{"id":370,"date":"2022-04-13T12:51:03","date_gmt":"2022-04-13T12:51:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/elementalwellness.net\/?p=370"},"modified":"2022-05-30T18:49:47","modified_gmt":"2022-05-30T18:49:47","slug":"intro-to-tcm-theory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/elementalwellness.net\/index.php\/2022\/04\/13\/intro-to-tcm-theory\/","title":{"rendered":"Foundations Yin Yang and Five Elements"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-cover is-light\"><span aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-cover__background has-background-dim\"><\/span><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1200\" height=\"800\" class=\"wp-block-cover__image-background wp-image-107\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/elementalwellness.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/ying-yang-water.jpg\" data-object-fit=\"cover\" srcset=\"https:\/\/elementalwellness.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/ying-yang-water.jpg 1200w, https:\/\/elementalwellness.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/ying-yang-water-600x400.jpg 600w, https:\/\/elementalwellness.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/ying-yang-water-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/elementalwellness.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/ying-yang-water-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/elementalwellness.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/ying-yang-water-768x512.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\" \/><div class=\"wp-block-cover__inner-container is-layout-flow wp-block-cover-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center has-white-color has-text-color has-large-font-size\">Yin Yang &amp; 5 Elements Basic Theory<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-css-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-heading\">We&#8217;ve begun a weekly series of talks on subjects surrounding health and traditional Chinese medicine.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-css-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-heading\">In case you missed our talk this week, here is the first installment in which Beth talks about the concepts of Yin and Yang and the 5 elements according to Chinese medicine.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:100px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed aligncenter is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"TCM Intro: Yin Yang &amp; 5 Elements\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/_uDiti5ddEw?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-ub-expand ub-expand\" id=\"ub-expand-730b0022-2a9a-47b7-b699-2f14e398feaa\" data-scroll-type=\"false\" data-scroll-amount=\"\" data-scroll-target=\"\">\n<div class=\"ub-expand-portion ub-expand-partial wp-block-ub-expand-portion\" id=\"ub-expand-partial-730b0022-2a9a-47b7-b699-2f14e398feaa\" aria-hidden=\"false\">\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<a id=\"ub-expand-toggle-partial-730b0022-2a9a-47b7-b699-2f14e398feaa\" class=\"ub-expand-toggle-button\" style=\"text-align: left; \" role=\"button\" aria-expanded=\"false\" aria-controls=\"ub-expand-full-730b0022-2a9a-47b7-b699-2f14e398feaa\" tabindex=\"0\">\n\t\t\t\tshow more (transcript)\n\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n<div class=\"ub-expand-portion ub-expand-full ub-hide wp-block-ub-expand-portion\" id=\"ub-expand-full-730b0022-2a9a-47b7-b699-2f14e398feaa\" aria-hidden=\"true\">\n\t\t\t\n\n<p>O kay so we&#8217;re going to get started today welcome to everybody who is joining us and i just wanted to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>talk to you a little bit this evening about the fundamental theory of chinese<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>medicine one of the things that drew me to this medicine in the first place was that i really<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>believed it was the most elegant way anybody had ever explained to me the way the body worked<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and there are some really key principles that we&#8217;re going to cover tonight that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>play into that model and it&#8217;s the thing that i love about it is it&#8217;s<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>it&#8217;s so simple and yet it encompasses so much so there is a depth and complexity<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>to what it can accommodate and yet on its very surface level the the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>concepts are very simple and so today we&#8217;re going to talk a little bit about those fundamental theories of how we<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>look at the body and so much in chinese medicine that you&#8217;ll notice<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>is that we look at the body within the context of the greater<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>natural world so that is something else to keep in mind is that we&#8217;re often<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>hearkening back to how does the systems how does the system that we see<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>operating around us in nature apply to what is going on our body and vice versa<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>so the theory itself the the basics of them anyway are broken<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>down into these kind of five five areas uh the first one being the concepts of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>yin and yang i&#8217;m sure you&#8217;re all familiar with that that symbol we&#8217;ll look at it a little bit more in a moment<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um and then once we get to yin and yang we further classify things or we can classify them by their five elements the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>five elements school of acupuncture is actually widely practiced in the uk<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>it&#8217;s one of the predominant teaching modalities that they use in terms of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>constitutional diagnosis as opposed to what my education was based on in California<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>which is what&#8217;s called the zhong fu school and um you&#8217;ll see i can talk to you a little<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>bit about that particular difference there but you&#8217;ll get a little bit of both in<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>different educational settings and and i quite like five<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>elements for a lot of different reasons and i&#8217;ll go into that more later on so we categorize things by yin<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and yang we categorize things according to their element and we&#8217;ll talk about how those elements work together<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and then you might have seen my model of the person with all of the lines on<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>their body these are the meridians or the channels um you&#8217;ll hear them called that in<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>chinese the word is my that is used um but commonly we&#8217;ll look at them as<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>meridians channels collaterals is another word that you might hear them called but um there are there are<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>basically pathways that run along your body on both the outside and inside<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and they connect pieces of your body to your organ systems<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>to each other and so this system of meridians is sort of a<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>core fundamental<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>representation of how your body works holistically<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and um we can talk a little bit about that more later on as well but um the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>meridian theory all by itself has its own place and i&#8217;m only going to touch on<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>that briefly but i do want you to understand that that every organ in your body is connected to every other organ<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>in your body based on this either meridian system or element system or any other ways and this is how we get<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>that beautiful richness and complexity that i love about chinese medicine and yet still are<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>able to sort of very simply categorize things and take a look at the syndromes and and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>that&#8217;s kind of how you get down to those nuts and bolts after the meridians we&#8217;re going to talk<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>a little bit about the substances you may or may not have heard your acupuncturist discuss concepts like chi<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>blood yin yang phlegm those kinds of things<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>flood is actually evil associated with damp but there&#8217;s a lot of words that you&#8217;ll hear<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>with substances and evils and those might mean something to you in english<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and and of course they are translations from chinese into english but they sometimes mean something different<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>within the context of chinese medicine which happens a lot and we&#8217;ll try to tackle the concept of chi although<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>to attempt is again thousands of year old question that we&#8217;re trying to deal with there so<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>we&#8217;ll see what we can get to and if you have any questions at any time feel free to take a moment and and uh jot it down and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>raise your hand and suddenly i&#8217;m back in the evils<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>hold on there we go i&#8217;ll get to the evils later so<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the yin yang theory or the yin yang theory depending on how you&#8217;re you&#8217;re<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>talking about it is one of the core basics of chinese philosophy you&#8217;ll see it in all kinds of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>representations and it is essentially it is the the chinese<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>version of i think duality that we all sort of see in our world you know<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um the computers we operate are based in binary code you know we&#8217;ve got day we&#8217;ve<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>got night got light we&#8217;ve got dark we&#8217;ve got um we&#8217;ve got male and we got female<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>although i will say that um you might think that the yin yang theory is a bit binary for your<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>needs in terms of that one of the things i love about the young young theory is is that you can always go deeper so<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>there&#8217;s always yin with and young and yan yin and that is part of the interdependence of yin and yang is that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>you almost never approach an absolute yin or yang in whatever you&#8217;re doing or looking at and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>so while it does hold within it the construct of the binary model it is very<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>fluid and forgiving and i think the way that really matches beautifully the natural world<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um so there&#8217;s the duality of being there&#8217;s the interdependence which really is that they need each other there&#8217;s<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>always a little bit of one in the other that&#8217;s what those little dots in the in the yin yang symbol mean you&#8217;ve got the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>lightness of the yarn with a little dark dot to represent the yin within the yarn and then you&#8217;ve got the darkness of the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>yang or the yin with a little right dot in the center which is the yang within the yin and so that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>dependence on one another they really do require each other to to flourish<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the inter-transformation is something that oftentimes will kind of confuse people a little bit<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>where you will oftentimes have like that yin can turn into yang or that yang can turn into yin and that&#8217;s when you see<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>those those tails right um kind of wrapping around each other<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>that&#8217;s the tail of that little paisley i guess this is the best word to describe it uh figured that you see on the yin<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>yang and um and that is that you know they lead into one another you know uh<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>night becomes day and day becomes night and the tide comes in and the tide comes<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>out and there are these pieces at the beginning and the end of these cycles where they are really leading into one another<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um and so it&#8217;s another hallmark characteristic of the yin and the young<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and how they work together and the last four is mutual consumption which means that if either of them<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>come to excess too much yin too much young they will eventually consume each other<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>so it is is part of how they keep themselves in balance so<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>there&#8217;s always that place in the middle where they transform one into the other and within that is and of course if we<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>get beyond that balance where they become out of balance for some reason um you will one will consume the other so<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um let&#8217;s say we&#8217;re talking about um rains for instance<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>rain would be considered very yin and uh an excess of yin would cause erosion ultimately because<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the rain will wash away the soil the soil will not be as lush will not be able to maintain life and the soil will<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>become very young in nature because it won&#8217;t be able to hold because of the excess of yin so the excess yin will<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>consume um uh so those are<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the hallmarks of the yin yang theory um i&#8217;m just going to go into a little bit more talk about the duality again<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the yin and the young they are polar opposites right and you can walk throughout your life<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and categorize everything you see as either yin or young you&#8217;ll do that for a few days at least i did when i first<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>started learning about this you know that tree branch right there what is that tree branch is it in or is it young<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and you say okay well is it lighter is it darker is it wetter or is it drier where are those opposites within<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>everything that i&#8217;m looking at and sometimes you&#8217;ll challenge yourself but i guarantee you everything<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>can can fall within something that&#8217;s either more yet or more young and the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the beauty of this is of course um this duality offers a structure and i<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>think it&#8217;s actually one of the reasons we struggle as a culture with binary um<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>or rather honoring and acknowledging the spectrum<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>of the world is because when we feel unsure of ourselves we really hold to this duality because that polarization<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>actually gives us the tension that we need to feel stable right oh it&#8217;s either yin or it&#8217;s young that feels stable it<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>gives us a tense structure from which to work and find stability um which is useful but it is only part of the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>picture because in the next piece of the picture you recognize that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>they are in fact interdependent you cannot have yin without yang everything around you<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>even if it is able to be categorized into yin are young they all have both yin and yang<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>they exist together and in fact more to the point their definitions exist in relation to each other so it&#8217;s not that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>that thing over there is yin or that thing over there is yang but rather that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>compared to the thing on the left the thing on the right is more young or<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>more yin and so we have to keep that in mind when we are going through and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>looking and as an acupuncturist i go through when i look at the body i use that heavily to say when i&#8217;m looking at<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the body right um i&#8217;m always looking at the yin and the young in relationship to each other and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>then the the beauty of course is that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the flexibility within this interdependence is what is what brings that absolute yin and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>yang to life into form you know when things are black and white not that there&#8217;s not beauty in black and white i<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>think there can be but even in the black and white the beauty really isn&#8217;t the gradients it&#8217;s the gray that makes it<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>gives it depth gives it life gives it movement and so um<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>you know i think about that interdependence and the flexibility that you find within that system that brings<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>life to the absolute black and whiteness of the yin and yang the other thing is is this inter the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>concept of inter transformation right um speaking of movement right so not only<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>do you get the depth from the interdependence but the inter transformation brings you deeper into the concept of movement right things are<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>always shifting if as we like to say if you don&#8217;t like the weather right now wait an hour it&#8217;ll<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>change for you this is the very core fundamental of the inter-transformation characteristics of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>yin and yang they are always shifting back and forth and they rarely stay in their absolute form for very long so<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um in order to to maintain that shift it&#8217;s really all about the timing and the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>conditions right so depending on how how the time shifts whether it&#8217;s you<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>know long short right um when it&#8217;s happening and what&#8217;s happening around it that you begin to see that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>shift change and and morph and so we find we use this a lot in chinese medicine because again if what<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>we&#8217;re looking for is trying to shift into young or yanto yin we will um we&#8217;ll take a look at the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>timing right like what interval of treatment are we looking at what time of day are the symptoms happening under what conditions<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>are we currently operating and what conditions can we shift to encourage the natural shift that happens in the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>inter-transformation of yin and yang and it is truly through this that you then begin to appreciate the beauty and the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>subtlety that this binary construct brings to the world around you in the natural<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>world i love this image of the waves shifting i mean it&#8217;s just there&#8217;s power<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>there&#8217;s beauty there&#8217;s movement you know things are nice when they settle for a period<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>but as we all know like you&#8217;re not going to sit on the porch for 24 hours a day like you have to you know take that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>moment that it comes to you but recognize that it is forever changing and that it&#8217;s that change in fact that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>brings us the great beauty um the final concept of the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>young theory is is mutual consumption where we begin to talk about um the yin<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>yang that is out of balance and that is that too much of either will cause depletion of the opposite<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um and in this case what you do is as again we&#8217;re continuing to talk about<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>them in relation to each other so you will have circumstances when you&#8217;re looking at the yin and the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>yang within each thing because if you&#8217;ve established there is yin and yang in all things<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and you will say okay so if i&#8217;m looking at what balanced yin and yang look like<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>are we looking at the yin and yang as excess meaning too much or deficient meaning not enough right are we looking<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>them at absolutes so the yang is it is the yin<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>adequate but the youngest excess or deficient or is it only in relation to the yin is the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>yin relatively low and therefore the normal young looks excess and we use that a lot<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>diagnostically in chinese medicine too when we&#8217;re looking at a person we need to know like am i treating the yin or am<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>i trying to be young happens all the time and so um being able to identify<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um similar symptoms in a body you would see heat is the best example that i have of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>that right there there&#8217;s heat true heat which could be categorized as an excess of young sometimes it is sometimes it<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>not we&#8217;ll get into heat there&#8217;s other reasons for the heat sometimes you get heat in a body signs<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>of heat that are actually due to deficiency yin deficiency will cause heat not<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>enough moisture to keep the temperature even and so in the absence of moisture<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>you will build up heat but it&#8217;s not an excess heat it&#8217;s a deficiency heat um and so you&#8217;ll see that a lot and trying<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>to balance how you look at that and um and again these words excess and deficiency<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um we use them clinically in chinese medicine but it doesn&#8217;t mean that that anybody is too much or too little i mean<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the first person to say that i&#8217;m a bit too much but i&#8217;m at peace with that so um but i do i want you always to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>consider when you&#8217;re looking at these things when you hear someone say things these things about you or your body that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>we&#8217;re talking in comparative terms and more importantly the other thing that i love about this<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>medicine too is that these are unique to you so again much in the same way that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>we would compare yin and yang to each other we are always comparing what is<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>typical for you in your unique body to what is currently out of balance for you<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>in your unique body and so those are important concepts to keep in mind and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>then of course really this function of yin and yang is designed to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>to create balance when it has fallen out of balance and to correct<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>disharmony which is how we talk about um things in chinese medicine when<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>something in the body is not operating at its optimal level we call that a<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>condition of disharmony and of course our goal is always harmony within your body<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>so those are just things to keep in mind um<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the next bit of chinese medicine theory and i think we&#8217;re only going to go into yin and yang and the five elements<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>tonight because i it&#8217;s a lot of material to cover and i want to keep these short so that you enjoy them<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>but um the next thing that we will talk about this evening is is a five element theory<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and um and this again as i said is a predominant um<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>way that we categorize things in chinese medicine and in fact both what we call the five element school of acupuncture<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and the zhong fu school of acupuncture actually use these elements so it&#8217;s not that they&#8217;re different it&#8217;s<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>just that they use them in different ways and so we talk about<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>categorizing the different organ systems of the body they each have an element we talk about<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>how the elements work together um you know and and whether they&#8217;re they&#8217;re<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>encouraging each other to grow or whether they&#8217;re encouraging each other to to deplete to sort of to control so<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>there&#8217;s this two cycles that you see in five element theory where you&#8217;ve got elements working together to generate<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and nourish each other and elements working together to control and correct imbalances<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and we&#8217;ll talk about that some more but again in in so much of this<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>medicine you&#8217;ll find that we can categorize almost anything in our world to the five elements so<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um depending on the symptoms that you&#8217;re presenting with we will oftentimes use those symptoms um and attribute them to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>elements and we&#8217;ll use them to diagnose the root cause of the system pathology the thing that&#8217;s lovely about the five<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>elements is that um you get a little bit more complexity so whereas there&#8217;s young there&#8217;s yin<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>there&#8217;s vietnamese and yang there&#8217;s young within yin the five element theory you&#8217;ve got you&#8217;ve got mother elements and sun<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>elements and you&#8217;ve got generating elements and controlling elements and insulting elements and so they work<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>together and you almost always when you&#8217;re working in five elements have at least three predominant elements um<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>so there&#8217;s usually like your three primary elements you might have a fourth that gets in the picture and then there&#8217;s one element that just has<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>nothing to do with what you&#8217;re talking about but um that we use that a lot and so it allows<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>us to to give a level of complexity to diagnosis that a straight yin young<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>wouldn&#8217;t allow us otherwise um the other thing that&#8217;s great about the five elements is is a lot of study<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>has been put into the concept of constitutional diagnosis that you know every person is born into this world<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>with a predominant constitutional element right and that there are things<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>about the way we are uniquely as human beings that would lead us to those appropriate diagnoses and then of course<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>every element has their own you know classical pathologies or disharmonies that they are prone to because of their<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>constitutional element that&#8217;s not to say that we don&#8217;t have syndromes that happen outside of your constitutional element<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>but it&#8217;s a good place to start and it can be fun and then we also use it in conjunction with pulp taking<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and the four needle techniques so there&#8217;s different ways where we would use your pulses to figure out those predominant<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>organ involvements um associating them with their elements and then using those elements to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>identify the appropriate needles to use and um we use that a lot called a four<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>needle technique so it&#8217;s possible for you to walk into an acupuncturist&#8217;s office and have four needles and be done happens all the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>time so um it&#8217;s just one way to treat but it&#8217;s one way to treat that is heavily<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>rooted in the five elements because as we&#8217;ll talk a little bit not only are each of the organs associated with the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>elements there&#8217;s also points on each channel that are associated with the elements so the elements are very<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>heavily rooted in chinese medicine and um the diagnosis and the systems that have<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>built up around it the other thing you might have noticed from the last slide with the image was<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>that there are five elements which might be something that you are not used to seeing you&#8217;ll see here in chinese<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>medicine that we have wood fire earth metal and water there is no air present<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and we have the inclusion of of metal and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and so and and wood so it&#8217;s a bit different from what you might see in a western model of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>elements but i i really like it mostly because i&#8217;m familiar with it but i i like the way<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>that they work together and i&#8217;ll have a chance to explain that more to you as we move on so<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um again all of the elements have their own qualities and we will sometimes use these qualities to make constitutional<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>diagnoses wood it can be bent and straightened fire flares upward<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>earth permits selling growing and reaping metal can be molded and can<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>harden and water moistens downward so when you&#8217;re trying to have an idea of how these elements operate within the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>natural world and within your body these are concepts that you can always kind of keep in mind um<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and they&#8217;re helpful both in diagnosing but also and just knowing yourself a little bit more you know if you&#8217;re you<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>tend toward fire then you&#8217;re more likely going to be experiencing symptoms that are flaring upwards you know you&#8217;re<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>going to get hot flashes in the face you&#8217;re going to get um you know you&#8217;re going to get headaches you know like a<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>lot of those upward symptoms have to do with with fire the fire element palpitation is another one you know a<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>kind of upward feeling in your chest that you get um you know wood is a fascinating one<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>people think that like you know wood would be hard and rigid but the best thing about what is it it&#8217;s flexible it<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>will bend it will shift it will move i mean when it breaks it breaks and there&#8217;s very little you can do to repair<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>it unlike metal which can be molded and hardened even though it is rigid but you know<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the the wood element as we&#8217;ll see later is associated with the liver and the gallbladder and there&#8217;s something very beautiful about<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>you know thinking about that bent and straightened aspect the resilience of that associated with the liver organ which is<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>one of our few major organs that actually regenerates itself um<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>earth permits sowing growing and reaping in chinese medicine this is associated with your digestive system very heavily<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>but it is what what grounds us for lack of a better word and so you know<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>it&#8217;s what allows us to to have those those roots and that like the nourishment that we need and so a lot of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>nourishment comes from that earth element um it&#8217;s also um it&#8217;s also heavily<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>associated with motherhood because of the reproductive faculties now reproductive systems in general are<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>associated with several different organ systems but you will find that um many women tend to go through an earthy<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>period when they&#8217;re when they&#8217;re procreating and that&#8217;s it&#8217;s an interesting um bit of how we shift through our five<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>elements as we move through life um metal again very rigid but it can be molded and can<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>harden it just depends on how you know how you handle it associated with the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>lungs actually and the season of autumn so uh we&#8217;ll talk a bit more about those<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>correspondences later and then water it it moistens and it goes downward um and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the water is associated with your kidneys but also you&#8217;ll see that you know water whereas up to this point we&#8217;ve<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>really been talking about water and this sort of nourishing yin capacity right but as we were discussing with the rain<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>metaphor earlier on about rain and erosion water can get out of balance pathologically within the body and even<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>though your body is made up so much of water predominantly water<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>we can have too much water and that can also cause problems so it&#8217;s interesting to look at all of these<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>uh elements with their their characteristics and how that works<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um moving on each element has a direction that they<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>go wood expands outward we find a lot of pathology over people like oh i&#8217;m loaded and my stomach is so<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>expanding or like you just feel full all the time and go well it&#8217;s very wood you know fire goes up as we were talking<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>before earth is the center it&#8217;s the stability right like earth doesn&#8217;t do a lot of moving i it does but like it<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>doesn&#8217;t do a lot of moving it just sort of is there it is that grounding there force<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>metal contracts it comes inward some people experience<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>uh metal elements as a literal turning in when you&#8217;re dealing with metal pathology that can be one of the ways we<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>identify it and then water as we said before moves downward often times you&#8217;ll find issues that have<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>to do with your urinary tract or with any other movements where we&#8217;re talking about downward or falling sometimes have<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>to do with the water element and so it&#8217;s it&#8217;s they&#8217;re interesting to look at how they work together but they all have<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>directions and we can use those directions when we begin to apply the elements to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>points on the body and things like that i&#8217;ve mentioned now a couple of times that all of the elements are associated<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>with corresponding organ systems so<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>wood is the liver and it&#8217;s paired organ the gallbladder fire is associated with a heart and it&#8217;s<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>paired or in a small intestine but also two other organs that are<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the sem gel which i&#8217;m not going to discuss today is also associated with fire but um it&#8217;s an organ that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>biomedicine has yet to identify what they think this angel is we&#8217;ve got theories it would be a fascinating<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>lecture all on its own but and then the pericardium which we know of is like the external protective shell<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>around the heart so um it has its own channel in chinese medical theory but it&#8217;s still associated with the heart<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>organ um in that fire element so earth is associated with the spleen<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and it&#8217;s paired organ the stomach metal is associated with lung and it&#8217;s pure organ the large intestine and water<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>is associated with the kidney and it&#8217;s paired organ the urinary bladder so they all have<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>their organs they also all have their colors so we&#8217;ve got the green of wood the red of fire the yellow of earth the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>white actually of metal and the blue of water they all have their seasons and tastes<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and emotions they all have tissues that they work with as well so you know we&#8217;ve got bones and tendons um<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and uh and sounds deep sighing crying right um laughter<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>so it sounds silly to say it but when i&#8217;m doing my patient interviews and we begin<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>talking about different things how you&#8217;re feeling what your predominant emotion is what kinds<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>of sounds i hear coming from me if i have a patient come in and i&#8217;m just they&#8217;re sighing right we go oh they&#8217;re<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>sighing right we need to look at their water element their kidney element i&#8217;ll take more time diagnosing that pulse and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>i&#8217;ll look at their tongue but these are little guide guide posts along the way right taste or another one what are you<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>craving salty sweet right craving sweets all the time well we probably should treat your your<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>earth organs right your spleen in your stomach and so those are different ways that we look through that and then also<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>time of day so these correspondences end up being really important to our differential<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>diagnosis in chinese medicine and so don&#8217;t ever think that the details you<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>give your acupuncturist are silly or superfluous there&#8217;s so much wonderful wealth of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>information that to be had in these five element correspondences and one of my<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>favorites is the emotion aspect of it and i&#8217;ll get to it a bit when we talk about the controlling cycle<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um and why different emotions control different things so um<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>now i&#8217;m going to talk a little bit about the cycles i&#8217;ve hinted at them before right but essentially what<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>you need to know is that they work in this the generating cycle works in a circle the controlling cycle works in a star<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and then there&#8217;s a an insulting cycle that works along the star lines as well only backwards<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>but the generating cycle is really important because um you know<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>each of the elements feeds and nourishes the next um you know and much like we<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>would see in the natural world where water nourishes wood wood feeds fire<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and you know each element sort of leading into the next um and it&#8217;s kind of a lovely way to take that that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>natural movement within the world and apply it to the body um<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>because one of the things that can happen is if if a mother element the one that is feeding the one<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>next to it say you know water is feeding wood for instance well if water is depleted<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>sometimes wood can also be depleted and so often times it might not be like even though the symptoms that are presenting<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>our depletion of wood you sometimes need to look deeper and say okay well what what in the water element is looking<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>like it needs needs nourishing because because clearly the water is not nourishing the wood and so we could<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>treat the wood and that would be effective minimally for a period of time but it&#8217;s not going to get to the root<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>cause of what&#8217;s actually happening within the body and so knowing you know how they work together<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>who&#8217;s depleting who right sometimes you&#8217;ll have a weak water element and you&#8217;ll think oh you<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>know metal is not nourishing water it&#8217;s like well no maybe it&#8217;s weak because wood is taking more<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>than it needs maybe the water element is weak because the wood is in excess and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>it&#8217;s the the mother is nourishing the sun to her own detriment and so um<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>working within that context of who&#8217;s feeding whom who&#8217;s taking nourishment from whom and whether or not that cycle<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>is in balance is part of how we use the generating cycle next cycle that we look at is called the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>controlling cycle where each of the elements oh i have a mistake in my slide<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>each of the elements does feed and nourish the next but it&#8217;s not in the controlling cycle that&#8217;s the generic cycle but um but it again<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>each of these elements actually controls the one opposite it and so if you look<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>at the arrows they make a little five-pointed star so um and again it follows the natural<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>world water controls fire right metal controls wood think of an<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>axe chopping down a tree right and so these are very interesting cycles to get into as well because<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>oftentimes you&#8217;ll see you know if if you have like again a deficiency in<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>your fire element right you have to go back maybe and look at that water element so one of the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>things you&#8217;d look at is like oh my fire is looking predominantly deficient well is it a liver pathology you know is this<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>liver not feeding it um is it a you know is it a spleen pathology is the is the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>earth element taking too much or is it a water pathology whereas there&#8217;s just too much water<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um uh and that and so this excess of yin is actually causing the deficiency of the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the fire and the heart um or vice versa happens one of my favorite ways to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>explain the controlling cycle is to talk about the predominant emotions<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>in the cycle so i&#8217;m just going to use the elements of of metal and wood<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>in this particular example the the emotion associated with metal<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>is grief and the emotion associated with wood is anger<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>right and so when you look at the controlling cycle you&#8217;ll find um i think one of the things<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>that happens frequently when someone gets angry for instance is anger tends to ultimately dissolve into tears<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>right and so in that way you find that grief or the sadness associated with the metal element is<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>able to control the anger right um you find that the emotion associated<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>with the water elements or the kidneys is fear and the emotion associated with the heart and the fire element is joy<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>right and so oftentimes if you&#8217;re if there there&#8217;s an over abundance of joy in your world that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the thing that will kill that faster than anything is of course fear right um<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and and so those are those are some of the ways that you&#8217;ll find that um<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>that the uh that the elements work within the concept of of emotions<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>emotions uh illustrate that example in sort of a an interesting way in the body so um<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the insulting cycle is sort of the opposite of that right where you&#8217;ll have one insult together and this insulting<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>relationship actually happens quite frequently between the heart and the and the kidney the fire and the water<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>elements where you&#8217;ll find that that the the the fire is insulting the water right<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>whereas the water&#8217;s job is usually there to control the fire sometimes the fire gets so hot it burns up all the water<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and it&#8217;s too hot to put the fire out with water and so the fire then begins to insult the water element and the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>water element becomes deficient because of this so this is the controlling cycle and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>then it&#8217;s partner that the insulting cycle and and that&#8217;s how we work through<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the five elements and a lot of that has to the correspondences and if anybody&#8217;s interested<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>in knowing more about those correspondences i know i find them fascinating i have a wee handout that i<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>can pass along to you so that you can take a closer look at how we sort of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>divide up our world into these five areas um because again it&#8217;s it&#8217;s these kinds of divisions that i think<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>are really what make chinese medicine so elegant it&#8217;s the simplicity in these categorizations but<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>that leads to the kind of depth and complexity that happen within<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the body so the body is complex but the system is not the system is is<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>straightforward when you understand some of the underlying principles so um<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>next we&#8217;re going to get into the meridians we&#8217;re going to talk about meridians and body fluids and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the substances and the evils hopefully we can get to all three next time if not you know we<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>might take you know one of those three and split it off um by itself and if you have any questions again feel free to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>reach out you know how to find me thank you for joining me this evening it was lovely to speak with you all and i<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>look forward to to meeting with you all in the future um so again questions email me call me i&#8217;m<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>always here i love to talk about chinese medicine and i look forward to talking with you again thank you so much<\/p>\n\n\n\t\t\t<a id=\"ub-expand-toggle-full-730b0022-2a9a-47b7-b699-2f14e398feaa\" class=\"ub-expand-toggle-button\" style=\"text-align: left; \" role=\"button\" aria-expanded=\"true\" aria-controls=\"ub-expand-full-730b0022-2a9a-47b7-b699-2f14e398feaa\" tabindex=\"0\">\n\t\t\t\tshow less\n\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t<\/div>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Beth talks about the concepts of Yin and Yang and the 5 elements according to Chinese medicine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":374,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,19,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-education","category-medicine"],"aioseo_notices":[],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/elementalwellness.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/IntroTCM-YY5Elements-Thumbnail.png","author_info":{"display_name":"Beth 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Gram","author_link":"https:\/\/elementalwellness.net\/index.php\/author\/beth\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elementalwellness.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elementalwellness.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elementalwellness.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elementalwellness.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elementalwellness.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/elementalwellness.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":473,"href":"https:\/\/elementalwellness.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370\/revisions\/473"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elementalwellness.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elementalwellness.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elementalwellness.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elementalwellness.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}