EP 70 TCM Part 3 - ATGFY

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That's where it gets really magical and very complex is the more chronic something is to sort through that mess to find out where the original dysfunction or what we call the root started versus treating the branch which is the symptoms can be very complicated.

Hey friends, thank you for listening to the All Things Good 4U podcast. Join us as we explore ancient traditions, modern tools and practices in the world of health, wellness and personal development. I'm Amy Christensen, your host and your curated mind coach.

And I'm your co host, Brian Bowen, founder of Integrative Health Inc. And Better Human company High performance Coaching. Are you ready to take control of your life and start feeling enthusiastic, empowered and limitless each and every day for a life well lived, Let your curiosity flow with all things good for you. Good morning, Amy. How's your chi Chi?

My chichi is chewing along.

Choo, choo it along on your chi chi. For those of you who do not know what we're talking about, this is our third episode on traditional Chinese medicine and so we're are talking about chi and all of the aspects of Chinese medicine. So. So if your minds are wondering what the heck we're talking about is, we're just being joking with chi. So don't go any other place than that, please.

We're just along. All right? That's all that's going to happen is you.

Two thumbs up, one thumbs up, one thumbs down or two thumbs down today.

Amy, it's not really. I have one up, one sideways because I'm still processing a move. My place is a bit in disarray, which creates confusion in my world.

That'll suck some of that. Remember our prenatal chi. For those of you don't know what we're talking about, part of our conversation, we talked about prenatal and postnatal qi and what does that mean? And so when you're moving and you have stress and your sleep is disturbed and your environment's disturbed, it probably created a lot of irregularities in your daily habits and routines. And so you've probably been leaking chi from your postnatal chi. So got to get you back on track.

Part of what that does is just organization. In my home, that's what's happening that.

You love your new place?

I do. I like it. It's a lot of fun. Yeah, I can't. I. I can't imagine. I know I'm. I was looking at getting a house in the next year, but I can't imagine doing this again in less than two years. I'm going to have to be very specific my next move, because it will probably. I want it to be maybe my last move, because I just want my own space and place, but I love where I'm at. This is fantastic. It's been super great. And isn't it funny just how things like light and windows and just the ease of in and out of your home. I just. I'm always fascinated with how your home environment affects your energy and focus.

If you have a smooth flow going into feng shui, the idea of feng shui is a smooth flow of energy moving. And we talked about wu wei before, which means effortless movement. So you want things to move fluidly and effortlessly. So if your house is set up like that, then that supports you in your life, too. Vice versa. If your house is in disarray or chaotic and there's not a smooth flow, you can feel that. That can mirror back onto you.

So.

So those Miran neurons kick in and they're like, what the hell's going on? I got so excited right there. Oh, I had a head cold and my. My chi was not moving smoothly and I had what we call flem misting the mind. So my mind's still a little. My mind's still a little crazy right now. So be aware of what might come out of my mouth. I apologize.

Oh, boy, oh, boy. I. That explains a lot, because I have lived my entire life saying that.

They have flem mist in your mind.

Nope. But that might explain things. I've got constantly. Forgive me for whatever comes out of my mouth.

I mean, maybe all politicians should use that too, just to be aware. I got Flynn misting the mind.

That's fine. Misting the mind. I love the. I love the. The imagery. The imagery that the traditional Chinese medicine has with the way they describe things. It's lovely.

Yeah, it's really cool. So, again, just for those of you who are just not listening, this is our third part of this series. We' to jump into it, but please go back and listen to the first one and the second one, because that's the foundation of today's conversation. And the metaphors and stuff from the diagnosis and differentiation. Like, one of them is five element stuff. And the metaphors from that are just super beautiful. And again, it starts with the observation of things going on around us. And so it's easy when you are aware and you're studying nature and you're observing on how the interactions are and stuff like that, you can easily pull those metaphors into anybody's daily life. And I really do think there's extreme power and, you know, metaphors unique to each individual purse people, I really do think activate something in the subconscious mind. That's a whole nother conversation. We could have a whole podcast on metaphors in the subconscious mind. But. Yeah, yeah, let's do that.

Let's do that. But today's topic, we're gonna. We're gonna get into what maybe a lot of people who have touched a little bit into acupuncture or Chinese. Traditional Chinese medicine may be familiar, but not entirely. And that's the body's meridian lines.

Yes, yes. So we talked previously about what is qi. We talked about the different types of qi. We talked about the foundations of qi and the prenatal and postnatal, and we talked about all the different theories and systems theories which play or will play into our diagnosis and differentiation for when we're understanding what's going on with somebody. We talked about the different aspects of Chinese medicine, the herbology and the acupuncture and the gua sha and the cupping and the TWI Ma. And then we talked about diving a little deeper into each one of those systems theories, such as five elements and eight principles, six stages, four levels, all those yummy things. And so today we're pulling it into a little bit more of the types of things that we do to diagnose and differentiate somebody, because all those are important when it leads to what points are we picking? But we want to talk about the meridians and just a little bit of general about those. And then how those where the points that are on those meridians, how we utilize those.

And. Yeah, and so, and we talked a little bit about, like, the yin Yang and how they intertwine and work together and amongst each other. And the meridian lines are similar in that respect. Right. I know that there's lines, the channels or line meridian lines that run through the body for these different 12 areas that we're going to talk about. But similar to the yin yang, they blend and work together. It's not. If you had kidney infection, you're going to go see an acupuncturist and just have the kidney meridian line worked.

Yeah. And I think that's a Good place to start, I think, talking about the name of the meridian and understanding where the name comes from. Because as a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine, we're not allowed to diagnose from a western diagnosis. I can't tell you, oh, you have, you know, a urinary bladder problem specifically, or you have a kidney disease, or you have, you know, lung disease. So you can't specifically get into western diagnosis. So the, the name, I always warn my patients when I'm working with them, if I say something about the liver chi stagnation, I'm like, don't necessarily think there's something wrong with your organ, living organ, the liver itself. But the meridian and the pathway goes through that system. So you can think about there's 12 primary meridians. And going back to our yin and yang theory, you, there's a paired one for each element. For instance, the wood element has one yin organ system, or one meridian system, I should say, and has one yang system. So the liver is the yin part of that system, of the wood element in the meridian, the liver meridian. And the gallbladder is the yang part of that system, which is the gallbladder meridian. And again, each one has its own specific thing. So just to pause on that for a minute, even in the name liver meridian right there is. You get into these specific crazy kind of sounding things like xue yen. And so is the name of the liver meridian. But I don't say when I'm talking to people because I do want people to understand what I'm talking about. And so you have these 12 primary meridians. Each one has a yin and yang system. The only one that has four is the fire element. And the fire element has the pericardium, which is yin, the heart, which is yin, the small intestine, which is yang, and the triple burner, which is yang. And then the earth element has the spleen, which is yin, and the stomach, which is yang. And then the metal element has the lung, which is yin, and the large intestine, which is yang. And the water element has the kidney, which is yen, and the urinary bladder, which is yang. And in general, think about the Yang systems, meridian systems that are more about transforming, transporting. They have this kind of moving, vitality, kind of energy to them, very circulating very energetically, moving a little bit more. Where the, the yin systems have more to do with storage and nurturing and nourishing and blood and stuff like that. You have these systems so energetically, before something can even show up, the can be off so you can Think about the compounding effect if you have what. Let's just keep the liver meridian, specifically, let's talk about that.

And what did you call the liver meridian? I'm gonna, I'm gonna joy in right now. I'm gonna in on this and just say this is a lot for everybody who doesn't know that stuff. So basically what we want to just walk away from that little section is that you have the elements and each element has a yin and a yang meridian coordinating with that element. And you take all of that into a little perspective or a big perspective when somebody comes in with some dysfunction or ailments or pain and you address all of the whole system based on what maybe needs to move or what needs to get better flow or what needs to stop flowing. Because sometimes we're over flowing in some areas. Is that.

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Yeah. And the just real quick on the meridians. At the meridian, when we look at the body, there's these 12 primary meridians. And it looks like they're these finite lines, just electrical wires. But they're really not in, in reality in the body they're not that, they're not that fine of a line. But again, it's energetically the pathway that the energy moves through the system. And you know, they had to develop an observation and you know, utilizing experiments basically back in the day, they put all these systems together. And so it's like, how does the body have this smooth flow and this constant synergy moving, you know, throughout the whole body? And back in the day when they developed these systems through observation, through practice, through meditation, through experimental stuff, through all kinds of other things that they first had, they understood that the energy moved through these things. Now so the liver pathway, if you will, the reason is the liver is because the pathway goes through the liver organ. And so the reason it also is associated to the gallbladder is because there's a connection to the gallbladder. The lung meridian, its paired system is the large intestine if you look at the pathway of the lung meridian, you have the primary channel and then you have these divergent channels. And so the primary channel is the one that has the points on it. So one through lung nine and then. But you have this path off the channel that drives deeper into the body, that goes down to attach to the lungs and then dives down more to attach to the large intestine.

Okay.

Yeah. So that's how they become paired, paired systems. And everything has duality, everything has a balance, and that's why you have the yin and the yang aspect within everything. And so energetically, when something is thrown off, whether it's strange stress, stagnation from trauma, stagnation from mental stuff, stagnation from whatever, from deficiency or excess, these things start to come out of balance. And then eventually, over a period of time, we can start to see that organ imbalance or dysfunction show up. That can eventually translate into a Western diagnosis, if you will. Ideally, you want to catch that imbalance and be paying attention again. The big takeaway is every little thing you do is influencing your body. And to be aware of where you feel off, to be aware where you're starting to feel out of balance and know that means something more than you can even imagine. And so to try to put that back into balance, whether it's, you know, utilizing acupuncture, whether it's utilizing massage, where it's utilizing meditation, or, you know, whatever modality you're doing to help prevent it from cascading and compounding into a disease, which is dis. Ease in the body.

Right, yeah. And I like, that's. I think that's the whole point of why we appreciate. Or obviously you go into it quite deeper. But I appreciate, even though I didn't have a full understanding, I certainly still don't. I have more and I understand now that it. I've always just recognized and respected that the energy lines of the body, there was an energy process and we could use that as a means of overall staying healthy and pre treating some things that could be coming up so that it doesn't have to become a serious treatable issue. What do we call that? Because we don't do that a lot in Western medicine.

Prevention.

Oh, that one.

Our idea of prevention is a little minuscule for sure. And that the thing too is, it's interesting because a lot of complementary or alternative medicines actually utilize the foundation of Chinese medicine a lot. And even in naturopathic medicine and things like that, they might tell somebody, oh, based off this, your liver is goofed up. Right. And so they're still utilizing things that diagnosis and differentiation kind of observational stuff that that Chinese medicine has had in place, whether it's naturopathic stuff, whether it's functional medicine practitioners integrating some of that, and there's all kinds of other therapies that are alternative medicine, complementary medicine practitioners that utilize this. And so it's cool because it's been around for a long time and that's been mapped out. I'm, you know, so real quick, before I get too far ahead here, let's just go over the meridians real quick. So I'll try to keep them paired together. So you have the lung meridian, which we talked about. And think about that. The first points up in the chest area and then goes down to the thumb area. Okay. And then the paired system with that gn. And then the other one, the paired system is the large intestine meridian. And that kind of goes. Starts at the. The finger, the index finger, and goes up to the nose. And let's see here, just to keep my stuff organized here, the heart will go over that one. That goes up to little finger and kind of ends in the chest area. And then the pericardium and that yen. And then the pericardium, yen starts at the middle finger and ends around the. And again in the chest area. And I'm trying to keep this super simple here. Triple burner is going to be yang. And that starts on the outside of the ring finger, goes up and ends by the eyebrow, and then so on the head. And then the small intestine is the next one of that. And that starts at the little finger and comes up to the. It ends by. In front of the ear. And so that's yang. So those are the most complex. That's the two yang and the two yin meridians. And then the spleen that we already talked about, that is yin, and that starts at the foot and comes up and ends on the side of the chest, if you will. And then the stomach, that's yin. And then the stomach meridian is yang. And that starts at the second toe, goes up the leg, through the abdomen, ends by the jaw. And then the lung we already talked about, and the large intestine we already talked about. That's metal element. And so the kidney meridian is yen. And that starts at the inner toe and then comes up. And then the urinary bladder channel is the yang aspect of that. And that one starts by the inner eye and then comes. It's crazy. So it starts at the Inner eye comes up over the head, goes all the way down the back and then ends at the foot. And so it's a pretty crazy one. But the thing I really want to point out about these meridian systems and these lines is energetically, they all, even though they seem like a line, they all loop and feed together at some point. And then that's when you look at the five elements and you look at the Shen cycle and the control cycle of things, it gets very complicated. But as we've evolved and have done more studies and really looking at how, what is Qi and how does it potentially move, you know, throughout the body? 85% of the Chinese meridians overlap, the myofascial meridians, which is very, very cool because it's an intense fibrous connection throughout the whole body. And when we look at connective tissue, or the fascia engulfs every cell in the whole body, so literally everything in the whole body is connected via fascia, fascia. And then back in the 80s, I believe, in South Korea, they discovered these little tubulars throughout the, kind of the connective tissue, if you will. And they called him the dongbang ducks. But now, I know it's pretty, pretty funny. And they didn't know really what they did, but it was the first discovery of these little tubulars throughout the whole body, throughout this network. And now it's called the, called the interstitium, which a couple of years ago they were making a big debate for it being the largest organ system in the body. And then I think that got pulled back. So still I need to look that up to see if it is officially if it beat skin or not, or if they pulled it back as considered being an organ system. I lost track on that after this. They, they re redacted that.

Yeah. And the, the, the big takeaway there is that our bodies are very complex. It's all connected. If people don't know what fascia is, it's basically just this interstitial tissue. It's like a sweater that's wrapped around all of the body muscle systems interlaced into your skin, and it has these little. I mean, you can almost think of it like a spider web also. And so sometimes you'll see in spiderwebs where there's really thick areas and really thin areas and they're all interlaced and connected together. And when you work on one section, if you were even to think about a spider web, and you're moving one little section of the spider web, the rest of the spider web is affected by that little bit of vibration and that's similar to what's happening with the fascial system. And I think it is incredibly fascinating. And I think the fact that it ties together so well with the energetic lines of the meridian line, I think it's just an amazing process that we can really get into the connection of how powerful our body is and how sensitive and aware our body can be and how we can treat it in a preventative way with things that seemingly. And not that it's not painful, but it's. Acupuncture in general is pretty tolerable. And oftentimes it's just completely relaxing. Every now and again, you might get a zinger when they put in in a point. But overall, you go in, you have these in. And most. I fall asleep almost every time because it's so relaxing.

Yeah.

But it's actually doing healing processes for your body while you're just chilling out for 20 or 30 minutes.

Yeah. Back in the day. So you have these. You have acupuncture points on all of these meridians. So there's a certain amount of points on each meridian. Right. And each point has its own energetic function that, that it causes or helps the body facilitate. And back in the day, they used to stimulate those with splinters of bone and just crazy stuff. Right. Because they didn't have these sterile acupuncture needles. Yes. It's really comfortable now compared to what it used to be. They used to do like scarring mox and all these. And then the needles when they first had.

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They weren't even stainless steel like bronze needles and stuff. They were big. They were like sticking a nail in you. So it's way more comfortable now because these things are so tiny. They're on average 36 gauge, but they're solid. They're considered a filiform needle versus a hollow needle if you're getting an injection, which tears the tissue so it hurts a lot more. So, like, 24 of these could fit in the end of an average hypodermic needle. They're that tiny.

Yeah. I came into acupuncture at the right time in the world then.

Yeah, you sure did.

They probably would not be bamboo spears into my body.

And we've bastardized it a little bit here in the west, for sure. I hate to say we have a tendency to do that to some things, but a, we wanted to. We're just not in an acupuncture framework. We're not as tough. Right. With dealing with some of these needles. And so here it's, oh, come once or twice a week over there. You do it every day until you're better. You don't necessarily just do it once or twice a week. So we've diminished the frequency amount for one and then two. Most practitioners that are traditional from China are heavy stimulators. They thrust the needle up and down, almost like the same sensation you would get if you're going to get dry needled. And so they. The qi to arrive immediately. They want to get the chi. So basically, when you put an acupuncture needle in the point, you're stimulating the body's response to activate and really stimulate this area which gets that qi moving and performs its function. And in Japan, they're very light needlers, so very. Just gentle tap in. They don't do a lot of heavy manipulation. And they believe the chi will arrive. It's. Oh, it'll come. I like to do a little bit of a mix where I put it in and then I'll manipulate it a little bit, but not get quite heavy stimulation as far as. Because it's. I know it'll come, but we don't have all day. Let's get it going a little bit.

That'd be nice to be able to go in and get acupuncture every day until you felt something was solidified or rectified or whatever. It's not very realistic for most people.

Well, it's not. Mainly because the time and then the. The finances over there. I don't know what it costs now, but it was like $10, right. Or you're like, trading something for it. But the idea of that which I truly believe the majority of, a large majority of practitioners of different types of modalities would have more success consistently if they saw people more frequently because what it is is it's input. And so if you have something going on and I'm putting input in it. Input. Right. We're going to get ahead of it versus I'm going input, see you in a week, see you in a week. Input, see you in a week. And between those times, I'm putting the input in of the type of input I want to help your body. All the things in the world are putting input in that could be countering what we're doing.

Yeah. And it's just like everything else. It's like with us in mindset, work and training, physical, personal training. Right. If you're not going to make that, can you make a change over time, going to the gym or doing some strengthening activity once a week? Sure. It's what you depend on, what you're doing in between those times. But even in that realm, most personal trainers will say if you're not doing at least three days a week, you're probably not going to see a significant change anytime soon. You're still seeing benefit. Yeah, but ideally, even if you're not killing yourself in the gym three days a week, you're doing something for your body, strength wise, health wise. Every single day, even if that's on a rest day, you're doing something to help heal your body. Same thing with mindset. Like we know that mindset takes, if you're super intense and you're very focused, it takes a minimum of what research is showing about 63 days to even shift a firing pattern in all of the areas of the brain. But that's super intense work. Most people can do focused work if they're really focusing on it in 90 days and make a shift. But some people need 365 days or more. So my point being is that when we look at health and wellness in general, just for a person's body to change the way it functions, whether it's personal training, mindset or doing Chinese medicine, more consistent that you can do it, the better.

Yeah, it's all about the reps.

So let me ask you this. I know you've got like a ton of stuff, but let me just say real quick again, a little review on the meridian lines. So essentially there's what, there's 12 principal meridians, right? I know there's 12 primary, two primary. Okay. And that's 12 primary, 12 primary. And that's stomach and spleen and then small intestine and heart, bladder and kidney pericardium and triple warmer gallbladder and liver, lung, and large intestine.

Good job. You passed your acupuncturist now.

Okay, thank God. I can read from my pretty little color diagram that I have here. You can go on, anybody can go on and look up the body meridians if you're intrigued or interested in looking at some of these. And in general, you're going to be able to see that, how those areas flow through the body. And then. So that's the 12. I know that there's two governing bodies.

Or two extraordinary vessels.

Extraordinary. Extraordinary vessels.

Extraordinary.

I love that we're all extraordinary.

The ren, the ren and the dew.

The ren and the dew. But it's all. That's called a few different things. Right. Because some of it, like the one I'm looking at is conception. Vessel.

Vessel, yeah, yeah. The red and the dews is more traditional, but you can call them that the same. And that creates kind of a loop. Basically. Think about like coming down. The front of our body is the wren and the back of our body is the dew. But it really creates like, like this loop around the whole body and that on that sagittal plane.

Okay, so is ren, conception and do governing correct?

Yes, you're correct. Yeah.

Okay, thank you. Yeah, thank you. All right. I just had to jump in for some clarity on all of this. And then how. And obviously again, we overlap. Everything works together. You're even like when you talked about the levels of the yin and Yang. Okay. There's one that you can think of the body in depth and you can address one. But then there's a deeper connection that makes that is one is yin to this one. But if you go deeper, then it becomes yawn to the other one. Is that right? Yeah.

Yes, everything. So there's always the seed of yin within Yang. But yeah, they primarily, each one has its own designation. But you can never like again, going back to that five element conversation, the yin, there's always a seed of yin within Yang. And so different aspects. As far as our diagnosis, Yin and Yang theory, we look at that. I think one thing to point out with the meridians and even going back to what you said about Western medicine, and it doesn't always do this, but I think sometimes we get pigeonholed into this aspect of segmenting stuff.

Right.

So it's. Oh, it's your liver meridian. It's rarely ever just one system that's off. And so it's an interplane of system. So I like to think about. You're in a neighborhood. Right. And it's okay if Your neighbor is a jerk. Like, how does that affect you over a period of time? For instance, the liver meridian, like a very basic thing is like when people are really stressed out and overwhelmed, it creates a lot of what we call liver qi stagnation, which is just disruptive the liver's job. Chinese medicine has to do with harmonizing as well. And so when it gets off, we can become a little more irritable, a little less flexible, a little bit more stagnant. Catch yourself sighing and you're not above it, right? You're in the thick of it. And the neighbor to the liver happens to be the stomach, right? And so sometimes when we're stressed and overwhelmed, all of a sudden we can have some digestive stuff, some stomach stuff too, right? Nausea, maybe a little crampy, a little whatever, bowel disturbance and stuff like that. So it's okay. So you can see that's called a wood overacting on earth pattern. And so the liver qi stagnation is overwhelmed. It's overacting on the earth element, which is the spleen, stomach. And so that's just again, an example of how things can affect each other. And so you have this, when we go back to all those different systems, on how you see them integrate to each other. So you might talk about the kidney has yin deficiency, which the yin deficiency is giving rise to fire. The fire rises up because that's the nature of heat is to rise up, right? The heat rises up into the body and starts harassing the heart. So the heart then becomes harassed. Can. Can. Can give you insomnia, right? It could give some irritability, it could give some things like that. You don't just treat necessarily the heart because you're not affecting and building the yin to calm the heat down. And so that's where it gets really magical and very complex, is the more chronic something is to sort through that mess to find out where the original function, or what we call the root started versus treating the branch, which is the symptoms can be very complicated. And so you're utilizing in your intake, you're listening to questions, you're looking at the complexion of somebody's face. You're listening to the sound of their voice. The big thing I'm a big fan of as we're doing a pulse diagnosis because the pulses tell you a lot more than what we're used to in the western pulses. It's not just about the rate. There's six primary positions in 38 different qualities. You can break each of those qualities at 38 into excess and deficient. And in each excess and deficient there are specific qualities in there. And so that helps tell you what's happening in those systems. What you want to hear. What is somebody saying? What are other diagnostic principles that you're implementing? What are they showing you? And you need at least three things pointing.

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Drive to disharmony or dysfunction in certain systems. And then you have to utilize those previous these things that we talked about in the systems theories for diagnosis and differentiation and start applying those to come up with an example of what I just explained.

It's so deep. I love it though. I like that it's all connected and, and the whole point of. Okay, here's the question. Can somebody affect specific. Okay, I know we just said they overlap. If something's cooking and you go to the acupuncturist and they're like, we're going to work on your whatever. Liver wind rising. And I only know that because you did that once for me.

Yeah, yeah. She had gas. Okay.

I don't, I don't eat dairy gluten anymore, Brian. So I don't have that problem. Okay, but what, okay, now that you've said that, what did remember tell people what it really meant?

Well, so liver, for instance, wind. When we say the word wind, you can think about it a as moving around. It also describes kind of the level of depth that is in our body. So there's a lot more Wind can show up different ways. Wind can show up like a wind B syndrome, which is a type of pain syndrome which moves around. Oh, one minute hurts over here, one minute hurts over over here. Right. So that's a wind type thing. If you start getting a cold, that can be a wind type thing because of the invasion and the level it's at in the body. So that can be from a wind thing. And so sometimes you can have a tinnitus which is a ringing in the air, but that can be. So you can have. Wind can mean different things in different situations. And again, that's the biggest thing in Chinese medicine that I learned that we should all really take to heart in life is that everything is relative. And I think we've lost or do not have that understanding on a mass level that everything is relative. So it helps us stop and be like, wait a second, problem solving, Right? What. Here's what's happening. Okay. How does it relate to this or how does it relate to this or understanding or perspective? I think if we just, you know, have that. So you have to have that ability. We had two students in my class that had the biggest challenge. And both of them were clearly smart because one was a lawyer and one was a doctor. And they had a harder time in acupuncture school because they were linear thinkers in their mind. It's okay, if this happens here, it means this if this happens. And it's very that. And so to wrap your brain and to be able to step into this relative mind, which I also think is more divergent type thinking, can be a real challenge. So I think people who have divergent mindsets can step into some of these principles a little easier.

Okay, and then we have a next podcast topic. Yeah. So it just the. It's all intertwined. It's never just exactly one thing. But I guess when my question is, if you knew that, you went in and say you've gotten. You're struggling here. We're going to work on this. I'm going to treat the liver and whatever else is it. What was it? Liver. I'm forgetting which.

Well, the one we're talking about. So, like liver yang rising. So therefore you're one. You're trying to tornify the yin. You're trying to rectify and harmonize the liver qi. Maybe you're trying to reduce or clear out the channel a little bit because there's some stagnation. So you use some she. Cleft points. And again, liver yin, kidney yin, because kidney is a found of all yin. And so this is. My brain is like, doing that all the time.

Right.

In certain environments, we are prone to more specific things here, specifically in the US we're really prone to liver Chi stagnation and spleen Chi deficiency. It was actually a joke in school. And because everybody had liver chi stagnation, spleen Chi deficiency. But it's so common throughout the US that it's. There's a global inner acupuncturist joke about the whole thing.

So liver and spleen.

Yeah, yeah, the liver and spleen. And notice both of those are yin organ systems.

Right.

So really if you want like the liver, spleen and the kidney, like those through a lot of diagnosis and differentiation, those tend to be harder hit. So I like to think of those kind of as like our anti aging points too, because the kidney, we got to keep that vitality up. But then there's seems like the spleen and liver always have a role throughout all patterns to some degree, especially again.

In the U.S. okay, so if somebody went in and had some work done on their liver and their spleen, can they go home? Considering you can't come in even once a week, can they go home and do some things at home that will help other than take herbs? I know we can get into the herb conversation, but are there acupuncture points work? Are there acupressure points? I know they, you know what I'm saying? Is there, are there some techniques or things people can do to help continue that process?

Yeah, again, I go back to the word input. First of all, single use acupuncture points are good, don't get me wrong. But a lot of these harmonize and work together. It'd be like listening to a symphony. Like the oboe, I'm sure is amazing. But if you just sit there and listen to the oboe, it's not going to be that. It's not going to be that awesome. But the oboe with the violin, with the. So they do orchestrate in and there is a synergy of them working together because sometimes you have to clear excess first before you build deficiency. So if you're doing a point that's just about deficiency, but you're not clearing the excess, then it's defeating the purpose a little bit. There is an extreme point of, of importance to doing multiple points at once and understanding that. And then yes, I think I'm a big fan of active and passive therapy. And so passive is, hey, I'm doing something to you. If you get a massage, right? Or if you, you get acupuncture, if you get an adjustment or whatever it is. But then the active part is the participation of homework that you do. Whether it's you're doing an exercise or you're changing a dietary thing, or you're doing a mindset thing or whatever it is, that input was critical because again, input, endpoint, so where's our void? So if I see you once a week, what are you going to be doing the other times throughout the week to help support that input? So in Chinese medicine, one of our big things that we can do is herbology and so the herbs that we're giving you are synergistic and energetically functioning towards the same treatment principle of our diagnosis and differentiation that we give you. So those herbs are creating and giving you that same input that ideally stimulating that acupuncture point is going to do. So even if somebody didn't want to do acupuncture, if they still went through the proper diagnosis and differentiation of traditional Chinese medicine, they could do the IRF herbs and get there as well. So that would be another big option for people who didn't want to do the needling. But here's an example of something that's really important. So the spleen, when it's out of balance, sometimes it craves sweets. So the earth element is all about nourishment. So when it's out of balance, sometimes we look for false nourishment. So we start craving things that really aren't serving us well. But one of the things that damages and depletes the spleen, there's a lot of stuff nutritionally, fried foods, damp foods, stuff like that. But overthinking and over worrying.

Oh, boy.

And over worrying. That's why I said the spleen's so involved. We are overthinkers and over worriers to. At a high degree, I could sound like a wizard or sage or magician when people come in. Because if you say to me, if I just looked at you and go, oh, you overthink and over worry. How did you know?

How did you know? Because you're live in this country.

Because everybody does. Or if somebody is. I wake up. Oh, I wake up in the middle of the night. Oh, do you wake up between one and three by chance? Yes, I do. Oh, my God. How do you know that? Because every. Because that's the liver chi.

So by the way, when cortisol gets. Can shoot up and wake you up, all ties together. And you can be doing things to help that by managing your circadian rhythm. So I. I get it. Okay, I'm geeking out.

Yeah, go ahead. So the input that you would do is one is maybe I give you some herbs, help nourish that spleen Chi. And to help rectify it, we do some acupuncture points for that and create some balance with the other systems. And I go home and I'm like, I really need you to really put some boundaries, earth elements about boundaries around the times when you overthink and worry. Okay, so give yourself permission to over consume, overthink, over worry, beat up mentally. But I want you to do it between you pick the times. I'll give you two hours. Right. Again, think about. The earth element is about holding boundaries. It holds the water in its channels, right? It creates the boundary and supports the tree. It does all these things. So we need to have some boundaries around when we overthink and over worry. And so that's one of the homework I like to give people. So it's. That's another input because we got to take the log off the fire. If we're going to throw water in the fire, we got to take the log off the fire. I might give you some dietary recommendations, too. Things not to eat. Things to eat. There's a lot of things we can do. But still to this day, I stand by 70% of the reason we don't get more improvement in with our health with certain modalities, it doesn't matter which one it is. It's applicable to all of them, is because it's things that we're continuing to do throughout our lives that are supporting the input that is not serving us well, the input that is supporting our body to be out of balance. So if you come in and you get acupuncture and you're just belligerent, you're just irritable, and you're like, and I need to relax. And then. Then you go back to the job that you hate, that you were just complaining about, and you don't change your mindset around the work environment, the people you're with, the thing that you do, or just change it all together, and you go right back, what good is that serving?

It's a temporary plug for just a minute, and then you're just opening the gate back up for all the problems.

100%, yeah. 100%, yeah. This has been delightful. I have a phone call. I have to jump on here in a little bit. So I hate to jump off because I could talk about this on all day long, but that was super fun and I appreciate you letting me just gab away for a little bit. So thank you.

I love it. Thank you so much for sharing all the depths. And I know you're questioning whether we need one more on the tcm, but I'm gonna. I'm probably gonna throw something out there to get one more in there. But thank you for all of this, and thanks for everybody who's jumping in and listening and getting some information on traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture, and just ways that we can be more overall preventative and building our bodies towards health rather than pulling it away from health. Yeah.

Thank you everybody. And go get some needling done. Go get curious. Try some acupuncture. Don't be afraid of it. I tell you, 98% of people who are scared to come in and I put that first needle in there, that's it. So it can be very gentle. There's even really small pediatric needles. Even if you're just doing the herbs, there's a lot of other ways to help stimulate the body. I honestly think just sitting down with a practitioner, they ask so many questions that are way more in depth, that are very intriguing, that just give you insights about yourself. So there's a lot of value just in that.

So absolutely.

All right, guys, I appreciate it. Thank you, Amy.

Thank you, Brian. Have a fantastic day and a great call. I'll you take talk to you later.

All right, talk to you later.

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