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Alcohol Part 1
65 Plays10 months ago
It's the festive season when people gather with friends to eat, drink, and talk story. Alcohol traces it's roots back to beginning of human civilization and agriculture potentially being the first fermented substance humans manufactured. In Chinese Medicine alcohol is also a foundational component, not only as a solvent but as a radical in the character Yi. Join us on the first part of our jaunt discussing alcohol and while tangential narratives are iconic of one under the influence we can assure you it was all sober fun.
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Transcript
Introduction to Alcohol as a Drug
00:00:10
Speaker
This week with Voices on the Mountain, we're going to be talking about alcohol. It's the most used, most ubiquitous and abused drug in the United States.
Alcohol: Toxin or Medicine?
00:00:20
Speaker
That's right. Maybe sugar, but actually today we're sticking alcohol. Well, alcohol is kind of a sugar. It is. But is it a toxin? Is it a medicine?
00:00:30
Speaker
Does it all just depend on dosage? That's right. All interesting things to get into.
Moderation & Consumption Limits
00:00:35
Speaker
Yeah. We always get this question in clinic too. You're like, people like looking to you to kind of be like, how much should I be drinking? What's your answer to that question? Well, I give them options, you know? Yeah. That's a big one. And I really appreciate that people are thinking about the should instead of just like,
00:00:55
Speaker
I will get hammered every day. It's like, what's the right amount of getting hammered? Of getting hammered? Well, and it's the Dallas thing too, to like kind of go out and get hammered. I mean, that's right. Just like on the mountain to kind of get hammered?
Historical and Herbal Contexts
00:01:12
Speaker
Yeah, we're just like everything in moderation, including moderation. The act of getting hammered isn't foreign, isn't, you know, poorly out there. We're not Buddhists, right? We're not saying you can never go out and engage in some debaucherous behavior. That's a good point. So moderation means a moderate amount of debauchery as well.
00:01:36
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's an interesting point. But then you might say, well, what's the moderate amount to consume arsenic? Oh, well, yeah, something's not even once, you know, math. Yeah. Arsenic.
00:01:52
Speaker
Although, yeah, I think I told you there's, I have heard of people ingesting arsenic, small amounts, but don't do it. Don't do it. We are in no way putting a stamp on okay of ingesting arsenic in any amounts.
00:02:08
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. There actually is an ancient herb that they used for really insane, like really intense stuff, maybe some mental stuff, but definitely some serious toxicity and it has, it's comprised, comprised partly of arsenic. It's called pichuan. Yeah. And that was internal. That's correct. They did eat that one. What was it called? Pichuan. So then there's like a
00:02:33
Speaker
is an exaggeration, but as a slight aside, I always tell people too for ginger because that's good for a lot of people. It's really good for water flow for those non-muggles out there or hard studying muggles. Ginger moves your upper and middle burners. It just doesn't move your lower burner for fluid movement.
00:02:53
Speaker
So then you have to combine it with something if you want to get all three but move in the upper and middle That's not a bad bad deal at all So drinking ginger in your water and not like ginger tea for the for the majority of the day is really good idea but then there's a phrase that if you drink ginger after the like dinner time and
00:03:10
Speaker
It acts like pee shuang in your body, which is, of course, an exaggeration. It's not like you're just arsenic poisoned yourself. Lots of Chinese people will put ginger in the evening meal that they're cooking. But the goal is to try not to overdo it past dinnertime because it can keep you up at night. And then if you tweak people sleep bad enough, then that's no good for the health, right?
Alcohol in Chinese Medicine
00:03:33
Speaker
Yeah. If you're taking it in a high enough dose and you're not balancing out that moving quality,
00:03:39
Speaker
that the moving quality that we're most doing in the kind of the young activating quality. Yeah. So it's kind of the opposite of what we want to do for evening time is like, calm, anchor, not move and excite. Totally. So alcohol is pretty fundamental to Chinese medicine. I remember Steven at one point told me that what the radical of alcohol is in the
00:04:08
Speaker
Is it in the Yi, or is it in the...? It is Yi. Good memory, dude. Just nailing your characters like this. That's exactly right. The character Yi, which means medicine, the bottom radical is alcohol. Which tells you it's fundamental to Chinese medicine. Now, how fundamental? I mean, they could have just been swabbing the points, you know what I mean?
00:04:29
Speaker
Oh yeah, I'm for sure they were swabbing the points after they put the needle in their mouth to clean it. Oh, very good point there too. Very good point. Yeah. But just the idea that, you know, alcohol can clean, sanitize, disinfect a lot of stuff. I'm sure they were cleaning wounds with it and stuff.
00:04:47
Speaker
Mm-hmm and I was thinking too. I mean just such a great way to pull out the constituents and the tinctures that we use That's absolutely right. You know that did the jaws the hip fall line. I mean just same one. Yep. Yep. It's incredible Yeah, we use it all the time. It's like the best solvent because it does Both kinds it does hydrophobic and hydrophilic stuff at the same time Right. Yeah, so it really pulls everything so a lot of sense when people just want tonifiers then they might do
00:05:17
Speaker
That one's hydrophilic. No, no, phobic, I'm sorry. You can pull that out in a non-polar substance. So that would be the oils? Yup, exactly. But you just get everything if you put it in alcohol. So that's why people are like, should I really tinker around with... Like glycerin would be a good example of a non-polar solvent. But are you sure that it's going to extract in that? So just stick it in alcohol instead.
00:05:47
Speaker
Yeah. And if you live in the States, alcohol is pretty cheap for, for pulling out those types of constituents.
Alcohol Production for Medicinal Use
00:05:55
Speaker
That's true. Is it not cheap at your area? No, it's pretty expensive. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we should get a still one of these, one of these days and build it to, to make our own moonshine, whatever, just for Chinese medicine stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Just for, I'm not ingesting this. Yeah, exactly.
00:06:17
Speaker
So we had one professor in school that told us, one drink, medicine. Everything after that talks in. That's interesting.
00:06:29
Speaker
I like the point, but I would say one drink, maybe medicine if needed, and the key is frequency. So this is another interesting one. There's a ton of good research coming out about this. I think some people listen to the Huberman podcasts too. They have some interesting information on there too. I think he's a professor out of
00:06:51
Speaker
one of the schools in California. Anyway, Chinese medicine. No, Western. Yeah, Western. So he'll do like a Jewish doctor. Oh, is Huberman a Jewish name? Oh, dude, the men gives it away at the end. Really? Everything ending in men is Jewish? Yeah, all the superheroes of yours.
00:07:14
Speaker
beaterman superman yeah no but for real that a lot of them written by juice and yeah like Zimmerman and oh that makes a lot of sense interesting I'll be Hoffman I mean
00:07:27
Speaker
Well, Huberman, he gets some good information too. He does have an alcohol episode. I recommend everyone listen to that if they want to drink alcohol because it gives them a good Western basis on what should they be.
00:07:43
Speaker
If they want to drink alcohol, it's a pretty good plug if you ever want to drink alcohol. Right, exactly. This one, continue. Well, because I think a lot of people, you know, everyone listening to our thing is like trying to figure it out from the Chinese medicine perspective.
Health Impacts of Alcohol
00:07:56
Speaker
But then it's also helpful for a lot of people who haven't had this background to know what the western side is.
00:08:02
Speaker
kind of like what is it doing and all those sorts of things. Well, he reiterates pretty much what we would say in our medicine as well is that even a drink a day, pretty toxic on the body. It can be pretty harsh. When a teacher had said one drink medicine the rest toxic, yeah, but not even daily. And so then you'd say, okay, well, from our perspective, I guess we could break it down first with what is alcohol.
00:08:29
Speaker
From our perspective, alcohol is damp heat. It's literally damp heat. Who shouldn't be doing it? Damp people, hot people, damp hot people. Who can do it? Cold, dry people. Cold, dry people might like it a lot, actually.
00:08:44
Speaker
But damp heat, if you've got either or both of those toxins or pathogenic factors at work in your body, probably not great. So that's number one, it's damp heat. It's nature, very moving and dispersing. That's the medicinal part of it. And what it's moving is an interesting one. Most alcohol just moves young. But
00:09:06
Speaker
From our perspective, red wine can also move blood. So most of it just moves yang, and red wine also moves blood. And this is an interesting idea. Yes, if you move yang, sometimes you circulate blood with it, as long as there's no blockages. And then the third thing about or that one other directionality component too, is it tends to move yang most notably in your chest. And because of that, it's actually used in certain formulas.
00:09:33
Speaker
And then the third thing we want to know about fundamental stuff is which organs it's affecting. And the key there is stomach liver. Of all the organs that it's affecting, stomach liver the most. And so when you really see people drinking too much, full alcoholism, even recovering alcoholics,
00:09:52
Speaker
check the stomach and liver with extra care and attention and nine times out of 10. That's where the issue is. So like a good here's a good example pathologically is, have you ever heard of brandy nose? I was thinking brandy wine. It's like rosacea on the tip of the nose. Yeah.
00:10:09
Speaker
Break do they break or they just get red? Oh man, they get more than red. They they like swell and like it looks like a tumor or bazillion tumors on the end of their nose. Yeah. Yeah. Like it's really remarkable. If you've never seen that's a really good thing. I always recommend people to go to China even you know, I probably spent too long there.
00:10:27
Speaker
I'm not telling people to dedicate 11 years of their life to do anything, but even if you just go for a couple weeks, you will see some weird severity of cases that you just cannot see here, like psoriasis. I saw a dude who had 70% of his body was covered in psoriasis.
00:10:45
Speaker
literally purple, scaly, flaky, dry, probably cracking and bleeding 70% of his entire body. The crazy thing is that dude sat down at my, you know, across from my teacher, my herbs master, and I literally like audibly heard my herbs master would be like,
00:11:03
Speaker
okay, let's get this, you know, like you, you heard him like, pep himself up. And the guy first thing he says is, so, um, of course, in Chinese, right? He's like, so my tummy's been hurt. And you gotta be kidding me, like, he literally pointed at the backside of his face, like, you don't want to treat this. And I was like, this, you should see what it does in the summer. And we're like, dude, you have 30% of your skin left, man.
00:11:31
Speaker
Like if you do any do any more you are a purple dragon like you would either be Children's best friend or worst enemy. I don't know purple, right? You turn into Barney immediately
00:11:42
Speaker
Wow. But when's the last time you ever saw someone with 70% of their body? I mean, it was on the back of his head. I didn't see a ton on his face, neck, arms, feet, everything, your legs. So you just don't get to see psoriasis like that here. Well, another example would be this brandy nose or this kind of nose rosacea where it gets knobbly and it literally looks like turmeric because it's like a polycystic ovary right on his nose kind of thing.
00:12:12
Speaker
Yeah, I can think of like the old hits that would drink a lot and them having those. Yeah, those like gross on their nose. Yeah, it's like the entire front of it, right? It's like an alcoholic Rudolph or something.
00:12:27
Speaker
Yeah, totally. So how does the pathology of the alcohol create the briny nose? So that's the biggest cause of it. And I think Western medicine is on board with that too. I'm pretty sure, I heard this from PA, that Western medicine just doesn't know how to treat that or just chooses not to treat that or something.
00:12:47
Speaker
But I think they're at least on board that alcohol is a huge component of it. And for us, that's so true. So this guy, it was an older dude. And for those of you who've been to alcohol or been to alcohol, been to China, like in modern China, right? It's super alcohol-y. The older they get, the more they drink. Yeah, the old dudes, and they drink like, like ever clear stuff, like 70, 80% alcohol stuff.
00:13:15
Speaker
Fire water. Oh, it's been it stinks. They made me drink it sometimes too and I was like guys no more
00:13:23
Speaker
Don't hang out with old dudes unless you really want to get blasted. But yeah, so this guy clearly had just had a habit of drinking too much his whole life. And he comes in and my teacher gave him like a raw herb to coction. So full strength, right? And my teacher did not shy away from large doses. That's why people here think I have large doses. I was like, you want to see large doses, check out my verbs master.
00:13:49
Speaker
I'm not joking. In one week, it went down like 40%. It looked like you could see his actual nose skin on the front after one week of full strength herbs, but I've just never seen anything react that fast. It was lots of stuff, but one of the key herbs in there was shurgal, which is really effective at clearing stomach fire. It's the stomach fire that's rising up and doing it to the nose. Correct.
00:14:17
Speaker
Correct. And I guess I would preface that we don't treat diseases, so we would want to separate syndromes, but I've never seen one that's not stomach-fired for that. So sometimes it's kind of like shingles. It's like there's a couple of diseases you're like, you know, it's liver. It's got to be liver. Hepatitis. Yeah, exactly. It's still just liver. But then, you know, some people will be like, oh, well, then how do you treat nephritis? And you're like, no, no, you can't do that. Key transformation is way too complicated. Yeah, yeah.
00:14:48
Speaker
Yeah, so yeah, so that's a good one. And then the second one is the alcohol bit for the liver. And just like Western medicine knows, there's that component as well. And so a lot of you'll see this with just people who have kind of pushed their tolerance to the edge, who then are very susceptible to it. So if they drink even just a couple drinks, maybe they'll have like full night sweats all throughout the night and so forth.
00:15:14
Speaker
And that just means they've probably built up a lot of damp heat stagnation, which is funny because damp heat doesn't cause night sweats. It really doesn't. I've heard that. Does the church talk about that?
00:15:25
Speaker
I don't know if it was Motocho or if it was just in going around school, but absolutely, you know, uh, indeficiency heat being the most common night sweat presentation, like a menopause, but, uh, they, they did say damp heat could also be it. But I figured that was always going to be a less intense sweat, like a clamminess at night. Um, it was insomnia type thing, not like an active sweat. Yeah. And I've just never heard in any,
00:15:55
Speaker
classic reliable source that damp heat causes night sweats. I've heard that a lot since I came back though, but here's the trick. And this is a little bit of, it sounds like a nuance, but it's really not, is damp heat in the liver gallbladder settles into the blood pretty darn fast. And blood heat is probably one of the two most common causes of night sweats. The liver stores the blood.
00:16:19
Speaker
We're going to get there, but just through the liver and the gallbladder. Correct. Correct. It's like if you had damp heat in your intestines, no way. Are you kidding? How are you going to sweat from that? No night sweats at all. But if it's damp heat in the liver because the liver stores the blood, now you see it. That's actually why the number one cause, I would say at least in America, of blood heat is stress. When people stress their liver out and it gets stuck,
00:16:44
Speaker
unless they have very little yang, they'll generate heat pretty darn fast. And that heat then is stuck heat in the liver of gallbladder. Well, just like we said, the liver stores the blood. So given any length of time, it just drops right into the blood.
00:16:59
Speaker
Well, let's take that stress person from the beginning. They have stress, they have a hard time winding down at the end of the day or whatever the case may be, and so they are habituated to have a drink at the end of the day. True dad. Because the highly moving nature of alcohol is going to give them temporary relief from their stress symptoms. True and true. Yeah. But here's a
Addiction and Emotional Resilience
00:17:25
Speaker
trick. They're still going to get damp heat in their liver.
00:17:28
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, totally. And so they're not going to build up the tools to kind of deal with this stuff. Otherwise, this is basically when I was in school, my roommate was co-founded a rehab center in Evergreen, Colorado. Nice. Yeah, it was a really cool one called Sparrow. It's all peer to peer kind of stuff. Very neat.
00:17:51
Speaker
And I would help out there and help treat some of these guys in like a community acupuncture setting. So I got to see a lot of addicts, not just alcohol. Also, heroin would be the other big one. But just watching people kind of come off of their of
00:18:09
Speaker
their substance abuse in past like the immediate acute stage where they're, they're not getting out of bed and they're just like in dire straits. Yeah. But still after that, there's tons of heat and there's totally a lack of, uh, of being able to like handle emotions or all, all the things that you would have had to do in the first place. But then you kind of lean on alcohol to self-medicate to get through that. And I was like, Oh, this is also clear heat and deal with the dampness.
00:18:40
Speaker
So, so true, dude. So true. You bring up so many good points. Let me pull out two so I don't diatribe people's ears off. But that kind of resilience that you're saying that they didn't have that they kind of used alcohol to go against like or like to kind of cheat their way through stuff. That resilience for us is mostly in the middle burner.
00:19:04
Speaker
And so the best way to resist stress, right, we can't, unless you're going to go monk, you can't like eradicate stress, but you and then people like well just change how stress affects you. Yeah, but how do you do that from our perspective, middle burner, this is all spleen and stomach when the middle burner is strong.
00:19:21
Speaker
The liver could even stop transporting for a little bit. You'd be fine. You won't get stagnating. You won't get stomach fire Obviously, you can't shut down this liver gallbladder forever and for expected to be fine But the momentary changes in stress are much less You're much less susceptible to anything turning pathological. So little burner is kind of like our anchor like
00:19:43
Speaker
that, you know, provides us resilience to things. The second thing is for especially addicts of all kinds, alcohol does do this heroin more so and even weed does this, which is heart kidney connection. Super important. Yeah. Yeah. And in a way like the because I see this a lot too with the if you started young, where maybe your heart kidney connection was
00:20:10
Speaker
Like, you know, still figuring itself out, still coming to like figure out its own homeostasis or its own like way of working. And if you threw in a substance abuse issue there or just start using them, then you'd never get that. And like, it's not like you can go back to it. Like, oh, I'll buy a remember how to do this. It's like, no, you have to relearn, but now it's like a 30 year old. And boy, is that tricky.
00:20:36
Speaker
So true, dude. Yeah. And then I think, like you said, that's probably a big reason why people relapse so often, right?
00:20:44
Speaker
Yeah. Cause they're like, well, I stopped the thing. Why don't I feel better? Yeah. But you stopped the thing and you got to where you were when you started using alcohol and drugs for those reasons. Exactly. I was so shocked in the beginning. I was like, these guys are like eight year olds, you know, and then 12 year olds. And then I was like, Oh, that's when these guys started to use. And so like, that's where the maturity level is. Um,
00:21:09
Speaker
I wanted to say one more thing about the middle burner, because I'm always a huge fan of the lungs and breathing. And we left it out, but the lungs do start in the in the middle gel. Yeah, man. What that the lung and the diaphragm then are going to have an influence, a movement property there and keeping things healthy and moving. Oh, exactly. Yeah. Heck yeah, you just you hit on such a key point. First of all, why she going and breathing is so important.
00:21:38
Speaker
It doesn't just move our blood. It doesn't just move our lungs. It moves, like you said, our digestion. And secondly, this is a never-ending point for me is learn your channels, dudes. Learn your channels. I get so many blank stares when I'm talking about lung one for digestive purposes. I'm like, guys, that's where the channel starts. That's what the name of the point means. Yeah.
00:22:02
Speaker
Oh. Zhong fu. Zhong fu means middle for organ. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a different fu, but that's what it means. Yeah. Oh, man. Opinion is so hard. Okay. But yeah, so the lungs also being a major player in this. Yeah. Okay. You bet.
Types of Alcohol and Body Effects
00:22:25
Speaker
So, and then there's also a difference in types of alcohol. Should we roll on that?
00:22:30
Speaker
Yeah, that's what I was going to ask you. I was going to be like, so, you know, we call whiskey fire water. That one's very, very fiery. That's true. That does fit our analysis. Yeah. That was a Dr. Mulati thing. I was like, I'm having trouble sleeping. She's like, what do you drink? I'm like whiskey. She's like, maybe not so much on the whiskey. I'm like, but I like whiskey.
00:22:53
Speaker
And it's tricky. So other I'm assuming all hard alcohols are going to be pretty hot, but are there less hot ones? So basically, I like to separate it. I'm also not the connoisseur of alcohol here. But I like to separate into the big three. So like the beers, the hard alcohols, and the wines. So when you're talking about hard alcohol, it is exactly right. Think more heat less damp.
00:23:18
Speaker
more heat, less damp. So we know they're all damp heat, but it's more heat, less damp. And we know this for two reasons. Obviously it's affecting the body, but it burns when it goes down, it is fire water, and it's clear. The clearer it is, generally the less damp it'll be. Not to make people, well, I don't know, maybe stop, make people stop drinking alcohol, but not to use a metaphor
00:23:44
Speaker
that they might not like, but kind of think about the pee pee, right? When the pee pee is cloudy, you know something is afoot. And it's dampness, right? Yeah. Yeah. So the same idea, because it's clear, because it's spicier, more hot, less damp. Now, when it comes to like, which hard alcohol, like you're talking like whiskey, tequila, vodka, that sort of thing? Yeah, Jim.
00:24:07
Speaker
We would say it really doesn't matter which one, it just matters how strong. So I think the standard is like 80 proof, 40% for most of those. But if you look back at ancient China, they could never get even close to 80 proof. That's probably like 20% 40 proof. That's right. Yeah. And that was the good stuff. That was what they call like Qingzhou, like the clear alcohol, because as it ferments further, it gets clearer and clearer, the more you distill it.
00:24:37
Speaker
The less damp. We'll wrap the background to that in a little bit. That's exactly right. Which is also, so it's like takes longer to make. It was higher quality. It was less damp. It was also the ones that you would give to elders and the ones that you would use for like rituals and stuff.
00:24:56
Speaker
Is that like medicinal rituals as well? Or just spiritual rituals? Both. Yeah, like so offerings, but then also, some Shang Han Lun formulas ask to use Qing Jiao and put it in when you're cooking it. So this is a really fascinating idea. This is truly medicinal too, which is we talked about it being a great solvent. If you cook your herbs, your raw herbs in alcohol or alcohol mixed with water doesn't matter if it's pure or not.
00:25:23
Speaker
the higher the rate of concentration of alcohol, just the faster the extraction. But if you cook it in both, you're actually going to extract more stuff. So that's pretty cool. The second thing is it moves in the chest really well. Now, specifically, we're talking about yang moving formulas here. So there's a classic formula. Shout out to a more shang-han-lan formulas. This one is called
00:25:44
Speaker
Gualo xie bai san, or Gualo xie bai ban xia tang. Anyway, the key is it has to have gualo, xie bai, and bai zhou. Bai zhou is the word for just like kind of Chinese vodka or rice wine. It literally means white alcohol. It doesn't mean white wine. The word zhou is really alcohol, not wine. But yeah. And this is what we would know as sake. That's correct. Basically, sake. That's right.
00:26:11
Speaker
And that's the one that you cook that formula in.
Herbal Remedies with Alcohol
00:26:13
Speaker
And this is a really interesting formula because it's used for yang blockages in the chest due to dampness.
00:26:20
Speaker
So then people would say, well, then why are you putting alcohol in something like that? Well, you're putting the spicy stuff because you want the movement. You want to activate the yang, but you're actually cooking it. And so they cooked all the alcohol off. Yeah, ancient cooking processes took quite a long time. But the key is you're putting it with a really good yang mover, xie bai. It's just like a weirdly powerful green onion.
00:26:44
Speaker
So just like Xinyao, I call it the super potato. Goji berries, I call it the super raisins. This is the super onion, super scallion. Nice. And then Gualo is really, really good at clearing fluid, damp stagnation out of the chest. So a dampness and phlegm and so forth. So with this, I mean, this is a cool formula. If you diagnose it right, as like a cold, damp blockage in the chest,
00:27:11
Speaker
One round of this formula can like it can take people out of like a tachycardia that they've been having for years. Hmm. Yeah, that's pretty it's pretty cool. You just got to diagnose it, right?
00:27:23
Speaker
So while we're on using the hard alcohols to treat things in the chest, I know lots of people that swear by the shot of whiskey to get over a cold or flu if that's what's going on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So warm and it's cold that works and lots of moving. Correct. And then is it just if you hit it early enough that you can get away with this type of thing? And then if you were more sick and more damp, it wouldn't work nearly as well?
00:27:52
Speaker
Correct. So if it was like really early, not very, not, not damp at all, it might work. Yeah. But if it is damp, you're really gonna punch in yourself in the gut there. Much more effective than that would just be hot, like a strong ginger tea. Yeah. No, they'll do it with, especially like their entries are not here, they'll do it with ginger, lemon. Yeah. Whiskey. Yeah. That's their, that's their thing. And if one doesn't work, then they double down.
00:28:22
Speaker
Which one are they doubling, though? Everything. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Ginger lemon is a pretty cool combo. It's kind of a cool Western combo. In China, we would do ginger red date. The Chinese duck jujubes are red dates. Both good. It's true. Lemon juice can actually nourish yin. So that's useful. It's just not quite as powerful as the red date.
00:28:44
Speaker
because the red dates actually like going to help you produce the yin and the lemon's just going to consolidate yin that you have. Interesting point. They both do produce. Okay. Um, you're right. Lemon will const, uh, astringent consolidate some, um, but it also does th this goes back to like a Gwaiter tongue principle, which is that if you combine sweet with, uh, sour, you generate yin and sweet with pungent, spicy, accurate, you generate yang.
00:29:14
Speaker
Whoa. Okay. Man. All right. Well, there's a little plug for herbs. And if you didn't catch that, go back and we listened to it. Um, yeah, very excited to do herbs with you next year. Um, get into more of those flavors and now the flavor combinations. I had no idea. Yep.
00:29:35
Speaker
Awesome. But sweet and sour is a huge thing in Chinese food. It is true. What was the other one was sweet and acrid? Yeah, the word acrid is it's I always use the trio pungent spicy acrid because it's the same word in Chinese. So like pungent would be onion, spicy would be like anything hot pepper and acrid would be something closer to like maybe like a cinnamon or something.
00:30:04
Speaker
Okay, or I guess that one would be the onion pungent maybe then would be the cinnamon so if you think about like cinnamon onions and chili peppers This garlic in there too. Yeah, garlic's in there. Yep. Okay. Yeah, so we put all that into one flavor I Like to call it the moving flavor because it really does move and people kind of know what that means It's like the one that's zooming around on the tongue, right?
00:30:29
Speaker
Yeah. No, it just folks an image. Yeah. And why not use images to help communicate? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And like a different category. And it's got, we've had this classic phrase, I don't know if it's also herbal stuff, but we have a classic phrase, which means like this pungent spicy acrid, everything has this flavor, has a moving quality to it. The spicy acrid and the, was it sweet to get the generating on? Correct.
00:30:58
Speaker
So you're moving, but then you're also tonifying a little bit of, or generating a little bit of fluids to like keep the movement there, not just move it out. That's right. That's right. So the fluids are generated by the inside and then they're moved by the yong side. This is what I like to refer to as boosted move. When anyone steal my DJ name out there, I don't know how to DJ, but I plan to at some point. And when I do, I'm DJ boosted move. Boost and move? Boost and move, man. Is it going to be a mobile DJ spot?
00:31:28
Speaker
It will be mobile and we'll just throw out little packets of Gwager Tongue to the crowd and shit. Oh, nice. Yeah. I don't know if the crowd's going to get it. It has to be a very specific crowd to understand that. Otherwise, maybe just get some booster chairs. Ooh, dude. OK, OK. Or some wheelchairs. It's got a booster. It's got to move. One of the other. Yeah, so that's the key principle. So here, the idea is, yeah,
00:31:54
Speaker
Lemon's not bad. Lemon juice or lime juice, they work the same. So you would just cook the hot ginger tea once it's done cooking for like maybe 10 or 20 minutes, then squeeze some lemon or lime juice in the end.
Balancing Yin, Yang, and Qi
00:32:05
Speaker
That is a good way so that you don't over dry. So the one downside of ginger tea all the time or anything else is that you're moving fluids, but what are you moving at a certain point? Hence you got to boost a little before, you know, while you move it.
00:32:19
Speaker
Stick around. We have some more content coming your way. Definitely not about the topic this week, but it is hosted by your one and only DJ Boost and Move. And then the red date combo. Oh man. I really think like there's so many things that I can really do, but that that's a very gentle way of what we call harmonizing the ying in the way.
00:32:44
Speaker
Yeah. And this is, oh my gosh, I'm going to take a slight aside. Sorry, muggles, we're going off. But this is an annoying combo of words that really plagues Chinese medicine. Because if you ask anyone who's ever been through herbs, and they'll be like, I haven't studied in 20 years, or I just got out, you ask them what Guizhou Tang will do, and they should know, even still to this day after 20 years, they'll be like, got it. That one harmonizes the ying in the way. And you're like, great, what does harmonizing the ying in the way mean?
00:33:13
Speaker
It harmonizes the yin and the way. And then they're like, so it makes the yin and the way work together or... Are we talking about the fluids then? Yeah, that's exactly it. So when we say harmonize the yin and the way, there's actually a much more useful and the Shang Hanh Lin describes it word for word, you nourish the yin nutritive fluids and you move them by rectifying the flow of the Wei Chi. So when you harmonize the yin and the way, it means nourish the yin and rectify the flow of the way.
00:33:43
Speaker
way defensive for those people keeping track at home. And then, so are we also saying in this that the way Qi is responsible or has influence over the movement of Yingqi?
00:33:57
Speaker
Partly, but also if the way she is chaotic is if it's moving in a chaotic way and been disordered, specifically due to wind, then you'll be leaking, being nurtured out of your pores by spontaneously sweating at the wrong time. And then it's like trying to fill up a broken bottle, right? Leaky bucket. Yeah. I knew there was a metaphor in there somewhere. Yeah. A little leaky bucket. That's right. Stop the leaky, fill the bucket. That's what it means.
00:34:26
Speaker
Got it. Because then also then you get better movement through where you're trying to go. That's exactly right. So externally, you stop the leaky, but internally, just like you said, it's true. The way does help the yin move, just like the qi helps the blood move, just like the yang helps the yin move. But, you know, that that brings up an interesting, like, treatment wise question.
00:34:48
Speaker
we never just move the yang to move the blood. Like if you think about points even, right? We wouldn't just be like, oh, well, I'm going to circulate your gallbladder and liver chi and then everything else will be fine. Well, if there really is blood stasis, why not just pick blood moving points, right? Right. Which are on more yin parts of the body. Good point. There are more yin parts of the body. And this is a fascinating one. Gosh, we are
00:35:13
Speaker
I mean, way off topic. That's cool. Keep going. That's great. Let it fly. Boost and move, baby. Boost and move. Well, check this one out. So you know where the blood master point is? It was way high? Or? Or the eight influential master points? Yeah. It's the geshu, like the diaphragm shoe. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. What's UB17?
00:35:43
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. It's in where the liver should be, but then the liver hopped one. Oh, I like it. So, dude, you always answer my question. You're so good, dude. Impressive. So, you ever wonder why in the world is the diaphragm point, the blood master point? How does that make any sense? Because it's right above the liver. Right above the liver and right below what?
00:36:04
Speaker
Um, the spleen. No. So if you think about, uh, who stores the blood, right? Liver who moves the blood and regulates the blood heart. So it's a blood master point. And you actually bring up really good point too, which is here we can kind of lump spleen and stomach or spleen and liver together. So spleen makes the blood liver stores, the blood heart regulates, which basically moves the blood to the smaller vessels.
00:36:35
Speaker
Yeah, but okay, so then just cuz we're here and on the what's called the diaphragm or shoe. Heck yeah. Back to that diaphragm and that lung component.
Blood and Fluid Movement Dynamics
00:36:45
Speaker
Yeah, you know, in its role and, and just making everything move properly. Correct. And when it comes to blood, we like to think about it like this and channel chi actually blood and channel chi the same way. Lungs are the big first push.
00:36:58
Speaker
And then for blood, the vessels, when we say the heart is the master of the vessels, what it means is it does all the little pushes after that. So if you think about the artery moving, that's blood vessels, that's heart. But that big first push, we don't attribute to the heart, we attribute it to the lungs. How about capillary movement?
00:37:20
Speaker
Because from a Western perspective and someone that I like to follow named Katie Bowman, if anyone's interested in her work of movement and getting different types of a variety of movement into the body, she's got great literature out there. In some of her work, she talks about how the capillaries are more managed by the movement
00:37:49
Speaker
around them than they are the heart pumping. And one of the pieces of evidence she had for that was capillary space, if you add it all up in the body, it equals the amount of liters of blood that you have. And so if it was just the heart that was pumping into the capillaries, then
00:38:08
Speaker
then you would have no blood in your system. They would all be in the capillaries and it would pop out. If your capillaries can go back, you know, basically there's way too much space in all your capillaries combined for you to, for your heart to be the sole responsibility one. And the reason she brought that up was for people who have diseases where they say, Oh, you need to increase blood flow in the area. And they say, Oh, go do cardio. She's like, actually, the cardio is not going to help you. It's not going to not help. You know, you're going to increase blood movement around the whole body.
00:38:37
Speaker
But if we're trying to increase blood flow in a specific area that's not on a major highway, you're going to need to do different movements to get that blood there. Heck yeah. We vibe on all that, yeah. And I think Western medicine got this part right, too, which is that, just like you said, if all of our capillaries open at the same time, we'd all pass out immediately. Be hilarious. That'd be a great Superman power.
00:39:03
Speaker
Just like the blood vessel opener. Vessel man. And just like he touches people and they fall down because it's like, oh, where did all my blood go? Well, or if you could control where the blood vessels would go because he just shot off the brain and boom, bye. See you later. It's like a blood bender. Oh, yeah, blood bender. Nice. Oh, God. Yeah, if he's like tired of you, he'll just like make all the blood go to the tip of your nose or something.
00:39:31
Speaker
So from our perspective, so yeah, so Western medicine, I think even says this, they're saying like, it's shunting. So a lot of your vessels are closed. 80%, I think, or so is the number, are closed most of the time. And then your body just rhythmically alternates which ones are open and which ones are closed to try and fuel everything. But just like you mentioned, some of the shunts get stuck. And some areas just don't get enough blood. And from our perspective, that really comes down to three major, boy, we are really rolling. We might have to make a sub someone
00:40:00
Speaker
Anyway, we'll come back to alcohol. But when it comes to this one, we actually focus on the three biggies. So Western medicine would probably, I assume, focus on blood flow for just macro to micro, kind of bigger vessels to smaller vessels. But here, I think we really do take the cake on it because we focus on three different things, the flow of blood, the flow of chi, and the flow of fluids.
00:40:24
Speaker
Blood, when it gets stuck, is stasis. Chi, when it gets stuck, is stagnation. And fluids, when it gets stuck, is dampness. Damp. Damp. And so check out, like, for those of you who treat Reynolds patients and stuff, see how many of them don't respond to the blood movers. See how many of them don't respond to the chi movers. And what do they usually respond to then? The damp. The damp blood poppers. The fluid movers. Fluid movers and the damp busters. That's right. OK.
00:40:52
Speaker
And sometimes it's really just a very small amount of those that will really shift the efficacy of a whole formula. So yeah, we do great with that one. Do Raynaud's patients not have, cause I mean, just seeing Raynaud's patients, they look blood deficient most of the time. Yeah. Like, I mean, some of them, like, you know, you see the tongue and you're like, whoa, that's actually redder, maybe even blood heatier than we want. Um,
00:41:18
Speaker
And so those people, and, you know, there are also some telltale signs, like some radiance patients only get like the symptom flare up, which is like white, sometimes it turns like full white waxy, like it looks like their fingers are just like waxed, like kind of like a wax doll kind of thing.
00:41:36
Speaker
But sometimes it's not just cold that flares it. So some people just the colder it gets the more flares. That's pretty standard. So that's, you know, it's more like she and blood stuff there. But if it if they get like right around like the 40s, not super cold 40s like Fahrenheit.
00:41:53
Speaker
Sorry, I don't know why I said that from Celsius listeners out there. I mean, I was just in Celsius land. Exactly. In China, I was there long enough. I was like, actually, it's a pretty good system. I like Celsius. But anyway, like 40 is not that cold, right? And yet when it's like 40 and damn, these people really flare. I mean, that is not useless diagnostic information. But the problem is most people don't ask that question.
00:42:18
Speaker
If you hear rain odds, a lot of people, a lot of practitioners are like, okay, cold makes this worse. Well, you got to check. And yeah, cold probably makes it worse. But does damp make it worse? So check humid conditions. Or what kind of cold? Some people are like, yeah, my rain odds is actually fine at like 20 degrees. It's just bad at 40. That's not usually cold constricting. That's some things like damp blocking and so forth. Totally. Yeah.
00:42:42
Speaker
That's it for this week. Come back next week. We will at least start our conversation about alcohol. Who knows where I will go. Don't forget to hit that like button, subscribe and share this content with all your drinking buddies.