What's a meridian?

Some of you may have heard of meridians in some way. For those of you who have not, a meridian is a channel or line. In the body there is a network of channels called meridians that carry energy through the body. Just like your house is wired for electricity, your body is "wired" with meridians. Acupuncture is a technology, from China, of manipulating energy in the meridians to bring about certain health results.

It has been observed over thousands of years that the energy flowing through these meridians is connected to certain organs. So, for instance, one can affect the health of the kidneys by stimulating a place on the bottom of the foot. This is because there is a meridian connecting the bottom of the foot with the kidneys. All of these connections and relationships have been known and mapped for thousands of years. I attended the Chinese exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art some years ago. They had an antique full size wood carving of a man. On the carving were drilled hundreds of eighth inch holes in a specific pattern. I realized that these holes represented the exit points of the meridians on the surface of the body.

Not only have these meridians been mapped, but it has also been observed that unbalanced living can lead to these channels becoming blocked. Blockage of meridians can lead to pain, and other symptoms in the body. There is a technique called moxibustion where a source of heat, usually a lighted cigarette, is held at the exit point of a specific meridian. The heat draws the energy through the exit point and removes the blockage or stagnation. This technique should only be performed by a trained practitioner so don't try this at home. The point is that when you are balanced, your meridians become open and the energy moves freely though your body the way it is supposed to.

Yang energy comes from above spiraling inward. It enters the top of your head and spirals through the body through the meridians. Yin energy comes from below spiraling outward. It enters the body through the feet and groin and spirals upwards through the body in the meridians. Where yin and yang meet in the body there is a spiral of energy which we call a chakra.

So, many of you may be saying, "I'm doing just fine with my meridians blocked. Thank you." But are you satisfied with just an ordinary life? Would you be interested in an extraordinary life? When your energy is flowing freely in your body, techniques like yoga, tai chi and chi gong have a much greater effect. You also become much more receptive to spiritual factors in your environment. Meditation is easier and deeper. When these meridians are blocked these techniques have to break down these barriers before they can have an effect. If you are helping the process by creating balance in the body then you get multiplied benefits from these pursuits in addition to the health benefits.

Thanks for reading.

A beautiful gift, a marvel.

Once in a while you run across something that works so well or is so highly evolved in its application that you just have to marvel at it.

Today I would like to pay tribute to one of these gifts of culture. This gift is called umeboshi plum. These little marvels come from the Japanese culture and have been used for thousands of years for many purposes. They grow as small green plums on a tree. They are pickled in sea salt for at least a year packed with shiso leaves (from the beefsteak plant) which have red veins. As the pickling process takes place the plums turn a deep pink color. The best ones are pickled for up to three years and these are very powerful.

Umeboshi plum is used to impart vitality and great energy to the body and can be taken about twice a week for this purpose. They can also be used medicinally as a remedy for any kind of trouble in the digestive track. Upset stomach, nausea, diarrhea, bowel issues, etc. can all be relieved by these little gems.

Take my word for it, these small plums have saved me on several occasions. This is an extreme yang application but it is buffered by the fruit so it is more gentle.

They are available in most health food stores and also come in paste form. Take mashed up in some tea and drink the tea (kukicha, bancha twig tea). Oh and each plum contains a surprise bonus. Inside each plum there is a pit. Once you have eaten the plum, take a nut cracker and break open the pit. Inside you will find a small seed kernel. Eat it.

Not recommended for babies and small children below age four as this is a yang application and they are already very yang.

Give them a try. Don't over do it. A little yang goes a long way. Thanks for reading.

Meaty sandwich

I am amazed at how many times a food that I encounter in the vegetarian diet that I eat now gives the same sensations as a food that I used to eat when I was a meat eater.

Silken tofu like scrambled eggs for instance. So when I first put lightly steamed collard greens between two pieces of bread I was skeptical, even for me. Add a slice or two of tomato or cucumber and a little mustard and you have the makings of a great sandwich that has the texture and feel of a meat sandwich. The way my teeth cut down through the greens is so much like when I used to eat meat. This has become one of my favorite lunches.

There are many more examples.

More later. Thanks for reading.

Violence and anger under control

We have discussed some of the basics of maintaining yin and yang balance. One of the greatest benefits of this is the reduction of anger and violence. Are you a violent person? Your going along just fine and then someone cuts you off with their car or says something critical and suddenly you are a totally different person. You just go off and explode. Has this happened to you? Do you feel like you are on a hair trigger? Many of us have had this experience and I personally have wondered where this anger comes from.

One of the things I experienced as I became more balanced was that this "hair trigger" feeling was gone. I was much less prone to impulsive reactions. I was much calmer and could accommodate other's behavior. If I did get angry, it was short lived. I was also able to give up my feelings of hurt. I was able to understand these behaviors in others.

I grew up in an abusive home. After I began to understand how excess yang and excess yin could affect peoples behavior, it helped me to understand how and why my parents could act the way they did.

Excess yin and yang are stressful for both the body and the mind. Studies have shown that crime can be significantly reduced in prison populations when balancing foods are introduced into the diet. When people are more balanced they are much less prone to anger.

Paranoia is another aspect of excess yang. It is an aspect of the tension that excess yang creates in the body and mind. Excess yang can affect us in many extreme ways. We need to recognize the indicators of excess yang and understand how to correct the situation.

How do we correct the excess yang or excess yin condition? Always correct to the middle. We will crave the opposite of what our condition is. But we must add foods in the middle to get the correction that brings balance.

Thanks for reading.

Back to basics

Today we will review some basic concepts about yin and yang.

Where does yang come from? Yang comes from outer space in to earth. The force comes in a spiral and spirals into the top of a human's head. It continues to spiral through the body meeting yin force coming from the other direction.

Where does yin force come from? Yin force is generated by the spinning of the earth. The force radiates outward from the mass of the earth and enters the body from the ground up through the body and exiting out the top. Yin force meets yang force and they spiral together forming the seven primary chakres in the body. Yin force also enters the body as a spiral.

How does yang force manifest? Yang force hits the earth from an insubstantial source, i.e. light, and manifests as its opposite. Its energy condenses into solid matter and intense movement, sound, feeling, etc.

How does yin force manifest? Yin force comes from a substantial force, the mass of the earth, and manifests as its opposite. Its energy expands into ethereal energy and dissipates into the atmosphere.

In our experience, yin force is moving upward or outward and yang force is moving downward or inward.

We experience yang force as intensity, tension, heat, solidity, dry, compactness, condensed, concentrated, substantial matter.

We experience yin force as relaxed, dissipated, cool, wet, expanded, loose, gaseous, ethereal, insubstantial matter.

Extreme yang brings about yin. Extreme yin brings about yang.

Thanks for reading.

Why we have cup holders on shopping carts

I was in a store today shopping for a few things and I noticed that the shopping cart had cup holders. This is a phenomenon that appears out of nowhere one day. What does it mean? It means that the level of thirst in the general population has reached a level that necessitates this kind of thing as well as millions of plastic water bottles used per day.

This never existed when I was a young person. This level of general thirst has evolved over the past 40 years. It indicates that we are becoming much more yang then we were 50 years ago. Why would that happen? Is it global warming?

No, I don't think we can attribute this one to global warming. This has to do with the amount of yang foods that we are consuming. The main culprit is sodium and sodium treated processed foods. First of all, we have become so unbalanced that we don't even see that 600 grams of sodium in a serving of canned soup is a problem. And then, of course, we eat more than one serving. One pretzel from the mall stand blasts our system with enough sodium to last a week. Treated meat like ham, beef jerky, hot dogs, sausage etc. flood our system with sodium and also create stagnation in the body so it becomes difficult to remove.

These are just a few examples of the levels of sodium that we are consuming and feeding our children. This excessive yang creates a craving for yin which is initially expressed as thirst. We need to drink enormous amounts of water to balance this kind of sodium intake. So much so now that we have to carry a water bottle everywhere we go.

This puts tremendous stress on the body and affects the very tissue of our body in a very stressful way. This condition leads to high blood pressure, heart disease, the feeling of stress, panic attacks, insomnia and many other conditions.

One of the traits of yang is "small and compact". When some object or organism is small and compact, it is an expression of yang energy. Which of us are small and compact? Babies. Yes babies pack all of the intensity of a human being into a small and compact unit. So babies are yang to begin with. As they grow, they become more and more yin. So the rule says, if an organism is yang, then they need to consume yin foods to balance the yang condition. So when you feed your 18 month old child french fries with the normal amount of salt on them, they are going to become immediately excess yang possibly at a dangerous level. This condition usually results in screaming, inability to rest or be still, tantrums, anger and meanness and other expressions of excess yang.

My fear is that this condition is having long term affects on the quality of our children's health and the quality of the future of the human race as a whole.

You can not imagine how beautiful and easy a balanced child is.

Thanks for reading.

Rice is nice

I first got started with this yin and yang technology about 25 years ago when I was about 37 years old. I had gotten divorced from my first wife and I was pretty frightened about my future. I was overweight at about 180 lbs. and I had an ample beer belly. I didn't feel attractive and I felt sluggish and lazy. What to do? I was in Sunday school class one week and one of the members mentioned that an elderly woman in the church had cancer and was trying to cure herself with a diet called macrobiotics.

I had heard of this diet in the 60's when I had first gotten married but I had written it off at that time. I decided to do some research and see what it was about. I went to the library and got a book about the diet and found out after reading it that macrobiotics is much more than a diet. Macrobiotics is the technology of balancing yin and yang in your body, in your house, in your neighborhood and in your community. I was amazed to learn that such a technology existed and that I could adopt it in my own life.

At the time I was a typical unbalanced diet consumer. I loved meat and ate it with gusto along with eggs, and other high protein foods. My first wife and I loved to cook and we had an assortment of gourmet cookbooks which we used often. One of the recipes that we loved to make was red beans and rice, a traditional southern favorite. It called for ham hocks cooked long and slow with red beans. Yummy. The recipe also called for whole grain brown rice. Because we liked this recipe so much, we were in the habit of keeping a box of brown rice in the cupboard.

From what I had read, I knew that brown rice was in the middle of the yin and yang spectrum and so I decided to try an experiment. I wanted to test out this "technology" and see if what these people were saying had any merit. I pulled out that box of rice and cooked it up.

I started adding brown rice to every meal that I could. In addition, I started eating other whole grains such as rolled oats, barley, etc.

Within two weeks I started to lose weight. Within a month my taste for meat seemed to be reduced. Within three months I had lost 25 lbs and had lost my taste for meat almost entirely. I was starting to feel different. My blood sugar levels evened out and I stopped having mood swings. My anger levels were much reduced and I felt much calmer, less stressed.

I was amazed with these results. Suddenly all of the problems that I had been having with my body, headaches, colds, flu, pains, etc. simply disappeared. I began to be able to control my diet and even my mind became clearer. My life became less about food because my cravings had reduced so much. I was satisfied which was a tremendous freedom for me.

Since that time rice has continued to amaze me with its versatility and its ability to solve so many issues. I call brown rice my first guru and I credit it with saving my life in many ways.

More in the next post.

Thanks for reading.

Steve

August the first

It's the first of August and yang force is in full bloom where I live in midwest USA. It is getting drier and it is very hot. This is a time to consume yin foods and liquids to keep the body cool. Swimming, cool showers, and cool drinks and summer fruits all help to balance the yang environment.

I spent the past week with my three grandchildren. They are 8, 5, and 2 in age. They are 100, 150 and 200 in decibels. They are lots of fun. They display many classic signs of out of balance conditions. I was noticing how the activity level would shift from yang to yin and back to yang again. My oldest grandson loves sports and athletic activity of every type. We played catch with the baseball every day. He practiced throwing the frisbee and went to the pool to swim. These activities are of the yang category. Yin activity would be sleeping, board games, visiting with relatives, etc. The little one would go, go, go until she just could not go anymore at which point sleep would overtake her. Sometimes aggressive, sometimes passive. She would swing from one expression to another.

They are very entertaining and I was sorry to see them go.

I look forward to our next visit.

Thanks for reading.