Eastern medicine for me has always been shrouded in mysticism, and I approached it with equal parts curiosity and trepidation like an unfamiliar animal you're not quite sure how to interact with. In all my attempts to better understand eastern medicine I only ever felt more confused. It was like communicating using only vowels, in barely intelligible grunts.
The problem is translating eastern medicine into a form understood scientifically, but also how to apply it practically. I have felt like I have some understanding of the science, ultimately the science is very similar if you understand the terms, but I was always baffled at how that actually applied. What does it mean for me to have dampness, or wind not in theory but application?
Today when we went to our Monday QiGong session we were treated with a presentation by Andy Miles, and he finally started breaking down our communication barrier. He added consonants to our barely intelligible grunts. His aim was to explain each of the different "knots" associated with our syndromes, giving us deeper definitions and helpful instruction on how the terms actually apply to our lifestyles and why our treatment phases are always changing. I won't for the sake of clarity try to cover what he did today, I will only say it provided a great leap in understanding for me.
Something clicked for me today, and for several others I believe, honestly it all made perfectly practical sense -only we had just been looking at it from the wrong angle. Perception is a nifty trick.
One of the biggest hurdles I have faced personally is the victim mentality; I perceived everything happening to me, like ingesting my hurt. One thing Andy talked about that punched me in the gut (which is totally appropriate) is that if you pull something inward; absorb, ingest, it changes your biome and your body reacts, but you can counter that by also pushing something outward; expelling, releasing. I was always ingesting my hurt but never releasing it. This kind of thinking always seemed kinda of hoodoo to me, but it's all very practical. You know when you are pushing something out and when you are taking something in. Sighing, shaking, tapping, sweating, even bowel moments are all forms of expelling, and until just that moment it hadn't clicked. It's not so much mysticism as common sense.
How about the wind for example, an external force. When you are standing in the wind and you become cold you are absorbing that force rather than expelling it. In order to stay warm you have to generate heat around yourself to create a buffer. So how do you do this? Some of these things we do instinctively, we rub our hands together, we shake and move, we yawn and tap to increase circulation. Don't rely on your core to provide your heat, push it out to your extremities. From your core outward. If you view it from the perspective of not the wind reducing you, but of you pushing heat out toward the wind, then you have the tools to fight your discomfort in that moment.
Don't get me wrong it's not as simple as just think it and it shall be. It takes practice to train your sympathetic and parasympathetic systems to work like that. It's all very interesting and we are learning the breathing and circulation exercises that make these perspectives work in our weekly QiGong sessions.