Life is intelligent. Life is conscious. Life is present. Life is eternal.
These are the primary and primal messages I want to convey to you now.
For the last century and a half, medicine has been fascinated with the microscopic and molecular. And, with good reason. The discovery of the cell was no doubt one of the most groundbreaking and fascinating discoveries in recent history. The discovery that, in essence, there is an entire universe of cells living and cooperating within many organisms such as plants, animals, fish, and humans, provides enough study material for thousands of generations of scientists.
So, it’s no wonder that, 150 years later, we are still obsessed with the cell, its structure, its function, and its mysteries.
In over 14 years practicing as an acupuncturist, herbalist, and holistic nutritional coach, with an education in Chinese Medicine and Medical Qigong -- and 10+ years prior to that studying yoga, meditation, mysticism, energy healing, and other modalities -- I have reached some very important conclusions that I want to share with you.
I’m not sharing this information with you to brag or boast or build myself up as some kind of guru. That would be ridiculous because, what I’m going to share with you was already explained many centuries ago by the medical sages of China. The Chinese medical classics are replete with simple, yet profound statements that I firmly believe are absolutely true about not only how the body works, but how the Universe itself works.
The Chinese sages that studied life understood something critical that, unfortunately, in our modern scientific age we have largely lost. They understood that man and Universe are of the same cloth. That, in essence, understanding how human beings work requires that we understand how the entire Universe works. That life is life is life is life. There is no boundary, there is no separation. All is a complete Unity.
Of course, later, many modern physicists began coming to the same conclusions vis a vis a “Unified Field Theory”. This theory states that, indeed, there is one field of energy that contains and produces all perceptible phenomena including mountains, oceans, houses, cars, fish, dogs, hamburgers, and humans.
In our mad rush to classify and categorize and name all the chemicals, molecules, proteins, enzymes, cellular structures, and such, we of the modern age all but dismissed the invisible as superstition and childlike fantasy. We began to see the world as a big machine, with gears upon gears, churning and moving in seemingly - or more like “hopefully” - mechanical, predictable ways.
It’s comforting to think we have figured things out. And, we have become addicted to this comfort of thinking we know how our bodies, the weather, the oceans, and the Universe itself works. We spend billions of dollars a year on research to explain more things to ourselves, to bring ourselves more what I personally feel is illusory comfort and solace.
It’s illusory because, as any real scientist will tell you, there are no laws, only theories. Laws are merely theories that have become dominant for a time to where a large number of people believe they are true. Yet, laws do not explain why things happen, only how they happen. The laws of physics cannot explain why molecules behave the way they do, they can only explain how they predictably do so. And, eventually exceptions are discovered that turn laws on their heads, and the whole premise of things like the Law of Evolution, or Newton’s Law have to be completely re-examined and sometimes completely discarded.
So it is with medicine. We have come to a point where the old ways of looking at the body and its infinitely complex systems, attempting to chart and map out every single chemical interaction and state, and manipulate tiny pieces in an attempt to effect healing is, in my opinion, failing us.
The three biggest discoveries of modern medicine happened about a century ago. Vaccines, antibiotics, and clean surgery. It can be argued that everything else is a corollary to these three discoveries. With vaccines, we virtually eradicated or at the very least severely suppressed many once common fatal or life-altering diseases. With antibiotics, we largely solved one of the most fatal conditions man had ever known - sepsis. And, with clean surgery, we discovered how to successfully cut a person open without necessarily killing them or causing them to die from an infection later.
The entire pharmaceutical and surgical industries are based on the premise that the body is a machine to be manipulated. That, by fixing the body you fix the person. And, they are partially right. Certainly, there is a place for life-saving medications to thin the blood if you’re having a stroke or a heart attack. There is a place for removing an organ or tissue riddled with cancer. There is a place for interrupting the life cycle of a deadly virus before it kills the host.
So, this is NOT about proving anyone wrong. In fact, within the realm of Five Element Functional Medicine there is the concept that in order to give Shen or Spirit the opportunity to truly thrive, the Jing or Physical Realm of the being must have a base level of strength and cohesiveness. Medications, surgeries, and other modern medical techniques can help create conditions for this strength to emerge, just as herbs, foods, acupuncture, physical therapy, and exercise can.
But please note, I said “create the conditions” for physical strength to emerge. This is very important semantically. And, it leads me nicely into explaining the foundations of the vision I am trying to convey.
As I stated above, life is conscious. It is not consciousness. It is conscious. All of life, everything you see around you, exists inside a conscious, living field. Even the seemingly “inanimate” is, essentially, a projection of consciousness. A remnant of a creative process that persists in the field.
Medicine, in order to be truly healing, must start from this central truth. That all of life is conscious. That there is a conscious entity at the core of all phenomema, including what we call cells, muscle, bone, organs, tissues… human.
In Chinese Medicine, this conscious entity is called Shen or (roughly translated) “Spirit”. And, it is thought of as the primal force that guides everything that happens.
Now, this is not necessarily “God” as we have defined him or her in the human sense. It is really impossible to fully describe Shen. But, I will give you an analogy.
Imagine the sun. It shines with an almost unfathomable amount of energy. Its very center, from which all that energy is emanating, is like Shen. If you could travel to the very center of the sun, you would then know WHY the sun is shining, why it is where it is, why it is making all the light that it is making. Not HOW, but WHY.
This is Shen, or Spirit, as best I can describe it for now.
So, principle one is that Life Is Conscious.
Now, this will be strange to a lot of people because, well, we have all been indoctrinated into the belief that “thoughts = consciousness”, that if your eyes are open, and you are able to think, you are conscious.
Well… Sorry. But that’s absolutely false.
Being conscious does not depend on thinking. It’s actually the opposite. Thoughts arise out of consciousness. Without being conscious, you cannot think. Being conscious, you don’t HAVE to think.
A fly is conscious. An elephant is conscious. A fish and a bacteria is conscious. The oceans are conscious, mountains are conscious, and the entire planet, solar system, and galaxy are conscious.
As humans, we assume our ability to analyze and think and name things is what makes us conscious, and that the world around us is, well, not conscious. Just a machine, doing what machines do -- the same thing all the time. Only we humans have this amazing ability to think and create and change things.
And, yes, it’s true. We do have an amazing ability to think, and create and change things. But, so does everything else. The world we live in CONTAINS us, we are ENVELOPED in conscious life, this very moment. The air you breathe, the food you eat, the ground you walk upon, the sun and stars that radiate energy to this “planet” we live on, even the planet itself -- all are conscious, all embody a intelligent milieu within which we move, live, breathe, and operate.
OK, so life is conscious. Got it.
Next, imagine that same sun. See all the rays going outward into “space” (which doesn’t really exist, either, but we’ll get into that later). These rays of light carry insane amounts of information. This information is the encoded wisdom in a full spectrum of how to create more life, how to replicate consciousness, how to spread that Shen into all places that it touches.
This is the second principle of 5EFM, namely that we are the living embodiment of an intelligent field.
This field carries unfathomable, dare I say INFINITE amounts of information. All of it encoded in a way that life innately understands. Seeds grow into trees, water flows into oceans and rivers, animals move through their enivornment in search of food, people gain understanding of elements and things. All of these things -- in fact, all of everything -- happens seemingly “automatically”, by what we call “instinct” or “natural law”.
However, none of it is automatic. It is part of a conscious process, a process that expresses INTENTION. All “instructions” for how life unfolds emanate from the information in this intelligent field, which carries the intelligence of Shen forward.
So, this is where we can understand why a liver knows what “liver” is supposed to do. Why an embryo knows how to form a kidney, a heart, a brain, and bones. Why a child knows to seek its mothers breast for sustenance. Why a seed sends its roots down and its leaves upwards.
The Chinese sages would say it like this: “A liver has Liver Qi”. An embryo has “Embryo Qi”. A seed has “Seed Qi”. These are the unique expressions of this intelligent field which guides the function and form of all life, but that knows how to do every single life process down to the most infinitesimal observable chemical reaction.
All of the information to create, sustain, and recycle life is contained in the field, the vast field of conscious energy inside which we live.
We want to think its more complicated than that, but it isn’t. A liver cell and a heart cell have the exact same DNA, but a completely different structure. Both started as a cell in an embryo, completely undifferentiated. Scientists have observed over and over the “loci of control” and other factors that indicate differentiation of cells. But, there is still no clear explanation of where those differentiation factors come from. How does the embryo know where the loci of control are supposed to be? How does stem cell A know to migrate into the area where the heart will be formed, while neural crest cells know to migrate to brain, adrenals, heart, and other key body areas?
This is not a machine. It is an intelligently unfolding conscious being -- even at the embryonic stage.
So, what is the driver of that amazingly complex, unfathomably intricate creation? Shen or Spirit via Qi, or “The Field” which carries its information, much like a cell tower carries its signal to your smart phone.
You don’t see the signal, but you certainly see its result on your phone’s screen.
And, that brings us to the third principle. The physical world is a representation of the signal transmitted from Spirit via the Field into a perceptible form.
Again, let’s go back to the sages. They very correctly and precisely understood the human bodymind as the Universe in microcosm. This is not a metaphor. This is literal.
The Universe is essentially a holographic reality, with all phenomena occuring simultaneously on both large and small scale -- the macro and the micro -- the cosmic and the microcosmic.
Our bodymind is a world, literally. Planets and galaxies. Oceans and streams, tides and currents, light and dark, warmth and cool, growth and decay, mountains and rocks, clouds, sky, sun, moon. Rain, humidity, desert, tropics. Predators and prey. Plankton and killer whales. Suns, stars, galaxies, planets. Flowers and pollen and bees and…
It’s all there. It’s all happening right now.
There are pulse waves that represent literal tides and waves in the ocean of fluid moving constantly through our bodies. The Earth is 70% water, and so are our bodies. This is not by accident. The oceans carry energy, currents, electricity, minerals, and harbor intelligent life by the billions. So too does our body fluid and blood. Cells upon cells, chemicals that transmit billions of signals every second, intelligent life in constant movement.
Like bees, carrier proteins bind hormones and carry them to pollinate and activate distant cells. These cells, like flowers, open up and receive the pollen of the hormone and respond by creating more cells, more chemicals, more seeds, more life.
The heart, and brain, pump in rhythms so complex Mozart would have no clue as to how to create them. Internal signal hormones from the deep recesses of the brain -- the hypthalamus and pituitary-- are pulsed in rhythm, like a sun/moon, day/night, inhale/exhale. These rhythms, just like the moon phases, cycle in continuous waxing and waning of frequency and intensity. Reflecting as well as resonating and balancing the energies of the entire organism.
Billions of organisms, living within our gut, our lungs, our skin, and everywhere else comprise a vast, unfathomable ecosystem. Some living in moist, lush, tropical environments, others living in harsh, dry, cold, rocky, or isolated places. Yet they survive and thrive. And, they provide critical support to the big ecosystem of you. Just as “out there”, “in here” when the delicate balance of life is shifted even slightly, consequences can be far-reaching.
Dysfunction of the gut flora can affect brain, immune system, adrenal, lung, and every other tissue function in the body. Same goes for skin flora, bone flora, lymph flora…
And, there is a terrain. A REAL terrain. Just as the mountains and oceans meet, and streams and rivers flow through fields and valleys. Just as deserts and tropical rain forests all co-operate and mingle to create the amazing biosphere we call Earth, our bodies have an intelligent and vastly complex continuous terrain with mountains, oceans, flora and fauna, air, soil, fire, and water.
And ALL of this, every last bit of it, is under the operative guidance of consciousness. So, we return to Shen, to Spirit. The invisible, yet undeniable presence at the center.
Five Element Functional Medicine is about understanding the language of this intelligent Spirit as it communicates via the field and expresses itself into physical form. Rather than trying to pick apart the gears to “reverse engineer” the code (as we sometimes do in the software world I once inhabited), we want to go to the source and work forwards. We want to enter the mind of nature, understand how she thinks, understand her ineffable intelligence, and then align ourselves with it.
And, this doesn’t require us to break everything down into the most minute observable entities. It doesn’t necessitate deep analysis of snapshots of chemical processes over time. When we think in terms of chemicals, we are measuring the result, not the intelligent intention that created that result.
Not that chemistry is invalid or unimportant. Like reading tea leaves, we can glean helpful information from chemistry, to attempt to trace back into what Shen or Spirit is trying to say, about where the Qi or Field is showing difficulty restoring balance.
But, it is absolutely critical to note that we are not treating chemicals. We are treating and helping a living, intelligent, self-directed field that created and manifested and generated those chemicals.
When we analyze bloodwork or saliva or urine, we are examining a fingerprint. Like a time capsule. It gives us a temporal view of something that has roots potentially millions of years in the making. It’s like looking at a star through a telescope. The light in the telescope has taken 100,000,000 years to travel to the place where the telescope is. By the time you make the observation, there have been millions of events that have happened since. And, there were millions of events that led up to that split second in time that you are viewing, 100,000,000 years later.
Now, it is time to integrate the greatest, most accurate, and most profound mind-map of nature into the practice of biomedicine. What the ancients observed and codified into what we call “5 Elements” or “5 Phases” -- “Wu Xing” in Chinese -- is essentially this: The precise and deeply insightful discovery and elucidation of the conscious intelligence at the core of all natural phenomona -- the INTENTION behind nature’s conscious process.
Essentially, it is a mind-map of nature’s creative expression into being. It is the blueprint of the emergence of life, and how life flows in infinitely layered and unbroken cycles.
When we gain a deep and working understanding of this model, we gain insight into what life is doing behind the scenes, if you will. We pull back the curtain between chemical and spiritual. We begin to understand why cells decide to do the things they do. We begin to transcend genetics and physiology and pathology and even histology because we are entering the realm of that which creates genes, determines how systems interact, creates blockages and depletions in it’s eternal quest to express healing, and constructs the terrain upon which all of this takes place.
We also begin to see “disease” in a different light. Instead of a “malfunction” of an automated machine, it is an expression of an intelligent life force seeking completion of a phase in a cycle. When systems begin to breakdown, instead of looking at how to “fix” it, we understand what the intelligent force is trying to do, and we help it get there.
We unblock the blocked. We bolster the weak. We calm the overactive. We cool the overheated. We warm the cold.
As I get more into depth on this topic, what each element represents, it’s place in the natural cycle, and what it regulates and what regulates it… You will begin to see things in a simple way that flows in harmony with how nature is seeing it. You will have the vision of what is really happening in the cosmology of the living matrix of the person you are attempting to help.
I hope to empower you, to help you achieve your goals as a healer of life. This is offered as a gift to you so that you may become a source of wisdom, strength, and power -- and most importantly, unconditional lovingkindness -- for yourself, your patients, and all you touch.
These are the primary and primal messages I want to convey to you now.
For the last century and a half, medicine has been fascinated with the microscopic and molecular. And, with good reason. The discovery of the cell was no doubt one of the most groundbreaking and fascinating discoveries in recent history. The discovery that, in essence, there is an entire universe of cells living and cooperating within many organisms such as plants, animals, fish, and humans, provides enough study material for thousands of generations of scientists.
So, it’s no wonder that, 150 years later, we are still obsessed with the cell, its structure, its function, and its mysteries.
In over 14 years practicing as an acupuncturist, herbalist, and holistic nutritional coach, with an education in Chinese Medicine and Medical Qigong -- and 10+ years prior to that studying yoga, meditation, mysticism, energy healing, and other modalities -- I have reached some very important conclusions that I want to share with you.
I’m not sharing this information with you to brag or boast or build myself up as some kind of guru. That would be ridiculous because, what I’m going to share with you was already explained many centuries ago by the medical sages of China. The Chinese medical classics are replete with simple, yet profound statements that I firmly believe are absolutely true about not only how the body works, but how the Universe itself works.
The Chinese sages that studied life understood something critical that, unfortunately, in our modern scientific age we have largely lost. They understood that man and Universe are of the same cloth. That, in essence, understanding how human beings work requires that we understand how the entire Universe works. That life is life is life is life. There is no boundary, there is no separation. All is a complete Unity.
Of course, later, many modern physicists began coming to the same conclusions vis a vis a “Unified Field Theory”. This theory states that, indeed, there is one field of energy that contains and produces all perceptible phenomena including mountains, oceans, houses, cars, fish, dogs, hamburgers, and humans.
In our mad rush to classify and categorize and name all the chemicals, molecules, proteins, enzymes, cellular structures, and such, we of the modern age all but dismissed the invisible as superstition and childlike fantasy. We began to see the world as a big machine, with gears upon gears, churning and moving in seemingly - or more like “hopefully” - mechanical, predictable ways.
It’s comforting to think we have figured things out. And, we have become addicted to this comfort of thinking we know how our bodies, the weather, the oceans, and the Universe itself works. We spend billions of dollars a year on research to explain more things to ourselves, to bring ourselves more what I personally feel is illusory comfort and solace.
It’s illusory because, as any real scientist will tell you, there are no laws, only theories. Laws are merely theories that have become dominant for a time to where a large number of people believe they are true. Yet, laws do not explain why things happen, only how they happen. The laws of physics cannot explain why molecules behave the way they do, they can only explain how they predictably do so. And, eventually exceptions are discovered that turn laws on their heads, and the whole premise of things like the Law of Evolution, or Newton’s Law have to be completely re-examined and sometimes completely discarded.
So it is with medicine. We have come to a point where the old ways of looking at the body and its infinitely complex systems, attempting to chart and map out every single chemical interaction and state, and manipulate tiny pieces in an attempt to effect healing is, in my opinion, failing us.
The three biggest discoveries of modern medicine happened about a century ago. Vaccines, antibiotics, and clean surgery. It can be argued that everything else is a corollary to these three discoveries. With vaccines, we virtually eradicated or at the very least severely suppressed many once common fatal or life-altering diseases. With antibiotics, we largely solved one of the most fatal conditions man had ever known - sepsis. And, with clean surgery, we discovered how to successfully cut a person open without necessarily killing them or causing them to die from an infection later.
The entire pharmaceutical and surgical industries are based on the premise that the body is a machine to be manipulated. That, by fixing the body you fix the person. And, they are partially right. Certainly, there is a place for life-saving medications to thin the blood if you’re having a stroke or a heart attack. There is a place for removing an organ or tissue riddled with cancer. There is a place for interrupting the life cycle of a deadly virus before it kills the host.
So, this is NOT about proving anyone wrong. In fact, within the realm of Five Element Functional Medicine there is the concept that in order to give Shen or Spirit the opportunity to truly thrive, the Jing or Physical Realm of the being must have a base level of strength and cohesiveness. Medications, surgeries, and other modern medical techniques can help create conditions for this strength to emerge, just as herbs, foods, acupuncture, physical therapy, and exercise can.
But please note, I said “create the conditions” for physical strength to emerge. This is very important semantically. And, it leads me nicely into explaining the foundations of the vision I am trying to convey.
As I stated above, life is conscious. It is not consciousness. It is conscious. All of life, everything you see around you, exists inside a conscious, living field. Even the seemingly “inanimate” is, essentially, a projection of consciousness. A remnant of a creative process that persists in the field.
Medicine, in order to be truly healing, must start from this central truth. That all of life is conscious. That there is a conscious entity at the core of all phenomema, including what we call cells, muscle, bone, organs, tissues… human.
In Chinese Medicine, this conscious entity is called Shen or (roughly translated) “Spirit”. And, it is thought of as the primal force that guides everything that happens.
Now, this is not necessarily “God” as we have defined him or her in the human sense. It is really impossible to fully describe Shen. But, I will give you an analogy.
Imagine the sun. It shines with an almost unfathomable amount of energy. Its very center, from which all that energy is emanating, is like Shen. If you could travel to the very center of the sun, you would then know WHY the sun is shining, why it is where it is, why it is making all the light that it is making. Not HOW, but WHY.
This is Shen, or Spirit, as best I can describe it for now.
So, principle one is that Life Is Conscious.
Now, this will be strange to a lot of people because, well, we have all been indoctrinated into the belief that “thoughts = consciousness”, that if your eyes are open, and you are able to think, you are conscious.
Well… Sorry. But that’s absolutely false.
Being conscious does not depend on thinking. It’s actually the opposite. Thoughts arise out of consciousness. Without being conscious, you cannot think. Being conscious, you don’t HAVE to think.
A fly is conscious. An elephant is conscious. A fish and a bacteria is conscious. The oceans are conscious, mountains are conscious, and the entire planet, solar system, and galaxy are conscious.
As humans, we assume our ability to analyze and think and name things is what makes us conscious, and that the world around us is, well, not conscious. Just a machine, doing what machines do -- the same thing all the time. Only we humans have this amazing ability to think and create and change things.
And, yes, it’s true. We do have an amazing ability to think, and create and change things. But, so does everything else. The world we live in CONTAINS us, we are ENVELOPED in conscious life, this very moment. The air you breathe, the food you eat, the ground you walk upon, the sun and stars that radiate energy to this “planet” we live on, even the planet itself -- all are conscious, all embody a intelligent milieu within which we move, live, breathe, and operate.
OK, so life is conscious. Got it.
Next, imagine that same sun. See all the rays going outward into “space” (which doesn’t really exist, either, but we’ll get into that later). These rays of light carry insane amounts of information. This information is the encoded wisdom in a full spectrum of how to create more life, how to replicate consciousness, how to spread that Shen into all places that it touches.
This is the second principle of 5EFM, namely that we are the living embodiment of an intelligent field.
This field carries unfathomable, dare I say INFINITE amounts of information. All of it encoded in a way that life innately understands. Seeds grow into trees, water flows into oceans and rivers, animals move through their enivornment in search of food, people gain understanding of elements and things. All of these things -- in fact, all of everything -- happens seemingly “automatically”, by what we call “instinct” or “natural law”.
However, none of it is automatic. It is part of a conscious process, a process that expresses INTENTION. All “instructions” for how life unfolds emanate from the information in this intelligent field, which carries the intelligence of Shen forward.
So, this is where we can understand why a liver knows what “liver” is supposed to do. Why an embryo knows how to form a kidney, a heart, a brain, and bones. Why a child knows to seek its mothers breast for sustenance. Why a seed sends its roots down and its leaves upwards.
The Chinese sages would say it like this: “A liver has Liver Qi”. An embryo has “Embryo Qi”. A seed has “Seed Qi”. These are the unique expressions of this intelligent field which guides the function and form of all life, but that knows how to do every single life process down to the most infinitesimal observable chemical reaction.
All of the information to create, sustain, and recycle life is contained in the field, the vast field of conscious energy inside which we live.
We want to think its more complicated than that, but it isn’t. A liver cell and a heart cell have the exact same DNA, but a completely different structure. Both started as a cell in an embryo, completely undifferentiated. Scientists have observed over and over the “loci of control” and other factors that indicate differentiation of cells. But, there is still no clear explanation of where those differentiation factors come from. How does the embryo know where the loci of control are supposed to be? How does stem cell A know to migrate into the area where the heart will be formed, while neural crest cells know to migrate to brain, adrenals, heart, and other key body areas?
This is not a machine. It is an intelligently unfolding conscious being -- even at the embryonic stage.
So, what is the driver of that amazingly complex, unfathomably intricate creation? Shen or Spirit via Qi, or “The Field” which carries its information, much like a cell tower carries its signal to your smart phone.
You don’t see the signal, but you certainly see its result on your phone’s screen.
And, that brings us to the third principle. The physical world is a representation of the signal transmitted from Spirit via the Field into a perceptible form.
Again, let’s go back to the sages. They very correctly and precisely understood the human bodymind as the Universe in microcosm. This is not a metaphor. This is literal.
The Universe is essentially a holographic reality, with all phenomena occuring simultaneously on both large and small scale -- the macro and the micro -- the cosmic and the microcosmic.
Our bodymind is a world, literally. Planets and galaxies. Oceans and streams, tides and currents, light and dark, warmth and cool, growth and decay, mountains and rocks, clouds, sky, sun, moon. Rain, humidity, desert, tropics. Predators and prey. Plankton and killer whales. Suns, stars, galaxies, planets. Flowers and pollen and bees and…
It’s all there. It’s all happening right now.
There are pulse waves that represent literal tides and waves in the ocean of fluid moving constantly through our bodies. The Earth is 70% water, and so are our bodies. This is not by accident. The oceans carry energy, currents, electricity, minerals, and harbor intelligent life by the billions. So too does our body fluid and blood. Cells upon cells, chemicals that transmit billions of signals every second, intelligent life in constant movement.
Like bees, carrier proteins bind hormones and carry them to pollinate and activate distant cells. These cells, like flowers, open up and receive the pollen of the hormone and respond by creating more cells, more chemicals, more seeds, more life.
The heart, and brain, pump in rhythms so complex Mozart would have no clue as to how to create them. Internal signal hormones from the deep recesses of the brain -- the hypthalamus and pituitary-- are pulsed in rhythm, like a sun/moon, day/night, inhale/exhale. These rhythms, just like the moon phases, cycle in continuous waxing and waning of frequency and intensity. Reflecting as well as resonating and balancing the energies of the entire organism.
Billions of organisms, living within our gut, our lungs, our skin, and everywhere else comprise a vast, unfathomable ecosystem. Some living in moist, lush, tropical environments, others living in harsh, dry, cold, rocky, or isolated places. Yet they survive and thrive. And, they provide critical support to the big ecosystem of you. Just as “out there”, “in here” when the delicate balance of life is shifted even slightly, consequences can be far-reaching.
Dysfunction of the gut flora can affect brain, immune system, adrenal, lung, and every other tissue function in the body. Same goes for skin flora, bone flora, lymph flora…
And, there is a terrain. A REAL terrain. Just as the mountains and oceans meet, and streams and rivers flow through fields and valleys. Just as deserts and tropical rain forests all co-operate and mingle to create the amazing biosphere we call Earth, our bodies have an intelligent and vastly complex continuous terrain with mountains, oceans, flora and fauna, air, soil, fire, and water.
And ALL of this, every last bit of it, is under the operative guidance of consciousness. So, we return to Shen, to Spirit. The invisible, yet undeniable presence at the center.
Five Element Functional Medicine is about understanding the language of this intelligent Spirit as it communicates via the field and expresses itself into physical form. Rather than trying to pick apart the gears to “reverse engineer” the code (as we sometimes do in the software world I once inhabited), we want to go to the source and work forwards. We want to enter the mind of nature, understand how she thinks, understand her ineffable intelligence, and then align ourselves with it.
And, this doesn’t require us to break everything down into the most minute observable entities. It doesn’t necessitate deep analysis of snapshots of chemical processes over time. When we think in terms of chemicals, we are measuring the result, not the intelligent intention that created that result.
Not that chemistry is invalid or unimportant. Like reading tea leaves, we can glean helpful information from chemistry, to attempt to trace back into what Shen or Spirit is trying to say, about where the Qi or Field is showing difficulty restoring balance.
But, it is absolutely critical to note that we are not treating chemicals. We are treating and helping a living, intelligent, self-directed field that created and manifested and generated those chemicals.
When we analyze bloodwork or saliva or urine, we are examining a fingerprint. Like a time capsule. It gives us a temporal view of something that has roots potentially millions of years in the making. It’s like looking at a star through a telescope. The light in the telescope has taken 100,000,000 years to travel to the place where the telescope is. By the time you make the observation, there have been millions of events that have happened since. And, there were millions of events that led up to that split second in time that you are viewing, 100,000,000 years later.
Now, it is time to integrate the greatest, most accurate, and most profound mind-map of nature into the practice of biomedicine. What the ancients observed and codified into what we call “5 Elements” or “5 Phases” -- “Wu Xing” in Chinese -- is essentially this: The precise and deeply insightful discovery and elucidation of the conscious intelligence at the core of all natural phenomona -- the INTENTION behind nature’s conscious process.
Essentially, it is a mind-map of nature’s creative expression into being. It is the blueprint of the emergence of life, and how life flows in infinitely layered and unbroken cycles.
When we gain a deep and working understanding of this model, we gain insight into what life is doing behind the scenes, if you will. We pull back the curtain between chemical and spiritual. We begin to understand why cells decide to do the things they do. We begin to transcend genetics and physiology and pathology and even histology because we are entering the realm of that which creates genes, determines how systems interact, creates blockages and depletions in it’s eternal quest to express healing, and constructs the terrain upon which all of this takes place.
We also begin to see “disease” in a different light. Instead of a “malfunction” of an automated machine, it is an expression of an intelligent life force seeking completion of a phase in a cycle. When systems begin to breakdown, instead of looking at how to “fix” it, we understand what the intelligent force is trying to do, and we help it get there.
We unblock the blocked. We bolster the weak. We calm the overactive. We cool the overheated. We warm the cold.
As I get more into depth on this topic, what each element represents, it’s place in the natural cycle, and what it regulates and what regulates it… You will begin to see things in a simple way that flows in harmony with how nature is seeing it. You will have the vision of what is really happening in the cosmology of the living matrix of the person you are attempting to help.
I hope to empower you, to help you achieve your goals as a healer of life. This is offered as a gift to you so that you may become a source of wisdom, strength, and power -- and most importantly, unconditional lovingkindness -- for yourself, your patients, and all you touch.
|
Copyright 2015 and beyond, Chris Axelrad
|