AUGUST 2007 RESONANCE ARTICLES

Sprouts / The Receptivity of Blood / 25 Minutes / No One Else Has This / Moderation

SPROUTS
Sprouts represent a unique category of food. They are the young seed and shoots of grains, vegetables, herbs, or legumes. Typically eaten raw, they are generally very beneficial to the digestion. The biomedical explanation for this is the high enzymatic activity of these young plants. Chinese medicine considers sprouted foods to be useful for treating stagnant food (technically, they disperse food and abduct stagnation). The two primary sprouted foods used in Chinese medicine are barley sprouts (mai ya) and rice sprouts (gu ya), which disperse food and transform accumulation resulting from undigested grain. Hawthorne berries, while not a sprouted food, are also a common food item used to treat food stagnation arising from undigested meats.

Because they are so young and vital, sprouts also perish quickly. Sprouts and mushrooms are the two vegetable foods which need to be eaten quickly due to easy spoilage. The best way to avoid old sprouts is to sprout them yourself. Fresh sprouts are fun and easy to grow, last longer than store bought sprouts, and aid digestion through high enzymatic activity. My favorite sprouter is the Easy-Sprout, available directly from the manufacturer Sproutamo or from Sproutpeople.

THE RECEPTIVITY OF BLOOD
The Spleen manufactures Qi from the transformed essence of food and drink. In the Heart, this mixes with the extracted Qi of air and is transformed into Blood through a process known as red transformation.
One of the five functions of Qi is holding (Qi transforms, transports, warms, protects, and holds). This capacity of holding gives it a tension. That is, there is potential energy in Qi. The potential energy of Qi is Blood, which is the realized potential of Qi. Blood possesses the lack of tension which results from Qi transformation (just as a spring relaxes once it is released), and imparts this quality into us. Blood gives the sensation of comfort and relaxation, and of smooth unimpeded movement. It is the physical substrate which imparts the Liver’s function of free flow (see Benevolence – The Virtue of the Liver). Blood is the foundation for a fluid sense of self arising from rootedness and self-esteem, both in turn imparted by Blood. Qi is dynamic and creates movement, Blood is receptive and moves of its own accord. Modern cardiology understands that the heart does not pump the Blood, but instead acts as an accelerator for a circulatory system whose movement is self-generating. Qi creates hunger, Blood creates fullness. The relationship between Spleen Qi and Heart Blood is reflected in the Chinese herbal formula Gui Pi Tang, or Restore Spleen Soup.

25 MINUTES
I am often asked if it matters how long acupuncture needles are left in the body during a treatment. The overriding answer to this and to all questions pertaining to Chinese medicine is that everything matters. My belief is that the purposefulness of treatment creates order in the body. This occurs through the principle of resonance, which is governed by the Heart. Briefly, the creation of an orderly, resonating state will affect nearby systems. A familiar example of this is a tuning fork, which when struck will cause another fork of the same note to vibrate. This reflects the principles of resonance, coherence, entrainment, alignment, accordance, and correspondence. For more on this topic, see Propriety – The Virtue of the Heart.

Regarding the timing of acupuncture treatments specifically, there are no set rules for how long the needles should be left in place. Sometimes I leave needles in for 5 minutes, sometimes for 1 hour. But there is a reason for the 25 minute average. The Ling shu, or Spiritual Pivot, describes that the circulation of Qi through the entire circuit of acupuncture vessels occurs 50 times during a 24 hour period. Each complete circuit is approximately 111 feet long, and the rate of Qi flow through it is approximately 3 inches per breathing cycle. 13,500 breathing cycles occur during a 24 hour period. In an average person, it takes approximately 25 to 30 minutes for the Qi to circulate once through all of the vessels. Experientially, this is about how long it takes for most people to get into a deeply relaxed state during acupuncture, as well as during meditation or breathing exercises. Therefore, this is also the amount of time it takes to both produce and experience a meaningful shift in one’s energy, breathing, and mind.

NO ONE ELSE HAS THIS
It is a natural human belief that we are individually unique, and in so many ways we are. But there is little that any one person has or experiences that others do not as well. I am told by my patients, out of their frustration, that their friends, family, and co-workers seem better able to function than they are. They eat what they want, act how they want, and do not suffer the way they do. In short, that no one else has what they have.

There is absolutely no chance of this. No one gets away with anything. This is not meant to infer moral or ethical judgment. It is simply an observation that all actions have consequences. In addition, we do not get to see what is in another person’s path. Never have I met a person, myself included, who does not have their own issues to contend with. Everyone has issues with food, health, pain, and everything else. The problem, as I see it, is that we personalize our experience and our suffering. Disconnected from our own inner experience and path, we see illness as a problem which we can solve, fix (generally attempting to skip the solving stage), and then remain in that very brief period in our lives when nothing seemed to affect us. And we miss the obvious fact that everyone else has this, not just us. What we have, and must learn to value, is our own version of it (“it” being whatever we perceive no one else has).

MODERATION
The awakened view of moderation is finding balance in one’s own life and choices. The unconscious view of moderation is that whatever we do is moderate, and whatever everyone else does is extreme.