated... ranging from our children's "ADD" to the use of neuroleptic drugs to essentially lobotomize the "insane". The problem is we rob shao yang of its force to open and transform... the leads to a loss of expression of tai yang, the heart fire which illuminates and brings awareness that helps to manage ritual so it is not empty.
The apparent reaction of the "men's movement" is the "wild man" who embodies a sort of Id with legs that does what it likes without constraint. I think this is a negative expression of shao yang, boiling over in the face of an insult from metal... however, it leads to a breakdown in tai yang, which in the Jungian archetypes is the magnanimous King. Without the conscious leadership of the Confucian uberman (or uperperson if you care) society devolves, and we seek solace in more ritual repeating the cycle.
The bottom line is that I am exploring personality traits as expressed through the yin yang four movement model because they are informative, speak to my sensibilities, and happen to coincide well with my own, perhaps greatly flawed, view of the world... enjoy.
The idea of maturity is something that we don't see discussed much these days, but there seems to be a movement towards "responsibility" which will do in a pinch. I think that many of the challenges we face as a culture derive from a lack of personal responsibility, and a concurrent failure to recognize the world as it is. Partially this is due to the perception of the world as a more dangerous and chaotic place, which leads one to invest in fantasy and ritual as secure places for the mind to rest. While a level of ritual is important to bolster a decent sense of self the dominance of ritual eviscerates the experience of life.
Ritual is yin and in keeping with metal phase. In our culture many aspects of the wild and rambunctious are marginalized and medicated... ranging from our children's "ADD" to the use of neuroleptic drugs to essentially lobotomize the "insane". The problem is we rob shao yang of its force to open and transform... the leads to a loss of expression of tai yang, the heart fire which illuminates and brings awareness that helps to manage ritual so it is not empty.
The apparent reaction of the "men's movement" is the "wild man" who embodies a sort of Id with legs that does what it likes without constraint. I think this is a negative expression of shao yang, boiling over in the face of an insult from metal... however, it leads to a breakdown in tai yang, which in the Jungian archetypes is the magnanimous King. Without the conscious leadership of the Confucian uberman (or uperperson if you care) society devolves, and we seek solace in more ritual repeating the cycle.
The bottom line is that I am exploring personality traits as expressed through the yin yang four movement model because they are informative, speak to my sensibilities, and happen to coincide well with my own, perhaps greatly flawed, view of the world... enjoy.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Introduction
Hi, and welcome to what I hope will be an ongoing observation of aspects of Chinese medicine that are not always discussed very explicitly in the standard literature.
My name is Par Scott. I am on the faculty of the New England School of Acupuncture and have a private practice in the Boston area. I have been specializing in the treatment of sleep disorders for a while but I have been starting to explore men's health issues recently, both psycho emotionally and physically.
I would like to state some caveats here: my understanding of this material presented here is a test balloon, and not meant to be authoritative. It is a playground for ideas. I aspire to develop a deepening of cultural context for Chinese medical ideas so we can better utilize them in our culture. The culture bound aspects of Chinese medicine can make it challenging to engage with, and I think this leads to many practitioners looking to western medical diagnosis and relatively bland prescriptive treatments. When we apply Chinese medical thinking to problems outside of the medical context it helps us improve our diagnostic thinking and expands the scope of our practice more deeply into the lives of our patients.
Another thing I want to make clear is my ability to translate Chinese is somewhat limited. I post translations here as a way of getting the material that I work with out in a forum for constructive criticism and to illustrate my points, but I would not advise you take my work as any sort of gospel truth. That said, I do not suck at it either, and I won't post something I don't think has any merit. My rule of thumb has been to be a literal as possible in translation, which often leads to somewhat stilted sounding language. I tend to use Wiseman's terminology, but I am not very rigorous about it.
Lastly, I tend to frame arguments rather loosely. While I would like to think this is a reflection of the Chinese mode of loosely structured discourse that leads one gently to the truth, however it is more likely a manifestation of my laziness, so if the connections between things are a little vague you were warned.
My name is Par Scott. I am on the faculty of the New England School of Acupuncture and have a private practice in the Boston area. I have been specializing in the treatment of sleep disorders for a while but I have been starting to explore men's health issues recently, both psycho emotionally and physically.
I would like to state some caveats here: my understanding of this material presented here is a test balloon, and not meant to be authoritative. It is a playground for ideas. I aspire to develop a deepening of cultural context for Chinese medical ideas so we can better utilize them in our culture. The culture bound aspects of Chinese medicine can make it challenging to engage with, and I think this leads to many practitioners looking to western medical diagnosis and relatively bland prescriptive treatments. When we apply Chinese medical thinking to problems outside of the medical context it helps us improve our diagnostic thinking and expands the scope of our practice more deeply into the lives of our patients.
Another thing I want to make clear is my ability to translate Chinese is somewhat limited. I post translations here as a way of getting the material that I work with out in a forum for constructive criticism and to illustrate my points, but I would not advise you take my work as any sort of gospel truth. That said, I do not suck at it either, and I won't post something I don't think has any merit. My rule of thumb has been to be a literal as possible in translation, which often leads to somewhat stilted sounding language. I tend to use Wiseman's terminology, but I am not very rigorous about it.
Lastly, I tend to frame arguments rather loosely. While I would like to think this is a reflection of the Chinese mode of loosely structured discourse that leads one gently to the truth, however it is more likely a manifestation of my laziness, so if the connections between things are a little vague you were warned.
Positive masculine in psychology and physiology
Positive masculine
One aspect of Chinese medical psychology and physiology that is overlooked is the positive masculine. I use the word masculine instead of "yang" because as a group we seem to pursue the feminine and yin aspects of treatment more often, probably due to the substantial majority of practitioners and patients who are female. Positive manifestations of the masculine are the heart and livers fire, and elements of the lung and kidney functions. The yang functions of the heart and kidney are both attacked just as often as other aspects of the physiology, but we end up addressing these organs via yin nourishing and dispersing much more often. Sedation, calming, the dispersion of "frustrated" energy and the supplementation of yin and blood all reflect the types of social conditioning that are used to take the energetic ideas of yang and subvert them. There is a truism that yang vacuity is easy to treat, and yin vacuity is hard to treat, but it is false, in that effective treatment of yang vacuity is predicated on healthy yin. It seems that we culturally regard the masculine as threatening and have difficulty differentiating positive and negative aspects of the masculine. One case in point is how many people react to Obama’s style of discourse, as if there is something inherently wrong with being a somewhat paternalistic logical and level headed character. The puffy egos on the right get extremely reactive to being called on their crap and have turned on him out of a sense of being emasculated by an actual example of a stand up guy (I mean, do you really think that differences on policy issues could get someone to compare a man to Hitler?).
In the broader culture the feminine virtues (joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control) have been touted for the last two thousand years, somewhat ironically via the patriarchal Christian church. As we know, the promotion of one aspect of something will not eliminate its opposite; it will merely pervert its manifestation. The manifestation of the masculine in our culture, going back a long time has thus been masked, perverted, and angry. Nietzsche touted another set of virtues, which I believe he called Roman virtues (or something along those lines), they were heroic virtues that embodies positive masculine traits, like bravery, honor etc. I think the notion of virtue in our society fails to recognize these more masculine virtues, leading to a damaged manifestation of the same ideas, with bravery becoming anger and aggressive violence, honor becoming secretive plotting and the hollow ritual bonding found in things like fraternity hazing and the mask of the responsible "corporate citizen" that business wears today.
Another challenging aspect of modern psychology, and the resulting pathological manifestation in the general population, is the inversion of the virtues in terms of cultural expectations; what I mean by that is that women are expected to manifest more "masculine virtue" in order to compete effectively in workplaces or otherwise "have it all". The result is anger and frustration with a situation where there is no winning; women get progressively more angry and frustrated because they often feel they lack "support", which originally would have come from the positive masculine. This is not to say that women can't do what they want or have to stick to traditional "feminine" roles, just that they seem to be pining for something that is absent, and I think that it is this positive masculine. Having positive masculine energy in her life allows the woman to be more expressive and feel supported, not in a financial sense, but in an emotional one.
Men on the other hand are expected to be "equal" in relationships and subsume their ambitions at the very least under a mask of humane feminine virtues. The culture infantilizes men (the "Disney dad" in his shorts and paunch hiding Hawaiian shirt) and demonizes the aggressive masculine as "bad boys" (aggressive men without any balancing feminine virtues) and other examples of naked ambition which represent a distilled and unrooted anger and lust for power or sex that obviously must be contained and pacified, if not killed outright. The pop culture aspects of this are pretty obvious, but I think this perversion goes back much farther in western culture.
I am not advocating for a return to an earlier time, but for a way to harmonize the energetic qualities of our lives and relationships. I think it has the power to make us better individuals, partners and mates, better parents and in the long run healthier people. We are privileged to live in an age when most of the lower rungs of Maslow's hierarchy of needs are taken care of, and we lack strong cultural models and gender roles of how to proceed with the higher aspirations. I think that Chinese medicine can help to fill that gap, allowing people to develop a sense of greater purpose and positive movement in their lives that is otherwise not well modeled in our culture.
The "men's movement" that started back in the '80's mined the work of Carl Jung and came up with four archetypes of the positive masculine: The Warrior, the King, The Lover and the Magician. They are interesting to me from a Chinese medicine perspective because they can be mapped over yin and yang in a way that I find pleasing, but the more I contemplated it the more I thought it might also be a way to accentuate and restore men's perception of their own positive masculine, and a way to understand what is lacking in women's lives that they can either work on for themselves or seek in a suitable partner. Again, my thinking about this is based on ambient pop culture, my talking with patients, and some relatively light reading, but I think it deserves more exploration. In the following days I will do my best to frame out some of these thoughts.
One aspect of Chinese medical psychology and physiology that is overlooked is the positive masculine. I use the word masculine instead of "yang" because as a group we seem to pursue the feminine and yin aspects of treatment more often, probably due to the substantial majority of practitioners and patients who are female. Positive manifestations of the masculine are the heart and livers fire, and elements of the lung and kidney functions. The yang functions of the heart and kidney are both attacked just as often as other aspects of the physiology, but we end up addressing these organs via yin nourishing and dispersing much more often. Sedation, calming, the dispersion of "frustrated" energy and the supplementation of yin and blood all reflect the types of social conditioning that are used to take the energetic ideas of yang and subvert them. There is a truism that yang vacuity is easy to treat, and yin vacuity is hard to treat, but it is false, in that effective treatment of yang vacuity is predicated on healthy yin. It seems that we culturally regard the masculine as threatening and have difficulty differentiating positive and negative aspects of the masculine. One case in point is how many people react to Obama’s style of discourse, as if there is something inherently wrong with being a somewhat paternalistic logical and level headed character. The puffy egos on the right get extremely reactive to being called on their crap and have turned on him out of a sense of being emasculated by an actual example of a stand up guy (I mean, do you really think that differences on policy issues could get someone to compare a man to Hitler?).
In the broader culture the feminine virtues (joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control) have been touted for the last two thousand years, somewhat ironically via the patriarchal Christian church. As we know, the promotion of one aspect of something will not eliminate its opposite; it will merely pervert its manifestation. The manifestation of the masculine in our culture, going back a long time has thus been masked, perverted, and angry. Nietzsche touted another set of virtues, which I believe he called Roman virtues (or something along those lines), they were heroic virtues that embodies positive masculine traits, like bravery, honor etc. I think the notion of virtue in our society fails to recognize these more masculine virtues, leading to a damaged manifestation of the same ideas, with bravery becoming anger and aggressive violence, honor becoming secretive plotting and the hollow ritual bonding found in things like fraternity hazing and the mask of the responsible "corporate citizen" that business wears today.
Another challenging aspect of modern psychology, and the resulting pathological manifestation in the general population, is the inversion of the virtues in terms of cultural expectations; what I mean by that is that women are expected to manifest more "masculine virtue" in order to compete effectively in workplaces or otherwise "have it all". The result is anger and frustration with a situation where there is no winning; women get progressively more angry and frustrated because they often feel they lack "support", which originally would have come from the positive masculine. This is not to say that women can't do what they want or have to stick to traditional "feminine" roles, just that they seem to be pining for something that is absent, and I think that it is this positive masculine. Having positive masculine energy in her life allows the woman to be more expressive and feel supported, not in a financial sense, but in an emotional one.
Men on the other hand are expected to be "equal" in relationships and subsume their ambitions at the very least under a mask of humane feminine virtues. The culture infantilizes men (the "Disney dad" in his shorts and paunch hiding Hawaiian shirt) and demonizes the aggressive masculine as "bad boys" (aggressive men without any balancing feminine virtues) and other examples of naked ambition which represent a distilled and unrooted anger and lust for power or sex that obviously must be contained and pacified, if not killed outright. The pop culture aspects of this are pretty obvious, but I think this perversion goes back much farther in western culture.
I am not advocating for a return to an earlier time, but for a way to harmonize the energetic qualities of our lives and relationships. I think it has the power to make us better individuals, partners and mates, better parents and in the long run healthier people. We are privileged to live in an age when most of the lower rungs of Maslow's hierarchy of needs are taken care of, and we lack strong cultural models and gender roles of how to proceed with the higher aspirations. I think that Chinese medicine can help to fill that gap, allowing people to develop a sense of greater purpose and positive movement in their lives that is otherwise not well modeled in our culture.
The "men's movement" that started back in the '80's mined the work of Carl Jung and came up with four archetypes of the positive masculine: The Warrior, the King, The Lover and the Magician. They are interesting to me from a Chinese medicine perspective because they can be mapped over yin and yang in a way that I find pleasing, but the more I contemplated it the more I thought it might also be a way to accentuate and restore men's perception of their own positive masculine, and a way to understand what is lacking in women's lives that they can either work on for themselves or seek in a suitable partner. Again, my thinking about this is based on ambient pop culture, my talking with patients, and some relatively light reading, but I think it deserves more exploration. In the following days I will do my best to frame out some of these thoughts.
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