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Qi Hua II
65 Plays1 year ago
The second part of this fascinating discussion on Qi Hua. Enjoy! Two of the the most telling and essential Nei Jing quotes covered in this episode is: 《素问·灵兰秘典论》三焦者，决渎之官，水道出 焉。膀胱者，州都之官，津液藏焉，气化则能出矣。 From the Su Wen, Ling Lan Mi Dian Chapter: "The triple burner, the water managing and irrigating official, the water ways come from here. The bladder, the river managing official, Jin Ye is stored/controlled here, therefore Qi Hua can function/come from here." 《素问·六节藏象论》脾、胃、大肠、小肠、三焦、膀胱者，仓禀之本，营之居也 From the Su Wen, Liu Jie Zang Xiang Chapter: "The spleen, stomach, large intestine, small intestine, triple burner and bladder, the root of receiving food/nourishment, the residing place of Ying nutritve.
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Transcript
Introduction to Fluid Metabolism
00:00:08
Speaker
and we're back from our little break. Steven, I wanted to clarify with you, or just go over the whole fluid metabolism in the body for us. You betcha. That's a biggie. But obviously an essential one. Also, good one to remind ourselves that the fluid and the food pathway are not synonymous. But yeah, let's just do fluids because it'll help so much. There's crossover, but
Small Intestine's Role in Fluid Separation
00:00:33
Speaker
they're not exact. So when we bring fluids into the equation,
00:00:37
Speaker
The key is, and this is so confusing, I'm sure it's confusing for everybody, but I always also thought like when the heck does the small intestine come into play? Because they say the spleen is the source of fluids. The lungs are the upper reservoir of fluids and they descend throughout the skin and then down the body. The kidney mixed with the bladder, you can never separate those two for this function, are indeed the lower part and the bladder controls the water. Where the heck is the small intestine?
00:01:06
Speaker
And this didn't, again, sounds like broken recordy, but didn't figure it out until formulas. So you have a formula that hopefully all herbalists know very well.
Health Implications of Fluid Separation
00:01:17
Speaker
And for those of you budding herbalists out there, just keep this one in your pocket too. It's called Bi Sie Fun Ching Yin.
00:01:24
Speaker
So bizhi is the herb. Fun qing means to separate the clear. Yin is just another word for decoction. So this is literally the formula that helps separate the small intestines, fluids, helps the small intestine to separate the thin and the thick fluids or what you can also call the clear from them. And this is a tricky one because clear and turbid sound okay. Thin and thick sound very healthy.
00:01:51
Speaker
but like there's lots of other less exciting ways to say turbid and it can be like kind of gross and like dirty and and this is a tricky one. Small intestine in general would be the one where it separates out waste that we don't want.
00:02:06
Speaker
from things that we do want king so this is separating the two and the king so this idea of two is actually drinking fluid that's not healthy you want to get food poisoning stuff like that small intestine involved here so basically you want to think about it small intestines the front not the back of this fluid
Spleen's Role in Fluid Transportation
00:02:26
Speaker
transfer.
00:02:26
Speaker
So as the fluids hit the middle burner, is it the spleen that's really moving this around? And in fact, how could the spleen, the organ that hates fluids, right? We all know spleen doesn't like to be damp. It prefers dryness. How in the world does the spleen functionally transporting all these fluids? So we would say the small intestine really takes the lead on this one. So small intestine clears out the fluid we don't want, and helps us keep the fluid that we do want in the body. And that's what then
00:02:56
Speaker
kind of rises with the spleen yang that's drawing all that stuff out of the food, goes up to the chest. Once it's in the chest, we have another separation process. And remember, this is where we create zongqi. For those of you, we're doing a very abbreviated version of this. So hold on to your hats, because we'll do a more thorough one. But once you're here, you get zongqi, not gathering qi, Douyi.
Cycle of Fluid Transformation
00:03:19
Speaker
This is called ancestral or predecessor qi. So bad translation there, too, flag for that.
00:03:25
Speaker
Then we separate the clear and the thick, not the clear and the gross, or the turbid can mean both ones. So here, thick is just richer, more nutrient stuff. That's blood that goes to the heart. So notice when we were in the chest, we weren't in an organ, and then thin, what we call thin, is actually two parts. It's Jin Chi, channel Chi, and it's fluids. Now at this point, it's just water, right? Or
00:03:50
Speaker
Corona or whatever other liquid you absorbed. Not officially the the gin and the yeah, which I'm assuming is the next step. That's exactly right. So the key that Asher just pointed out here is we can't use those fluids. We can use that chi right away. You betcha. And we can sure use that blood right away. But we have no way of using this fluid because it's not imbued with yang.
00:04:11
Speaker
So if you've ever tried don't do this please ever. Pump people full of water. Nobody IVs anyone with water. That's the worst idea ever. And you can kill people that way. Don't do that. Why? Shoot. Can I edit this? Edit this? No, I'm kidding. Whatever. The point is you can't put plain old water in anybody. It just doesn't work. So you have to have yang imbued water, what we call it.
00:04:37
Speaker
And you can absolutely that does include things like electrolyte laden water proteins your proteins in that water if you put your water in a vessel it causes absolute chaos and so this is where we have that fluid but it doesn't do anything for us at that point and remember to send it and then went into the lungs what is the lungs do goes up to the surface you betcha and descends.
00:05:00
Speaker
more descending than there is lifting. That's a shout out to an organ. When we talk about lungs, we'll explain it's not actually 50. So then it gets down, and once it's descending all the way, where does it go to? The bottom. And that's bladder and kidneys. Once it gets to bladder and kidneys, you've got all this water down there. And we literally call it shui qi. We don't call it anything else. Shang Han Lun will explain what happens when this shui qi gets blocked. Shout out to you Shang
Kidney Qi and Fluid Transformation
00:05:27
Speaker
Han Lunners. If you're thinking Bun Toan, running piglet,
00:05:30
Speaker
which actually should be called squirming pivot, but then that is where this happens. Yeah, we'll talk about that too. That's a funny one. People, yeah, sorry. There's a lot of diatribes here. So then that's where all that water goes into this crock pot and steams upwards.
00:05:48
Speaker
Now you've imbued it with yang. The combination of kidney yin and kidney yang, which we now know is kidney qi, steams this useless water into very useful jin and yang. That's the thing that's imbued with yang. We all know that yin is just like form. It's an animated form until it's imbued with yang. Now it's imbued with yang. You bet it's going to go in and moisten all those tissues.
00:06:13
Speaker
from the throat on down and that's going all the way up and it's repeating the same cycle it goes all the way up steam slip to the top the canopy and then it circulates through the whole body but now what you're circulating isn't just water it's tin and you so it's the same process you can see that we're cycling again and again the waterways just continue to go but it only becomes useful once it goes through qi hua transformation
00:06:38
Speaker
Right. It's almost at the end of the first half and the beginning of the second one, which then ends with the bien and the excretion through the bladder. That's correct. And so once this, you'll go ahead. No, I was saying, I understand. Nice. Yeah. So once that jin and ye then finally reach the end of their useful life, then they do collect in the bladder and then the pp happens.
00:07:04
Speaker
The other thing that this is making me think about, because I always have struggled with the Tai Yang being full of blood and not of Qi, and being a Yang thing that doesn't have any blood really directly related to it, because they're not Yin organs, they're not holding anything, kind of had me confused for a long time. But now I'm starting to think that maybe if I think of blood as just fluids,
00:07:33
Speaker
And then there's a lot between the small intestine, as you noted, its importance and the bladder. So true, man. So true. Because you're right, small intestine, too. Where's the blood connection to that? You're absolutely right. I like how you're thinking about this, too. It requires us to think this way. Like, oh, well, blood is a yin thing. Are we talking about all yin things? Are we talking about fluids? Asher's spot on. That's how you have to read the classics.
00:07:57
Speaker
Awesome, you had another beautiful quote for us. I think that talked about the origins of Chihua, or Chihua being the origins. All right, so this quote, also Suwen, just like everything else we're doing today, the first half in Beijing, this one is from the Qijiao Bin Dadlan chapter. And this one is pretty tiny quote, and it says,
00:08:25
Speaker
So this translates to basically everything comes from qi hua. This is a really fascinating idea. It ties into so many different things. We'll have to do another chapter on or another podcast on wuxing in a lot of cool ways. For those of you five elementors out there, hopefully you know that there's actually six elements, fire being divided into two, ministerial and
Cultural Interpretations of Elements
00:08:50
Speaker
monarch.
00:08:50
Speaker
Yeah, you got that. Yeah, you had me freaked out there for a second. I was like, what? That's right. It's actually the sixth element is a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle plasma goo. Oh, no way. Plasma goo. That sounds like it did not get put through the chi hua in the proper order. That is what the small intestine just kicked right out of there. You split the fire and do you have a name for the or a way of thinking about the distinction between the two?
00:09:18
Speaker
Yeah, like in the natural world, if you're going to break it down into six. We do. Very good call. The sun is the monarch fire and the heat in the earth is ministerial fire. Okay, because it reflects.
00:09:37
Speaker
Yeah, it's and it's you arguably it's not as much geothermal unless you're considering geothermal from Taeyang because we would still consider the Minister of Fire always coming from Taeyang, but it is the heat that's stored in the earth. Oh, so back to Gochong-Chi-Chi-Huaia. So we're talking about the five element connection and that one is
00:10:00
Speaker
We'll get back to it, but it's, you know, Nijing roughly says, don't worry, we'll get to the actual paragraph and I'll read the classics for this too, but that life starts in the kidneys, generates wood and that generates fire because we all know that yang is essential for life. Chinese medicine, at least the Nijing, this passage very much so, focuses on the kidneys being the source of life. It's just it has to go through the transformation into wood and then generate
00:10:27
Speaker
fire, which then generates everything. So yes, Yang is kind of the source of life, but don't forget Yang had to come from somewhere too.
00:10:34
Speaker
And so we would say it comes from the kidneys. And so this connecting to glitzom qi qi hua, everything comes from the qi hua, without kidney function, nothing else. Now, technically, you can expand the word qi hua into something a little bit larger, which can talk about shifts and so forth like that. But the majority of it would be, certainly in the clinic, needs to be in this water metabolism. Nice. You know that, it's funny that you say that because, and we were just talking about
00:11:03
Speaker
the lava out here, who we call Pele. And she's the generator out here. She creates all the land. She's the original one. But it's interesting to note that she was carried here by her sister from Tahiti. Pretty sure it was Tahiti. Hiyaka, who is the water or the ocean goddess. It's her sister. And so she carried her here to Hawaii before she... So there you have water starting the birth of fire.
00:11:33
Speaker
I love it. And then fire generates everything else. That's true. Nobody's gonna complain about that. I love it, dude. So many good connections there. You know, I think they're all talking about the same stuff just in different ways. Totally. Yeah, absolutely. And they all had a lot of connection with each other, I think, too, you know, stemming from each other's knowledge and so on.
00:11:52
Speaker
I think Chinese probably just have a longer lineage that's held together at this point. Not that it might have always been like that, but definitely where we're sitting right now. You have a language and written things that have survived for so long, and most other cultures don't have that at this point. And if they do, it's not a spoken language. I mean, you can read the Scrolls of the Dead, but who speaks ancient Egyptian? Yeah, or Aramaic and stuff like that.
00:12:22
Speaker
It's true. It's really interesting. Actually, one of my patients is a religious professor at one of the colleges and he does speak Aramaic, speaking of really intense specialization of people. I mean, obviously brilliant dude. And we've gotten to talking about some of the similarities and tons, this is really fascinating how close they are.
Jing, Qi, and Replenishment
00:12:44
Speaker
We can drop a little nugget here, but one of the things he was talking about is that the old word for the Aramaic word for soul,
00:12:51
Speaker
actually means the breath from the deepest part of your throat, which is a pretty big shift from what I think a lot of people are interpreting. And if you go back to your nejing pathways for your liver, there's an area in your throat that we only identify is called hongsang. And nobody really can identify exactly anatomically where this is, except that it's the area where deep nasalized sound can come from, hongsang.
00:13:18
Speaker
So I think soul basically means when it's the ethereal part of the liver, because it's that, that's the only part that can reach that deepest part of the throat. Huh. I wonder if the Tibetan throat singers have a leg up on everybody. Yeah. I bet they sleep like babies. They are swans are entang. Oh, you use the swans are entang for? Anchoring the hood. Oh. Yeah. It's all starting to click. You betcha. You betcha.
00:13:45
Speaker
All right, so we do one more quote? Sure. All right, we got Su Wen Zabigy. And boy, is this one a confusing one. So it certainly started confusing. But I'm going to use this one as like a cool example of how when you go back to the Ne Jing and you've learned things, you've applied things, and really important, you've practiced things. So there's no way to get this without practice. Nobody thinks their way into being a great doctor. You have to do it, right? And so the more you see, the more you try, the more you understand, the more you
00:14:15
Speaker
use all the correct ways to increase knowledge. Anyway, this is a great passage to do that. So this is from the Suwen, and it's yin yang, yin xiang, daluan. So it's one of the biggest key chapters that's really in the Beijing. So many times you'll see things referred to this chapter. And it starts with
00:14:35
Speaker
Wǐi, wǐi, xīng. So this translates to the flavor belongs to or generates form. So this wǐi word can actually mean multiple things. It can mean come back to, it can mean belong to, it can also mean basically generating or turning in. So wǐi, wǐi, xīng, xīng, wǐi, qī. And then the second part is the xīng
00:15:01
Speaker
which is the form, the physical form, kui, so it generates or belongs to qi. And so you're like, okay, well, that kind of makes sense, but I thought form was a yin thing, not a yang thing. They continue on and they say qi, kui, jing. So qi belongs to or generates the jing. And then lastly, jing, kui, hua.
00:15:23
Speaker
the qing belongs to or generates the hua. So in this case, the transformation. So if we go through it linearly, it says the flavor creates the form, the form creates the qi, the qi creates the qing, and the qing creates the hua. Remember, belong and create can be interchanged there. So what this is telling us is we have to eat food, right? We have to have food and water, and that's what builds up the form in our body.
00:15:52
Speaker
And in this case, when we're talking about xing or form, lots of different things, but we would generally refer to something like zhongqi or predecessor qi. Well, where does qi come from? It comes from zhongqi, just like blood does, just like everything else in our postnatal. So xinguiqi, that's where that form that we've absorbed through our
00:16:11
Speaker
transformation process in the spleen and now of course we see small intestine shout out there too um creating then qi what happens with qi and this qi is actually referring to two things it's actually referring to wei qi defensive qi and ying qi which means nutritive qi but in this case we're really talking about fluids qi qi qing ha so what is this talking about kidney qi so kidney qi
00:16:39
Speaker
Well, all of those things, they all come down to the kidneys. So it's actually from the food, from the water, all of this will come down and land in the kidneys. If you're eating a good enough diet, nutrient-dense enough, then it'll come down to the kidneys, it'll refuel the kidneys, rebuild the Jing, and then from the Jing, which is the kidney in,
00:16:59
Speaker
qīng qīy huā, so qīng, that kidney jīng, qīy huā will turn into transformation. So we're really using the entire food and beverage cycle here to refuel, replenish the kidneys, and that's what's generating the qīy huā transformation.
00:17:18
Speaker
Awesome. I think a little point of clarification for those who may have been taught in the West will be that Jing can be replenished in this conversation because I know I learned that from the Qigong practices that I've done, but I'm pretty sure in school they were trying to tell us that Jing was just prenatal. You have what you came into with the world. You can only spend. You can never build back.
00:17:44
Speaker
Great point. Thanks for shouting out, Asher. That's awesome. So yeah, this is a really interesting one. And it's a little bit distressing that I think students are told that you can no longer rebuild kidneys or that you can't rebuild Jing. So first question would be, well, what about the herbs that literally say they're rebuilding Jing?
00:18:03
Speaker
I mean, that's kind of a crazy one. So let's go for one of the most basic but absolutely one of the best, Dihuang. How in the world can you replenish Jing without Dihuang? It is so, so essential. In fact, Dihuang actually has a nickname. Can you believe that herbs have nicknames? But I guess it's bound to happen after 3,000 years.
00:18:24
Speaker
But some people are like, oh my god, I can't remember all these Chinese names for herbs. Oh yeah, well, how about memorizing those and their nicknames? Well, the nickname for diwang is called di sui, which means the marrow of the earth.
00:18:37
Speaker
Dihuang just means yellow earth, but dizui means boy that drives that point home. If you literally want to rebuild your bone marrow, your kidney marrow, you take dihuang. I mean, it's just such a great herb. And this is the one that's going to rebuild. However, it doesn't rebuild the kidney yang. So there's lots of ways, but physiologically, how do we do it without treatment, without herbs? Nutrient density.
00:19:01
Speaker
You bring in good food, you have good functioning flow of organs and so forth, flow of chi, flow of fluids, and flow of blood. All the organs take their dibs, and then the last organ to get any nourishment is always the kidney. But most people aren't eating nutrient-dense enough to get anything down to the kidney. Once you get something down to the kidneys, then you start restoring kidney yin.
00:19:26
Speaker
Well, then how in the world are we generating kidney yang or siphoning off the heart? That's called the ministerial fire. So if you get your yin from your food, your yang from your heart, you rebuild your kidneys in a healthy physiological, long lasting way. And it's very evident because you can bring people's kidneys, pulses back up. So I always thought it was so sad when people would be like, yeah, there's this great understanding of kidneys, but you can't treat it.
00:19:52
Speaker
Yeah, you're just screwed. You have what you have. It is what it is. No changing it. Yeah, that turns what would be practitioners into like observers. Okay, I'm going to observe how much your kidneys suck, but there's nothing I can do about it, right? Totally. It's like a step below where we need to be. And I think that's a lot of times what happens where
00:20:13
Speaker
We don't totally have the physiology 100% there. You know, the diagnosis, the treatment stuff, we learn, but I think we're missing the base foundations of the physiology that really will take Western practitioners to a level that I think this medicine should be at. Yeah.
00:20:34
Speaker
Absolutely. And all practitioners, really. You know, it's funny, if you go even to China, ask practitioners there what qiyi is. It's a hard question for anyone to answer. And it does require a lot of experience and knowledge. Because you have to see it in action, you have to see it. And then that's, again, where formulas are just so darn instructive.
00:20:52
Speaker
you know the classics are there for a reason he's teaching us with these these great books but yeah yeah absolutely you know this the interesting thing is too i would say it's you know it's not just on those teachers unfortunately who are saying you can't nourish your kidneys um i'm not saying that they're not great practitioners or anything but my guess is that they probably um maybe we're taught the same which is
00:21:12
Speaker
you know, pass non-bad info.
Patient Compliance in Kidney Health
00:21:14
Speaker
But the second thing is they might not have any patients compliant enough to do it because to rebuild kidney pulses, you can do it. I've done it with multiple, plenty of patients, lots of them, but it takes time. It takes a lot of compliance and a lot of time. And if you can get them on board, you can get it done.
00:21:31
Speaker
And if you can get them to change their diet a little bit, you can really get it done. But we're talking on the range of like four to six months to rebuild kidney pulses, which is not that bad. I mean, in the scheme of things, that's not that bad. A life, lifelong disease, you know, for four to six months, that's nothing. Yeah, exactly.
00:21:48
Speaker
That's like what, like, that's like a Netflix subscription or something, you know, but, but people out here do want it to be quick. They want convenience. Just give me the pill doc. I just want to take it, go home and then don't change my lifestyle. God, whatever you do. That's a really hard one. Can I get the kidney? She, uh, hamburger and, uh, from the drive-through, please. Yeah. Or can I just like drop and get the booster pack and, you know, be really good for two weeks and then go back to doing whatever I want. Yeah.
00:22:18
Speaker
And it's surprising though, like, I mean, even with, I mean, shoot. I'm trying to think back to one of my patients. We brought her kidney pulses, both yin and yang up in two bottles of herbs. But you can tell she had a pretty healthy lifestyle. Her spleen was kicking. All of her other organs were not kicking.
00:22:38
Speaker
which is part of the reason why we targeted those kidneys. But it was impressive. That tells you just how many things she was doing right in her lifestyle and stuff too, but they stuck. And that was like months ago and she still got kidney pulses on both sides. Yeah, it's exciting. Do you want to finish off this quote or leave it where we're
Nourishment of Kidneys through Food and Fluid
00:22:58
Speaker
at? Oh, yeah. So the reason why this quote can be so confusing is you're like, okay, fluid
00:23:04
Speaker
Belonging to or changing into form and then why what is all this stuff? But you can see that first half is really talking about how you get from food and nourishment all the way down to Nourishing the kidneys and therefore Chi Jua transformation at least the yin half of it The second part is a little bit
00:23:21
Speaker
confusing, but I'll read it out just so we can do it and shout out to it later. But this one calls qing shi qi. So qing is still your kinescence, shi is actually to eat or to consume in this case, qi. Well, that's a fascinating one. Remember, this is a separate phrase, even though it's in the same, it's following it.
00:23:40
Speaker
And then it says, shing shui. So the form eats the flavors or the five flavors. So again, basically talking about, well, how do you fuel jing? You fuel it with qi. Specifically, what kind of qi? That requires a whole lot of information. But as you guys now know, it's kidney qi. And then shing shui, how do you fuel a form through flavor? For instance, if you're trying to help people put on some weight again, maybe they had some weight loss after whatever, whatever.
00:24:09
Speaker
nourish the in, nourish the way, help their digestive absorption. And that's really one great. Then it continues on and it says, hua sheng jing, the hua transformation process, literally sheng jing generates jing kidney acid. So this is telling us, okay, once we've got these fluids, they're all moving, now the organs are working.
00:24:31
Speaker
Don't forget, zang fluids is yie. The thicker yie fluids are what help the zang organs to work properly. What do you think it does when you can get a plentiful amount because your qi transformation is working? You generate your yie. Guess how well your spleen is going to work? Well, your spleen generates everything else, including the jing that's going to go back into it. And then qi sheng xing, the qi generates the form.
00:24:55
Speaker
And then again that would talk about both the yin, nutritive, wei, defensive, all those sorts of different kinds of qi. And then lastly it says jing hua wei qi. So the essence jing and hua transforming the jing wei qi is called qi.
00:25:11
Speaker
So that last part, I mean, we could spend hours talking about this whole thing, but the key takeaways is get that food and fluid nourishment cycle, fuel those kidneys, the yin, the yang, stick them together, you got kidney qi, that's what's fueling that qi transformation. Nice. And that last way qi is not the surrounding qi, is it or is it?
00:25:33
Speaker
So good. Good ears, by the way. That way is the word for is. Yeah. So way is also the ancient word for is, as it is stomach, as it is defensive. Lots of ways out here. Yeah. Shout out to Taoists too. Lots of ways out there too. I know, but I was going to say, but that one's Tao. That way is actually Tao. That's true. It's only the English speaking Taoists for now.
00:25:55
Speaker
Awesome. Well, thanks for joining us on this episode. Catch us back next time. Hopefully we will get into the rest of the fluid cycle.