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Heavenly Star Points intro
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Are you familiar with Ma Danyang's heavenly star points? Don't worry Steven had never heard of them before. Today a short introduction to these points. Hope you enjoy tangents!
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Transcript
Introduction to Dong Yang Acupuncture Points
00:00:08
Speaker
We're back with voices on the mountain. This time my audio is working and we're going to go over Dong Yang acupuncture points. Shall we?
00:00:19
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know if any of you guys have heard of this. Actually, Asher was the one who introduced me to this. So that's exciting when you come from China and you're like, hey, what is this thing?
Are Heavenly Star Points Magical?
00:00:30
Speaker
Yeah, well, it's in um our Deadman books. Okay. Certain points get, ah you know, christened with with this title. They're like, oh, it's also, i think they call them, it's confusing because I think they call them Heavenly Star Points, which is different from Window to the Sky Points, but kind of sounds similar for a logical brain.
00:00:51
Speaker
That's right. Yeah. so it Heavenly Star is a direct translation. Tien Xing, which is interesting because it's like, is that opposed to Earthly Star? Yeah, I mean, do we have the earth and branches kind of going on here?
00:01:03
Speaker
Yeah, well, then that then it would be, yeah, exactly, heavenly stems and earthly branches. Yeah. Kinkan teacher. So, like, it's not that, but it's, yeah, I agree. I think they could just call them, what if they just called them superstar points? That'd be fun.
Skepticism and Holistic Approach
00:01:18
Speaker
I mean, they're basically like, hey, these points are magic, and if you only use these 12 points, you'd get great efficacy, is kind of what it feels like they're saying. That is what they're saying, which I think,
00:01:30
Speaker
For those of you out there who love these or you've never heard of these or anywhere in between, um I'd say take that with a grain salt. um So just remember, if you've lived in China, I did for quite some time, like 11 years, you realize that um pretty much going back to the beginning of Chinese history,
00:01:49
Speaker
There are some big talkers in Chinese history and there's big doers too, but just remember there's always a lot of big talkers as well. And so they like to make the good things sound good and maybe a little too good. yeah So it's the idea that you could treat everything under the sun with these 12 points. Unlikely.
00:02:08
Speaker
Do you want to do it like only this? Unlikely, but it doesn't mean like don't delve in and like, you know, really kind of research it yourself, um, go like, happen you know, really fully dive in, in the clinic setting. I mean, there's lots of good things for it, but I guess I would just remind people that like, there's no one key that fits all the locks.
Tai Chi Master Story: Multiple Techniques
00:02:30
Speaker
So try not to lock yourself in. There's actually a great, um, little kind of story about that, a wee bit of anecdote. There was this great martial artist, um, his The way they translated his name in chinese and English was Chen Man Ching.
00:02:46
Speaker
And so it'd be like Chen Man Ching, I think. I don't know. I've never seen it in actual kind of like Mandarin pinyin spelling. Anyway, he's a great ah Tai Chi master from Taiwan. He's one of the most well-known in the last like generation.
00:03:02
Speaker
So there's a great Chinese a book about martial arts called Chinese Boxing Masters and Methods by... so It's a little red book. Anyway. Are they all?
00:03:14
Speaker
What's that? Aren't they all? Yeah, exactly. This was not written by Mao though. So it's a slight benefit. I don't think Mao is much of a martial artist. Sure. um And so this one though is interesting because ah someone asked him like a really interesting question, especially for a Tai Chi master. They're like, okay, well, you're great. For those of you who know that Tai Chi is a fighting art, it's just a really phenomenal fighting art if you get good enough at it. But someone was like, well, what would you do if someone like bear hugged you? right You didn't see him coming. Bear hugged you. Can you Tai Chi your way out of that? And he's like, no way.
00:03:45
Speaker
I just use a chin na, which is like this grappling, seizing, and method where you can press on um acupuncture points and get joint locks and stuff. And they're like, oh, you didn't tell us you'd do that
Critical Thinking in Acupuncture
00:03:56
Speaker
too. And he's like, oh, yeah, you got have different tools, right? So like the most well-known Tai Chi master switches if he needs to, because that's what you're doing. You're you're finding the right method.
00:04:06
Speaker
So I guess what i what I want to make sure people don't do is just drop everything else and invest in these 12 points and be like, wait, why didn't it work for me? Totally. And I think um for me, i like looking at stuff like this, whether it be Dong's like top 10 magical points or whether it be these 12 or whatever.
00:04:26
Speaker
i like looking at them just to see – Well, one is, are are their top kind of clinical points overlap with my ones and like what's not there? And, you know, is that a facet of what they're treating at the time versus what I'm treating now in my clinic? like Or is it just, oh, I forgot about this point I should be using it more, like Tongli or something, right?
00:04:48
Speaker
And then also kind of to try to pick apart... what they're saying that that point does. um And then just kind of get my brain working like that. Cause I feel like that's where, i don't know, your clinical brain gets to exercise outside of clinic kind of thing. Like I can kind of at a slower pace, kind of work it through some exercises and kind of see if I'm on the right track.
00:05:15
Speaker
Oh, I couldn't agree more with what Asher just said. Yeah. Cause if you can't do it, Asher just said, then we never switch from the following guidelines kind of acupuncturist to the basically paving the pathway. And I'm not saying generating, like, you know, discovering our 12 points, that's not what I'm saying.
Poems and Western Critique of Chinese Medicine
00:05:34
Speaker
But what I mean is like, we don't want to just be looking at the manual and being like, okay, they've got, all right, facial paralysis. Let's scroll down to F. Got it. These seven points. No, it doesn't work that way. what it
00:05:46
Speaker
What we're looking at is a holistic picture of a human. And if you can incorporate these and actually deepen your understanding of that full picture of a human, well, gosh, you just did yourself a real big service, I think.
00:05:58
Speaker
So 100% shout out. Like, why did he pick these points? Why does he use it for these things? Don't memorize indications alone. In fact, maybe don't and memorize indications. Not at all. Yeah, exactly. i mean Or or as as a tool maybe, but the indications are just there to get you to the greater understanding of function.
00:06:16
Speaker
And when you understand functions, right If you want to like that, yeah. So everybody's got a ah way to get there. my My pathway to that was the five shoe points or sometimes called the antiquity points. Why in the world is it called antiquity points? i don't know. But five shoe transport points, I think makes a whole lot more sense. Shoe is like transport.
00:06:34
Speaker
That's what Dr. Guo focused on is his first and foremost, and not at all that he didn't focus on the low points and other things. But if for him, the bread and butter, the thing that you could not treat patients without was the five shoot points.
00:06:48
Speaker
For sure. i feel like the distal points on the channel that are, I mean, i might be pairing them with something farther up the channel, local to the site of i illness or something else, but i don't think there's ever not something distal on the channel to kind of tell the whole thing what to do. Like, oh, want to clear heat, or oh, I want you to open up the load, or... Heck yeah.
00:07:11
Speaker
Heck yeah. Maybe, yeah, arguably from elbows and knees down is literally the most powerful points on the body, right? Sure. Especially from moving. Yeah. Or stringing.
00:07:23
Speaker
Or stringing. Jing river. Sure. But moving, he si, clearing, ying ying spring. Yeah, like just the function in those is just phenomenal. Dispersing, jing well.
00:07:36
Speaker
Great. So let's hop into it. The first one is not going to be a new point for for anybody. Zusan Lee, Stomach36. Let's do it. Is the first. um Oh, and then these all come in forms of a poem or a song, kind of a song. I like poem because song makes me feel like someone should sing it. And these are not singable. Yeah.
00:07:58
Speaker
The best you could get is like the Taoist like head circle as you say. like you we yeah kind of get You got to be pretty drunk for that. god so That's how they used to drink and read tongue poems. so He wasn't Dylan, okay? You can't sing his poems. You got to just kind of...
00:08:18
Speaker
And not even raps, i don't think. I think these these are just um academic poems are are not as interesting, maybe. That's right. There's a little less like tat-tat-tat coming at you. One shout-out about these poems, sometimes called songs, sometimes called p mnemonics, whatever you want to call them. um I have heard – used to teach at the Denver School – in Denver, of course. And there used to be a Denver and a Boulder school until the Boulder school got squashed. um But the Denver school, there was a teacher who said, um he said this to some of the students there. He said, ah ah so I'll just say what he said, and then we'll talk about it. He's like, Western acupuncturists will never get to the same level as Chinese acupuncturists because they don't know the songs.
00:09:05
Speaker
So first of all, he is a teacher at that school and he does read and speak Chinese because he is Chinese. And I would say, first and foremost, well, it's his job to translate those things for his students.
00:09:17
Speaker
Because you can't just tell students as a teacher, you can't tell students like, well, you'll never be as good because you don't have this resource that I have and you don't.
Historical Insights and Lineage Claims
00:09:26
Speaker
That's just dumb. and And I'm responsible for teaching you.
00:09:30
Speaker
Right. But you're always going to suck. yeah So like there's, that's wrong on a lot of levels. Secondly, if you just based on what, like what he's talking about, that like an acupuncturist can never get to the same level without these songs or, or, ah or are poems. It's like, it's basically clinical information condensed into like a poet like stanza. Right.
00:09:51
Speaker
that's even Even that is a questionable statement. And yes, they're phenomenal. like Sun Sun Miao wrote one, some of the best acupuncturists in the and the entire history of Chinese medicine wrote some of these. And yes, they are useful.
00:10:04
Speaker
They can be very useful, but arguably more useful than say mastering the Neijing, that's a hard question. More useful than mastering particularly the second half of the Neijing, the Ling Shu,
00:10:14
Speaker
but Again, like i I don't think we can make these sweeping generalizations. And I think it's just, if his goal was to inspire students, then he should have given them a resource. And if it's anything else, I just feel like he's being a bad person. but So just as a quick reminder, there's lots of these songs slash poems out there. um And they are useful. They really are useful. I've used them. I've continued to use some of the information I've gotten from them.
00:10:37
Speaker
um And you don't have to master all of them, certainly at once. But just remember, they're out there. And so try and seek them out. If you speak Chinese, great. If you don't, figure out some reliable way to get at them. If you don't have that, then get an unreliable way to try and translate them and then work on that first.
00:10:54
Speaker
So I actually ran across these. in the English translation and Tom Beuzeo's Pearl from the Dragon's Neck. And he kind of goes into little bit of detail about these points. They they might be an artifact from Bien Chui, is what he kind of says. Yeah, yeah. So I don't know how good that track is, but that's what people are saying. So...
Translation Challenges in Chinese Medicine
00:11:15
Speaker
Yeah. I think that'd be, I've heard that same thing. And I think it is interesting because if you think about like the time period of it, so he was 1122 to 1183 is when he was living.
00:11:26
Speaker
This Bianchui? Ma Dan Yang. Oh, Ma Dan Yang. Okay. Yeah. And like Bianchui is like well before, you know, zero. So yeah okay I don't know. Like, can, can this be a millennia later? And then so maybe, i mean, lineages in Chinese have done crazier things, but Just be a little careful. Like I remember I met someone in China who was like, I am the 181st like grandson of Sun Sun Miao. And I'm like, really? Like from 700 AD? Let me see that. Let me see the stone that that shit's written on because it's certainly not paper. Paper can't last more than a couple hundred years.
00:12:05
Speaker
so Yeah. don't even Yeah. So just be a little careful. People say big shit. and And I just wish people would have a little bit more just critical thinking. It doesn't mean negative thinking. I always like to entertain whatever someone's telling me, even in China and stuff. Just remember, like I was there for 11 years and I probably met a thousand people that said they could Qigong people bapt back to health.
00:12:24
Speaker
Right. I met one person who could do it. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's the big thing too. It's like, so maybe he is like the 131st grandson of, you know, since the meow, but where's your practice at? And like, how good are you at teaching? And like, how good are, cause that's really what matters. The other thing is just self-aggrandizing ego.
00:12:45
Speaker
but Exactly. So learn to keep your eyes out for that. If a teacher is putting you down or self-aggrandizing, exactly. Just get your, your ninja hairs up on your back of your neck or something.
00:12:57
Speaker
Yeah, i think it's I think it's a good point you said about putting them down because I i can see how a student in that relationship can feel. teacher to come in, there's a power dynamic thing. And if they come in putting you down and you just accept that, you let them kind of gaslight you, I can totally see that. And we had a couple of students even our at our school, the Denver school that did that. But I didn't take no shit from nobody. Don't take that shit. I mean, you arguably, you could say maybe they learned it from Western medicine.
00:13:26
Speaker
Medicine, lesson I think, seeks to disempower people most of the time. Oh my God, all the time. And so if these teachers are literally seeking to disempower their patients, I'm sorry, their students, by and then doing so basically get like endless control over them, well, then find another teacher because that's a pretty shitty person, right?
00:13:46
Speaker
But it's, I just heard this interesting thing where they're like, we made the perfect political system to like find the narcissist and then elevate them in our society. And it's like, oh, but maybe we've kind of done the same thing with teachers.
00:14:00
Speaker
I mean, the i don't want to say i had amazing teachers at Denver. I'm so thankful for all of them. But maybe there's also this cut where it's like, you know, your clinic isn't going great and you're maybe trying to make a little extra money and then you're teaching and maybe you don't feel that great about yourself in this practice or something. And then, and then the teaching feels really good because you have all these people looking up to you and that's kind of, you know, feeding that bit and that can be less than helpful.
00:14:29
Speaker
That's so so true. I like how you humanize it. It doesn't mean they're right or that we should still listen to them or be swayed by them. But I like what you're saying, like maybe it came from a more organic place instead of a malicious place.
00:14:41
Speaker
Oh, for sure. I feel like that's most of the time. That's what the human experience is Yeah. give you give Give everyone a little bit of grace. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
00:14:53
Speaker
right. So if we start off this this song, this song, poem, stanza. Yeah, you ready to sing? you got your singing voice out? All right. That would not be a popular podcast.
00:15:05
Speaker
So like one thing that it starts off with, and like so it basically lists the 12 that he's going to talk about. And then in the second little stanza, he talks about like, kind of a brief like introduction about why these points are dope. And he's like, he literally says in Chinese, uh, well, maybe I won't, I think that would be mundane if I just keep saying the Chinese parts, but I'll just translate it He says treats disease, ah with like, uh, um,
00:15:32
Speaker
not magical efficacy, but like like next level. Let's call it that. It's called shunling, which translates to kind of like shun as and we would say with spirit, though it's not really a spirit here. It just means like the top level in that case. Ling, sometimes translated as like soul or spiritual.
00:15:52
Speaker
But what this is telling us is that it it treats to a much greater level. I really don't like the translation of shun for spirit. Nor Huynh for whatever Machoch said, ethereal soul or something like this.
00:16:05
Speaker
I'm just going to go ahead and be a bitch about this one and just say it because I think he imposed a lot of Western ideology on Chinese thinking that didn't exist there. And I think that's actually a form of academic colonialism that I don't want to be a part of. But it's, it's ethnocentric for sure. Where you take your own values and impose it on, and we do this all the time, but I don't know where he's from or like his background. He's Italian. Yeah. He's Italian.
00:16:35
Speaker
And then it's just like, yeah. Yeah. there's I mean, take an Italian, i assume it's Catholic, and stick him in um like a secular country like China where like Confucianism is called a religion. Are you joking? Confucianism is a philosophy through and through. It's like not even close to a religion. Taoism is barely a religion. Maybe some parts of it are shamanistic, but it's I guess it's just so annoying. it's like It feels like a colonizer being like, yeah, but who's your god? And i'm like,
00:17:04
Speaker
which God or we don't have a God or what the heck is a God? Right?
Cultural Interpretation of Spirit and Soul
00:17:08
Speaker
Like there's so many answers around the world, but like ah depending if they landed in India or China or somewhere else. But the point here is it's like, don't,
00:17:17
Speaker
Don't emphasize the translated word. Shun is not a spirit. Shun is an outward expression. If you break down the character, shun, gosh, this podcast is going to take forever if I keep diatribing like this shit, but maybe this is a good example of it. If you break down the left and right radicals of shun, it's it's a clothing radical on the left.
00:17:36
Speaker
And it's the radical on the right is to express. And so what this is saying is that the exterior of our body, in this case, our skin and our face and everything, our eyeballs, the stuff that you can see, that's the clothing of the human.
00:17:49
Speaker
This is what's expressing outwardly the condition of their chi and blood. That is a nice way to think of it. And that's different than spirit. So when you ask a you know normal Western white person or Western whatever person, what does spirit mean? I don't think they'll ever say the quality or state of chi and blood visible from the outside.
00:18:12
Speaker
spring maybe don't translate it that way. In my head, the past year, I've been having this conversation about um how much of a logical culture we are since since the enlightenment. And we've basically like pushed off all spiritual kind of mythos um forms of thought.
00:18:31
Speaker
And... that maybe in a in an earlier understanding of Western thought pre-enlightenment, when you had both kind of an active spirit that moved through you in the in the in the community, like it might not have been as foreign back then than it is now. Because now we just, we're so materialistic and in a spirit, then also now has a material form where it's like ah the spirit is just this thing inside you, maybe that,
00:19:03
Speaker
will live on after you die. So true. And it's like, I think it was more about the relationship that you had with other people and the natural world and animals and the work that you did and with yourself.
00:19:15
Speaker
And that's kind of closer to aligning to an expression of something inside kind of being able to express out and have relationship with. Because that's what we see too. Like if if someone's Shen is disturbed, right? Or they they can't, like they they're out of relation with um their community.
00:19:33
Speaker
All right. 100%, man. Yeah, absolutely. And by the way, I was saying what a full body shun was not the heart centric shun, which is one of the five different, sure, which we'll talk about, I'm sure on some episode, but yes, the heart. electricric one Oh yeah. They're good stuff.
00:19:47
Speaker
Um, but I totally agree with Asher. Like what we now say is spirit is probably been drastically molded and shifted and contained in a box. i was actually talking to a, uh,
00:19:59
Speaker
One of my patients in Boulder, who's a religious study professor at CU. Oh, is this the one who speaks Aramaic? Yeah. Yeah, right. Which is like, whoa. And he was telling me that the word that we they use for soul, like the word that's been translated as soul in the Bible, means in Aramaic, breath from the deepest part of your throat.
00:20:19
Speaker
Oh, Yeah, on the deepest part the throat. That's the liver channel. That's hung something. yeah that's That's, look at you. but It's called hung song. It's a meta, it's a, it's a onomatopoeic anatomical term that's describing where nasalized sound comes from.
00:20:37
Speaker
And it's like, check it out. So there's lots of different medicines and traditions and stuff out there. um I just was introduced to one because there's a a really interesting guy who just delves into every kind of cool ceremony. I work in the same offices. But anyway, he was introducing to me to like some other medicines and stuff, ah one of which is this kind of like tobacco that they grow in the rainforest that turns black.
00:21:07
Speaker
Yeah. Kind of like snuff. Exactly. But this one is a paste. And what you do is you just take a little bit and rub it on ah like a gum, like on the outside of your gum. So it's not like you're, and you don't spit it out. It's not like whatever that thing's called, chew. And then I guess they will often put like cocoa leaf powder on there on top of it. And so you kind of hold that in the side of the cheek.
00:21:28
Speaker
So theoretically, if I did that, then i would have felt potentially like this weird tingling sensation, at literally the deepest part of your throat. It doesn't even feel like where normal sound comes from.
00:21:39
Speaker
I was like, oh, it's a liver channeler. That is, and like, you can feel that space. So you know what it feels like. and We all know what a plum pit feels like and everything else like that, like plum pit cheese stuck there. Anyway, that's, so yes, maybe it does mean spirit as long as you can get pat like past all the modern baggage of that word.
00:22:00
Speaker
Sure, for sure. We can we can do a whole spinoff of anthropological stuff. And that's the episode right there.